by Lisa Regan
Josie opened the bag and took the phone out. She pressed the power button. The screen said: enter passcode.
“Shit,” Josie said.
Dan stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“It needs a passcode.”
Dan frowned. “Oh yeah. Gretchen said that she asked the parents if they knew her passcode, but they didn’t.”
“Thanks, Dan,” Mettner said as the older man shuffled out of the room and back down the stairs. To Josie, he said, “I’ll call Christine Trostle and see if she knows.”
Christine didn’t know the passcode but made several suggestions, none of which granted them access to the phone. Josie plopped into her chair with a sigh, put the phone on her desk and glared at it. From the corner of the room, Amber spoke up. “You said she was a swimmer, right? You should try something swimming-related. What was her event? The race she did the best at?”
Mettner flashed Amber a smile.
Josie sat forward and tapped away at her keyboard. “Great idea,” she said. Pulling up the latest WYEP story on the Denton University swim team, Josie, Mettner, and Amber watched the short video, which focused almost entirely on Nysa. Hudson had been included, as per his mother’s wishes, but his contribution had been pared down to short sound bites praising Nysa. The sight of her alive, well, and thriving was painful. Josie could still feel Nysa’s cold, lifeless form beneath her hands as she tried to pump life back into her.
Mettner said, “Sounds like her best race was the hundred-meter butterfly.”
Amber said, “I bet you her personal best time is her passcode.”
Josie clicked off the WYEP story and did a Google search. It only took a few minutes to find it. “Amber! You’re brilliant.” She picked up the phone and typed in 5786. Immediately, the phone unlocked.
“Yes!” Josie said, drawing laughs from Mettner and Amber.
They crowded in behind her as she navigated through the phone. The home screen was a photo of the white dog that Josie had seen in a frame on Nysa’s dresser. There were several unread texts, most of which were from Christine. Some were from other students who obviously shared classes with Nysa, wondering where she’d been that morning. There was one which Josie believed was from her mother, sent at nine that morning, asking how the paper was going. Josie swallowed over a lump in her throat. Clearly, Nysa had been very close to her family.
Josie had to find out what happened to this girl.
“There are no texts from last night except for the ones between her and Christine,” she complained. “Whoever the ‘friend’ was that she met up with, they didn’t text her. Unless she deleted the texts.”
“Check the call log,” said Mettner.
Josie did but there was nothing aside from Christine’s calls, all of them missed. “There’s nothing.”
“There has to be something,” Mettner said. “Let me see.”
He took the phone from her hands, scrolling and swiping. Josie said, “Check her email and social media. There has to be some evidence of this mystery friend. You checked all the library footage, right?”
“Yeah,” Mettner mumbled. “She went inside, went to the fourth floor, talked with the librarian and then worked at a computer station until the library closed. She didn’t talk to anyone.”
“Then she must have met up with the mystery person on her way out of the cut-through,” Josie said. “I was down there today. She could have seen someone on the path or even walking back to her house. Also, people park there and walk up to campus. Someone could have even been waiting for her when she stepped off the path.”
Mettner looked up from the phone. “So this is worthless.”
Amber said, “Could I take a look?”
Mettner handed the phone off to Amber. To Josie, he said, “Didn’t you say that the roommate thought Nysa was seeing someone secretly?”
“She implied it,” Josie said. “Yeah.”
“Maybe they met there and spent the night together. Maybe that’s a place they routinely meet up—at the cut-through. If so, there would be no need for them to call or text one another.”
“Could be, but Christine was expecting her to come home when the library closed. If the GPS is enabled on her phone, we might be able to find out where she was last night,” Josie suggested.
“Her phone was in her backpack, which was tossed into the woods,” Mettner said. “It was probably there all night.”
“True,” Josie said. “But it’s worth checking.”
