by Lisa Regan
She grinned at him. With some finagling of the mouse and computer software, she was able to pull up a photo of the same dust-free circle with bright yellow rulers alongside it measuring its size. She then pulled up a photo of the bottom of the Wawa mug she and Hummel had taken into evidence that morning. Josie had held the same yellow rulers to measure its size for the shot. On screen, she brought both photos up side by side. “Yes,” she told Noah. “They’re a match.”
“But we have no way of asking Gretchen whether or not it’s her cup,” Noah said. “No way is Bowen going to let us talk to her. I mean, I guess we could get Loughlin to ask her.”
Josie said, “I already called Denise Poole—my contact in the state police lab.”
“I remember her,” Noah said. “She’ll expedite getting the prints?”
Josie nodded. “Well, she said it could be hard to get prints from a curved surface, but she’ll try her best. I had Hummel drive it out to her.”
Noah’s eyes bulged. “Are you kidding me? Isn’t that a four-hour drive? Chitwood’s going to flip when he finds out.”
Josie smiled. “But Lieutenant Fraley, the mug was found at the scene of a double homicide that the press is now covering. In fact, Chitwood went on television last night and told the public that we’re doing everything we possibly can to find the killer.”
Noah returned her smile. “Good point. So let’s say we find Gretchen’s prints on this Wawa mug. Then what?”
“Then we know there was someone else at her house the day that Omar was killed.”
Slowly, Noah shook his head. “No, we don’t. All we can infer from finding Gretchen’s prints on the cup is that she was at the Wilkins scene.”
Josie’s heart did a double-tap. Gretchen was unaccounted for on the night of the Wilkinses’ murder. Still, Josie didn’t believe for a second that Gretchen had been there. “Well, we know Gretchen didn’t leave semen on Margie Wilkins’s body,” Josie shot back. “I don’t think we can infer that from her mug being found at the scene.”
Before Noah could respond, Chief Chitwood’s voice boomed across the room from where he stood in the doorway to his office. “You two! Loughlin’s here. She’s got Palmer’s confession. Get your asses down to the conference room.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Gretchen had given Detective Heather Loughlin a hand-written confession. It was terse, the handwriting a scrawl. Josie knew Gretchen’s handwriting—it was usually neat and precise. Josie could practically feel the tension and desperation oozing from the hastily written words. She and Noah read it over while Loughlin sipped coffee and Chitwood paced near the head of the table. When they were finished with it, Josie handed it to Chitwood, who barely glanced at it.
Josie asked Loughlin, “Do you believe her?”
Loughlin shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. She confessed. She had an answer for everything.”
Chitwood tossed the pages onto the table, and Noah picked them up once more. “She says she met Omar in Philadelphia a few years ago. That’s pretty vague.”
“A few years ago, Omar wasn’t even in Philadelphia,” Josie said. “He lived in Idaho and did his undergrad in Indiana. He started at Drexel after Gretchen had already left Philadelphia to come work here.”
“So what?” Chitwood said. “She had friends in Philadelphia. Maybe she met him when she went back to visit. Maybe she’s got her timeline mixed up, and she saw him last summer.”
Josie was fairly certain Gretchen had not been back to Philadelphia since her move to Denton, even for a visit, but she had no way of proving that, so she kept quiet. Instead she asked Loughlin, “Where did Gretchen say they met?”
“Jogging along the Schuylkill—he was jogging, not her. She says he bumped into her and knocked her down. She hit her head. He helped her get up, find a bench, and sit. They talked, and when he found out she was a cop, he had all kinds of questions about the job. She had a headache and didn’t feel like talking, so she gave him her number and said he could call her any time if he had questions about police work.”
“That’s pretty thin,” Josie said.
Loughlin shrugged. “I have no reason to disbelieve her, although her story about him being interested in her position as a police officer seems like just that—a story. I don’t know that she’s telling the truth about how they knew one another. But she says he tracked her down here, and she felt threatened by him, especially by the fact that he had driven two hours to her home.”
“What did she say the altercation was about?” Noah asked. “All this says is she asked him to leave multiple times, and he refused and became combative.”
Josie looked over his shoulder at the confession again. It was written in the broadest and vaguest terms possible.
“She says for some reason he had become obsessed with her. She doesn’t know why and said she doesn’t believe it was a sexual thing, but that him showing up at her home without an invitation felt very intrusive and threatening. She says he’d been harassing her by phone for two weeks.”
Josie remembered that the phone records from Gretchen’s phone showed only two calls from Omar’s number to hers. That hardly constituted harassment.
“If she thought he was harassing her,” Josie asked, “why didn’t she report it?”
“Like I said,” Loughlin replied, “I don’t think she was being truthful about whatever it was between them. I think maybe whatever was going on—she was embarrassed and thought she could make it all go away on her own, and when it went south, she ran.”
“You think they were having a sexual relationship?” Noah asked, and Josie could tell by the skepticism in his voice that he was having an equally difficult time envisioning Gretchen carrying on some kind of affair with a college student in his early twenties.
