by Lisa Regan
With a sigh, Josie closed the flaps of the box. “Hopefully she’ll show up and it won’t come to that.” But the fizzing in her stomach told her otherwise.
From downstairs, Mettner called, “Boss? Lieutenant Fraley? The ME is here.”
Chapter Five
Already clad in a Tyvek suit and skull cap, Dr. Anya Feist knelt next to the body, carefully unpinning the photo and depositing it into a brown paper evidence bag that Mettner held out for her. As he sealed it and marked it, Dr. Feist turned back to the body, her gloved fingers probing the jagged bloody circle the bullet had punched into the man’s shirt. She didn’t look up as Josie and Noah approached.
She said, “Whoever this guy is, he never stood a chance.”
Noah took his notebook out and turned to a fresh page.
Dr. Feist continued, “I’ll have to get him on the table, but I can tell you right now that the bullet probably perforated his lung, maybe even went through the heart. He was probably dead in seconds, if not before he hit the ground. You guys find a shell casing?”
“Nine millimeter,” Josie offered.
Dr. Feist nodded, moving up toward his head, smoothing the curly black hair away from his forehead. “Yeah, nine millimeter will do it. Jesus. He’s young.” She went back to his torso and slowly curled the shirt up his back to reveal the bullet hole just below his left shoulder blade, an inch from his spine. “I don’t see any stippling or tattooing, so this wasn’t a contact shot.”
“We think the person who shot him was standing on the porch,” Josie said. “At the top of the steps.”
Dr. Feist looked from the porch back to the body. “Then your shooter is either really lucky or a really good shot. I mean, this kid wouldn’t have even had time to cry out. Death was likely instantaneous.”
It was only a small relief to Josie that the boy hadn’t suffered. Dr. Feist was right—he was young—and Josie felt the weight of what his parents were about to endure. She didn’t need to be a mother to know that the loss of their son would shatter their lives completely. His life had ended, but their torture was only just beginning.
With a heavy sigh, Dr. Feist got to her feet, brushing off her knees. “All right. Get him in the ambulance and bring him over. I’ll get started right away. I’ll make sure he gets fingerprinted too.”
Mettner signaled to Hummel, who let a couple of EMS workers through the crime-scene tape with a gurney. Josie recognized one of them as Owen. He wasn’t much older than the dead boy, but Josie knew he had twins under the age of one, and he worked so much overtime that members of the Denton PD were likely to see him at every scene that required an ambulance. He waved at her and Noah as they laid out a body bag next to the boy and then turned him onto his back so that he was lying over the opening of the bag. Noah checked the front pockets of his jeans as Owen and his colleague tugged the flaps of the bag up over the body and sealed it.
“No wallet,” Noah groused as the EMTs lifted the bag onto the gurney and steered it toward their open ambulance with Dr. Feist in tow. “You think he was robbed?”
Josie stepped back toward the house. “No. I don’t know. We don’t even know if he was in the house, and if he was, who else was here. Assuming it wasn’t Gretchen.”
“An accomplice?”
Josie walked down the driveway, around the side of the house, and Noah followed. “I think we can safely say this wasn’t a robbery,” she said. “If there were two guys, then what happened? They came here—for what, we don’t know—then they turned on each other and the killer shot his accomplice in the back, took his wallet, and left him here with a mysterious old photo pinned to his collar? Again, without taking anything from the house? Without even disturbing the house?”
Noah said, “Maybe once he shot the kid, he got freaked out and took off. Besides that, we don’t actually know that nothing was taken from the house. We’re just assuming that since the place wasn’t trashed, and we found the cash and jewelry in her bedroom. There could have been something else here that was valuable to them that we don’t know about. We really need Gretchen to go through and tell us if everything is as it should be.”
Josie stopped in front of each window along the side of the house and studied it. None of them looked disturbed, but all of them appeared to have a homemade burglar deterrent on the outside sill. “Look,” she said as Noah stepped up behind her. The windowsills were about a foot above her. Nearly a head taller than her, Noah was almost eye-level with the sill. He reached up to touch the sill.
