by Lisa Regan
A man’s voice gave a reedy hello, and a small ache started in Josie’s chest. She didn’t even need to ask who it was. There was no sound in the world like the sound of grief in a parent’s voice. “Mr. Omar?” she said.
He cleared his throat. “Randall Omar, yes,” he said. “I’m—I’m James’s father.”
“I’m glad you called,” Josie said. “First, let me say how sorry I am for your loss.”
“Thank you,” he said, and the strain in his voice deepened. “The, uh, medical examiner here in Boise contacted us. Told us about… about James. He said you were the detective in charge of finding his… his…”
“His killer,” Josie supplied. “Yes, I’m going to do everything I can to find the person who killed your son and make sure that person is brought to justice. I promise you that.”
“Thank you,” Randall repeated, voice thick and husky. “Do you have any leads?”
Josie went over what they knew, sparing the more gruesome details as much as possible. There was no sense upsetting the grieving father more when he had only yesterday found out his son was killed in such a cold-blooded fashion. “Mr. Omar, your son was found in the driveway of a woman named Gretchen Palmer. Does that name sound familiar to you?”
“No, I’m sorry. I can ask my wife, but it doesn’t sound familiar at all. What about the picture you mentioned? Of a young boy, you said? Would it be possible for us to see it?”
“That would be very helpful,” Josie said. “I can text it to you now, if you’d like.”
“Yes, please.” He rattled off a number, and Josie used her cell phone to forward the photo to him. She waited, listening as he and his wife discussed it, their voices distant and muffled. Then Randall came back on the line. “I don’t understand. We’ve never seen this boy. We don’t know who he is. Do you know who the boy in the photo is, or why it was pinned to my son’s… my son’s body?”
His voice cracked on the word body. Josie’s voice was gentle. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Omar. We don’t know who the boy is—not yet. I’m trying to find out. When was the last time you spoke to your son?”
“Three days ago. It was my wife’s birthday. He called to wish her a happy birthday.”
“Did he mention anything to either of you about going on any trips?”
“No,” Randall said.
“Did he seem like himself? Did he seem stressed at all or distracted?”
“No more than usual. He was always under a bit of stress with school.”
“I understand your son was a graduate student at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Is that correct?”
She heard him swallow. His voice sounded stronger with a subject that put him on firmer emotional ground. “Yes, that’s right. He was studying…”
In the background, Josie heard a woman’s voice interject. “Genetics. He was studying genetics.”
Nervous laughter filtered through the line. Randall said, “My wife said genetics. Sorry, I can’t really think straight right now.” He sucked in a breath. “I did know that. James is always going on about all this scientific stuff—oh God—he was… he was always going on about it. Jesus.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Omar,” Josie said softly. “I know this is an extremely difficult time. Again, I appreciate your speaking with me. Can you tell me where James lived? Was it on campus?”
“Well, I don’t think it was campus housing. He was a grad student. But there’s a small apartment complex a few blocks from the sciences building. It’s not much, but it’s cheap.”
“Did he live alone?” Josie asked. “Or with a roommate?”
“Uh, yeah, a roommate. Ethan.”
“I’ll need to interview Ethan,” Josie said. “Do you have his number, by any chance?”
“Of course,” Randall said. “Are you going to Philadelphia?”
“I’ll be leaving in a few hours,” Josie said. “If you could text me the names and contact information for anyone there you think I should talk with, that would be great.”
“Of course,” Randall repeated. “He had an advisor—Dr. Larson. I’ll send you his phone number. He was a real mentor to James. He’s also James’ landlord. Maybe he can help you.”
Josie thanked him again before following up with one last question. “Mr. Omar, can you think of any reason why your son would have rented a car and driven to Denton?”
A long silence followed, punctuated by the man’s shallow breaths. Finally, he said, “No, Detective. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Chapter Sixteen
Three hours later, Josie had a reservation at the Hilton a few blocks away from Philadelphia’s police headquarters. She’d made appointments to meet with both Lieutenant Steve Boyd and Professor Perry Larson the next day. She had tried contacting James Omar’s roommate, Ethan, but his phone went straight to voicemail. She stopped at home to have a quick dinner with the Paynes before they all returned to their homes. She drove to Philadelphia in the dark, grateful that it was late enough that she didn’t have to deal with city traffic.
Her hotel room was on one of the higher floors, with an expansive view of the twinkling lights of the surrounding city. She sat on the bed, bag still packed next to her, and stared out into the night. She was truly alone for the first time in months. Not just for a few minutes or a couple of hours, but for an entire night. As the night sky grew darker, her reflection in the window became sharper. Now every time she looked at herself, she couldn’t help but see the face of her sister, Trinity. Her thoughts drifted from the family she had gained to all that had been taken from her. In these rare moments alone, she couldn’t help but feel bitterness and anger for the turn her life had taken. She supposed all had turned out well. She had survived, hadn’t she? She was alive while many others she had crossed paths with were not. Her family had been reunified. Still, the demons swirled at the corners of her mind.
The soft hum of the minibar’s motor seemed to call to her. She stood and walked over to it, resting one palm on its handle. It would be so easy. Just a little something to take the edge off. To see her through the night.
