Her Final Confession: An absolutely addictive crime fiction novel

by Lisa Regan

  “Pull over,” she said. “We’ll check it out.”

  Noah found a spot near the curb that they would probably never get out of with all the backed-up traffic. As they approached the house, Josie saw the ambulance bay doors were open. Inside, a woman sat on the gurney, her face battered and bloody. Owen leaned over her, gently wiping at the blood with a piece of folded gauze. Josie squinted at the woman and recognized her as the person who had made the domestic violence call that Josie handled the other day. She climbed into the back of the ambulance as Noah walked on, over to the uniformed officers.

  The woman said, “I’m ready to press charges.”

  Josie nodded. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.” She turned to Owen. “Take her to the hospital so we can document her injuries.”

  “You got it,” Owen said.

  Josie began climbing out of the ambulance. “I’ll meet you over there,” she said.

  She heard Owen telling the woman about the new women’s center and the new shelter the city had just built. The difficulty the woman would have in staying safe until her husband was prosecuted was not lost on Josie.

  “It used to be near the hospital,” he was telling the woman. “But this new one is a lot nicer. It’s a little out of the way. You know that road by Denton East…”

  Josie didn’t hear anything else. Her heart did a quick double tap.

  She searched for Noah. When their eyes locked, he said something to the officers he’d been speaking to and walked over to her. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Can you take this domestic?” she said. “I really need to go back and get another look at Omar’s phone records.”

  “Of course,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I think I know how to find the identity of the Strangler.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  “Quinn!” Chitwood shouted as soon as Josie entered the bullpen. He stood at his office door, white hairs floating over his head. He looked behind her. “Where’s the other one?”

  Josie riffled through the piles of paperwork on her desk. “Fraley? He caught a case on the way here. He has to go to the hospital to get a statement from the victim.”

  “So the vic is still alive?”

  The phone records weren’t on her desk. She moved around and started going through the reports on Noah’s desk. “It was a domestic,” Josie told him.

  “We need to talk about this Strangler situation,” Chitwood said. “I want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

  “So do I,” Josie said. Finally, her fingers closed on the report of records from Omar’s phone. “Give us a couple of hours.”

  Josie waited for him to protest—he didn’t like giving them additional time for anything—but he merely stared at her a moment longer. Then he clapped a hand against the doorframe and said, “You and Fraley in my office in two hours. Have your shit together, you got it?”

  Josie nodded and mumbled, “Got it,” but her hands were already frantically flipping pages, searching for the call she’d seen on Omar’s phone records the day they’d received them. The one she had dismissed as a wrong number because it was a one-off. The call to the Norristown volunteer ambulance company two weeks before his murder. Snatching up the pages, she moved back to her own desk and booted up her computer. She did a Google search for the name of the company, and when she was satisfied she knew who to ask for, she dialed the number.

  Chapter Sixty

  Two hours later, Josie stood in front of Chitwood’s desk, a sheaf of papers clutched to her chest. Noah was on his way back from the hospital. Beneath his desk, the tap-tap-tap of Chitwood’s loafer on the tile filled the room. Pointedly, he looked at the clock above Josie’s head. “I don’t have all day, Quinn,” he reminded her.

  “Noah will be here any second,” she said. “Just another minute.”

  Before Chitwood could add anything else, Noah jogged through the door, slightly out of breath. He plopped into a chair and looked expectantly from Josie to Chitwood.

  “Good of you to join us,” Chitwood told him.

  Noah ignored the barb and turned to Josie. “What’ve you got?”

  “The Soul Mate Strangler is not in law enforcement,” Josie told them. She handed them a collection of pages. “Today when we stopped for that domestic call, I overheard Owen telling the victim the location of the women’s shelter.”

  Chitwood said, “Who the hell is Owen?”

  “He’s a paramedic,” Noah said. “He works more shifts than anyone in his whole department.”