“Careful,” Josie said.
“Jesus,” Noah said as he extended an index finger to gently touch the sharp point of one of many small nails pointing up out of a strip of wood on the sill. “She’s made her own deterrents.” He tried to dislodge the strip of wood, but it wouldn’t budge. He stood on tiptoe and looked at either end of the strip. “Yep,” he said. “She nailed this onto the sill.”
“So if anyone ever tried to climb up and break in, they’d take a bunch of nails through their palms,” Josie said.
She walked briskly around the house with Noah in tow, noting that every one of the downstairs windows had the same trap. Back inside the house, she pushed the gauzy curtains of the living room windows aside and found wooden dowels jammed between the top of the window frame and the top of the movable window. You wouldn’t be able to open the window without removing them. Of course, nothing would stop someone from simply smashing the glass and climbing through. Perhaps Gretchen figured the noise of glass shattering would be enough to alert her to an intruder if she was home.
Beside her, Noah gave a low whistle. “Talk about paranoid.”
“Yeah,” Josie agreed. “Something’s not right here.”
“What do you mean?” Noah asked.
Before Josie could answer, they heard Mettner calling from outside. “Boss, we got something.”
Chapter Six
Josie and Noah followed Mettner beyond the crime-scene perimeter, out to the street and nearly a block down from Gretchen’s house, where a blue Ford Fusion was parked curbside. Mettner stood behind it, fingers flying over a tablet in his hands. “A couple of the neighbors told us they’ve never seen this car before. It’s been here since this morning. We ran the plates. It’s a rental,” he explained. “I already called Prime rental company, and they confirmed it was rented two days ago in Philadelphia.”
“Who rented it?” Noah asked.
Mettner frowned. “They want a warrant to give out that information. I already called Lamay. He’s writing one up.”
“There’s a Prime right outside of town,” Josie said. “We might have some luck if we pay them a visit. All we need is a name.”
“We’ll head over after this,” Noah said. Addressing Mettner, he said, “Did any of the neighbors see anything?”
“The lady across from Detective Palmer’s house thought she saw Gretchen walking up her driveway not that long ago, but she couldn’t say when.”
“Walking?” Josie said. “Did she see Gretchen’s vehicle?”
“She doesn’t remember. The officers canvassing pressed her, but she really couldn’t remember anything of use. She also said that Gretchen is in and out all day.”
Josie sighed. “So she could have seen Gretchen walking in her own driveway an hour ago or this morning.”
Mettner grimaced. “Pretty much, yeah. A couple of neighbors heard the shot, but most of the neighbors who were home were sitting down to dinner or watching the evening news. Plus, between the privacy fence on one side of the property and the bushes on the other…”
“No one can see anything,” Josie finished for him, frustration starting a small headache behind her eyes. “All right. I think we’re done here. You guys can finish processing the scene. Fraley and I will swing by the station to see what the MDT turned up, get that warrant, and see what Lamay found on the CCTV.”
As they drove through Denton to police headquarters—a large, three-story, gray stone building with ornate molding over its many double-casement
arched windows and an old bell tower at one corner—the sun sank below the horizon, its last rays suffusing the horizon with a pink and yellow glow. Neither of them spoke. Noah studied the notes and sketches he had made at the crime scene. Josie ignored the insistent buzzing of her cell phone—her new family texting about the birthday dinner she was missing. It was her and Trinity’s birthday, and this would have been their first family birthday dinner together. Guilt pricked at her, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Gretchen needed her. Josie parked in the municipal lot, and they went in through the front lobby. The desk sergeant, Dan Lamay, gave them a nod and then waved them back to the CCTV room behind the lobby desk.
“Boss,” he said as Josie and Noah crowded into the tiny room behind him, “I found what you were looking for.”
“It’s Detect—” Josie began but stopped. As Lamay settled into a creaky desk chair in front of the large bank of screens streaming various areas of the building, Josie put a hand on his shoulder. “Dan,” she said, “just call me Josie, okay?”