Loughlin shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”
Noah pointed to the second page of the confession. “She disabled the MDT and threw it, as well as her and Omar’s phones and her gun, into the river. Then she ‘drove around’ for a few days before she decided to turn herself in. She wouldn’t say where she went?”
Loughlin shook her head. “She got agitated when I pressed her on it.”
“Why did she park on the block behind her house when she went to meet Omar?” Josie asked. “Did she tell you? And what about the photo of the boy? Did she say who it was and why she pinned it to Omar’s collar?” She snatched the pages away from Noah and riffled through them. “She doesn’t mention the photo of the boy at all.”
“I asked her about it,” Loughlin said. “About both of those things, actually. She said she parked on the block behind her house and snuck onto the property from the back because she was afraid Omar might be dangerous, and she wanted to assess the situation before she made herself known.”
“And the photo?” Josie asked.
“She said she found it on the ground near Omar after she shot him. She assumed that it was his and had fallen out of his pocket, so she pinned it to his shirt.”
“Where did she get the safety pin?” Josie asked.
“Her grandmother’s sewing kit, she said,” Loughlin answered.
“You’re telling me she snuck up on this kid, they argued about something, she felt ‘threatened,’ so she shot him in the back as he was leaving, and then she went back into her house to dig up a safety pin so she could fix the photo she says fell out of his pocket to his shirt?”
Loughlin frowned. “Yeah, that does sound thin. But why would she confess to killing this kid if she didn’t do it?”
That was what Josie hadn’t figured out yet. Without even thinking, Gretchen had confessed to cold-blooded murder. But why?
Chitwood said, “She shot this kid. Maybe she’s not being honest about why or how they knew each other, but she had prior contact with Omar. They were both at her house at the time of the shooting. The bullet they dug out of his back was the same caliber as Gretchen’s service weapon. Plus, she confessed. Wrap it up. You’ve got the Wilkins homicides to wo
rk.”
Chitwood strode out of the room. The three detectives slowly ambled into the hallway. “Heather,” Josie said. “What about her jacket? Did you ask her where her jacket was?”
Heather nodded. “She said she lost it.”
There was no way in hell Gretchen lost her jacket. But Josie was tired of being the only one in the room arguing for Gretchen’s innocence. She needed proof that someone else was there the day Omar was killed—that there was something more going on.
Josie and Noah said goodbye to Loughlin and went back to their desks. Josie picked up the receiver of her desk phone.
“Who are you calling?” Noah asked.
“The only person besides Gretchen who would have any idea what Omar was really doing here on the day he was killed is Ethan Robinson.”
“The roommate? He’s missing.”
“Yeah, but his dad’s not.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Doug Robinson answered on the fourth ring. He sounded rushed and a bit flustered as Josie introduced herself once again and asked him if he’d heard from his son yet. “Uh, no,” he said. “I got the police in Philadelphia trying to find him. I told them I’d call them right away if he turned up, but I know he won’t turn up at my house.”
“Why is that, Mr. Robinson?” Josie asked, seizing the opportunity to ask the questions that had been nagging at her since they first spoke.
“What do you mean?”
“The last time we spoke, it seemed like you felt there was some kind of rift between the two of you.”
He gave a long sigh. “I think I told you that his mom passed when he was in high school.”
“Yes, I remember,” Josie said.
“Well, they were real close. Always. After she died, he found out…”
He broke off, and Josie listened to his breathing for a long moment—not sounds of grief or sadness she realized, but frustration.
“Mr. Robinson?” she coaxed.
“I love my son, okay?”
“Of course.”
“But after my wife passed, he found out that we had adopted him. As a baby. My wife never wanted to tell him. At least, not while he was still a kid. I thought that once he was old enough to know what being adopted meant, that we should tell him. He was always a real curious kid, you know? Real smart. Always asking questions. Always down at the library reading books way above his grade level. You know when he was twelve we found him reading books about serial killers? My wife went through the roof!”
“I can imagine,” Josie said, keeping the conversation moving.
“Well after she died, we had to go through a lot of stuff. Paperwork and things like that. He was snooping around and found some documents. He confronted me. I told him the truth.”
“He was angry that you and your wife hadn’t told him?” Josie guessed.
“Yeah. Really angry. I tried to tell him that it was his mom’s idea to keep it from him, but that only made things worse. He said I was throwing her under the bus since she wasn’t there to defend herself.”
Josie could see how Ethan would think that but kept silent. “So that’s what caused the tension between the two of you?”
“It hasn’t been the same since. To be honest, Detective, I don’t hear from Ethan unless he needs money. I call him once a week, but he never answers or calls me back. Even when he’s here at home—which is not very often—he only talks to me if he absolutely has to, and most of the time he’s not even home. That time he brought James with him, I thought we were making progress—James is, I mean was, a good kid—but once they went back to Philadelphia, Ethan started ignoring me again. I’ve tried over the years to patch things up, but he’s so angry. There’s no getting through to him.”
“Have you contacted all your relatives to see if anyone else has heard from him? Your wife’s relatives?” Josie asked.
“Yeah,” Doug said. “The Philadelphia police asked me to do that straightaway. No one’s heard from him.”
