by Lisa Regan
“I’ll find out.” He walked off to make a phone call.
“You guys have coffee here?” Loughlin asked.
Josie led her across the hall to the small first-floor kitchenette and made them each a cup of coffee. Loughlin’s cell phone rang, and she answered it, plopping into a seat at the table and speaking softly to whoever was on the line. Josie was stirring extra half and half into her own mug when Noah returned.
“No jacket,” he told her.
Josie walked out into the hallway and gestured with her coffee mug to the camera mounted on the ceiling. “She was wearing it when she got the call from Omar. We saw her on the footage.”
“So?” Noah said.
“It’s not at her house. It’s not in the car.”
“It’s probably in the river with the rest of the stuff she ditched.”
Josie took a sip of coffee and shook her head. “No. She wouldn’t toss that jacket into the river. Whoever took her has it.”
“You still think there’s another person?” Noah asked. “Josie, she turned herself in. She punched you in the face so we’d arrest her. She told Loughlin that she killed him.”
“No,” Josie said. “She said, ‘I’m responsible for that boy’s death.’ That’s not the same thing. That’s not a confession.”
Noah raised a brow. “I think a jury might feel differently. Listen, I know you feel a certain… loyalty toward Gretchen, but I think you need to consider that she did this. We don’t know what went down—why Omar was there or what happened between the two of them—but we have no evidence that another person was involved. Gretchen turned herself in. She hasn’t implicated anyone else.”
“Because she’s not talking. She’s freaked out. Something is going on. There is more to this.”
“Maybe there is,” Noah said. “Maybe there isn’t. Sometimes even people who are trained to do the right thing don’t do it.”
Josie put one hand on her hip. “What are you talking about?”
“Look what happened to Luke,” he said. She shot him a wilting glare, and he put his hands up. “Just hear me out.”
Luke had been a state trooper. When Josie’s marriage to Ray Quinn disintegrated, she’d started dating Luke, and eventually they got engaged. After two and a half years together, he’d been involved in an off-duty shooting, and instead of reporting it, he’d covered it up, ruined his career, and faced criminal charges.
Noah said, “Luke was trained, just like us, on how to respond to a crime. That was his job as a police officer. It should have been a no-brainer for him. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he caught a homicide. Doing the right thing should have been easy for him. Second nature. But he didn’t do it. He freaked out. He did everything wrong. Sometimes people get it wrong. Even when there is no good reason. Even when it’s the very last thing you’d expect them to do. People get things wrong.”
“Luke wasn’t responding to a call,” Josie argued. “He was going to visit a friend. He lost people close to him. It wasn’t the same thing.”
“No, it wasn’t the same,” Noah agreed. “But to this day don’t you ask yourself why he didn’t just call 911?”
She hesitated a moment. Then she conceded, “Of course I do.”
“Because sometimes people get it wrong. No rhyme. No reason. It just happens.”
As annoyed as she was, Josie knew there was truth to what he said. People thought they knew who they were until they were tested. They thought they knew exactly how they would respond to frightening situations. But the disturbing truth was that even decent, law-abiding people with strong moral compasses were thrown off course sometimes. Still, she couldn’t keep her voice from rising an octave. “You’re telling me that Gretchen, an experienced investigator with almost four times as much time on the job as Luke had, shot someone she didn’t know and ran? That she deliberately destroyed evidence? That she just ‘got it wrong’?”
If Noah was stung by the acerbic tone of her voice, he didn’t show it. He merely shrugged. “I’m not saying that’s what happened. We don’t know what happened. I’m saying we should consider the possibility that yeah, Gretchen shot this kid and then ran.”
Josie pointed a finger at him and said only one word, clearly and firmly. “No.”
Before Noah could respond, the door to the conference room creaked open and Andrew Bowen stepped out, looking even more weary than he had when he’d gone inside.
“I’ll get Detective Loughlin,” Noah said.
Seconds later, she joined the three of them in the hallway. The officers stared at Bowen.
“You can process her,” he said. “I’ll enter my appearance on her behalf with the court in the morning.”
Once Gretchen entered the system, she would be picked up by the county sheriff and taken to their facility forty miles away in Bellewood. She would remain there until trial, unless she got out on bail or was able to strike a plea bargain.
“Will she be giving a confession?” Detective Loughlin asked.
“Detective Palmer will not be answering any more questions this evening.” He gave a long sigh and ran a hand over his blond locks. “But we will meet with you tomorrow so she can give you a confession. She’s instructed me to enter a guilty plea on her behalf.”
A small gasp escaped Josie’s lips. “To—to first-degree murder?”
Noah said, “She could get life in prison. Even the death penalty.”
Bowen gave a pained smile. “I’m not at liberty to discuss my client’s legal strategy with you, detectives. But it’s my job, as her attorney, to try to keep the death penalty off the table, as I would with any of my clients facing such serious charges.”
Loughlin stepped forward and handed Bowen a business card. “Call me in the morning.”
Bowen took it and tucked it into his briefcase. “Thank you. Tomorrow she’ll be transferred to the county jail in Bellewood. I’ll speak to the DA, and we’ll make arrangements for you to take down her confession so that a plea can be entered.”