He smiled and nodded at her. Lamay had been with the department nearly forty years. He had seen the coming and going of five chiefs of police—Josie included—and survived a huge scandal. He was now past retirement age, with a bum knee and an ever-increasing paunch. Josie had kept him on as a desk sergeant during her tenure as chief because his wife was recovering from cancer, and his daughter was in college. He had been fiercely loyal to her, helping her when she needed it most. Now she was worried that Chief Chitwood would let him go, but so far, he had stayed off Chitwood’s radar, performing his duties quietly and efficiently.
“What did you get from the MDT?” Josie asked.
Lamay pointed to a laptop open on one end of the table that showed a GPS map of south Denton. “We lost the signal here,” he said, pointing to a thick line that Josie knew represented a bridge that ran over the Susquehanna River.
“Lost the signal?” Josie asked.
“That’s impossible,” Noah said. “Did you send units out there?”
“Of course we did,” Lamay answered. “There’s nothing there.”
Which meant that someone had tampered with or destroyed the MDT in Gretchen’s Cruze. Either that, or someone had driven the car off the bridge into the river. “Was the guardrail still intact?” Josie asked.
Lamay stared at her a moment, chewing the inside of his mouth. “I assume so,” he said. “Patrol didn’t report anything out of the ordinary.”
“We’ll take a ride out there before we go to the rental car company. What’ve you got on CCTV?”
Lamay swiveled the chair to face the large computer screen directly in front of him, which showed the hallway on the first floor. Lamay had paused it. The timestamp in the upper right-hand corner read: 3:06 p.m. Standing outside the door to the kitchen was Gretchen, wearing the same uniform Josie wore but with an old, worn leather jacket over her shirt. Gretchen was never seen without it, but no one on the force dared pry into the story behind it. In one hand she held a mug of coffee.
Lamay pressed play. They watched as she walked slowly away from the kitchen, sipping her coffee and running her free hand through her short, spiked hair. Then she stopped and pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket. With a frown, she studied the screen. She seemed to hesitate before answering, her scowl deepening as she pressed the phone to her ear. There was no audio, so they couldn’t hear what Gretchen said, but it didn’t look good. The conversation lasted about three minutes. Then she hung up, put the phone back into her pocket, left her mug on top of the water cooler in the hallway, and walked out of the frame.
“Where did she go?” Josie asked.
Lamay swiveled in his chair to face another screen, where he pulled up footage of the lobby. “She walked right out the door,” he said, playing the footage. Sure enough, Gretchen entered the lobby from the first-floor hallway and strode out the front door without looking back.
“Was that a department phone or a personal cell phone?” Noah asked. “If it’s department-issued then we can find out who called her pretty quickly.”
Josie shook her head. “It’s her personal cell. I gave her the option of having a department-issued phone when she started, and she declined. Dan, when we’re done here, write up a warrant for her phone provider. We’ll see if we can triangulate her cell phone signal. Can we go back to the other footage?”
Dan turned his chair back to the first screen and queued the footage up again. Josie had him play it three times, but her attempts at reading Gretchen’s lips failed. “What is she saying?”
Noah leaned in and took the mouse, resetting the footage one more time. “Right there,” he said. “Before she hangs up she says, ‘I’ll be right there’.”
“Well that doesn’t do us any good,” Josie said. “We have no idea where she went. Can you figure out anything else she said?”
They watched it twice more, but none of them could make out any more of Gretchen’s words. “Where did she go? Did you guys get anything from the MDT?”
Lamay nodded. “MDT tracked her to one block over from her house. The vehicle was there for a half hour, then it traveled south, and the signal disappeared midway across the bridge.”
Lamay pulled the laptop toward him and clicked a few times, bringing up a different screen that showed a grid of streets, one of which was the 400 block of Campbell Street. Gretchen’s house was in the middle of the block. The icon representing Gretchen’s vehicle had stopped on Miller Street, the block behind Gretchen’s house. From Josie’s calculations, it didn’t appear as though she’d parked directly parallel to her own home, but she still could have snuck onto her own property from the back. But why would she? If she’d been headed to her own house, why hadn’t she parked in the driveway? If Gretchen had left the station after that phone call and gone directly to her own neighborhood—that meant she’d been at the crime scene. Didn’t it? If she had been there, where did she go afterward and why had she disabled her car’s MDT? Or had someone else disabled it? Had someone else shot the boy and taken Gretchen?
