Her Final Confession: An absolutely addictive crime fiction novel

by Lisa Regan

  Robyn shook her head. “No, no one I can think of, and believe me, yesterday after I got off the phone with Lieutenant Fraley, I racked my brain. But I couldn’t come up with anyone. My parents couldn’t either. I called a couple of Margie’s friends—women who were bridesmaids at the wedding—to see if they knew of anyone she was having trouble with, and they couldn’t think of anyone either.”

  Josie said, “Actually, if you could get me a list of names of her close friends so we can contact them directly, that would be very helpful.”

  Robyn nodded. “Of course.” She stood, taking one last pan of the kitchen—and froze. She pointed to the countertop where the coffee maker showed their reflections. “That,” she said. “That’s not theirs.”

  Josie followed her gaze to the plastic travel mug beside the coffee maker. The one that said Wawa Coffee on it. “The mug? That was here yesterday when we arrived.”

  Robyn walked over to the countertop and went to pick it up, but Josie stopped her with a gentle hand. “Wait,” she said. “Don’t touch it. If you think it’s important, I’ll want to bag it as evidence.”

  Robyn snatched her hand back as though she’d been burned, and hugged herself.

  Josie sent a quick text to Hummel, asking him to come and retrieve an additional piece of evidence from the Wilkins house. Josie didn’t have any bags or labels with her, and besides that, they’d need to establish a chain of custody. That, and she wanted to double-check the photos taken at the scene the day before against the cup’s current location to make sure no one on her team had disturbed it. “Why do you say it’s not theirs?”

  Robyn walked around the kitchen and opened each one of the upper cabinets. “Do you see anything plastic anywhere in this kitchen?”

  Josie took a careful scan of the contents of the cabinets. “No,” she said. She stepped over to a cabinet whose bottom shelf was crowded with additional travel mugs much like the Mr. and Mrs. mugs in the drainboard. “They’re all stainless steel,” Josie said.

  “Right,” Robyn said. “They thought they were being environmentally conscious and avoiding carcinogens by not using anything plastic. They were the people who brought their own cloth tote bags to the grocery store. They’d never have a plastic coffee mug in this house. Besides, we don’t even have Wawas around here.”

  “Wawa is in southeastern Pennsylvania,” Josie said. “New Jersey and Delaware too, I think. They could have picked it up if they were in any of those areas.”

  Robyn shook her head emphatically. “Yes, they could have. I’m sure they’ve been to a Wawa at some point in their travels. They did like to go to the Jersey shore in the summers. But they didn’t buy this. Maybe someone on your team left it?”

  Josie knew without a doubt that no one on the evidence response team would ever be wandering around an active crime scene with a coffee cup in their hands, much less leave it behind, but she didn’t say this to Robyn. “Or maybe Joel and Margie had a guest who brought it with them?” she suggested.

  Robyn’s shoulders slumped. “Oh. Yes, I suppose. I mean I don’t remember them having any guests recently, but I don’t know every detail of their lives.”

  Josie touched her shoulder and guided her toward the front door. “Regardless, we’ll take it into evidence and I’ll ask the lab if they can try to get some prints from it. We have to treat everything as potential evidence.”

  Robyn nodded. “Thank you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  MARCH 1994

  Seattle, Washington

  * * *

  Billy’s snores woke Gretchen from a sound sleep. If dragons were real, she imagined they sounded like her husband when he was deep in the throes of slumber, his snoring reverberating through the entire house. She rolled toward his side of the bed and patted the space where Billy normally was—when he was home—but he wasn’t there. She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling, trying to decide if she could get back to sleep in spite of the racket he was making. A minute later she was padding through the darkened house to the living room, where the television cast a blue glow over the room. Billy sprawled across the sofa, his feet, still in boots, dangling over the end.

  Slowly, Gretchen unlaced each boot and pulled them off. His white tube socks were gray with dirt and grime, and the big toe of his left foot poked through a hole. She wondered if wives were supposed to keep their husbands in clean, holeless socks. But Billy didn’t seem to care about things like that. He only wanted her. Had only wanted her since the day they met back East.

