Page 31 of The Couple's Secret
“Yeah, we fought over the expansion, sure. Tobias didn’t think we were ready. He was afraid we’d bite off more than we could chew, which was fair. But the real reason we were fighting was that he didn’t think I was serious.”
Gretchen had her notebook out, sitting on the table in front of her. “Why not?”
“He said I was just chasing a woman and that’s the only reason I wanted to expand—to Denton.”
“Were you just chasing a woman?” asked Josie, stirring some cream and sugar into her coffee.
Hollis shrugged. “Yeah.”
“So Tobias was right, but you fought him on it anyway,” Gretchen said.
“Just because he was right doesn’t mean the expansion was a bad idea. Look around you. It was a smart decision.”
Josie assumed the woman in question was the one who’d given him an alibi the night Tobias and Cora went missing. The one who passed away two and a half years after the couple disappeared. “How did it go with the woman?”
Hollis’s face reddened. “It lasted a week. I’m not great at relationships. Stopped getting married after my third divorce.”
“When was the last time you saw Tobias and Cora before the night they were killed?” asked Gretchen.
“This is all in Fanning’s file, you know.”
“Now it will be in our file,” Gretchen replied simply. “Answer the question.”
He regarded her for a moment, a spark in his eyes. “I like you, you know that?”
Seventeen
If Gretchen was surprised by this turn in the conversation, she didn’t show it. “Answer the question, Mr. Merritt.”
He kept staring at her appreciatively. Gretchen held eye contact, unblinking, her face a mask of total disinterest. Suspects, persons of interest, witnesses—there was always a handful who tried to flirt as a way to deflect from the subject at hand, but Josie didn’t think that’s what Hollis was doing. Regardless, it was inappropriate and a waste of time.
Josie gave a dramatic sigh and made a show of taking her phone from her pocket and studying the screen as though she was reading messages. “Mr. Merritt, we’ve got a lot more people to talk to after you and a very long day ahead of us trying to figure out who killed your business partner, not to mention his fiancée. You can talk to us now or you can come with us to the stationhouse for a more formal interview.”
His gaze dropped to his mug. “Fine. I saw him at work that day. We’d both been out on jobs. When I got back to the office around three, he was there doing some paperwork. He usually stayed later but he said he was taking Cora to dinner.”
Gretchen made a note on her pad. “Any particular reason?”
“Don’t know. Things between them had been strained. I think he was trying to pay her a little extra attention, try to get them back on track.”
More muffled sounds penetrated the walls of the building. Loud bangs, metal grinding, and the shrill, high-pitched rhythmic beeps of a truck reversing.
“Do you have any idea why things were strained between them?” Josie asked.
Hollis spun his mug around a few times. “It was a little bit my fault, probably. Cora was a waitress at this diner. She’d been working there forever. It was tough raising Riley herself, but she did it. After she and Tobias got engaged, he wanted her to stop working. She didn’t. It was this whole thing about maintaining her independence, but Tobias didn’t see it that way. He felt insulted, like she didn’t trust him to take care of her. After what she went through with her piece-of-shit ex-husband, he really wanted to take care of her.”
“How was that your fault?” Gretchen asked.
“Cora came to me and asked me to talk to him. Convince him that he was being… what did she say? ‘Ridiculous.’ Tell him if he really loved her, he would understand.”
“You and Cora were friends?” asked Josie. “Before she and Tobias met?”
“Nah, not friends. I knew her from the diner. Had been going there and sitting in her section for years before Tobias set his sights on her. I liked her, too. She was real pretty. Sweet as could be, but she never saw me that way. One smile from Tobias, though and—” He gave a low whistle. “Forget it. That woman was off the market. Once they got together, I saw her all the time ’cause Tobias and I were good friends and running the business together. Anyway, I guess she figured if we were best friends, I could talk some sense into him.”
“He didn’t see it that way,” Gretchen said.
“Sure didn’t. Told me I was meddling. Said a bunch of other shit, too, but the gist of it was ‘butt out.’ Didn’t hear a peep from either of them on the subject after that.”
“How long before they were killed did these conversations with Cora and then with Tobias take place?” asked Josie.
