Her Final Confession: An absolutely addictive crime fiction novel

by Lisa Regan

  Josie slid the warrant across the counter to her and flashed her credentials. “I’m Detective Quinn; this is Lieutenant Fraley with the Denton Police.”

  The girl’s eyes widened as she took in Josie’s department ID. “Oh my God, I know you!” she exclaimed. “You used to be the chief of police. Your sister is that reporter—”

  “Yes,” Josie cut in. “That’s me. But I’m not here—”

  “Oh my God,” the girl went on. “I watched the Dateline about you. I mean the third one. You solved that case where—”

  “I’m sorry, Miss…” Noah interrupted with a megawatt smile, edging in front of Josie. “I know that Detective Quinn is a bit of a local celebrity, but we’re actually here about a case. It’s really important. We were hoping you could help us out.”

  She pressed a hand against her chest, and Josie noticed her fingernails were bitten to the quick, and the red polish had faded to jagged streaks. “Me?” she said. “I would love to help.”

  “Yes,” Noah said, tapping a finger against the warrant. “We have a case involving one of your rental cars. This warrant allows you to release the name of the person who rented it.”

  She picked up the warrant and looked it over, her brow furrowing. Her eyes kept darting behind Noah to Josie. “Is this, like, a big case?” she asked in a hushed tone.

  Josie said, “We treat all of our cases with equal care.”

  “Of course,” said the girl. Carefully, she placed the warrant beside her keyboard and began typing. “James Omar,” she said. She turned the screen so they could see a copy of his driver’s license. “From Boise, Idaho.”

  Josie would need to compare the license to the body, but she was quite certain that James Omar was the man who had been shot in Gretchen’s driveway. His license showed a young, olive-skinned man with curly black hair and hazel eyes. He was unsmiling in the photo, but Josie could see he was attractive. As if reading her mind, the girl said, “He’s cute. And only twenty-three.”

  Josie suppressed her grimace. She couldn’t help but think of all the people James Omar would never get to date. What had he been doing there?

  “I thought you couldn’t rent a car if you were under the age of twenty-six,” Josie said.

  The girl waved a hand in the air. “Oh, that’s an old rule. Not all rental agencies abide by that. Newer companies, like us, lowered the rental age to twenty-one. It brings in a lot more business.”

  Noah was busy taking down information in his notebook. To the girl, Josie said, “Any chance you could print that out for us?”

  She smiled. “Of course!”

  A moment later came the sound of a printer whirring from behind the desk. The girl bent beneath the counter and came back up with a sheaf of pages, which she handed to Josie. “His rental agreement is there as well.”

  “We understand he rented the car in Philadelphia two days ago,” Noah said.

  The girl turned her screen back and clicked the mouse a few times. “Yep, that’s right. At our 3300 Chestnut Street location. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Josie took a pen from the countertop and marked the address on the top of the sheaf of papers the girl had handed them. “No, but thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

  In the car, Noah studied the printout of James Omar’s driver’s license. “What is a kid from Idaho doing in Philadelphia?”

  “Work? School?” Josie suggested as she fired up the Escape and pulled out of the parking lot, headed toward the morgue.

  “He’s twenty-three—he was twenty-three. Too old to be a student.”

  “Not if he was a grad student,” Josie pointed out. “Or maybe he took a job with a company in Philadelphia.”

  “Then what was he doing here?”

  “We’ll find out,” Josie assured him. “Is there a cell phone number on there for him?”

  Noah shuffled through some pages. “Yep,” he said, pulling out his phone and dialing. He put it on speaker so they were both able to hear it ring once and go directly to voicemail. A young man’s voice said, “You’ve reached James. Leave a message.”

  Noah pressed the End Call icon with a sigh. “We’ll have to get a warrant for his cell phone provider too. We’ll get records for the last week or two and then see if we can triangulate his phone as well as Gretchen’s. There was no phone on the body or in the rental car.”

  Josie nodded. “We’ll do that. Let’s get a positive ID first.”

  Denton’s city morgue consisted of a large windowless exam room and one small office presided over by Dr. Feist. It was housed in the basement of Denton Memorial Hospital, an ancient brick building on top of a hill that overlooked most of the city. The smell hit them before they even entered the exam room—a strange mixture of stringent chemicals and decay that Josie never quite got used to. With a pang, she remembered standing in the exam room beside Gretchen, who had been completely unaffected by the odors of the morgue—or its sad and often gruesome contents.

  The boy lay naked on the examination table, a large circular lamp blazing down into his face. Josie could see that he was lean and muscular, with a runner’s physique. His chest and legs were thick with dark, wiry hair. A tattoo of a wolf’s head sprawled across his left upper arm, its gray eyes penetrating. Dr. Feist’s back was to them as she organized her instruments on the counter. She had on navy blue scrubs, and her silver-blond hair was tucked up beneath a matching cloth skull cap. She turned when they entered, offering a grim smile. “I hope you’ve got something for me.”

  Josie handed her the copy of James Omar’s license. Dr. Feist studied it, her smile fading. “This looks like a match if I ever saw one. Of course, when we get in touch with the family, verification of the tattoo will seal the deal.”