Josie had a thought. “Do you know if he ever looked for his birth family?”
“No, not that I know of. I mean he was mad, you know, but I think it felt like a betrayal to his mom, you know? Adoption or not, she was his mother. She raised him. She loved him.”
Then there was no chance that Ethan Robinson was off somewhere hiding with his biological family. Josie said, “I’m very sorry about your wife, Mr. Robinson. Thank you for speaking to me today. If you hear anything at all, you should call the Philadelphia police immediately. Then, if you wouldn’t mind keeping me up to date, I’d certainly appreciate it.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “Hey, did you guys get James’s killer yet?”
Josie hesitated. She looked across the desks at Noah, who was engrossed in something on his computer. “We’re still working on it,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
They grabbed a bite to eat, and when they returned to their desks, they were greeted with James Omar’s phone records for the two weeks prior to his murder, and also a list of Margie Wilkins’s closest friends and coworkers, which had been sent over by Robyn Wilkins. Josie made phone calls to Wilkins’s friends, while Noah went down the list of incoming and outgoing phone numbers on Omar’s call log and traced the owner of each number. An hour later, Josie hung up from her last call.
“No one was stalking Margie Wilkins,” Josie told Noah. “At least, her friends don’t know of anyone who was giving her trouble. It’s a dead end.”
“There’s still the DNA,” Noah said. “We’ve got the killer’s DNA.”
“Yes, and I might be retired by the time we get those results back from the lab. You’re assuming they’ll match someone already in the system. We still need leads to run down, and I’ve got nothing.”
He beckoned her over to his desk. “Take a break then. Come see what I’ve got here.”
Josie rolled the chair around to sit beside Noah. Before him was a list of phone numbers from Spur Mobile, all marked up in Noah’s handwriting. Beside that was a stack of pages he had printed out with the names and other identifying information of various people. On top was a page with Ethan Robinson’s name and phone number in the page header.
Noah pointed to what Josie knew to be Ethan’s phone number, which Noah had highlighted dozens of times in pink highlighter. “These are all incoming and outgoing texts and phone calls between Omar and Ethan Robinson.”
Josie reached over and flipped through a few pages. “You couldn’t get the content of the text messages?”
“You know Spur Mobile. They make you jump through a lot of hoops to get that stuff if you don’t have the actual phone,” Noah answered. “But I’m waiting for the content. It will just take longer.”
Josie knew this was true. Different phone carriers offered varying levels of cooperation with law enforcement. Spur Mobile was the least cooperative and had the most red tape to go through. They could get the content of the text messages, but it would take a lot longer.
“What else have you got?” Josie said.
Noah went through the numbers. There were the three members of Omar’s immediate family—mom, dad, and sister. There was Dr. Larson. Some of the numbers were to restaurants he’d obviously ordered takeout from. Several were from other students at Drexel University, and Noah had been able to find most of their Facebook accounts. He handed her the printouts of each person’s profile page, and Josie went through them quickly. Then there were the calls to Gretchen.
“There’s one call here to a volunteer ambulance company in Norristown—that’s outside of Philadelphia.”
Josie frowned. “That’s odd.” She ran her finger across the page until she found the date. “Omar called there two weeks before he was killed. It’s a one-off.”
“Wrong number?” Noah asked.
“Probably,” Josie said. “What’s this?”
There were three calls to the same number in the two weeks of records they had, including a call to the number on the morning that Omar was kill
ed.
“It’s a burner,” Noah said.
“Did you try to call it?”
“Of course. It’s out of service. Pre-paid. Whoever was using it didn’t keep up the payments.”
“Can we try to triangulate its signal? Where it was last?”
Noah nodded. “Probably. I’ll write up a warrant.”
“What about this call to Ethan Robinson? Is this after Omar was murdered?”
Noah looked at the time and then checked his notebook. “Either it was made after his murder or right before it. We can pin down his death to within an hour window based on when Gretchen left here and when patrol first showed up, but not much more precise than that.”
“But this call was made between the time that Gretchen left and patrol found Omar in her driveway.”
“Yeah, but closer to the time patrol showed up. I would guess it wasn’t Omar who made the call.”
Josie’s desk phone rang. She wheeled her chair back around and answered, “Detective Quinn.”
“Hi, this is Jack Starkey returning your call.”
Chapter Forty
Josie’s heart momentarily went into overdrive. Would she finally get some answers instead of more and more questions? “Hi, Agent Starkey,” she said. “Thanks for calling me back.”
“Well, someone on my team in Seattle called me. Said you sounded pretty bent.”
“Bent” wasn’t the way Josie would describe herself, but she let it go. “Well, it’s important,” she told him. “I’m calling about Gretchen Palmer.”
“Lowther,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I knew her as Lowther, not Palmer.”
It took Josie a moment to process what he was telling her. She knew that Palmer was Gretchen’s family name, because her grandparents had been Agnes and Fred Palmer. She pulled her notebook over to her and flipped through the pages, looking for the list of contacts that Caroline Weber’s mother had provided from Gretchen’s mother’s side. Lowther was not her mother’s family name. Which only meant one thing.