  “So?” Chitwood said. “Some local paramedic knows where the domestics go. What’s that got to do with the Soul Mate Strangler?”

  Josie said, “The Soul Mate Strangler was an EMS worker.”

  Both men stared at her, Chitwood with his typical skepticism, which Josie was beginning to think was just his normal face, and Noah with dawning realization.

  Noah said, “They’re at almost all crime scenes. Even if there’s no living victims to treat, they take the bodies to the morgue.”

  “They talk to the police,” Josie said. “And we tell them things. They’re part of our team. They know almost as much as we do about violent crimes that go on in the city. I know that here in Denton, we have a great rapport with the paramedics that respond to all the scenes. It wouldn’t be hard for one of them to eavesdrop on our conversations or even to get friendly with an officer and casually ask some questions.”

  “That’s how he found Gretchen every time,” Noah said, following her line of thinking. “All he would need to do is casually bring up the one living Strangler victim to his Seattle PD buddies at a scene, act concerned, ask some innocent questions.”

  Josie said, “The FBI profile said he is likely very manipulative. Envision it. He’s at some random scene. Everyone’s milling around. He gets to talking about the Strangler case. Maybe he even says, ‘Man, I’m so glad this wasn’t a Strangler call, that guy has the whole city on edge. I can’t believe that last lady even survived,’ and it goes from there.”

  “He’d start talking about how he was so glad she made it, and how was she doing, and his PD buddies probably thought nothing of it,” Noah added. “I can see it. I mean we’re supposed to keep things confidential, but lines get blurred in those situations. I mean, we need emergency medical services workers. It’s impossible to keep everything from them.”

  Chitwood folded his arms across his chest. For once, his voice was at a normal volume. “I’m buying,” he said. “The Strangler is a paramedic. You get a list of paramedics who responded to Strangler scenes in Seattle in 1993 and 1994?”

  “Better than that,” Josie said. “I found him.” She gestured to the packets in their hands. “Two weeks before his murder, James Omar made a single call to a volunteer ambulance company in Norristown, which is just outside of Philadelphia. I thought it was a wrong number. Why would a grad student from Philadelphia be calling a volunteer ambulance company? I called his mentor, Professor Larson, and his dad, and asked them if he had been in any kind of recent accident or had any recent hospitalizations—any reason he might have needed to have contact with this ambulance company. There was nothing. So I looked them up, found the name of the supervisor, and called him.”

  “You sure the supervisor wasn’t the Strangler?” Chitwood asked.

  Josie shook her head. “I researched him. He’s lived in Montgomery County in Pennsylvania his entire life, and he’s too young to be the Strangler. He was very helpful. Didn’t even demand a warrant—after I told him what was going on. He has one sixty-three-year-old paramedic who joined the company five years ago.”

  “Sixty-three,” Noah said. “And he’s doing that kind of work?”

  “Supervisor says he mostly does the driving—he said he did a lot of training to learn the layout of the area. Not a lot of heavy lifting, although the supervisor says he is pretty fit. It’s volunteer. Apparently, he retired early from Seattle and moved out here. He’s an avid hunter.�
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  “That was also on the FBI profile,” Noah noted.

  “Yes. He fits the bill.” She pulled out a copy of his driver’s license, which showed a white man with thinning white hair and a sharp-featured face. Piercing brown eyes stared defiantly at the camera. It looked more like a mug shot than a driver’s license photo. Or maybe he only seemed chilling because Josie knew all the havoc he had wreaked on innocent people. “Ed O’Hara. I called Seattle PD and talked to someone who worked the case when the Neals were murdered in 2004. He didn’t remember O’Hara, but a couple of the older guys did. They said he was always around, worked a lot. He got married in 1998 and had a daughter, but there were a lot of domestic issues, and eventually the wife took the daughter and left him.”

  “You mean domestic calls,” Noah said. “He beat her.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s lucky she got away,” Chitwood remarked.