“There’s something in her calendar,” Amber said. She held up the phone so that both Mettner and Josie could see the screen. Sure enough, the tiny square for that morning was filled with something. Josie took the phone from Amber and tapped to enlarge it. Her heartbeat sped up a fraction. “You’re right,” she said. “There was a calendar reminder set for five fifty-five a.m. today. It says: ‘Time to be a mermaid.’”
“What does that mean?” Mettner asked. “Is that what she calls herself because she’s a swimmer? A mermaid? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke? Like instead of ‘time for a swim,’ ‘time to be a mermaid?’”
Josie scrolled through the calendar going back months, but the “Time to be a mermaid” alert was the only entry in it. “I don’t think she used this calendar.”
“She used it this morning,” said Amber.
“Right. But there’s nothing else on here going back a year, at least. Why would she suddenly put a reminder into her calendar app for a time she didn’t normally even go swimming? Why would she stay out all night on a Sunday night with some mystery friend and then go to the pool with no suit and without her swim bag? Where was she between the time she left the library and when she came back out of the cut-through this morning? Who was she with?”
Mettner stared at her. “Should I be writing this down?”
Josie laughed drily. “No. I’m thinking out loud.”
Mettner held out a hand and Josie gave him the phone. He tapped and scrolled. He frowned. “The GPS isn’t enabled. Even if she had it with her all night, there’s no way to find out where she went.”
“Draw up a warrant,” Josie said. “Send it to her provider so we can find out where the phone pinged last night.”
“That’s only going to get us to within one to three miles of where she was,” Mettner pointed out. “And it could take a week to get it, depending on her provider.”
“Still worth a try,” Josie said.
The stairwell door swung open and Noah stepped into the room, looking tired. Behind him, Detective Gretchen Palmer shuffled in, a rolled-up polo shirt tucked beneath one of her arms. She handed it to Josie before lowering herself into her desk chair.
“Thanks,” said Josie. “Dan ordered me some new shirts. I’ll give it back as soon as they come in. Did you guys get anything?”
Noah, too, sat down. He took out his notebook and tossed it onto his desk. “No,” he said.
“Not a damn thing,” Gretchen added.
“You’re kidding,” Mettner said.
“I wish we were,” said Gretchen. “But no one remembers seeing Nysa Somers last night or this morning. Or if they did, they won’t admit it.”
Noah said, “Sunday is one of the quieter nights, apparently. First classes on Monday don’t start till eight. Nysa came out of the cut-through around six. There wouldn’t have been many people out at that time on a Monday morning. We checked with Hudson Tinning’s roommate. He says Hudson was home all day Sunday. His mom brought his clean wash over with some dinner. They all had dinner together around six thirty, then the mom left. The roommate says both of them were there the whole night. He went to bed around one in the morning, and Hudson was in their living room playing Xbox.”
“Oh,” Josie said. “I expect he scored high on that chem test then.”
Mettner laughed.
Noah said, “Where do we go from here?”
“I’d like to talk to her parents,” Josie said.
“Not today,” Gretchen said. “They asked if
we could give them the rest of the day. Their other daughter is driving up tonight to be with them. She goes to Temple University in Philadelphia. Freshman year.”
Noah looked at his phone. “It’s almost five. We need to get home. We’ve got dinner.”
Josie smiled in spite of the terrible mood the Nysa Somers case had put her in. “Oh yes, I can’t wait. Let’s get home then. I could use a shower. I just want to call Dr. Feist and see if she’s had a chance to do the autopsy.”
Josie dialed Dr. Feist’s cell phone. After seven rings, the doctor answered, sounding out of breath. “Detective Quinn, what can I do for you?”
“We were just wondering if you’d had a chance to complete Nysa Somers’ autopsy?”
She blew out a breath. “Best-laid plans. I had my assistant start the preliminary preparations, and then the emergency room got slammed. Three cases of seizures and two of acute heart failure, all in a row. They asked me to come up and help out. It’s an ‘all hands on deck’ situation over here.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Josie said. “Don’t let me keep you.”
“Tomorrow, Detective,” Dr. Feist said. “I promise.”
