Page 41 of The Couple's Secret
Gretchen’s head swiveled, taking in their surroundings for at least the fourth time since they’d parked. “Which brings us back to murder for hire.”
“I always figured that Hollis was behind it and that he’d somehow managed to get the car—with them in it—to one of the junkyards where they dump their stuff. He’s got access to a couple of them. I checked them all, interviewed the staff, reviewed camera footage and all that but got nowhere. Then again, I always figured that if Hollis paid some guys to do it—let’s say guys who worked at one of the junkyards—then I definitely wouldn’t find anything. They would have made sure of that. Of course, now I know they were in the river in Denton.”
“It’s always been Hollis then,” Josie said. “In your mind.”
Fanning turned the car around and pulled back onto the road. “He had the motivation, the means, and an alibi. I checked his financials. Everything was clean. I looked into his employees, old friends, even the woman he was seeing in Denton. None of them made any big purchases, even years later.”
“You think Hollis paid the killers cash,” Gretchen said.
“Hollis is a little rough around the edges, disorganized as hell, but he’s not stupid. Not by a mile. He could have easily paid someone cash, and no one would be the wiser. As co-owner of the company, he had access to plenty of it. For all we know, he sold something valuable like that artifact Tobias found years ago and didn’t report it. Who knows how much unreported cash he had laying around?”
Josie saw his logic. She and Gretchen considered Hollis their main suspect, but she wondered if Fanning had overlooked something in his relentless pursuit of the man. His investigation had been thorough and dogged, but the absence of other suspects didn’t mean there weren’t any.
Moments later, they pulled up in front of the Lachlan home again. While Fanning turned the car around again, Josie said, “You searched the house.”
It was standard procedure. Police would have wanted to make sure that there hadn’t been any domestic issues or anything in the home that might help them locate the couple. Fanning hadn’t needed a warrant. According to the file, Jackson had given permission.
“Sure did,” Fanning confirmed.
“Do you recall if there was anything—some piece of furniture, a trunk or box of some kind—that required a skeleton key to open it?”
Fanning caught her gaze in the rearview again, one bushy brow arched high. “No, not that I recall, although I wasn’t really looking for that sort of thing. Why do you ask?”
Gretchen said, “Cora had a small skeleton key in her purse. It’s too corroded for us to figure out what it was from.”
“A skeleton key?”
“I’ll show you a photo when we stop,” Gretchen said.
“I know what that is,” Fanning said, sounding mystified. “But why would she be carrying one around with her?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” said Josie. “It could be nothing, but?—”
“It could be something,” Fanning finished for her.
Twenty-Two
The chime of Josie’s cell phone woke her. Sunlight streamed through the hotel windows. She’d left the curtains open because she couldn’t stand waking up in a completely darkened room. It made her feel too disoriented, brought memories of childhood traumas too close to the surface. A steady pounding in her head worsened as she sat up. She hadn’t had a drink after Fanning dropped them off the evening before. Hadn’t had a drink in years, but it sure felt like she’d spent last night with a bottle of Wild Turkey. Sleep hadn’t come easy. She’d spoken to both Noah and Wren before bed. Things seemed normal at home. Or whatever passed for normal these days. But her anxiety raged on, coupled with the myriad nagging questions about the Tobias Lachlan/Cora Stevens case. It felt like an endless loop. All questions and no answers.
Her phone went quiet. The sheets were like sandpaper across her bare legs as she tossed them aside. Nothing in the room was conducive to sleep. The mattress was so soft she practically needed a ladder to climb out of it, and the pillow was some kind of medieval torture device.
“Should’ve had the phone sex,” she muttered to herself, reaching for the bedside table. Maybe then she would have been too relaxed to care about the shitty accommodations.
The missed call was from her sister. It was inevitable. Trinity was the queen of cold cases, and this case was most definitely a crowning jewel. She’d never done an episode on it, though, and there was only one reason Josie could think of as to why. Tobias and Cora’s kids hadn’t agreed to be interviewed. Presenting the facts of a case and the police response was part of her show’s format, but Trinity’s aim was always to elicit tips that hadn’t been offered before, and for that she needed a more emotionally compelling element—grieving loved ones.
Somebody always knew something.
The kids had been interviewed for the Dateline episode but at that time, only two years had passed since the disappearance. Riley was about to go off to college. Trinity’s show had started a few years later. Assuming she’d approached them, had they avoided it because of Riley’s fragile emotional state? The bad blood between the brothers? Or Riley and Jackson’s marriage? Josie had no doubt that Riley was right. Their relationship would become a point of morbid fascination, eclipsing the details of their parents’ cold case altogether.
She tried to run her fingers through her sleep-matted hair, without success. Her phone buzzed again. The thought of dealing with her sister later was laughable. Trinity was more persistent than Trout when he knew one of them had food. With a sigh, Josie swiped answer and grumbled, “I can’t talk about the case.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Trinity scoffed. “Please. I know that. Although it should go without saying that if there comes a point when you can discuss it, I want dibs.”
“Dibs?” Josie rubbed tiredly at her temple. “What are we? Ten?”
“You need coffee.”
“No shit.” She needed a shower, too, and some ibuprofen. Then more coffee.
