Page 38 of The Couple's Secret
Twenty
John Fanning’s rental car was small and uncomfortable. Josie was pretty sure it also lacked shocks. Entirely. Every time they went over the smallest bump, it felt like she was about to wear her pelvic bone as a neck pillow. She had wanted to drive but for the purposes of their tour of Brighton Springs, it made more sense for him to do it. He had met them at the Brighton Springs PD headquarters. Now, they were in Fanning’s tiny, temporary ride. Gretchen sat in the front seat. Josie had chosen the back so that it wouldn’t be obvious that she was checking her cell phone every five minutes to see if Wren had responded to her flurry of text messages from earlier that morning.
After hearing Wren’s door close the night before, Josie and Noah had gone upstairs and knocked, hoping to speak to her immediately to clear the air. She didn’t answer. They could only conclude that she was pretending to be asleep so she wouldn’t have to talk to them. Josie had had to leave before she woke up. According to Noah, they’d had a brief and very awkward exchange over breakfast during which Wren had responded to his apology and reassurances with a grunt.
“All right, here’s Tobias’s house.” Fanning pulled onto the shoulder of the two-lane road they’d just turned down. It was on the fringe of Brighton Springs, where the small city gave way to more rural areas. There were no sidewalks here, only mailboxes marking gravel driveways. The homes were spread well apart, each one occupying three or more acres, most of them separated by small groves of trees rather than fencing.
The two-story Lachlan house was big, but it needed work. The brick façade crumbled in some places and spalled in others. One of its gutters hung loose. A handful of roof shingles was missing.
Gretchen rolled down her window. “Guess the kids didn’t use any of the money they were earning from Tobias’s share of the business to maintain the house.”
Fanning laughed. He wasn’t at all the hard-nosed pain in the ass that Hollis had described. At least, not to them. He was warm and chatty. Energy practically fizzed from his tall, lanky frame as they discussed the case. Josie could tell that it bothered him that he hadn’t been the one to find Tobias and Cora, but his relief that they’d finally been located was palpable.
“They spent the money on that,” he said, pointing to a large freestanding garage to the right of the house. It looked brand new, bay doors and clean tan siding gleaming in the sun.
The scent of cut grass and honeysuckle drifted along the warm air. It was another cloudless day. Josie watched two small white butterflies dance across lavender milkweed flowers near the back of the structure. “What’s it for?”
“How much do you know about junk removal companies?”
Gretchen answered, “Once they clean out a place, they typically do three things: recycle anything they’re able to, donate gently used goods, and dispose of the rest.”
Fanning nodded. “Except that Tobias kept finding valuable stuff in a lot of the houses they cleaned out. Antiques and such. When he and Hollis first started out, they got hired by this woman from California to clean out her recently deceased mother’s home. They found this weird sculpture. Looked really old. They didn’t know what to do with it. Tobias started contacting universities and art museums and came to find out it was some kind of ancient Mayan artifact. Worth twenty grand.”
“No shit,” Gretchen blurted.
“Yeah, it made the papers here.” Fanning eyed his side mirror, watching a car approaching from behind. “That’s how I know about it. Anyway, legally they can’t sell something they found in someone’s house.”
Josie thought about all the antiques and collectible items littering Jackson and Riley’s home as well as the ones in Hollis’s office. “But they can sell it on behalf of the owner and take a small commission.”
Fanning put his own window down so he could wave the other vehicle around him. “Exactly. Zane started collecting things and storing them in the new, climate-controlled garage while he found buyers.”
Gretchen shifted in her seat, turning to face him. “Then Riley took over.”
“Yeah.” Fanning let his arm dangle from the driver’s side window. “They worked something out with her. She’s good at it, from what I’ve heard.”
Next to the garage sat two older-model vehicles. Their tires were flat. Weeds sprouted from the gravel under and around them. They had been there a while. “What about the cars?” Josie asked.
“One of them’s Cora’s old car,” Fanning explained. “The other was registered to Tobias, but Zane was the one who drove it. After the disappearance, Zane started using his dad’s work truck.”
“Multiple vehicles in and out all the time,” Josie noted, watching as the twin butterflies circled one another while flitting from the back of the garage across the front lawn of the house.
“You’re wondering if Tobias and Cora were mistakenly targeted because of the car they were in?” Fanning said as he made a U-turn and headed back toward the more populated area of the city. “Sure. Maybe some asshole was looking for some other asshole driving a Hyundai Accent and got the wrong one. They confronted Tobias and Cora, and things went wrong.”
“That seems like a distinct possibility,” Gretchen said.
“Yep,” Fanning agreed. He motioned toward the road ahead. “I’m driving the route we believe they took to the restaurant based on where their cell phones pinged before they reached it.”
“Tell us what you really think.” Josie watched as the homes became smaller and grew closer together, their lawns shrinking. “Murder for hire? Organized crime? Wrong place, wrong time?”
“Yep,” Fanning said.
Gretchen chuckled. “That’s an answer, all right.”
“Listen.” He continued dangling his hand out the window, letting air slide through his parted fingers as he drove. “I went through all of Tobias and Cora’s phone records, emails, and social media accounts. Hell, I even went through their kids’ phones, emails, and social media accounts. Then I talked to everyone who knew Tobias and Cora. Their coworkers, customers, neighbors, people they went to school with, cashiers at the stores they frequented, their doctors, their damn dentists! There was no beef with anyone other than Hollis and Dalton and those two have alibis. The pings from their phones as well as GPS from their vehicles put them exactly where they claimed to be when Cora and Tobias disappeared. Dalton was at a pub across town. According to the bartender, he left when the place closed. Hollis was chasing some woman in Denton although as far as I’m concerned, she could have helped him kill them and dump the car in Denton.”
“You didn’t eliminate murder for hire,” Josie pointed out.
“But I couldn’t find any proof,” Fanning replied. “Believe me, I tried. If that’s what happened, my money’s on Hollis.”