Noah said, “I’m going to get that BOLO issued.”
“Good idea,” Josie said, tearing her gaze from the laptop. She patted Lamay’s shoulder. “Thanks, Dan. How about that warrant for the rental car company?”
Chapter Seven
There were two bridges in Denton that crossed the Susquehanna River where it snaked and curved through the outer edges of the city. The bridge in south Denton was relatively small—one lane in each direction—and didn’t see very much traffic. On the other side of it lay a network of narrow roads that weaved through the mountains and led to the neighboring county of Lenore and its rolling valleys of farm and game land.
Josie pulled over on the shoulder and got out. Noah followed. “What are we looking for?” he asked.
One car passed by, headed toward downtown Denton. Otherwise, the air was still and quiet, the last rays of sun giving off a soft, pink and purple twilight glow. Josie leaned over the edge of the guardrail. Below them, the river flowed peacefully. “I don’t know,” Josie said.
Noah touched a hand to the guardrail. “Well, we know she didn’t drive the car off the bridge. Everything is intact. The banks don’t look disturbed. If someone drove down one of them, I’d expect to see some flattening of the brush, a tree knocked down.”
“Which means whoever stopped the vehicle on this bridge disabled the MDT,” Josie said. “And probably threw it into the river.”
“You think someone besides Gretchen was driving the car?”
Josie met his gaze. “You think Gretchen was driving? You think she left a dead body in her driveway, drove here, disabled her MDT, tossed it into the river, and then just took off?”
Noah’s voice was even, reasonable. He was always reasonable. “Gretchen was at the station. She got a call on her cell phone. She said, ‘I’ll be right there.’ She drove to the block next to her house. Her front door was ajar, and the shell casing found on her porch was a nine mi
llimeter, which is the same caliber that her service weapon takes. Everything we know points to her having been at her house when the victim arrived and probably having shot him. Plus, disabling an MDT isn’t as easy as tossing it out of the car. Whoever did it knew what they were doing.”
“So maybe the person who shot that boy used Gretchen’s gun to shoot him and left him for dead in Gretchen’s driveway. Maybe that same person knew how to disable it, or maybe they made her do it.” As soon as she said the words, doubt seeped in. If Gretchen were under duress, she would have found a way to leave them a message, a clue. She would have made it look like the MDT was disabled but left the antenna intact so they could find her. Wouldn’t she?
“Josie,” Noah said. “I think we need to consider that we really don’t know Gretchen all that well—not enough to know what she’s really capable of.”
Josie put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “I know enough to know that Gretchen is not capable of shooting a boy in the back, leaving him behind, and running.”
Noah put his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “Boss—I mean, Josie—I know you have strong feelings about Gretchen, and she’s been a loyal, dedicated officer to the department here since she came on, but how much do you really know about her?”
Josie pushed past him on her way back to the car. Over her shoulder, she groused, “Enough. I know enough. Now let’s go to the rental car agency. We need to find out this kid’s identity and his connection to Gretchen.”
Chapter Eight
The Prime Car Rental agency was located on a wooded two-lane road at the edge of town, just a quarter mile from the interstate. A large parking lot surrounded the squat, one-story building. Shiny sedans and small SUVs of every color filled the spots. Fluorescent lights glowed through the glass walls at the front of the building, illuminating a small, tiled lobby area with a smattering of vinyl chairs and a table packed with various brochures. Across from the lobby was a high countertop. As Josie and Noah entered, a long, high-pitched ding dong sounded somewhere in the back of the building, and a young woman with black hair piled high on her head in a messy bun emerged from a door behind the front counter. She wore a simple black dress with a gray sweater over top of it. She pulled the lapels close together as she shot them a perfunctory smile. “What can I do for you?”
