Page 12 of The Couple's Secret
Sorrow pushed at the edges of her professional veneer. The entire lives of two vibrant, well-loved people had been reduced to this. A sad collection of bones caked with mud, collected in buckets on a riverbank in the middle of the night. Tobias and Cora had been parents. Before the rotator truck arrived to remove the car from the water, Josie had had time to gather more information about the couple. At the time they disappeared, Tobias’s sons had been twenty-three and seventeen. Cora’s daughter had been sixteen. The two youngest were very nearly adults but there was never a good age to lose a parent.
Josie was living with the fallout at this very moment. Now with Wren at home, it was more difficult to stay mentally removed from cases like this. It was impossible to stop the thoughts from creeping out of the dark corners of her brain. The girl had already lost so much. What if something like this happened to Josie and Noah? What if Wren was left behind, never knowing what had happened to them?
Turner’s little monologue from the day before came back to her.
The one thing this kid knows for sure, with one hundred percent certainty based on her experience, is that the people who are supposed to take care of her die. That’s a fact.
Wren hadn’t been with them that long and their relationship was rocky, but from the moment Josie had seen the resemblance to Dex, she had felt a protectiveness toward the girl that very nearly matched what she’d felt toward Harris the first time she’d held him. It didn’t matter if Wren liked her. It only mattered that Josie kept her safe. It only mattered that Wren didn’t have to endure any more staggering losses in the wake of her father’s death. It only mattered that she wasn’t left alone in the world again.
“What’ve you got?” Gretchen jarred her from her thoughts.
Josie glanced over to see her colleague looking every bit as tired, disheveled, and filthy as herself. Plucking the blackened bones from the screen, she deposited them into an empty bucket nearby. “Part of a forearm and some fingers, I think.”
All items and remains found were placed into buckets and loaded into the back of SUVs that belonged to the ERT. Later, they would be separated. The bones would go to the morgue and the other objects would be cataloged by Hummel at his small lab. Despite the layers of silt and other organic materials, they were able to determine that there had been two people inside the car when it went into the water—a driver and front seat passenger. Both had been wearing seat belts which were now hard as steel and embedded in the remains of the torsos left behind. Josie guessed that was due to the fact that during the decomposition process, bodies underwent bloating. Bacteria in the gastrointestinal system produced gases that had nowhere to escape, causing the body to inflate.
The occupants’ jackets, and presumably the shirts beneath them, had managed to contain most of their rib cages and spinal columns. The rest of the remains—what hadn’t escaped through the windows and been washed away—seemed to be dispersed throughout the layers of mud. The closer they got to the floor of the car, the more bones they excavated.
Still no skulls.
Hummel had assured them that this was due to the advanced decomposition. They were dealing with skeletal remains. There was no longer skin or fascia to hold the skulls in place. Given the upright position of the bodies, and seven seasons of changing water currents, some likely jostling the car, it was unsurprising that the skulls had separated from the cervical spines.
Gretchen said, “I found boots on the driver’s side floor. They’ve still got socks in them. Looks like all the small bones of the feet stayed inside those.”
Josie tried not to grimace at the imagery. She’d seen her share of gory and disturbing crime scenes over the years, and she could confidently say she hadn’t yet encountered socks filled with foot bones.
“I’m getting close to the floor of the passenger’s side,” Josie replied. “What kind of boots?”
Gretchen tugged her skull cap down, leaving smudges of dirt along its edges. “Dressy. Ankle-length. Possibly leather. They’re pretty badly degraded but I’d guess a man’s boots.”
The car belonged to Tobias. It wasn’t unreasonable to think he’d been driving. Josie’s stomach turned. What kind of shoes had Cora Stevens been wearing the day they’d gone into the water?
“Detectives?” Hummel called. “You’re going to want to see this.”
After securing the bucket in the back of an SUV, Josie and Gretchen followed the row of tarps to where Hummel was rinsing his own mound of mud through a screen. Except this wasn’t just a densely packed ball of dirt. Josie knew exactly what it was even before the stream of water from the firehose washed enough grime away to reveal two deep eye sockets.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“Back seat,” said Hummel, working to expose more of the skull’s surface. “Driver’s side.”
Josie and Gretchen watched him carefully rinse away more grime. Like the other bones they’d found, its surface was almost black. Given the sloped forehead and the prominence of the brow ridge, it had likely belonged to a male.
“No lower jaw,” Gretchen said.
“We might still be able to get a dental record match based on the upper teeth,” Josie pointed out.
“There’s also a chance we’ll find the mandible in the back seat as well,” said Hummel. “But with the windows cracked, probably not. We’ve still got quite a few layers of shit to wade through.”
Josie had no idea what time it was but it had to be close to dawn. The Chief had authorized overtime. Turner had returned to work overnight but in the warm, dry, good-smelling confines of the stationhouse. Someone had to handle other calls, he’d argued. In reality, he just didn’t want to get his hands or his expensive suit dirty. Noah would relieve them after dawn. Josie had a feeling he’d be taking her place right here.
“Would you look at that?” Hummel paused and let the hose drop to the ground. One of his gloved fingers pointed to the forehead.
“Shit,” said Gretchen.
Josie stared at the ovoid-shaped hole punched through the bony surface of the skull. Their medical examiner, Dr. Feist, would have to confirm who the remains belonged to, but Josie’s gut instinct told her that her prediction would be correct.
Tobias Lachlan had been shot in the head.
Seven
