Page 71 of The Couple's Secret
He nodded. “As you know, I have to maintain my client confidentiality.”
“Bullshit,” Gretchen said. “Cora went missing. If you had information that was relevant to her disappearance, you should have shared it.”
Olsen bristled. “I’m sure you know that there’s no mandatory disclosure requirement. I don’t have to offer up information about a client, no matter what happened to them. Besides, the issue Cora hired me to look into wasn’t relevant to her disappearance.”
Josie’s hips pressed against the edge of the desk as she leaned toward him again. She was finding it difficult not to lunge across it and shake him violently. “You’re splitting hairs here, Olsen. What did Cora want?”
“It’s not relev?—”
Gretchen shook her head, slamming her palm onto the desk much harder this time. “No. Don’t even say it. This is a double homicide. We get to decide what’s relevant. Now, we can all sit here awkwardly while I call my colleague in Denton and have him prepare a subpoena for those records, or you can tell us what the hell you’re hiding behind all this ‘no mandatory disclosure’ and ‘it’s not relevant’ bullshit.”
“Either way, we’re serving you with that subpoena,” Josie assured him. “So you’ll be obligated to hand over those records. Now or later. You choose.”
He looked from Josie to Gretchen and back. Whatever he saw in their faces convinced him that he wasn’t going to win this fight.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “But I do want that subpoena.”
“Fine,” Josie echoed.
He glanced back and forth between them as if hoping one of them would let him off the hook. When neither of them did, he spoke. “Cora came to me because when she and Tobias were putting their guest list together for the wedding, my name came up. Tobias told her how we knew one another—the whole story about Rachel leaving and me being the one to respond to the call about little Jackson that day. How I used to give the boys a talking-to whenever they needed one until I retired from the force and went private. Then he asked her not to bring up Rachel when we met. Said he didn’t want to taint their wedding day by mentioning her. Anyway, Cora looked me up. She wanted me to confirm what Tobias told her about Rachel leaving, which I did. Then she asked me if I’d ever done more than just take his word for it. She wanted to know if I thought?—”
He broke off, looking at the ceiling.
“If you thought what?” Gretchen prompted.
“If I thought she was dead.”
“Why would Cora care if Rachel was dead or not?” Josie asked.
He closed his eyes briefly. “This is difficult for me to say. I still don’t know what to think. I mean, I know what the evidence shows but…”
“What is it?” Josie pressed.
“Cora thought that Tobias might have killed her.”
Thirty-Eight
The air in the office suddenly felt cold. Josie could tell that even uttering the words pained Bruce Olsen. Regardless of the fact that the two men had drifted apart, he truly had held Tobias Lachlan in high regard. Josie thought back to all the photos she’d seen of the man. Round from middle age, thinning hair, always smiling. In most photos, especially with Cora, his happy eyes held a note of disbelief. A silent question: how did I get this lucky? He didn’t have the dark, intimidating look of a killer, though in Josie’s experience, that meant nothing.
Then there was his reputation. Unimpeachable. Was it so overwhelmingly positive as to reek of fakeness? No, she decided. The people closest to him hadn’t painted him in a perfect light. All of them had admitted to his moodiness, to anger at times—not an unreasonable amount—and to him not being faultless. He’d argued with Hollis plenty over the expansion and his partner’s meddling in his personal life. He’d argued with Cora over issues within their blended family. Namely, handling Riley and Zane, who’d indulged in underage drinking.
None of that guaranteed that he wasn’t a killer, but Josie could certainly understand Bruce Olsen’s dismay at the very idea.
Which begged the question, why had Cora come to him? He’d been a lifelong friend to Tobias. Or was that the very reason she’d approached him? Because he’d known Rachel, had been the police officer to respond to the 911 call the day she left? If she was after information about Rachel Wright and her fate, Olsen was probably the best and most reliable source. She could have gone to Hollis but did she trust him not to rat her out to Tobias? Why would she trust Olsen?
There was only one explanation. “Cora hired you so that you couldn’t tell Tobias anything the two of you discussed.”
She hadn’t been saving up for a security deposit on an apartment. Or she hadn’t only been saving up for that. Josie was certain that Olsen’s retainer, even back then, wasn’t cheap. The only thing that ensured that Tobias would never find out that Cora was poking around in his past were the strict confidentiality laws between private investigators and their clients.
Olsen nodded. “I think that’s why she hired me, yeah. One of the reasons, anyway. She kept asking for reassurance that I wouldn’t—and couldn’t—talk to Tobias behind her back. She paid in cash so there would be no record. The other reason she hired me was that I knew Rachel and I was there the day she left—or as Cora believed, the day she was killed.”
“Why did Cora think Tobias killed Rachel?” Gretchen asked.
Olsen gazed at the photo in front of him for a long moment. Then he turned it on its face and stood up, fidgeting with the lapels of his jacket. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Not after all this time. Come with me.”
They rode the elevator in silence down to the basement of the building. Olsen led them through a maze of brightly lit concrete halls to a door marked Storage 5. From his pocket, he produced a set of keys, fitting one into the lock. The door swung open. Olsen flipped a light switch on the wall, revealing a windowless room with shelves and filing cabinets lined up in orderly rows. Josie and Gretchen followed him as he searched the shelving units until he found an unmarked cardboard box. It was the only unmarked box in the place as far as Josie could tell and it was buried behind two other boxes, deep in the recesses of the room. Dust motes swirled in the air as he swept a hand over its lid.
“There’s a table in here somewhere,” he muttered.
