Her Final Confession

Chapter Twenty

“A few years before she left for Denton, she caught a double homicide. Couple of bikers. You guys deal with a lot of outlaw biker gangs around your way?”

“Some,” Josie said. “But it’s mostly when they’re passing through.”

“You know anything about them?” Boyd asked.

“I know they’re basically organized crime factions and have a hand in the usual stuff—drugs, prostitution, gambling. I know they feud with one another. A lot of them are violent as hell. Is that it? Gretchen’s a biker?”

Boyd held up a hand. “Slow down, there. Gretchen’s not a biker. Like I was saying, she caught a case where a couple of bikers had been murdered here in the city. It was over a turf war. A guy named Linc Shore was out here. Name ring any bells?”

Josie shook her head.

“Shore was a higher-up in the Devil’s Blade gang. He was in charge of the Blade chapter out in Seattle for decades. We’re still not sure what he was doing out here. Maybe lending support to the Northeast chapter. Like I said, they were wrapped up in a pretty dirty turf war with another gang called the Dirty Aces. Anyway, you know what a prospect is?”

“Someone who wants to be in the gang?” Josie guessed.

Boyd unfolded the napkin he’d managed to fold into a square the size of a nickel as he spoke. “A hang-around is someone who wants to be in the gang. Most of the time, a prospect is a step up, because they’ve gotten a full member of the gang to sponsor them.”

“So the prospect is a little more ‘in’ than a hang-around,” Josie said.

“Basically, yeah. Well, Shore had a prospect with him. Name was Seth Cole. Young kid. About twenty, twenty-one. Now we know that full members torture prospects. Make them do all kinds of nasty shit while they’re waiting to be patched in.”

“Patched in?” Josie asked.

“It’s when a prospect becomes a full member. The club votes on them, they usually have to do something to prove their loyalty—like kill somebody or commit some type of crime—and then they’re given a gang logo patch for their jackets.”

“I see,” Josie replied. “Was Linc Shore sponsoring this prospect?”

“We don’t know,” Boyd said. “We’ll probably never know. The kid came with him from Seattle. Chances are Linc just brought him along to do shit for him—like a personal slave. Anyway, the Dirty Aces got them alone, shot them and sliced both their throats.”

“How do you know the Dirty Aces did it?” Josie asked.

Boyd said, “They left their calling card. A partially burned ace of spades. Apparently, they do that at a lot of their murder scenes. This way the other gang knows they’ve been put on notice.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. So right off we knew it was a turf war thing. For some reason, Gretchen really took that one to heart.”

“In what way?”

Boyd leaned back in his seat and looked around the small sandwich shop. “Look, we work the case, right? Whatever it is, we work it. A murder’s a murder. But when you get a seventeen-year-old student raped and murdered waiting for the bus, or a toddler hit by a stray bullet, or an elderly person beaten to death in a home invasion, it hits you harder. Maybe you work a little faster, spend a little more time on it, want to solve it more than, say, the murder of two people who chose a lifestyle of violence and killing.”

“Linc Shore and Seth Cole were high-risk victims,” Josie said.

“It was only a matter of time for guys like that. You join an outlaw biker gang, chances are you’re going to end up murdered in a pretty unpleasant way. Most of us don’t get invested when it comes to vics like that. We still do the job, but we’re not as tied to the outcome ’cause as soon as you put away the killers, two more prospects will get patched in and take their places. But Gretchen—man was she emotional about that one. I never saw her like that before. I caught her crying a few times. It was just strange. It should have been just another case. Plus, none of the rest of us really wanted to touch it. You get involved in something like that—really double down—and you put yourself in the crosshairs of the gang whose members you’re trying to put away. Gretchen didn’t give a damn. She worked that case harder than any one she ever caught before that.”

“Did she know either of them?” Josie asked, perplexed.

“No, that was the weird thing. There was no connection. I’m still not sure why the case meant so much to her. But anyway, she got the arrest and handed it off to the DA. They got the convictions—both Dirty Aces members got life in prison—and then Shore’s crew gave her this jacket.”

“Was it his jacket?”

Boyd shrugged. “Don’t know. She never told me. Could have been Linc Shore’s jacket or maybe the prospect’s. Or maybe just a jacket they bought for her. But it was old. Looked like it had been stripped down of its patches. Anyway, I saw her after sentencing. A lot of times, if we’re down at the criminal justice center for testimony, we’ll shoot over to the Reading Terminal and get some lunch. Lots of different food places in there. Anyway, I was there for a hearing and stopped over for some lunch, and there was Gretchen in the burger joint with a Devil’s Blade guy and Linc Shore’s old lady.”

“His wife?”

“Oh hell, I don’t know. Wife? Girlfriend? I just know she was involved with Linc. She was at the trial the whole time. So was the guy she was with. Anyway, they were there with Gretchen. They gave her the jacket, and Gretchen never took it off after that.”

“Did you ever ask Gretchen about why she took the jacket?”

“Course I did,” Boyd said. “She told me it was none of my damn business. So I kept asking. She told me it was between her and Linc’s friends, that I wouldn’t understand, and that was all I needed to know. I badgered her some more, but it became pretty clear she wasn’t ever going to tell me anything else, so I stopped asking.”

Silence fell between them for a few moments. Josie listened to the sounds of the kitchen behind them—shouted orders, the clang of a metal spatula over a grill, the sizzle of meat cooking, the beep of the deep fryer announcing a batch of fries were finished. Gretchen was more of a mystery to her now than ever. She sighed. “Were there any other cases she got emotional about?” Josie asked.

Boyd took a moment to think about it before answering, “No, none that I can think of. None that stand out like that one did.”

“Is it possible for me to have a look at that file? The Shore/Cole murders?”

Boyd frowned. “It’s an old file. Closed. I’ll see what I can do. For now, you could google it, go on philly.com and look it up. It got some press coverage at the time. If I can get my hands on it, I’ll send you whatever I get—how’s that?”

“Sounds good.”