Page 9 of The Couple's Secret
Josie hugged the blanket tightly around her shoulders, grateful they’d been having an unusually warm June.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” asked Dr. Slack when they reached her.
Josie nodded and found the widest, flattest rock she could, sinking onto it and trying to get her socks over her damp feet. “Yeah. I’m not sure how long it’s been under there, but you might not have seen it if the water levels weren’t so low.”
A notepad and pen appeared in Gretchen’s hands. She put on her reading glasses. “What were you doing down here?”
Dr. Slack waved a slender arm in the direction of the basin. “Looking for fossils.”
Gretchen dipped her chin, looking over the top of her glasses, brows raised skeptically. “Fossils? In the Susquehanna?”
“Oh yes.” Dr. Slack clapped her hands together. “You’d be surprised. With the water levels down for so long, I was hoping to get a better look in areas that are normally submerged. There’s an old boat ramp upriver, not far from here at all. That’s where I’m parked. I could show you what I’ve already found, if you’d like.”
“Maybe some other time,” Gretchen said. She shot Josie a look, her unspoken question loud and clear in the air between them. Is this a real thing?
Josie fussed with her socks, trying to smooth the fabric over her feet but they just wouldn’t sit right on her moist skin. “There are fossils in the Susquehanna,” she told Gretchen. “In fact, back in the nineties, paleontologists discovered a 360-some million-year-old fossil up in Renovo. First of its kind. A ‘fish with fingers’ I think they called it.”
“That was exciting,” Dr. Slack said enthusiastically, her eyes widening. “The most I’ve ever found around here were trilobites and crinoid fragments.”
“Right,” Gretchen said. “Until today.”
“Oh, well, yes.”
Josie yanked her boots over the top of her crinkled socks while Gretchen took down the paleontologist’s personal information and sent her on her way. Moments later, Dougherty reappeared, hurrying toward them, phone in hand.
“You got something?” Gretchen asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “The tag is dead. Hasn’t been renewed since 2018.”
The dread in Josie’s stomach solidified into a hard mass. She buckled her belt and made sure her holster was securely in place. “What else?”
With the back of his hand, Dougherty rubbed at his forehead. “The license plate is from a 2015 Hyundai Accent. Owner was a man named Tobias Lachlan.”
“That sounds familiar,” said Gretchen.
“Yeah,” Dougherty replied. “I thought so, too, so I did a quick internet search. Seven years ago, Lachlan and his fiancée, Cora Stevens, went missing from Brighton Springs. No trace of them has ever been found.”
Five
Josie’s eyes were drawn to the ripple in the middle of the river, marking the location of the Lachlan vehicle. A prickling sensation spread over her scalp. She tugged her fingers through her matted hair but it was no use. There wasn’t any physical cause for the uncomfortable feeling. She’d been on the job a long time and had worked enough cases to know when something big and ugly was on the horizon.
“We’ll need Hummel and his team,” she said.
Officer Hummel was the head of Denton’s Evidence Response Team. They were a big enough department with a big enough budget to support their own evidence techs and some basic forensic equipment. Anything they couldn’t handle went to the state police crime lab.
Dougherty blinked. “For an underwater… crime scene?”
Josie had no idea how a situation like this would or could be handled. If the car had been under there for seven years, that was seven years of seasons changing, rising and falling water levels, growth and decomposition of marine life and underwater vegetation, and shifting accumulation of chemical substances. The car alone would likely be a nightmare to remove and process. The odds of finding anything in the riverbed around it were slim to none but, as always, they only got one chance to properly process a scene.
“Just call him,” Josie said.
“If we have to call in resources from elsewhere, we will,” Gretchen added.
Dougherty nodded.
Josie used the blanket to pat her clothes dry. Well, as dry as she could get them. Normally, she had a set of backup clothes in her vehicle for situations like this one, but she’d changed into those two days ago after she’d had to interview a witness living in a flea-infested apartment. Those had been double-bagged and deposited into the garbage. “See if you can get rid of any press that showed up. Erect a perimeter from the boat ramp all the way down to here.”
He looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the boat ramp. It couldn’t be seen from where they stood but they had to consider the possibility that the car had gone into the water from there. With the windows cracked, the air inside the tires would have given it buoyancy for a short time. From the ramp, it could have floated, slowly sinking, until it reached its final resting place.