  She positioned herself between the couch and the coffee table, her eyes catching on the strange mug-like clay formation sitting between his wallet and keys. It was gray and looked half-melted and half-formed, like someone had been trying to fashion a coffee mug in a lava pit. It wasn’t exactly the type of thing she would expect an ATF agent working undercover in an outlaw motorcycle gang to bring home from work, but Billy had always been full of surprises.

  His long beard was coarse beneath her fingers. She woke him with a kiss. Even before he pulled her down on top of him, she knew he was awake because the snoring had finally ceased. His body was warm beneath hers, his hands roving up and down her back, fingers finding their way beneath her nightgown, cupping her ass. They kissed long and slow, and Gretchen felt the stirring of desire. It was the feeling she had chased all the way across the country.

  “You said you wouldn’t fall asleep on the couch,” she whispered as his lips traveled down her neck.

  “I’m sorry. Rough night. But I’m almost patched in.”

  A thrill of fear ran down Gretchen’s spine. Patched in meant becoming a full, official member of the Devil’s Blade, the outlaw biker gang he’d been undercover with for nearly two years. She’d been worried about it from the day she’d first heard the expression. What if they found him out? The smallest slip in his cover could prove fatal.

  “That’s a good thing,” he reminded her, sensing the tension in her body.

  “I know,” she said. “But I worry about you.”

  “I’m in tight with Linc, Gretch. He won’t forget what I did for him.”

  She didn’t point out to him that Lincoln Shore was a criminal, and regardless of the fact that Billy had saved his life, a cop was still a cop, and Linc would kill Billy without hesitation if he found out that Billy was working undercover for the ATF. It was an argument they’d had at least a dozen times, and it wasn’t worth having now, not while his hands caressed her body and his lips probed behind her ear.

  Changing the subject, she said, “Nice mug, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “That… thing. It’s a mug, right? Or it was. What’d you do? Drop it in a deep fryer?”

  His hands and mouth stopped moving across her body. In the glow from the television screen, she saw his eyes, confused. She sat up and pointed at the unfinished ceramic piece on the coffee table. He practically threw her off his lap, bolting to his feet.

  “Where’s my knife?”

  “What?” Gretchen said.

  His eyes tracked across the coffee table. Wallet, mug-like thing, keys. He pointed. “My knife was here.”

  All Devil’s Blade members—prospects or patches—carried a blade.

  “Are you sure you—”

  He cut her off. “It was right here.” He turned and looked at her, lowering his voice. “Gretchen, remember when I showed you how to use the Ruger upstairs?”

  She nodded, an unpleasant tingle filling her stomach, spreading to her chest.

  “Go to the bedroom and get it. Meet me in the foyer. Go fast.”

  “Are you sure that’s nece—”

  His voice remained quiet but held a firmness that almost sounded panicked. “Just do it,” he told her.

  She raced back to their bedroom. The drawer of Billy’s nightstand slid out with a groan. Her fingers scrambled along its undersurface until they found the tiny key. She put it between her teeth and climbed onto the bed. Over the headboard hung a painting
they’d bought at a local arts festival. A small wooden boat, floating empty on the still surface of a lake at dusk. As quietly as she could, Gretchen lifted the painting off the wall, gaining access to the built-in wall safe behind it. It took three tries for her trembling fingers to get the tiny key into the lock and open the safe.

  The Ruger wasn’t there.

  Panic rolled through her, a cold sweat filming her skin. She scrambled back to the living room, pulling up short in the foyer when she saw Billy standing stiffly in the doorway. It took her a moment to realize what was wrong. His hands. They were behind his back. The long barrel of a gun pressed against his temple. Before Gretchen had a chance to focus on the black form beside Billy, the beam of a flashlight blinded her.

  A voice she didn’t recognize said, “Hello, Gretchen.”

