by Lisa Regan
With a sigh, Josie knelt beside the woman, careful not to disturb anything before her ERT could photograph the scene. “She was strangled.” She pointed to the finger-shaped purple and pink bruising on Margie Wilkins’s delicate neck. “Look, you can see where the killer wrapped his hands around her neck. And here—” She gestured to her throat. “Those are thumb prints.”
Noah had his notebook out, sketching out the scene and writing things down as Josie spoke. “Bruising on her inner thighs as well. It’s likely she was sexually assaulted.” She stood and took a moment of silence for Margie Wilkins. No one should have to die like this, she thought. To Noah, she said, “Get her photographed right away and cover her up, please.”
“Of course,” he replied.
Josie took a slow pan of the room. For the violence that had been visited on Margie, the room itself was curiously devoid of detritus. “There wasn’t a struggle,” Josie said.
“You think the husband killed her?” Noah asked. “Domestic dispute? Murder-suicide?”
“I don’t know. Let’s take a look at his body.”
They made their way down a cheerily decorated hall dotted with various framed photos of the couple—half appeared to be vacation photos from different exotic locations where they’d gone camping, rock climbing, and white water rafting, and the other half were obviously from their wedding. Interspersed among the photos were small, painted wooden signs that said things like, This is our happily ever after and All because two people fell in love. Josie stopped to study one photo of the two of them on their wedding day, standing at the edge of a lake at sunset, gazing lovingly at one another. In life, Margie had been pretty, but most of her attractiveness seemed to come from an inner glow of happiness.
Josie tore herself away and followed Noah into a bedroom at the end of the hallway. It was considerably darker, the room-darkening miniblinds shut tight against the sunlight. A large queen-sized bed dominated the room, its teal and green floral-print comforter pushed to one side of the bed. Two open suitcases filled with clothes lay on the floor near an open closet door. They’d been in the process of packing for their cruise. Or maybe they’d packed most of their things and left their suitcases open to throw in the last of their things in the morning.
“We need to know the last time anyone heard from them,” Josie said.
Noah scribbled on his notepad.
“Here he is,” she said, moving toward one side of the bed. On the floor between the bed and the wall lay Joel Wilkins. “And this was not a murder-suicide.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Joel Wilkins’s hands and feet had been tied with what looked like climbing rope. He was bare-chested and only wearing cutoff sweatpants. He lay on his side, his curly blond hair matted with blood. A pool of red fluid congealed on the hardwood beneath his battered skull. His eyes were half-closed, as though he had just started to doze off.
“Jesus,” Noah said.
Josie squatted and took a closer look at him, noting the thick silver wedding band around his finger. She stood and studied the room once more, gaze falling on a small glittering crystal bowl, no larger than the palm of a hand, on the opposite nightstand. In it rested a diamond ring. It was a princess cut, Josie recognized, its band laden with tiny diamonds. Next to it was a smaller ring, a band with a half dozen small diamonds. Margie Wilkins’s engagement ring and wedding band. On the large dresser opposite the bed was a black wallet. Josie didn’t want to touch it before the scene had been photographed, but a cursory glance showed some bills peeking from the top of it.
“He didn’t take anything,” she said. “The killer. This wasn’t a robbery.” She moved to Margie’s side of the bed and pointed to the rings. “This engagement ring alone is worth thousands.”
Noah nodded. “Just from a quick walk-through, it doesn’t look like anything was taken from any of the other rooms either.”
Josie went back to the doorway. “Let’s see if we can figure out how the killer got in.”
Across the hall was the bathroom. The window was small. Too small for a grown man to fit through. The room looked undisturbed except for two cell phones that rested in the bottom of the toilet. “Noah,” she called.
He came into the bathroom and stared at the toilet bowl. “So this guy breaks in, tosses their cell phones in the toilet so they can’t call for help, ties the husband up, beats him to death, and then assaults and murders the wife.”
It had grown hot in the house. Beads of sweat formed on Josie’s brow. She moved out of the tiny room back toward the hallway and wall of happy photos. “Something like that,” she said. Walking back to the front of the house, she went into the kitchen. It was large, with faux stone tiles and, at its center, a big island table with tall stools surrounding it. It was clean and neat. On the kitchen counter, chrome appliances gleamed. Two phone chargers poked from an outlet above the counter, their cords dangling like loose threads. “They must charge their phones in here at night,” Josie said.
Noah said, “The killer must have grabbed them up on his way through here.”
“Everything else looks undisturbed,” Josie replied.
Plates, glasses, flatware, and two stainless-steel travel mugs—one that said Mr. and one that said Mrs.—dried in the dish rack. The sink was empty. A brown plastic travel mug with the words Wawa Coffee beneath the creamy outline of a flying goose sat next to the coffee maker. Josie used a gloved hand to lift its lid and peek inside. It was clean and dry. They’d obviously tidied up before they went to bed—or at least after they’d finished dinner—and then readied things for the morning. They had cleaned up, packed most of their things, and charged their phones, ready to go on a cruise. They’d probably been excited. Maybe they’d made love, or maybe they’d been too exhausted from preparing for a long trip and simply fallen into bed. No one would ever know. Sometime during the night, someone had come into their home and taken them from the world, destroying the love and light that filled up every inch of their cozy little home. A wave of sadness fell over Josie. She loved her job, but she hated this part of it. She thought of Gretchen’s characteristic stoicism at scenes like these. Philadelphia often had more homicides in a year than some countries. How many scenes like this had Gretchen seen there? Josie knew she was inured to the aftermath of murder. What had it been about the Shore/Cole slaying that penetrated her walls?