  Josie nodded. “The supervisor in Norristown says he hasn’t been around for almost two weeks. They called him a few times to take some shifts, but he doesn’t answer his phone. No one has seen him for days. Norristown PD has been alerted. They’re going to go to his house. I also let Philadelphia PD know since this is all connected to Ethan Robinson’s disappearance.”

  “Did you draw up a warrant?” Noah asked.

  She shook her head. “Not yet. Right now, he’s just a person of interest. We need a DNA sample from him to be sure.”

  “Or for someone to positively identify him,” Noah pointed out, but they both knew that wouldn’t happen.

  “All right,” Chitwood said, his voice still at a reasonable volume. Three horizontal lines creased his forehead. “This is going to be delicate. Let’s see what Norristown PD turns up. Get his vehicle information out to every department in the state, make sure everyone’s aware we’re looking for him. But if we can’t sneak up on this guy, I’m going balls to the wall. We’re going to draw this guy out. Make it impossible for him to hide.”

  “Get under his skin?” Noah asked.

  “Yeah,” Chitwood said. “We’ll put Quinn here in front of the cameras. Have her challenge him. Call him out for the little pissant he is, and then when he pokes his nasty little head out of the sand, we nail him.”

  Noah frowned. “Are you talking about using Quinn as bait?”

  “No, I’m saying—”

  “That’s what you’re saying,” Josie said. “You want to dangle me out there, make him turn all his anger toward me, and then wait for him to come after me.”

  “No, no,” Chitwood said. “I’m saying he won’t be able to help himself. He’ll feel the need to do something to reassert his dominance, to prove how superior he is, and as soon as he does that, he’ll expose himself.”

  Chitwood must have been able to tell by the looks on their faces that they didn’t believe him. He sighed with frustration. “Don’t you remember that guy in Kansas? The police publicly challenged him, and so he sent them some computer disc that they were then able to trace back to his location.”

  Josie thought of Margie Wilkins’s sightless eyes. “This guy isn’t the type to send flash drives. If he gets riled enough, he’s going to kill. We can’t protect every person in this city.”

  “I thought you liked the aggressive approach,” Chitwood said.

  Josie gave him a wry smile. “I’ve learned over the years that the smart approach works better.”

  “Well, I think the smart approach is to challenge this guy. Draw him out. If you’re worried about retaliation, I’ll put a unit on you. Or you can stay with Fraley, and I’ll put units on both your houses. You’ve got twenty-four hours to see if Norristown or Philly PD turns him up. Tighten everything up. Get your ducks in a row. Tomorrow, Quinn gives a press conference, and we go after this animal.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  The day was interminably long, and even after she had gone home and escaped the bustle of the station and the piles and piles of paperwork on her desk about the Omar and Wilkins murders, Josie still had the horrible feeling she was headed toward certain doom. It wasn’t the press conference. As interim chief, she’d given press conferences nearly once a week. She’d been on Dateline with Trinity three times. It wasn’t even the idea that the killer might come after her. Getting his face and name out into the press would go a long way to finding him. She was guaranteed national press coverage thanks to Trinity. There was a good chance he would be apprehended wherever he was in the country before he even thought about targeting Josie.

  She just felt like she was missing something.

  What had Gretchen meant when she asked for more time? Time for what?

  Moving through the living room, she picked up all of Harris’s toys. She had been so enthralled in her revelation and her phone call to Dr. Larson the night before, she hadn’t even bothered to straighten up. She went upstairs and broke down the co-sleeper, taking a moment to smell the sheet after stripping it from the mattress. It smelled just like him. Like sunshine, fresh air, and fruit.

  Back downstairs she turned on the television but didn’t watch it. Her mind brimmed with thoughts about the various cases and Gretchen and her son. She wished she could get it to shut off. Normally in this situation, she would down a half bottle of Wild Turkey and fall asleep on the couch in a perfect, contented, dreamless slumber. Instead, she called Noah. When he answered, she said, “I’m home alone.”