  Billy said, “Run!”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  PRESENT DAY

  Denton, Pennsylvania

  * * *

  Josie waited for Hummel to arrive. She took a photo of the Wawa travel mug with her cell phone and let him bag it and take it into evidence. They went over the photos the team had taken the day before. The mug was in the same place—so it hadn’t been moved or touched by anyone on their team. All the way back to the station, the mysterious mug nagged at her. It hadn’t seemed important at all the day before, but that was the thing with crime scenes—you just never knew what might turn out to be of critical importance. It was exactly the reason they’d asked Robyn to do the walk-through. Once Josie got to her work station, she phoned a contact in the state police crime lab and called in a favor. Across from her, Noah’s desk was empty. She hoped he was sleeping. As she sat down at her desk, she noticed a small pastry box from Komorrah’s Koffee. Inside was a cheese Danish. Her favorite. Noah must have left it for her before he went home. It was his way of trying to smooth things over, but Josie wasn’t sure it was enough. It bothered her that he was so quick to believe that Gretchen was a murderer.

  Still, she was hungry, so she ate the Danish and then tried calling Jack Starkey, the ATF agent on Gretchen’s list of references. His outgoing message still said he was out of town at a conference. Josie left another message. Then she looked up the number for the ATF office in Seattle and called. She got another agent who told her the same thing Starkey’s voicemail had told her. He was away. She left her cell phone number and asked the agent if he could get in touch with Starkey and ask him to call her right away.

  Josie called down to holding to see if Gretchen was still there, but she was gone. The sheriff’s deputies had come to transport her to county jail in Bellewood while Josie was meeting with Robyn Wilkins. Not that Josie could have spoken to her. Loughlin was due to take a confession later that day, and Gretchen was represented by counsel. With a sigh, Josie returned to her regular duties, spending a couple of hours writing up reports on the Wilkins case. Dr. Feist called to let her know that the autopsies didn’t turn up any surprises. As they suspected from the scene, Margie Wilkins had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and Joel Wilkins had been bludgeoned to death; the fractures to his skull were consistent with having been struck with a crowbar. It would take a few days to get the prints back, and weeks for them to test the DNA found on Margie Wilkins’s body. Real police work was not at all like what people saw on television.

  She took a call for a domestic disturbance where the woman decided not to press charges. After she finished up more paperwork, she got lunch. Noah still wasn’t back when she returned to her desk. She used her cell phone to call Dr. Perry Larson. He answered on the third ring.

  “Dr. Larson,” Josie said, “I was wondering if you had had a chance to talk to the police about Ethan Robinson and to review the footage of the apartment lobby.”

  There was the sound of traffic in the background, then what sounded like the whoosh of an electric door, and finally silence before he spoke again. “Oh yes. The detectives were out yesterday. They took down everything, had a look around the apartment. We reviewed the footage of the lobby, and it turns out that Ethan and James left together the day that James came to Denton.”

  “Really?” Josie said. “Do you think you could send me the footage?”

  “Of course.”

  He took down her email address, and a few moments later, the surveillance was in Josie’s inbox. She queued it up. It was only about ten seconds long. The view was from above the door leading outside. The two men walked out of the inner door, Omar first, dressed in the same T-shirt and pants he’d been wearing when they found him in Gretchen’s driveway. Ethan Robinson was slightly taller than Omar, his brown hair straight. He too wore a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and he carried a laptop bag over one shoulder.

  With a sigh of frustration, Josie reset the footage and watched it again. They walked from one door to the next. Ethan talked to Omar’s back as they moved. He had been in mid-sentence when they entered the tiny foyer and appeared to still be in mid-sentence as they left it. Josie reset the footage to the beginning and replayed it, trying to read Ethan Robinson’s lips. Again and again, she watched it. She couldn’t tell what he was saying, but she was pretty sure it was five words.

  “He’s saying, ‘when you get there, don’t,’ and then he’s out the door.” Noah’s voice over her shoulder made her jump so violently, she knocked her pen and pad off the desk.