Noah’s voice drew her gaze from the mug beside the coffee maker. “Over here,” he called. He stood a few feet away near one of the kitchen windows. As Josie drew closer, she saw it was open and screenless. Without touching the frame, Noah poked his head outside. “He got in here.”
Josie waited for him to move out of her way, and then she did the same. On the grass outside beneath the window lay the screen. On the outer sill of the window were pry marks. Her eyes were drawn to the grass toward the back of the house where a long, thin, black object lay. “What’s that?” she asked, even though she knew Noah couldn’t see it any better than she could.
The two of them went outside, where Hummel’s team was photographing the outside of the house. Josie and Noah rounded the side of the house, walking slowly, eyes sweeping the ground for anything unusual as they made their way toward the object.
“A crowbar,” Noah said.
Josie knelt and looked at it. Short blond hairs, bits of bone and flesh stuck to the flat end of it. “Well, we found our murder weapon. Make sure the team marks it.” She stood up. “I’ve seen enough for now. Let’s get out of the way. Let the ERT do their job. Photos. Print the house. Bag this stuff. The whole nine yards. We can canvass the neighbors. See if anyone saw or heard anything. You get the husband’s sister’s number and give her a call. See what you can find out about this couple.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Two hours later, Josie stood outside the picket fence, jotting down the last of her notes from her interview with the Wilkinses’ next-door neighbor. The evidence response team was finishing up. Dr. Feist had come and gone. Josie kne
w she would be back at the morgue by now, awaiting the arrival of the bodies. Mettner came to the fence and waved to the ambulance sitting curbside. “We’re ready for you guys,” he called. The paramedics had been on scene for some time, waiting to go in and get the bodies so they could be transported to the morgue. Owen stood with his back against the side of the ambulance, scrolling on his phone. He looked up and nodded at Mettner.
“Who’re we taking first?” he asked.
“Take the wife,” Mettner answered. “She’s in the living room.”
“You got it.”
Owen saluted Josie as he and his partner navigated their gurney past her. She was glad he had been on duty when the double homicide call went out. He was one of the few EMS workers who didn’t flinch or turn green at the more gruesome bodies. She knew he would treat the couple respectfully. Josie couldn’t get the image of Margie Wilkins’s glassy, vacant eyes out of her mind.
Noah emerged from the passenger seat of Josie’s Escape, where he’d been talking on the phone. “What’d you get?” he asked her.
Josie flipped a page in her notebook, reading over her notes. “The neighbor to the east didn’t hear or see anything. The neighbor to the west said he saw them come home last night around six—dinnertime—first Joel and then about a half hour later, Margie. He said she’s a part-time fitness instructor at the college, and Joel teaches at the high school. He said he chatted with Joel when he came home, and Joel told him they were leaving on a cruise this morning. He did notice both their cars were still here when he woke up but just figured that their plans changed.”
Noah held up a hand to interject. “I just got off the phone with Joel’s sister, and she said that she got a text from him around 11:30 last night. It was a normal exchange. Him asking her questions about exactly where they’d meet and what time, that sort of thing.”
“So, it was definitely him,” Josie said.
“Yeah. She said there’s no doubt in her mind. Then Joel texted that they were going to bed, and that was that.”
Josie gestured toward the house. “Neighbor in the back said their dogs started going crazy around 2:00 a.m., barking and growling. The owner went outside, looked around the yard, didn’t see anything unusual. By that time, the dogs had stopped barking, so he went back to bed.”
“So, they were alive at 11:30, and the killer most likely came through the back around 2:00, used a crowbar to pop the kitchen screen out and pry open the window. Climbed in and went to the bedroom.”
“He took the phones on his way through the kitchen and dumped them in the toilet before he went to the bedroom.”
“Unless the wife was sleeping on the couch, he had to have woken them both and then separated them. But how did he tie the husband up without the wife running or going after him?”
Josie chewed her bottom lip for a moment. It was ballsy as hell to go after a couple. Especially alone. “I think we should assume he had a gun. A scene becomes much easier to control when you have a gun. He could have had help. Another person with him. Or he bashed the husband’s skull in before he even woke the wife.”
“No blood on the bed,” Noah pointed out.
“Maybe he dragged the guy out of the bed, tossed him onto the floor, and then hit him before either one of them knew what was going on. They were probably both completely asleep. Waking up to an intruder in your bedroom would have been very disorientating. The other scenario is that the killer woke them and then made the wife tie the husband up. What did the sister say about the climbing rope?”
“It’s probably theirs. They did a lot of rock climbing. She said they were very outdoorsy.”