Josie said, “Who’s the boy in the photo? Did you ask her about the boy in the photo?”
“Really, Detective,” Bowen said, sounding exhausted. “You know I can’t discuss privileged conversations between my client and myself.”
“What if the boy in the photo is in danger?”
“In danger from the woman you’ve got in your custody? I don’t think so. But I’m sure Detective Loughlin will get all the relevant information from Detective Palmer tomorrow.”
They wouldn’t get anything out of Andrew Bowen. Josie knew this. If Gretchen didn’t want to talk, she didn’t have to. Bowen was her buffer against their barrage of questions. Besides, at this stage, Josie and Noah were largely out of the loop. Their job now was to do all the requisite paperwork, tie up the loose ends of the investigation, and hand the case over to the district attorney for prosecution. Even though Bowen had told them Gretchen would plead guilty, they were still required to prepare the case for the DA to take to trial in the event that Gretchen changed her mind and decided to plead not guilty. But the state police detective would be the only law enforcement agency to have access to Gretchen. If Gretchen confessed to Loughlin as promised, then from that point on, what happened to Gretchen would be largely up to the attorneys and the court system.
Gretchen seemed determined to send herself to prison for life. But why? Why not fight? Take it to trial and try for an acquittal? Or at least try to negotiate a lesser plea? Josie knew what Noah would say: because she felt guilty for having killed Omar, and she was holding herself accountable. But Josie was certain there was more to the story. And if there was, and Josie was right, there was a killer still out there on the loose.
“Good night, detectives,” Bowen said, and helplessly, Josie watched him walk away.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Josie went home with Noah, but less than five minutes after they walked through his front door, Josie’s phone rang. It was work.
“Don’t answer it,” Noah
said as he went into his living room and started flipping lights on.
“It’s work,” Josie said. “If I don’t answer, they’ll just call you.” She pressed the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
Bob Chitwood’s voice was almost a shout. “I need one of you on the street right now. You drew the short end of the stick, so I called you first. Tell me you’re sleeping, and I’ll call Fraley instead. Unless the two of you are together. Then you can flip a coin, and whoever wins can get their ass down to the strip mall over by Corinthian Place. There’s been a couple of break-ins.”
Josie sighed. “I’m on it.”
Chitwood hung up without another word. She looked at Noah, who said, “I heard. I’ll go. You get some sleep.”
“You think I’m going to be able to sleep?”
The argument about Gretchen’s guilt still lingered between them, tense and unfinished.
Noah handed her the remote to the television. “Eventually, yeah. I’ll take this one. You can do the walk-through with Joel Wilkins’s sister in the morning.”He picked up his keys from where he’d tossed them onto the coffee table and walked past her. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge.”
Josie stepped in front of him before he reached the door. “Do you really think Gretchen is guilty?”
“Do we have to talk about this right now?”
“I want to know.”
He touched her cheek, slid a lock of hair behind her ear, and ever so gently moved in to plant the softest kiss on the butterfly stitch the doctor had put on her cheek. Then he said, “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the evidence shows and what Gretchen does. She wants to plead guilty. The case is closed. We’ve got the Wilkins double murder and everything else that goes on in this city to deal with.”
She stepped back from him. “We’re supposed to stick together, Noah.”
“We who?”
“Me, you, Gretchen. The Denton PD. We’re a team. We have to look out for each other.”
He raised a brow. “There’s a fine line between looking out for one another and police corruption.”
Josie felt the color drain from her face. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
Noah folded his arms across his chest. “Then what do you mean? Because I did look out for Gretchen by doing my job. She’s a grown woman. She made choices and now she’s holding herself accountable for those choices. I know you don’t want to hear that or believe it, but—”
“It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that it’s just not true. Gretchen didn’t do this. I know it in my gut, and my gut is rarely wrong.”
His arms loosened and his annoyed expression softened. “Josie, I understand your impulse to want to somehow exonerate Gretchen. Hell, I even understand the need to answer all the questions. It’s frustrating for the case to close on our end when we don’t know why the hell things happened the way they did, but you need to face the fact that you barely know Gretchen. None of us really know her. Even that lieutenant in Philadelphia told you he wasn’t close to her. She accepted a gift from the Devil’s Blade. A gift she wore each day since they gave it to her. I know you’ve probably done your homework already, but the Devil’s Blade is no joke. They’re criminals—murderers, drug dealers—and the way they treat women… and I can see her accepting the jacket, fine, just to be polite, but why did she wear it? Why was that case so important to her? Has it ever occurred to you that the thing you think Gretchen is hiding is something criminal?”
A dozen replies flew through her head, but all of her arguments came down to one thing: she just knew. She also knew this wasn’t the kind of reasoning that Noah would accept. His cell phone rang. He glanced at it, silenced it, and said, “I have to go. We’ll talk about this when I get back.”
“I won’t be here,” Josie said to his back. “I’m going home.”
He turned back to her. “Josie, please. Don’t make this personal.”