At home, Josie took their Boston terrier, Trout, for a walk while Noah started dinner. Of the two of them, he was the only one who could cook a whole dinner without setting off smoke alarms. Misty and Harris showed up a half hour later. Much to Josie’s relief, Harris had had a wonderful day at Pre-K and couldn’t wait to return the next morning. He spent all of dinner regaling them with tales of the animals in the small petting zoo.
In spite of the pleasant dinner and the weight off her shoulders knowing that Harris had had a great—and safe—first day at Pre-K, Josie couldn’t sleep. Thoughts of Nysa Somers, the potentially laced brownies, the creepy sticker, and the missing hours before her strange death whirled in her head. When she checked the clock for the third time that night, it read 4:57 a.m. This time last night Nysa had been… where? Josie wondered. Where had she gone for eight hours? Who had she been with?
Trout whined at her feet and jumped down from the bed, finding a place on the bedroom carpet as he sometimes did when Josie tossed and turned too much for his liking. Josie reached out for Noah, but his side of the bed was cold and empty. She got up and padded downstairs with Trout at her feet. Noah was nowhere to be found. Back upstairs, she saw that his phone and wallet weren’t on the dresser where he normally left them. She called him. After six rings, he picked up.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Got a call,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the station later.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she asked.
“You were out cold. I thought you needed the rest. You can get the next one. Listen, I have to go.”
Josie opened her mouth to say something: Come home. I wish you were here. She wasn’t good at communicating those types of things. Things that uncloaked her vulnerability. She knew she was supposed to try. Everyone in her life had been pushing her to go to therapy for the past year. So far she had resisted. Reliving her vast and varied childhood trauma seemed like the least helpful thing to do. She preferred to push it down or out or into a compartment in her mind where she didn’t have to remember any of it. Sometimes certain cases caused her demons to swirl. It was always better if Noah was there with her, especially since she’d given up drinking. But he had a job to do, just the same as her. She knew he couldn’t come home, even if he wanted to.
“You there?” Noah said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I—I’ll see you later.”
He hung up before she could say the one thing she was comfortable admitting: “I miss you.”
Seventeen
Three hours later, Josie drove through the center of town and up the long road to Denton Memorial Hospital. The large, blocky brick building sat on top of one of the tallest hills in town. Josie parked and went inside, taking an elevator to the basement, which housed the city morgue. It was the quietest place in the entire building. A long hallway, once bright white but now dingy gray and complemented by yellowed floor tiles, led to Dr. Feist’s domain. As Josie drew closer, the ever-present smell of chemicals combined with the rancid scent of putrefaction assaulted her senses.
She bypassed the large exam and autopsy room and went to Dr. Feist’s office. The door was open, but Dr. Feist wasn’t inside. Josie sat in the guest chair in front of her desk and waited. Dr. Feist had done her best to make the room warm and welcoming. The cinder block walls were painted a soothing periwinkle blue. The abstract wall art was awash in pastel colors. Dr. Feist kept the overhead fluorescent lights turned off in favor of two desk lamps, which gave the room a softer glow. A second potted plant had been added since Josie was last there, and now a white cylindrical air freshener sat on top of one of the filing cabinets, hissing out a spray of apple-scented aerosol every few seconds. It was a pleasant addition, but couldn’t overcome the odor of the morgue next door.
“Detective Quinn,” Dr. Feist said as she sailed into the office. She plopped into the chair behind her desk with a sigh, lower lip jutted out as she blew a breath of air upward, making her silver-blonde bangs flutter. “Are you alone?”
Josie checked her phone furtively. She hadn’t heard from Noah all morning. His only response to her texts had been a terse: Got caught up. Meet you later.
“It appears that way,” Josie said. “You look exhausted. Here.” Josie handed her a cup of coffee from their favorite city café, Komorrah’s.
“I haven’t been home yet,” Dr. Feist said. Her eyes closed as she sipped the coffee. “Heavenly,” she added. “Thank you.”