“So, the killer didn’t bring the rope. He either found it in the house or made them get it out,” Josie said. “He could have seen the photos and had them get the rope out. My guess is he would have made the wife do it.”
“Do you think the husband was dead before the killer even took the wife into the living room?” Noah asked.
Josie said, “If he wasn’t, he was close to it. If the killer was alone, he wouldn’t want to run the risk of the husband getting loose while he was committing his other crimes. He would have seen the husband as the biggest threat. Anyone with half a brain would neutralize the biggest threat right off the bat. He was smart enough to dump the phones before he even got started and find and use the climbing rope. Also, there were no lights on in there, and none of the neighbors—especially the guy in the back—remember their lights being on during the night. So, this guy was also smart enough to use a flashlight—I’m guessing—and to keep the lights off so he didn’t draw any attention from nosy neighbors. This killer isn’t an idiot.”
“Well,” Noah said, “let’s hope he left us some evidence somewhere in that house.”
“What’ve we got in the way of background on these two?” Josie asked.
“Joel Wilkins is from here. Went to college out west. Came back to Denton to settle down. Margie Wilkins is from Erie. Also went to school out west, which is where the two met. They’re both into teaching and fitness. They were married roughly a year ago. They’d been dating for about three years before that.”
“So no exes looking for revenge,” Josie said.
“’Fraid not,” Noah said. “I asked the sister if she could think of anyone who might have it out for them, but she couldn’t. She says they were good people and well liked.”
Josie sighed. “Yeah, that’s what the neighbors said. All of them were pretty devastated to hear what happened. This is a pretty tight-knit block. No one can remember seeing anything out of the ordinary in the days before this, so I’m not sure if the killer randomly chose the house or if he did some reconnaissance before he struck.”
They both lowered their heads as Owen and his partner brought out a gurney with a body bag on it. They watched as Margie Wilkins was loaded into the back of the ambulance. “We’ll be back in twenty,” Owen told them.
Josie and Noah nodded their acknowledgment. Once the ambulance drove off, Noah said, “The sister will be back in town in a few hours. I told her to wait until tomorrow, once we’ve got the scene cleaned up, and she can do a walk-through and tell us if anything is missing that we wouldn’t recognize.”
“Perfect,” Josie said.
“What are we looking at here, Boss?”
She knew what he was asking. It wasn’t whether or not the murders were particularly savage, because they were, or if they were calculated, because they were. Noah was asking if this was a one-off or if they would need to put the city on high alert. There was never any way to tell, of course, until you had another slaying. But from everything Josie knew, killers who exhibited this level of sophistication were neither first-time offenders nor likely to stop. Josie gave a long sigh. “We’re going to need the press,” she said. “Maybe this was personal—someone who knew the Wilkins and had some kind of beef with them—but I have a feeling it wasn’t.”
“The crime scene certainly has a cold and impersonal feel to it,” Noah said.
“If it wasn’t personal, and we’re dealing with someone who enjoys killing for the sake of it, then we need to put the community on high alert.”
Noah pushed a hand through his thick brown hair. “All right. Let’s get back to the station and talk with the chief, and then we’ll sound the alarm.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Planning a news conference with Chief Bob Chitwood was about as pleasurable as getting a root canal, but after an hour, the three of them had a pretty good idea of which details the chief should disclose to the public. He asked them rapid-fire questions about the murders, the scene, the timeline, the family—almost as if he were testing their aptitude for police work and not just their patience. Leaving his office, Josie buoyed herself with the thought that for once, she wouldn’t be the one in front of the cameras. Also, the news of the double homicide of a young, beloved Denton couple would keep Gretchen’s name out of the press for at least another day or two. Josie sat back down at her desk and
made a few phone calls to her press contacts. As she finished up her last call, her cell phone rang. A Philadelphia number.
“Josie Quinn,” she answered.
“Detective Quinn,” said a familiar male voice, “it’s Dr. Larson.”
“What can I do for you, professor?”
There was a beat of hesitation. “Well, it’s about Ethan. Ethan Robinson? James’s roommate?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “I remember. I spoke with Ethan’s dad just after you sent me his information. Have you gotten in touch with Ethan?”
“Well, no. That’s the thing. His dad called me because Ethan hasn’t answered any calls or text messages.”
“Ethan’s dad told me that wasn’t unusual behavior for him,” Josie pointed out.
“No, it’s not. Ethan goes, how shall I put it? Off the grid sometimes. But Mr. Robinson was concerned that when he turned up, he would have no idea about James’s murder, so he really wanted to get in touch with him. He called me and asked if I could access Ethan’s class schedule—there was a copy in the apartment actually—and talk with his professors, see if he’d been in class. I’m afraid Ethan hasn’t attended any of his classes for a week.”
Josie felt a small kernel of anxiety in the pit of her stomach. “Dr. Larson, this is very concerning, but you have to understand that Philadelphia is well out of my jurisdiction. I think you or Ethan’s father should report him missing to the Philadelphia Police Department immediately. Then try to help them establish when was the last time anyone has heard from Ethan.”
“Okay, I can do that. I suppose I can make the report. We have campus police as well.”