But it was already personal. Gretchen knew—probably better than any person Josie had ever met—what it meant to have a toxic mother, what it was like to be raised by someone who hated you and hurt you at every turn. Gretchen knew how hard it was to talk about the abuse. When Josie was too weak and too gutted to put together the final pieces of the puzzle that exposed the woman who claimed to be her mother, Gretchen had done it for her. Gretchen understood Josie in a way that no one ever had, and possibly no one ever would.
And Josie understood that Gretchen was lying.
“If Gretchen broke the law, you know I wouldn’t stand in the way of her being prosecuted,” Josie told him. “But I don’t think Omar’s death is on her.”
“Then we have to agree to disagree.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Robyn Wilkins paced just outside the picket fence encircling her brother’s home. Brown leather boots reached to her knees, covering a dark-blue pair of skin-tight jeans. Over a long-sleeved cream-colored T-shirt, she wore a wine-red pashmina. Her fingers fidgeted with the fringe on the end of it. Long, silky blond hair sat atop her head in a messy bun. Her blue eyes were rimmed red from crying, and her face was drawn. Josie parked her Escape curbside and got out, introducing herself and extending her condolences.
Robyn put one hand to her chest. “Oh my God, it’s you. The chief of police, the one with the twin sister—”
Josie cut her off. “Detective now. I was only interim chief. If you’re not comfortable doing the walk-through with me, I can get Lieutenant—”
Robyn touched Josie’s forearm. “No, no. I’m glad you’re here. It’s a pleasure. I just wasn’t expecting to ever meet you in person, that’s all.”
Not for the first time, Josie wished Trinity hadn’t talked her into doing all those episodes of Dateline. She gestured toward the house. “Shall we?”
A balled-up tissue appeared in Robyn’s other hand, and she swiped it under her nose. “I guess we have to, don’t we?”
One hand on the gate, Josie stopped. “No, we don’t have to do it today. If it’s too difficult, we can reschedule. I certainly understand. But it would be helpful to our investigation if we knew whether or not anything was disturbed or taken.”
Robyn stared straight ahead at the house. Her brow furrowed, as if she was making some kind of decision. Then she took a deep, shuddering breath and said, “I want to get it over with. I mean, I’m going to have to come back soon anyway to get clothes for the funeral, go through their things… oh God.”
Josie gave her a moment to compose herself. Then she nodded, and Josie opened the gate. Side by side they walked up to the front door, and Josie let them in. “We found your brother’s keys inside.”
Robyn pointed to the key hanger mounted on the wall just inside the door. It was made from a piece of driftwood. “My brother made that. He got the driftwood from a beach on the Oregon coast.” Tears welled in her eyes. “They loved to travel. You know, Margie’s parents died when she was a teenager—car accident—they left her a nice little trust fund. Still, she was really good at stretching their travel money. ‘Do more with less,’ she always said. But that’s how they managed to take so many trips.”
“Your parents,” Josie said. “Do they still live in Denton?”
Robyn nodded. “Yes. I told them yesterday. They’re too—too devastated to deal with any of this.”
“I understand,” Josie replied. “It’s good that they have you.”
Aside from the fingerprint dust marring the various surfaces of the house, it was just as the evidence response team had found it the day before. Robyn walked through the rooms slowly, with Josie behind her. “You can touch things,” Josie told her. “Our evidence response team has already processed the house.”
At the door to the master bedroom, Robyn said, “They didn’t take Margie’s engagement ring?”
“No,” Josie said. “It doesn’t appear that anything was stolen. That’s why we’ve asked you to take a walk through. We just need to confirm that there was no robbery.”
They went from room to room, Robyn touring the house three times without finding anything missing or out of place. She asked questions about the crime, about the way the bodies were found, about the timeline, and Josie answered as best she could without compromising their investigation. On Robyn’s final pass, she lingered in the kitchen, standing at the island where Josie imagined she had stood many times while a guest at her brother’s house. It was Josie’s turn to ask questions. “How long did Margie and Joel live here?”
“Oh, about three years. They bought the house before they got married. They knew they would be together forever.”
“I see they were quite adventurous. Did they have a routine at home, or was it different every day?”
Robyn reached to the center of the island, plucked a napkin from the napkin holder, and used it to wipe beneath her eyes. “They stuck to a routine at home. It made things easier. They were both very much into fitness and working out. They were both usually up at six to take a run together, three times around the park, then my brother left for work. Margie didn’t have to be over at the college until later in the day. Margie got her workout in at her job, but Joel usually hit the gym after teaching all day. They were usually both home by six thirty though at the latest. They took turns cooking dinner. All healthy stuff.”
So anyone who wanted to learn their routine would have had an easy time doing so, although it struck Josie that the killer had chosen to attack them when they were home together. Especially when there was a period of time each day that Margie was home alone. Either the killer hadn’t done much reconnaissance at all, or sexual assault hadn’t been the primary reason for the home invasion. Nor had robbery. A chill ran down Josie’s arms. More and more this looked like it was simply murder for the sake of murder.
“I know Lieutenant Fraley probably asked you this already, but was there anyone that Joel and Margie were having trouble with? Possibly feuding with? Anyone giving them trouble? Anyone Margie might have been having a problem with independent of Joel?”
