Her Final Confession

Chapter Thirty-Three

Josie went home with Noah, but less than five minutes after they walked through his front door, Josie’s phone rang. It was work.

“Don’t answer it,” Noah said as he went into his living room and started flipping lights on.

“It’s work,” Josie said. “If I don’t answer, they’ll just call you.” She pressed the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

Bob Chitwood’s voice was almost a shout. “I need one of you on the street right now. You drew the short end of the stick, so I called you first. Tell me you’re sleeping, and I’ll call Fraley instead. Unless the two of you are together. Then you can flip a coin, and whoever wins can get their ass down to the strip mall over by Corinthian Place. There’s been a couple of break-ins.”

Josie sighed. “I’m on it.”

Chitwood hung up without another word. She looked at Noah, who said, “I heard. I’ll go. You get some sleep.”

“You think I’m going to be able to sleep?”

The argument about Gretchen’s guilt still lingered between them, tense and unfinished.

Noah handed her the remote to the television. “Eventually, yeah. I’ll take this one. You can do the walk-through with Joel Wilkins’s sister in the morning.”He picked up his keys from where he’d tossed them onto the coffee table and walked past her. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge.”

Josie stepped in front of him before he reached the door. “Do you really think Gretchen is guilty?”

“Do we have to talk about this right now?”

“I want to know.”

He touched her cheek, slid a lock of hair behind her ear, and ever so gently moved in to plant the softest kiss on the butterfly stitch the doctor had put on her cheek. Then he said, “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the evidence shows and what Gretchen does. She wants to plead guilty. The case is closed. We’ve got the Wilkins double murder and everything else that goes on in this city to deal with.”

She stepped back from him. “We’re supposed to stick together, Noah.”

“We who?”

“Me, you, Gretchen. The Denton PD. We’re a team. We have to look out for each other.”

He raised a brow. “There’s a fine line between looking out for one another and police corruption.”

Josie felt the color drain from her face. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

Noah folded his arms across his chest. “Then what do you mean? Because I did look out for Gretchen by doing my job. She’s a grown woman. She made choices and now she’s holding herself accountable for those choices. I know you don’t want to hear that or believe it, but—”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that it’s just not true. Gretchen didn’t do this. I know it in my gut, and my gut is rarely wrong.”

His arms loosened and his annoyed expression softened. “Josie, I understand your impulse to want to somehow exonerate Gretchen. Hell, I even understand the need to answer all the questions. It’s frustrating for the case to close on our end when we don’t know why the hell things happened the way they did, but you need to face the fact that you barely know Gretchen. None of us really know her. Even that lieutenant in Philadelphia told you he wasn’t close to her. She accepted a gift from the Devil’s Blade. A gift she wore each day since they gave it to her. I know you’ve probably done your homework already, but the Devil’s Blade is no joke. They’re criminals—murderers, drug dealers—and the way they treat women… and I can see her accepting the jacket, fine, just to be polite, but why did she wear it? Why was that case so important to her? Has it ever occurred to you that the thing you think Gretchen is hiding is something criminal?”

A dozen replies flew through her head, but all of her arguments came down to one thing: she just knew. She also knew this wasn’t the kind of reasoning that Noah would accept. His cell phone rang. He glanced at it, silenced it, and said, “I have to go. We’ll talk about this when I get back.”

“I won’t be here,” Josie said to his back. “I’m going home.”

He turned back to her. “Josie, please. Don’t make this personal.”

But it was already personal. Gretchen knew—probably better than any person Josie had ever met—what it meant to have a toxic mother, what it was like to be raised by someone who hated you and hurt you at every turn. Gretchen knew how hard it was to talk about the abuse. When Josie was too weak and too gutted to put together the final pieces of the puzzle that exposed the woman who claimed to be her mother, Gretchen had done it for her. Gretchen understood Josie in a way that no one ever had, and possibly no one ever would.

And Josie understood that Gretchen was lying.

“If Gretchen broke the law, you know I wouldn’t stand in the way of her being prosecuted,” Josie told him. “But I don’t think Omar’s death is on her.”

“Then we have to agree to disagree.”