“No,” she whispered to herself. This kind of coping was not sustainable. She had watched Lila Jensen drown her pain and rage in every substance imaginable. It hadn’t helped anyone. Empty-handed, she returned to the window, taking in the city Gretchen had called home for fifteen years. Josie wondered if the home Gretchen had lived in here had been booby-trapped like her house in Denton. Just what kinds of demons was Gretchen battling? What had she kept hidden? Josie had always known there were things in Gretchen’s memory that she told no one. She recognized the walls Gretchen erected around herself, because she had hidden behind the very same ones.
The ring of her cell phone interrupted her thoughts. Noah. A smile slid across her face as she answered. “What’s up?”
“You get in okay? How’s the room?”
Again, Josie’s gaze was drawn to the minibar. Quickly, she looked away. With one hand, she started unpacking items from her overnight bag. “It’s fine,” she said. “What do you have?”
“First, Gretchen’s mother doesn’t recognize the boy in the photo.”
“No surprise there,” Josie said. “What else?”
“No activity on Gretchen’s credit cards or bank account in the last twenty-four hours. The bank and credit card companies will let us know if they see anything. Also, we got the triangulation from both Gretchen’s and Omar’s phones,” Noah said.
Excitement prickled at Josie’s scalp. “Tell me.”
“Well, Omar still had the GPS on his turned on. Looks like it’s somewhere in the Susquehanna River.”
Josie sighed. “Let me guess, near the bridge where the MDT signal was lost.”
“About a half mile downriver. The GPS puts it in the river at its last location, but I’ve got a team headed there first thing in the morning to search the banks.”
“Gretchen’s?”
“Her GPS was turned off. We had to triangulate. We got it down to an are
a of about two miles, but it’s the same basic location.”
“So the phones and the MDT are in the river.” She tried to imagine Gretchen throwing everything that could track her into the river and then leaving Denton behind. She couldn’t. “There’s someone else involved, Noah. I know it.”
His long sigh told her he wasn’t sold on her theory, but that he didn’t want to argue with her again. “Well,” he said, “you’ve got less than forty-eight hours to prove it.”
Chapter Seventeen
Josie waited outside the small gray stone apartment building near Thirty-Third and Ludlow Street. She leaned against the short stone wall surrounding it and sipped a cup of coffee she’d picked up at a nearby minimarket. She had taken a taxi the twenty-two blocks from the hotel to James Omar’s apartment building, watching as the city passed her by, bustling indifferently to its own rhythm. She spotted Dr. Perry Larson sauntering down the street a few minutes later. Josie had checked out his faculty profile before contacting him to make an appointment. He appeared a bit older than his faculty photo—closer to sixty, she estimated. His silver hair blew in the breeze, and a pair of aviator sunglasses rested on his nose. He was dressed casually in a polo shirt and khakis, hands in his pockets as he strolled toward her.
He stopped a few steps away. “Detective Quinn?”
“Dr. Larson?” Josie responded.
He lifted the sunglasses onto the top of his head. Blue eyes smiled at her as he offered a hand. “Great to meet you,” he said. “I wish it were under better circumstances. It’s still so hard to believe.”
“Were you close to James?” she asked.
“James and I worked closely together on some research papers. He was a very promising scientist. Very driven. Focused. I don’t generally take on students who aren’t completely committed.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to James?” Josie asked.
Larson touched his chin. “A few days ago in the lab.”
“How did he seem to you? Was he stressed? Distracted?”
Larson shook his head. “No. He was the same as ever.”
“Did he mention taking a trip?”
“No. I’m just as baffled as you are about his trip to Denton. I have no idea what was there that would have drawn him. Like I said, James was very focused. He wasn’t interested in dating or partying. I’m not aware of any friends he had in Denton.”
“Have you ever heard of a woman named Gretchen Palmer?”
The blank look in his eyes told Josie everything she needed to know. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It doesn’t sound familiar.”
She took out her phone and pulled up the photo of the boy that had been pinned to James’s collar. “We have reason to believe this boy has some kind of connection to James. Do you recognize him?”
Larson spent a long minute studying the photo before shaking his head. “I’m sorry, no. But listen, I didn’t know James that intimately. You might have better luck with Ethan, his roommate.”
Josie put her phone back into her pocket. “I’ve tried contacting Ethan a few times now on the cell phone number the Omars gave me. It goes right to voicemail.”
Larson gave a short laugh. “That sounds about right. Ethan’s always been a bit hard to pin down. I was thrilled when James moved in with him, because James always got the rent to me on time.”
“Is Ethan your student as well?”
“Oh no, he’s studying criminology. He was a tenant of mine for a year before James joined my program. After a semester, James was looking for inexpensive housing. I introduced the two, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to Ethan?” Josie asked.
“Oh, a few weeks. Like I said, Ethan is a little… flaky. He tends to get wrapped up in his own research projects and goes off the radar. James once told me he spent a whole weekend in front of his computer—didn’t sleep for seventy-two hours. Evidently, he is quite obsessed with cold cases and serial murderers. Pleasant stuff.”