  He said, “I’ll be there in twenty.”

  He was there in ten. He wasn’t even completely through the front door when she rocked up onto her toes and kissed him, hooking her arms around his neck and pulling him down to her. Their hands and mouths were frantic, as though their very lives depended on these moments. By the time they reached Josie’s bedroom, they’d left a trail of discarded clothing from the foyer, up the steps, and down the hall. Noah’s skin was hot against hers. As he lowered her onto the bed, he pulled his head back, looking into her eyes. There was an excruciating stillness in the air around them.

  “What?” Josie asked.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  She had, in fact, never been more certain about anything in her life. She realized then that she hadn’t called him to distract herself from dark thoughts or demons. She didn’t want sex to blot out her anxiety. Sure, a distraction from work was welcome, but she had asked him over because she wanted to be with him.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  The first hint of daylight, gray and indistinct through her blinds, blanketed Josie’s bedroom. Noah turned away from her to study the large bank of windows across from the bed. “We’ve been up all night,” he said.

  Josie stretched her arms over her head and turned onto her stomach, resting her face on her pillow. Beneath the tangle of sheets, Noah’s hand found the small of her back and stroked up and down her spine. “Marathons aren’t known for their brevity,” she joked.

  He laughed. His head disappeared beneath the sheets, and a moment later she felt his hot mouth against her bare shoulder, working its way down. She closed her eyes and sighed with contentment. For the first time in months, her head felt remarkably clear, and it had started already to work back through what she knew about Gretchen’s case, the Strangler, and the Wilkins murders.

  “He’s going to kill Ethan Robinson,” she said.

  She felt Noah’s mouth pause. His head popped up, and he pulled the sheet back so his face was exposed. “If this is your idea of pillow talk,” he said, “then I think we need to re-evaluate this relationship.”

  Josie laughed. She turned over so she could meet his gaze. “I’m sorry. Sex helps me think better.”

  Noah gave a deep belly laugh, his sides shaking. Josie slapped lightly at his chest. “Hey,” she said. “It’s not funny. You don’t feel clearer-headed afterwards?”

  “No, I feel sleepy. Well, except for now.”

  His index finger traced the skin over her collarbone. She watched him for a long moment as his ha
nds explored her. The scar on his right shoulder where she’d shot him during the missing girls case drew her eyes. She touched it gingerly.

  Noah said, “Ethan knows O’Hara’s identity. He has to kill him.”

  Their hands continued to move along each other’s bodies, a slow study. Making up for lost time, she supposed. “So why would Gretchen make a deal with the Strangler to let Ethan go as long as she takes the fall for Omar’s murder? She can’t speak for Ethan. There’s no guarantee that he won’t go to the police.”

  “Well, he hasn’t,” Noah said.

  “But why? Why wouldn’t he? He’s been studying serial killers since he was a teenager. He read the book about the Strangler. He knows exactly what O’Hara is capable of, and he must know that O’Hara killed James. Why wouldn’t he go directly to the police?”

  “Maybe he feels guilty. He probably convinced Omar to arrange this meeting between Gretchen and the Strangler, and if he didn’t convince him, he still let Omar do it, and now his friend is dead.”

  “True,” Josie said. She thought about what Gretchen said about being young and stupid. Ethan was only in his early twenties. Josie had no idea what kind of person he was or how he handled stress. “So let’s say that Ethan is just young and dumb. But that doesn’t account for why Gretchen would think that O’Hara would let Ethan live. She must know. She must realize that O’Hara knows this kid knows who he is and that he could turn him in at any time.”

  “I’m sure she does. But we know she asked you for more time before going public with this whole thing, so obviously she’s up to something.”

  “Like what?”

  She felt him shrug beneath her hands. She hadn’t expected an answer. He had access to all the same information she did. She asked another question that she didn’t expect him to answer: “What the hell could she be up to?”