  She swiveled in her chair, shaking her head, and bent to pick up her things. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  Noah was dressed in his usual khakis and Denton PD polo shirt. His hair looked freshly washed, and the intoxicating scent of his aftershave made Josie’s earlier anger toward him slip just a little. He smiled. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks for the Danish,” she said. “How can you tell what this kid is saying? You never told me you can read lips.”

  He shrugged and walked around to his desk, plopping into his chair. “Only a little.”

  “You read Gretchen’s lips on the CCTV footage of her.”

  “I had a girlfriend once who was partially deaf. She read lips. She taught me how to do it. We used to make a game of it.”

  It was the first time he’d told her anything about his former girlfriends besides their names and how many there had been. He was a couple of years younger than Josie, had never been married, and hadn’t had a steady girlfriend since joining the force.

  Noah said, “Is that James Omar?”

  “Yes,” Josie said. “It’s from the morning of Omar’s murder. Omar and his roommate, Ethan Robinson, left their apartment together.”

  “But it doesn’t sound like they were going to the same place,” Noah pointed out. “Robinson said, ‘when you get there.’”

  “So, Robinson knew what Omar was doing—where he was going and why—and according to professor Larson, Ethan is still missing.”

  “The Philly PD are working on that, right?”

  “Yes,” Josie said. Changing the subject, she told him about the walk-through of the Wilkinses’ home and the mug that Robyn insisted didn’t belong to Joel and Margie Wilkins.

  “You have a photo of it?” Noah asked.

  Josie pulled it up on her phone to show him.

  “No one from our team brought this to the scene,” he said.

  “Hummel and I double-checked. It was there when the ERT arrived.”

  “There were two travel mugs in the drainboard if I remember correctly,” Noah said.

  “Right. The Mr. and Mrs. mugs.”

  “But only one beside the coffee maker.”

  “Because it’s not theirs and they didn’t put it there,” Josie confirmed. “There is the slight possibility that a friend or houseguest brought it to the house and that’s why it’s there.”

  “But why next to the coffee maker?”

  “Right,” Josie said. “Makes no sense. I think the killer brought it and left it there.”

  “On purpose?”

  “It would be a strange thing to do intentionally, but I’m inclined to think so. This guy was
seen by no one, had the foresight to toss their phones into the toilet, and managed to control two victims. There’s some degree of sophistication there. It’s hard to believe he would just accidentally leave his clean, empty coffee cup at the scene. At 2:00 a.m.”

  “Well, he did leave the murder weapon,” Noah pointed out.

  “Yes, but lots of killers leave their murder weapons at the scene. Besides, he left his DNA on Margie Wilkins, so it’s not a matter of him not wanting to leave behind something that has the potential to identify him. The mug is something else entirely.”

  “Okay,” Noah said. “Let’s say he brought the mug with him and left it at the scene on purpose. Why?”

  “It’s a game,” Josie said. “I mean look, if we hadn’t had the walk-through with Robyn—if she hadn’t noticed the mug—we would never even know it was important. This guy killed for the sake of killing. The mug is his way of taunting us, or at least enjoying how stupid he thinks we are.”

  Noah leaned back in his chair, using one of his feet to swivel his chair back and forth in a semicircle as he thought about what she said. “We don’t have Wawas in Denton. Wawas are in Philadelphia.”

  Josie said, “Right. When I was in Philadelphia, there was a Wawa practically every few blocks.”

  “You think the killer came here from Philadelphia,” he said.

  “Not exactly.”

  Josie used one hand on her desktop computer’s mouse to pull up the electronic file on James Omar’s murder, specifically the photos the evidence response team had taken inside Gretchen’s house. She found the photo of the end table with the shiny circle in the dust where some round object had been. She clicked to enlarge the photo and turned her monitor toward Noah. She expected skepticism, but instead he sat forward, took a long look at the photo, and asked, “Does the size match up?”