  She walked over to the exam table and held the license photo up next to the boy’s head. Josie and Noah crowded around and stared. For Josie, death always seemed to steal something essential from a person’s physical appearance so that they no longer resembled the person they’d been in life. It was the same for Omar. The thing that made him James Omar was gone, leaving only a lifeless shell behind. Still, the bone structure, hair, eye and skin color were all identical.

  Noah let out a heavy sigh. “That’s him.”

  Dr. Feist held up the copy of his driver’s license. “Can I keep this?”

  “Of course,” Josie said. She took out her phone and snapped a picture of it.

  Standard protocol when an out-of-state murder victim was found in their jurisdiction was for the medical examiner’s office in Denton to contact the medical examiner in the county and state where the victim resided, and then that office would make the death notification and put the family in touch with Denton’s police department.

  Dr. Feist said, “I’ll ask the Boise medical examiner’s office to contact you once they make the notification. I expect you’ll want to talk to his family.”

  “Yes,” Josie said. “We’ve got a lot of questions for them.”

  Chapter Nine

  MAY 1993

  Seattle, Washington

  * * *

  Clarity came in pieces. Luisa Munroe didn’t understand what was happening at first. She didn’t even realize something was happening at all. Arriving home from her three to eleven shift at Northwest Hospital, she was more concerned with the ache in her lower back than the fact that the porch light wasn’t on. She let herself inside and through to the darkness of the living room.

  “Josh?” she called.

  She flicked the light switch next to the front door. Nothing. A tired sigh escaped her. How long had the power been off, she wondered. Long enough for all the food in their freezer to have gone bad? Throwing her purse onto the couch, she made her way to the kitchen, where a slant of light cut across the room, illuminating the space in a dim glow. Luisa looked left toward where her neighbor’s backyard floodlight shone, as it always did, through their kitchen window. She’d been nagging Josh for months to put up miniblinds, since the jerk nex
t door refused to turn the light away from the side of their house.

  “Josh?” she called again.

  She crossed over to the back door, upsetting the hot air balloon–shaped wind chimes that hung over the door on the back porch as she opened it. She peered outside, noticing for the first time that lights glowed from the windows of the neighboring houses, meaning it was only their power that was out. Heading back inside, she noticed the drawing stuck to the front of their refrigerator. A slip of white paper with awkward stabs of color that jerked back and forth across it; a child’s rudimentary drawing of a red house, complete with a clunky yellow sun and four stick figures.

  “Josh!” This time, Luisa’s voice held a tinge of panic.

  They didn’t have children. They didn’t have friends or coworkers with children. None of the neighbors they were friendly with had small children. They didn’t even have any nieces or nephews. One of the things that had drawn them together and solidified their commitment to one another was their decision not to have children. They were happy. They had enough. It was a decision most people couldn’t understand, but it made sense for them.

  Luisa worked in the ICU—where it was painfully apparent just how fragile life could be—but more importantly, she had no contact with children unless you counted the adult children who sometimes lost their parents. Josh worked as an auto mechanic, and he was usually under a vehicle, not out dealing with customers—or their kids. Staring at the drawing, Luisa racked her brain for a scenario in which her husband might receive a drawing from a child—and then hang it on their fridge.

  The drawing—wherever it had come from—did not belong to them.

  Suddenly she heard the silence of the house like a thunderclap. Racing to the bedroom, she threw the door open. She had a split-second glimpse of Josh on his knees at the foot of their bed, the naked skin of his back, his hands bound behind him—and then the beam of a flashlight blinded her. A voice she didn’t recognize said, “Oh good, you’re home. Now we can get started.”

  Chapter Ten

  PRESENT DAY

  Denton, Pennsylvania

  * * *

  Chief Bob Chitwood had been in his position for roughly six months, and yet his office still had a temporary air about it; there were no personal touches, and the banker’s box with which he’d shown up on his first week as chief remained unpacked on the edge of the large desk. While Josie stood with Noah, waiting for Chitwood to get off the phone, she looked around, noticing the now-blank corkboard where she had had photos tacked and the empty walls where her degrees, certifications, and commendations had hung. She hadn’t loved being chief—it was a lot of bureaucratic work and political maneuvering that Josie wasn’t well suited to—but it did feel odd to be back at the other side of the desk.

  Chitwood hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair, hands steepled, regarding Josie and Noah with eyebrows raised. He was a tall, thin man in his sixties with thinning white hair; wisps seemed to perpetually float over the top of his head as though they weren’t firmly attached to his scalp. His cheeks were pitted with old acne scars, and gray stubble dotted his chin. Josie was never sure if he was trying to grow a goatee or if he just kept missing a spot when he shaved.

  “I want to issue an arrest warrant for Detective Palmer,” he said. “First-degree murder.”

  “What?” Josie blurted.

  Noah, always the more measured of the two of them, said, “Chief, I’m not certain we have enough evidence to arrest Detective Palmer for first-degree murder.”

