Page 10 of The Couple's Secret
“Yes,” Josie said. “The boat ramp, and Dougherty, whatever happens, do not let this get out. We still don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”
Gretchen said, “Once the car is removed, we’ll need to match the VIN to the license plate.”
“Right,” said Dougherty, scratching at his forehead again.
Josie strongly doubted that someone had swapped license plates and affixed Tobias Lachlan’s to some other vehicle before it ended up in the river, but they had to be sure.
The moment he walked off, both of them took out their phones. It would be a half hour or more until Hummel arrived, and Josie was certain that the job at hand far exceeded the capabilities of his team. Rounding up the necessary people and equipment to remove and process the car would take even longer.
They had nothing but time.
“Brighton Springs,” Gretchen murmured as she scrolled. “Isn’t that where Chief Chitwood is from?”
“Yep.”
The Chief hadn’t worked in that area in decades, but his father, Harlan Chitwood, had been a decorated and celebrated detective on the Brighton Springs police force for almost fifty years before his retirement. He’d also been one of the dirtiest police officers that Josie had ever known. His time with Brighton Springs PD was up long before Tobias Lachlan and Cora Stevens disappeared, but the corruption lingered.
“That’s how far from here?” Gretchen asked. “Two hours?”
“Three,” Josie answered as a photo of the couple came up on her search.
At a glance, they appeared to be in their early to mid-forties. Perhaps Cora was younger. The photo showed them at a concert of some kind. Evening had been setting in. Bright lights in the background illuminated a raised stage. All around them people were packed together, faces turned up toward a musician—leather pants and a mic stand the only thing visible from the angle of the photo. Bright orange bracelets circled Tobias and Cora’s wrists. Each of them raised a red solo cup in a toast. Wide smiles split their flushed faces. Tobias’s hair had receded from his forehead, leaving a dark fuzz around his crown and over his ears. He had a friendly, open smile and the bulky build of someone whose athleticism had waned with age. Cora was tucked under his arm. She was short and curvy with strawberry-blonde hair that barely brushed her shoulders. Her brown eyes were bright and sparkling.
Gretchen peered down at her own phone, obviously perusing one of the thousands of articles about the couple that had popped up online in the past seven years. She read off the pertinent facts. “They lived in Brighton Springs. Went out to dinner. Left in Tobias’s car. Somewhere between the restaurant and their home—a twenty-minute drive—they vanished into thin air. Their car was never even found—now we know why.”
How had they ended up in Denton?
“Any chance Trinity did a show on this couple?” asked Gretchen. “Seems like a case she would take on.”
Josie’s twin sister had her own television show called Unsolved Crimes with Trinity Payne. Every week she took on a cold case, laying out the facts, offering theories, and asking viewers for help bringing new information to light.
“It’s possible,” Josie said. “But I don’t want to call her just yet. I’m not tipping my hand unless I have to. She’s brutal when she smells a story, especially if it’s a follow-up to something she’s already investigated, even though she knows I can’t tell her any details.”
“Fair.”
Josie skimmed article after article, clicking through photo after photo of the couple. The Lachlan/Stevens case had been the subject of intense public scrutiny, locally and nationally. People were intrigued. They couldn’t get enough. Clicking on a couple of true-crime forums, Josie saw seemingly endless threads about it. It had become an obsession for Brighton Springs residents and cold case buffs nationwide. At the time of the disappearance, several national media outlets ran stories about the couple. Even Dateline did an episode about them.
Josie wondered what it was that had sparked such widespread fascination. Was it the fact that the couple looked so normal? Like they could be any couple in any city enjoying a dinner out before vanishing into thin air. By all accounts, they were a fairly average middle-class couple. Tobias Lachlan had been co-owner of a junk removal company and Cora Stevens had been a waitress. He had two sons and she had a daughter. They were two single parents getting a second chance at love. A couple trying to blend their families and start a new life together. A lot of people would be able to relate to their situation. A lot of people would see themselves reflected back when they saw photos of Tobias and Cora.
As Trinity would say, the couple was television gold.
Maybe the obsession was just due to them seemingly vanishing into thin air. After all, it wasn’t often that an entire car went missing along with its occupants, especially with so many developments in technology.
Gretchen looked up from her phone and waved, getting the attention of Hummel as he stepped out of the trees. “Why doesn’t this seem like a tragic accident?”
Cars accidentally went into waterways all the time. Rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, the ocean. There were nonprofit organizations that traveled the country in attempts to locate people who’d been missing for years. Decades, even. People who’d gone missing along with their vehicles. An astonishing number of them were located still in their cars, not far from where they were last seen. Last year, a New Jersey man who’d gone missing forty-two years ago had been recovered inside a sedan that had been submerged in a local creek. Near where he was last seen.
“Because everything we know about these types of cases tells us that if they were going to be found in a waterway, it should be in Brighton Springs,” said Josie. “Denton’s not even close to the last place they were seen.”
“If they’d had some strong connections here, Brighton Springs PD would have shown up poking around,” Gretchen said. “You remember anyone from there calling to say they’d be questioning people? Searching for the couple in our jurisdiction?”
“Nope.”
“Me either.”
Given the thousands of online articles on the couple’s disappearance, the press would have been stalking Brighton Springs PD investigators. Had there been some sort of search here in Denton, their local news station would have been all over it.
“If Brighton Springs PD thought they were here, there would have been public pleas for information circulated in Denton,” Josie said.