His joke fell flat. Josie moved on. “Was he a close friend of James?”
Larson motioned for them to walk up the front steps, and she followed. At the front door, Larson keyed in a code that let them into a large, tiled foyer, one wall covered in gray cubes that Josie quickly realized were mailboxes. On the other side was a community corkboard with flyers tacked to it for guitar lessons, art shows, and people seeking work as dog walkers and house cleaners.
“Ethan and James did grow quite close,” Larson answered as he took a set of keys from his pocket. He shuffled through them before finding one and sliding it into the lock of a heavy wooden door on the other side of the foyer. It creaked open before them.
Josie waved a hand around the foyer. “Do you have cameras in here?” she asked. “Inside this vestibule?”
“Why yes,” he said. “We were having some issues with packages being stolen. I had security cameras installed last year.”
“It’s always a good idea,” Josie said. “Is there any chance you would be able to review the footage—how far back does it go?”
“Six months,” Larson said. “It’s very high-quality.”
“I’ve been looking for a system for my own home. What kind do you have here?”
“I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s made by Rowland Industries.”
“Oh,” Josie said, flashing back to her own run-ins with the security giant. “I’m familiar with Rowland Industries—their systems are very high-quality. In that case, could you review it for at least the last two weeks and see if you can find footage of the last time either James or Ethan entered and exited the building?”
“Of course. I’m not sure exactly how to access it, but I can certainly make some calls and find out. You should know that the Omars gave me permission to let you into their apartment, particularly since we can’t get in touch with Ethan. Whatever you need, they told me, to help you solve James’s case.”
Josie was growing more and more concerned with the fact that Ethan Robinson was nowhere to be found. As Larson led her down a narrow hallway to a red door marked 19, she asked, “Dr. Larson, do you happen to have any contact information for Ethan’s family?”
Larson fingered his keyring again until he came up with the correct one. “Oh yes, of course. I can text that to you when I get back to my office if you’d like. I think it’s just him and his dad, but I’ve got his dad’s number. Like I said, a few times he was late with the rent, and his dad called me to ask me not to kick him out while they came up with the money.”
“Is Ethan from Philadelphia?”
“Oh no,” Larson said. “Portland, I think. Oregon. At least that’s where his dad lives now, as far as I know.”
Inside, the apartment was dark and smelled of stale cigarette smoke, bacon grease, and sweat. Larson flipped on the lights as they moved through the small rooms. There wasn’t much to the place. A living room, a narrow kitchen with a small alcove where a folding card table and two folding chairs sat, and then a hallway leading to a bathroom and two bedrooms. Textbooks and computer equipment littered the place. The furniture was spare and looked as though all of it had been bought at thrift shops. There was a plate and fork in the kitchen sink, a clean pan and mug in the dish rack. One end of the saggy red couch was cluttered with a balled-up blanket, a couple of dog-eared true-crime novels, and a half-finished bottle of Gatorade. The other half was pristine. The card table in the kitchen looked the same—one side clean and empty, the other beset with dirty dishes and fast-food wrappers.
“Which one of them was the neat freak?” Josie asked.
Larson laughed. “James. Here—this one is his bedroom.”
James’s bed was neatly made. No clothes on the floor. All items on his nightstand and dresser were arranged with precision. Hanging over the dresser was a framed photo of his family similar to the ones Josie had seen on his Facebook page. In the corner of the room was a small desk with a slim blue laptop on top of it. Josie gestured to it. �
��Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Larson said.
Josie sat in the desk chair, opened the laptop and booted it up. As she anticipated, it asked for a password. Behind her, Larson said, “I think I can help with that.”
She switched positions with him, and after two tries, he accessed the laptop. As he ushered Josie back into the chair, she said, “I thought you said you and James weren’t close. He told you the password to his laptop?”
Larson chuckled. “I took a chance. He has a dedicated computer in my lab, and as administrator, I know the password. James likes to keep things efficient, so I figured maybe he’d use the same password for his personal laptop. I was right.”
“Well,” Josie said, turning toward the computer. “I’m glad you were able to figure it out.”
He watched over her shoulder as she searched the files and internet browser. Everything she found was obviously to do with whatever he was studying. The scientific jargon was well beyond her capabilities. She’d only taken enough science courses in college to supplement her major and enable her to graduate. “James’s mother said he was studying genetics,” Josie said.
“Actually, James was studying epigenetics,” Larson said. Josie swiveled in the chair just enough to see him.
“Is that a different field from genetics?”
Larson perched on the edge of James’s bed. “Epigenetics is more specialized. The most simplistic explanation is that epigenetics is the study of heritable alterations in gene function that don’t involve changes in the DNA sequence.”
“Meaning changes in genes?” She waved toward the laptop. “These papers he’s written and the journals he’s logged into—it’s all a little over my head.”
“Not changes to the genes themselves, but in the way they’re expressed,” Larson explained. “The mechanisms that turn the genes on and off. External factors.”
“Like lifestyle?” Josie asked.
“Yes. Again, this is all very simplistic—”
Josie smiled. “Simplistic works for me.”