“They had you in the ER all night?”
She shook her head and put her coffee down on her desk. “Not the entire night. They had three more heart attacks after the other cases. I did what I could. I don’t normally treat patients, but I made myself useful in any way I could. Then I figured I was up, so why not come down here and do Nysa Somers’ autopsy? After meeting with her family yesterday, I don’t want them to have to wait long for the body to be released.”
“Thank you,” Josie said. “For getting to it so quickly.”
“Of course. I won’t have a report ready for another day, and even then, it will only be preliminary, pending the toxicology results. I can’t issue a final report until those are in, and as you know, toxicology testing can take up to eight weeks.”
“I’m aware,” Josie said. “Anything you can tell me now about your initial findings would be helpful.”
Dr. Feist leaned back in her chair, resting her head against its back. “Before I go into those, you should know that while it is pretty clear that Nysa Somers drowned, it’s not clear yet whether or not it was an accident. Her cause of death is drowning, but the manner of death—accident, homicide, suicide—I can’t give you a firm answer on that right now. Sometimes, when we see drowning as a cause of death, particularly in a case where a body is found in water and we don’t know how it got there, it’s not always clear how the drowning happened. That’s why toxicology tests are so important. I know it’s frustrating to wait, but we have no control over the speed of the lab, unfortunately.”
“I understand,” Josie said. “What did you find on exam?”
Dr. Feist nodded. “She had no traumatic injuries, no signs of sexual assault, no bruising, no lacerations, no skin under her fingernails, and no evidence of disease or sudden medical event. Basically, on exam, Nysa Somers was as healthy as could be. The only things I found were consistent with death by drowning. Her lungs were very congested. Hyperinflated. On x-ray they showed what we call ‘ground glass opacity,’ meaning that the images of her lungs look as though they’ve got ground glass in them. She had fluid in her stomach and her paranasal sinuses. But as I said, the manner of death is undetermined. At least until we get toxicology back.”
“Any other contents in her stomach?” Josie asked. “Any way to tell the last thing she ate and when?”
Dr. Feist’s face lit up.
“As a matter of fact, there was some type of food in her stomach at the time of her death. It was difficult to tell what it might have been but from having done autopsies for the last twenty years, my guess is chocolate. Some kind of candy bar, pastry—a brownie, maybe? I can’t say that for certain. I’ve sent the stomach contents off to the lab as well for analysis but that, too, will take time.”
Josie said, “The stomach takes about six hours to completely empty, doesn’t it?”
“Well, it depends on the person,” said Dr. Feist.
“We’ve got about eight hours of time unaccounted for in this case. From roughly nine thirty in the evening till six in the morning. Is it possible that Nysa Somers ate something during that time based on what you found?”
“Not just possible,” Dr. Feist answered. “Probable. It’s just difficult to pinpoint when she ate it. It would have had to be after midnight, I’d say.”
“What about time of death?” Josie asked. “Were you able to narrow that at all? I know we’re only looking at a two-hour window as it is—between six a.m. and eight a.m.—but I’m curious.”
“Given the temperature of the room in which the pool was located as well as the pool water, both of which are at a constant temperature, and the measurement from her chest cavity on autopsy, I’d say she was dead approximately two hours.”
“You’re saying it’s likely she died shortly after six a.m. when she entered the pool area, then?” Josie clarified.
Dr. Feist nodded.
Josie was silent.
“What is it?” Dr. Feist asked.
“Nothing,” Josie said. “I’m just trying to work out how I’m going to tell her family that their star swimmer did, in fact, drown yesterday.”
Eighteen
Chief Bob Chitwood stood in front of the detectives’ desks, his arms crossed over his thin chest, staring down at Josie, Mettner, and Gretchen. His dark eyes peered at each one of them in turn over the rim of a pair of reading glasses. Strands of his white hair floated across his scalp. At least his acne-scarred cheeks weren’t flushed with irritation or anger, Josie thought. Yet.