  “I’ve already spoken with the DA’s office,” Chitwood said. “We’ve got a twenty-three-year-old kid shot in the back on her driveway. There’s evidence that she was at, or near, the scene when the shooting went down. She’s AWOL and the MDT was removed from her vehicle. What more do you think I need to issue an arrest warrant? It’s only a matter of time before the press gets wind of this whole situation. We don’t want it to look like we’re sitting on our hands.”

  “Chief,” Josie interrupted, trying to moderate her voice. She knew she was reacting emotionally, and she tried to push her personal feelings aside. “I can take care of the press. I’ve got contacts. Listen, Detective Palmer is one of us. We’ve already got a BOLO issued for both her and the vehicle. We’ve faxed a warrant to her cell phone provider so we can try to locate her phone. I know Detective Palmer. I’m the one who hired her. I’ve worked with her for over two years. I don’t believe she would do something like this. I think someone else is involved.”

  Chitwood’s upper body levered forward, his chair creaking. He put his hands on the arms of the chair. “I’m not interested in what you think, Quinn. You think Tara didn’t warn me about you and all your hot-shotting in this town?”

  “Chief,” Noah said, “Tara—Mayor Charleston—has always been biased where Detective Quinn is concerned.”

  Chitwood smiled, but it was an ugly thing. “Oh, and you’re not? If I’m not mistaken, the two of you became an item when Quinn came back on duty. So don’t talk to me about bias, Fraley, or I’ll have your ass in a sling by the weekend.”

  Josie held up her hands. “Please,” she said. “We’re getting off track. We need to keep the focus on Gretchen—Detective Palmer. I was simply saying perhaps we should give Detective Palmer the benefit of the doubt. Maybe treat her as a missing person rather than a criminal on the run. I can see that it looks bad, but this is not open and shut. There’s the photo of the young boy from 2004. Why would Gretchen shoot this guy in the back and then pin an old photo to his body? There is something more going on here, and I’d like the chance to figure out what it is before we start pointing fingers.”

  Chitwood considered this. Josie could practically feel the heat coming off Noah’s body in waves. She chanced a look at him and noticed a flush in his cheeks she knew to be anger. Noah wasn’t the hot-headed type. Chitwood had really gotten under his skin. Josie understood that. Their new chief was implying that their personal relationships kept them from doing their jobs effectively, when the opposite was true. They hadn’t even had a relationship until Josie went out on medical leave—and could it really be called a relationship when they’d never even consummated it? Regardless, for the past two years they’d always put their work before anything else.

  She caught Noah’s eye and mouthed the words “Let it go.”

  He looked away from her. “At least give us some time,” Noah implored. “Seventy-two hours. We work Detective Palmer’s case as a missing person’s. If we don’t find her by then, you can issue the arrest warrant. Either way, the entire department and the state police are looking for her.”

  Chitwood stared at them for a moment longer, his flinty gaze moving back and forth between the two of them. Finally, he said, “You’ve got forty-eight hours.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “We’re not going to crack this case in forty-eight hours,” Noah mumbled as they left Chitwood’s office and made their way to the bullpen—a collection of desks in the center of the large room on the second floor where officers did paperwork, made calls, and conducted research. Josie, Noah, and Gretchen had permanent desks, whereas the other desks were shared by the rest of the officers. Noah had been the one to clean Josie’s personal effects out of the chief’s office while she was on leave. He had been the one to choose her new, permanent detective’s desk, which faced his own. Gretchen’s desk sat to the side of both of theirs, the three desks forming a T.

  As Noah threw his notebook down angrily, Josie’s eyes were drawn toward Gretchen’s desk. As usual, everything was neat and orderly. All the files she was working on were stacked tidily in one corner. Pens rested in an old Denton PD coffee mug. She bypassed her own paper-strewn desk and started pulling out the drawers of Gretchen’s desk. “We won’t solve it in forty-eight hours,” Josie agreed. “But we might be able to find Gretchen.”

  Noah took off his suit jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. Folding his arms over his chest, he watched her riffle through
the contents of Gretchen’s desk. “’Cause it’s that easy,” he said.

  Josie looked up long enough to shoot him a nasty glare. “We work the clues, Fraley,” she said.

  He laughed as he took a seat behind his desk. “What clues are you referring to? Because from where I’m sitting, we’ve got a whole lot of nothing.”

  Gretchen’s desk contained nothing but office supplies, some random personal hygiene items—floss, a bottle of ibuprofen, and some Alka-Seltzer—and work files. “I need her personnel file,” Josie said.

  She returned to Chitwood’s office and waited several minutes while he located Gretchen’s file. He hadn’t bothered to unpack his personal belongings, but he had taken the time to change the filing system that Josie had had in place when she was interim chief. Finally, she returned to her desk with Gretchen’s file in hand. Noah wheeled his chair around and sidled up next to her. “You’re looking for her emergency contact, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Josie said. “When she started, she would have had to put someone down.”

  On the various forms that Gretchen had had to fill out upon being hired, she had written: Caroline Weber, and under relationship: cousin. From the area code in the woman’s phone number, Josie guessed she lived in or near Pittsburgh, which was about four hours west of Denton.