Page 74 of The Couple's Secret
She sure as shit wasn’t getting any wins at work. With his usual acuity, Noah returned to their earlier conversation. “Fanning never looked into what happened to Rachel Wright?”
“Why would he?” Josie said. “It had been twenty years since she supposedly left. It probably never occurred to him to track down a woman who hadn’t had contact with Tobias or his son for two decades.”
“Fair,” Noah said. “Didn’t Olsen say that Cora thought Tobias might have also killed his wife? What was her name?”
“Gabrielle. Zane’s mom,” Josie said, picturing the young woman with the nose ring in the photos from the upstairs hallway in the Lachlan home, looking impossibly young—more like a college student than a mother and stepmother.
Laughter came from the living room. In the microwave, the popcorn bag slowly expanded.
“That’s one missing fiancée—Rachel.” Noah grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge. “And one dead wife—Gabrielle. Fanning didn’t think that bore scrutiny?”
“I don’t think it ever occurred to him.” Josie took the water he handed her. “First of all, he knew Tobias personally. Fanning was friends with his dad. There’s an inherent bias there whether Fanning would admit it or not.”
“Or the possibility that Fanning’s not as clean as he appears.”
Josie took a long sip of her water. “True. Though I spoke with Meredith again at Brighton Springs PD and she was firm that Fanning is clean. Second, at the time that Tobias and Cora vanished—were killed—Rachel had been gone for twenty years. Gabrielle Lachlan had been dead for eleven years. Third, Gabrielle died of a cardiac arrest. Olsen said the autopsy confirmed it.”
In light of everything they knew now, Tobias’s unlucky romantic history begged to be investigated. Josie even had her doubts about the legitimacy of Gabrielle Lachlan’s autopsy report. She’d already requested a copy from Meredith. But she was certain that seven years ago, in the search for Tobias and Cora, it had never entered John Fanning’s mind to track down a woman who had left Tobias twenty years earlier or to question whether it was really cardiac arrest that had killed his wife eleven years ago.
From the living room, Josie heard the low-pitched honk of the squeaker inside Trout’s hedgehog, then him barking playfully, and finally, Wren cooing over him.
“Okay, so Fanning had no reason to see the pattern, especially since Olsen withheld information,” Noah said. “But now we know that Rachel probably didn’t leave at all. Don’t you think Tobias’s secrets are relevant to the murder case?”
The microwave beeped again. As Noah deposited the second bag of popcorn into a bowl, Josie said, “Yeah, especially since we have nothing else to go on. I’m sure he had other secrets that no one uncovered. Maybe he’d done something more recent to piss someone off. If he killed Rachel, what else did he get up to in the twenty years before his own murder? He’d gotten away with it—maybe he got bold and did something else to set off the wrong person. What if the two of them—he and Cora—weren’t the target?”
“You mean what if the killers were only after Tobias and Cora just happened to be there? Then why try to pull it off while they were together? Why not wait to get him alone?”
“Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t want to be spotted lurking around him in advance. Maybe they saw an opportunity and took it, and it was just bad timing for Cora.”
Noah put the last bag into the microwave. “I still think this is a murder-for-hire scheme and that Tobias was the target. Who did Cora Stevens piss off besides her ex-husband?”
“Probably just Tobias,” Josie said. “Especially if he had any notion that she wanted to leave him or that she’d found his secret hiding spot. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Forty
With Gretchen in tow, Josie pushed her way through the doors to the morgue, feeling all the residual joy from the evening before drain away. Her face still hurt from laughing. Shannon’s picture game had been a smashing success. By the time Josie slipped into bed next to Noah, she was high on having watched Wren laugh and smile so easily and so many times. For the first time in months, hope bubbled from somewhere deep inside her. As she spied the single occupied autopsy table, guilt smothered that burgeoning feeling of happiness. Those wonderful H feelings didn’t belong here.
A sheet covered Riley Stevens’ body up to her shoulders. Her strawberry-blonde hair was lank, as though death had robbed it of its sheen. A stab of sorrow pierced Josie’s heart. What would Riley’s life have been like if Cora hadn’t been killed? If seven long years of not knowing hadn’t passed, compounding her stress and sense of loss? If she’d just been a normal, carefree twenty-three-year-old? If her mother had still been in her life, would she have turned to alcohol so readily? The never-knows were endless. Wherever there was loss, they were right beside it, driving the living to the brink of insanity.
Across the room, Gretchen knocked on the door to Anya’s office, calling for her. It had been three days since Riley’s death. The number of reporters stationed all over the city—at Riley’s home, at Hollis’s office, and at the police station—had tripled. At this point, Josie was beginning to associate the outdoors with questions being shouted at her. The Mayor had made an appearance at the stationhouse just yesterday, passive-aggressively criticizing their work ethic and their intelligence and putting the Chief in such a foul mood that even Turner chose not to provoke him.
Anya sailed into the examination room, her silver-blonde hair loose around her shoulders and a frown on her face. “Sorry. I was doing some research. Had to call a colleague of mine in Philadelphia.”
Gretchen said, “In connection with Riley Stevens?”
“Yes.” Anya stopped near the table, glancing at Riley’s face. She put her hands on her hips and blew out a breath. “God, I hate it when they’re this young.”
“So do we,” Josie said.
“Let’s get to it then.” All business now, Anya slowly folded the sheet down, exposing Riley’s torso, stopping just below her hip bones. “No signs of sexual assault. On autopsy there was evidence of cerebral edema—an excess of fluid in the brain tissue. However, I didn’t find any areas that suggested cerebral infarcts which are basically showing tissue death, which I’d expect to see if she’d had a stroke. No evidence of an infection, traumatic brain injury. No tumors. She also had pulmonary edema.”
“Fluid in her lungs,” said Gretchen.
“Yes,” Anya replied. “But what I didn’t see was visible damage to the heart, although the lab will do a host of histological tests.”
“That’s when they look at tissue samples under the microscope, right?” Josie asked.
“Right. But like I said, there were no abnormalities of the pericardium, blockages in the vessels, or damage to the heart muscle. She may have had a cardiac arrest, which is different from a heart attack. Cardiac arrest occurs when there’s a disruption in the heart’s electrical system. It’s usually the result of an arrythmia. Problems with the heart’s conduction system are not something that would be visible during an autopsy. There is genetic testing that can be done for inherited cardiac conditions, but those take time.”
