Page 93 of The Couple's Secret
“We offered not to bring charges against them if they gave us Olsen,” she continued. “And Olsen, well, he’s getting a reduced sentence for telling us all about you.”
“So I left the party around nine or whatever,” Jackson said. “That doesn’t prove anything. Olsen is lying. He doesn’t know anything.”
That wasn’t too far from the truth, but Josie wasn’t going to let him know that. Instead, she pulled a pile of photos from the file and placed it in front of him. “Recognize this car?”
He stared at the top photo. “I don’t… no. It’s just a car.”
“That is a 2017 Chevrolet Equinox that was registered to Mr. Olsen at the time that Tobias and Cora were killed. One of three vehicles registered to his household.”
She spread out the other photos which she’d borrowed from a different file. They were taken while Hummel was processing the interior of a car that had almost identical upholstery for latent bloodstains.
“Mr. Olsen sold this vehicle in 2019 to a retiree in Harrisburg,” Josie continued. “But she was happy to give us permission to process it for latent bloodstains and DNA.”
Jackson’s fingers trembled as he touched a photo of the steering wheel with three faded fingerprints on the top of it, glowing red.
“We used a selective turn-on NIR fluorescence dye. NIR is near infra-red radiation. Basically, when you’ve got a latent bloodstain—not visible to the naked eye—you can use this dye on it. The dye itself isn’t very fluorescent but when it binds with a particular protein found in human blood, it lights right up. The great thing about this dye is that even if latent bloodstains have been cleaned up or diluted a thousand times, they can still be detected.”
Jackson’s fingers shook so badly that he clapped them between his knees.
“The thing is,” Josie went on, “Mr. Olsen told us that the night of Karl Staab’s retirement party, you asked to borrow his Equinox even though your own car was already there. That was something else he never told anyone. Until now. He said you left in it just after nine and returned it around six the next morning.”
That part was true. Olsen had admitted that to Josie in his interview. He’d also given them the name and address of the woman he’d sold his Equinox to but Josie hadn’t had time to contact her, much less get her car impounded and processed for blood and DNA. Those types of things required warrants and lots of time for test results to come back. Jackson had picked up a lot from Tobias’s law enforcement friends over the years, but evidently he hadn’t learned that processing and analyzing most evidence could take weeks or months.
She tapped a finger against the photo of the prints and then against a photo of the driver’s seat where the dye had lit up red in uneven streaks. “Guess whose prints those are? Guess whose blood that is right there? Whose DNA? All of it in Mr. Olsen’s old car just waiting for the police to come along with their fancy dye?”
This was her biggest bluff. Neither she nor Bruce Olsen had any idea what had actually happened after Jackson left in the Equinox. It had been returned in mint condition with a faint bleach smell on the inside.
Everything else was supposition on Josie’s part. There was no actual blood. There were no actual fingerprints. No physical proof. She just needed Jackson to believe that there was.
“Jackson?”
He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the pictures. The trembling in his fingers spread to his forearms.
“I understand why you did it,” Josie said in her most sympathetic voice. “You were angry with your dad before Cora came along. Realizing what he’d done and knowing there was nothing you could do about it. Believe me, I get how frustrating it is to know in your bones that someone did something criminal and realize that they’ll never pay for it because there is simply no proof. Nothing definitive, anyway.”
“I didn’t—it wasn’t about revenge,” he said, so quietly that Josie had to lean in to catch the words.
Inside her, a dam broke. Relief poured through her body like the sweetest drug. There it was—the first crack. She just hoped the camera had captured his words.
“Oh, I know,” she said.
His blue eyes searched hers. “You do?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“If it was simply about revenge, you would have done it a lot sooner,” Josie said. “Probably a lot more impulsively, too. I have to hand it to you, Jackson. The meticulous planning that went into this is impressive. You had everyone stumped for seven years. If it wasn’t for the drought, your streak might have lasted decades. You committed a flawless crime. I took in the scope of what you did, and I knew that there was only one reason you could have done it.”
He watched her with a sort of hopefulness in his eyes. The desire to be seen and understood fully was powerful. Josie had leveraged it in many of these types of interrogations.
She dropped the word like a bomb. “Love.”
Time stopped. She could feel it. Jackson’s body was as still as the dead. She wasn’t sure if he was even breathing. Then, the first tear broke free, rolling down his cheek, fat and heavy.
“I didn’t think anyone would understand,” he croaked. “It wasn’t evil. It wasn’t cold or callous. It came from the best possible place. It had to be done. He never would have stopped and he would have kept getting away with it.”
“I know,” Josie said. “And Jackson, I know everything that happened that night. What I don’t know is whose idea it was to kill Tobias—yours or Cora’s?”
Fifty-Two
That he didn’t look surprised in the slightest told her that her crazy theory—the one the Chief didn’t entirely buy—was correct. She allowed herself a quick glance at the camera, wondering if Gretchen and the Chief could sense her mental fist pump. Finally, they were unraveling the most baffling mystery of this case.
