Her Final Confession

Chapter Twenty-Three

Two hours later, Trinity snored beside her as Josie combed the Philadelphia news websites for news of the Linc Shore/Seth Cole murder and the conviction of the two Dirty Aces members responsible for the slayings. The mug shots of the two Aces killers showed two nearly identical men in their late forties with round, bearded faces and graying hair tied back in ponytails. Both too old to be the boy in the photo. There were photos of both Linc and his prospect as well—mug shots or driver’s license photos, Josie couldn’t tell—but neither of them looked familiar to her. Linc was too old to be the boy in the photo pinned to James Omar’s body. In his fifties, Linc Shore had greasy shoulder-length black hair and a long black beard threaded with gray. His brown eyes stared defiantly at the camera, and the smallest hint of a smile turned his mouth upward. He looked like a man who was keeping a secret. Or waiting for the punchline to a joke.

Seth Cole was young enough, but because the boy in the photo was only shown in profile, it was difficult to tell if they were one and the same. She paused her search for articles about the murder to punch Seth Cole’s name into Google as well as a few police databases. He had almost no online footprint. A Facebook account showed a profile picture of him on a Harley Davidson, smiling with a beer in his hand. His hair was long and blond, past his shoulders. A long, crooked nose sat off-center on his ruddy, stubbled face. He looked much older than his twenty-one years. Either his Facebook page was little-used, or he’d switched his privacy settings to the strictest available, because there was nothing else on his page besides his photo and that he lived in Seattle. Her police databases offered little more. Only that he’d been convicted of a couple of misdemeanor drug offenses before taking up with Linc Shore and the Seattle chapter of the Devil’s Blade.

With a sigh, Josie returned to her search for details about the double homicide in Philadelphia. There were several articles, but none told Josie much more than what Boyd had told her. The two men had been brutally slain, and Gretchen had worked tirelessly to bring their killers to justice in spite of the witnesses being repeatedly threatened. The Aces members were both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Case closed. Two years later, Gretchen had sat across from Josie in the office now occupied by Chief Chitwood to interview for a detective position.

Josie spent the better part of the night searching every source available to her, trying to make a connection between James Omar and the Dirty Aces—or any outlaw motorcycle gang. She searched Gretchen Palmer and Dirty Aces; Gretchen Palmer and Devil’s Blade; Gretchen Palmer and James Omar; even Gretchen Palmer and Ethan Robinson. Nothing. There were plenty of news reports quoting Gretchen as a Philadelphia homicide detective on the cases she’d handled, and Josie found the obituary for each one of Gretchen’s grandparents, but nothing else of use.

Again, Josie’s head swirled with unanswered questions, not the least of which was: Where the hell was Gretchen? If she had fled her home as Noah suggested, why hadn’t she taken the $2,000 in her sock drawer? No, Josie was certain she’d been taken. Had the Aces kidnapped her? Made her disappear as revenge for helping put their club members away for life? Was James Omar caught in the crosshairs? Maybe his visit to Gretchen’s house was completely unrelated to Gretchen’s disappearance. Perhaps he had gone to see Gretchen for reasons that had nothing to do with the Dirty Aces, and he’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe the Aces were trying to frame Gretchen for his murder. In which case, they’d done a damn good job. In the morning, Chief Chitwood would issue an arrest warrant, and once the press got wind of it, Gretchen’s trial by publicity would begin.

But what about the photo? Who had pinned the photo to Omar’s body, and why?

Beside her, Trinity stirred, sitting up groggily. She blinked sleepily at the cable box, which showed it was after three in the morning, and then turned to Josie. “Good lord, you’re still at it?”

Josie snapped her laptop closed and threw herself back into the couch cushion with a loud sigh. “And I’m getting nowhere,” she complained.

Trinity shook her head, stood, and took Josie’s arm, dragging her up off the couch and toward the stairs. “’Cause you need to sleep. You’ll have a clearer head if you get some rest.”

Josie let Trinity pull her up the steps. She didn’t protest when Trinity climbed into her king-sized bed, instead of going to the guest room, and promptly started snoring again. Exhausted, Josie got into bed next to her. A little ache yawned open in her heart as she wondered how many nights like this she had missed in the last thirty years—sleeping side by side with her sister. Pushing the thought away and the pain that came with it, her mind turned back to Gretchen, searching for some other angle, some new approach to the case. Again, she thought of the first time she’d met Gretchen. The first interview. Then she thought of what had made Gretchen’s application stand out to her in the first place. All those years of experience, the stellar references. The references. Something sparked in the back of her mind, but as quickly as it came, it was gone. She tried to get it back, but sleep came too quickly.