Her Final Confession

Chapter Thirty-Six

PRESENT DAY

Denton, Pennsylvania

Josie waited for Hummel to arrive. She took a photo of the Wawa travel mug with her cell phone and let him bag it and take it into evidence. They went over the photos the team had taken the day before. The mug was in the same place—so it hadn’t been moved or touched by anyone on their team. All the way back to the station, the mysterious mug nagged at her. It hadn’t seemed important at all the day before, but that was the thing with crime scenes—you just never knew what might turn out to be of critical importance. It was exactly the reason they’d asked Robyn to do the walk-through. Once Josie got to her work station, she phoned a contact in the state police crime lab and called in a favor. Across from her, Noah’s desk was empty. She hoped he was sleeping. As she sat down at her desk, she noticed a small pastry box from Komorrah’s Koffee. Inside was a cheese Danish. Her favorite. Noah must have left it for her before he went home. It was his way of trying to smooth things over, but Josie wasn’t sure it was enough. It bothered her that he was so quick to believe that Gretchen was a murderer.

Still, she was hungry, so she ate the Danish and then tried calling Jack Starkey, the ATF agent on Gretchen’s list of references. His outgoing message still said he was out of town at a conference. Josie left another message. Then she looked up the number for the ATF office in Seattle and called. She got another agent who told her the same thing Starkey’s voicemail had told her. He was away. She left her cell phone number and asked the agent if he could get in touch with Starkey and ask him to call her right away.

Josie called down to holding to see if Gretchen was still there, but she was gone. The sheriff’s deputies had come to transport her to county jail in Bellewood while Josie was meeting with Robyn Wilkins. Not that Josie could have spoken to her. Loughlin was due to take a confession later that day, and Gretchen was represented by counsel. With a sigh, Josie returned to her regular duties, spending a couple of hours writing up reports on the Wilkins case. Dr. Feist called to let her know that the autopsies didn’t turn up any surprises. As they suspected from the scene, Margie Wilkins had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and Joel Wilkins had been bludgeoned to death; the fractures to his skull were consistent with having been struck with a crowbar. It would take a few days to get the prints back, and weeks for them to test the DNA found on Margie Wilkins’s body. Real police work was not at all like what people saw on television.

She took a call for a domestic disturbance where the woman decided not to press charges. After she finished up more paperwork, she got lunch. Noah still wasn’t back when she returned to her desk. She used her cell phone to call Dr. Perry Larson. He answered on the third ring.

“Dr. Larson,” Josie said, “I was wondering if you had had a chance to talk to the police about Ethan Robinson and to review the footage of the apartment lobby.”

There was the sound of traffic in the background, then what sounded like the whoosh of an electric door, and finally silence before he spoke again. “Oh yes. The detectives were out yesterday. They took down everything, had a look around the apartment. We reviewed the footage of the lobby, and it turns out that Ethan and James left together the day that James came to Denton.”

“Really?” Josie said. “Do you think you could send me the footage?”

“Of course.”

He took down her email address, and a few moments later, the surveillance was in Josie’s inbox. She queued it up. It was only about ten seconds long. The view was from above the door leading outside. The two men walked out of the inner door, Omar first, dressed in the same T-shirt and pants he’d been wearing when they found him in Gretchen’s driveway. Ethan Robinson was slightly taller than Omar, his brown hair straight. He too wore a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and he carried a laptop bag over one shoulder.

With a sigh of frustration, Josie reset the footage and watched it again. They walked from one door to the next. Ethan talked to Omar’s back as they moved. He had been in mid-sentence when they entered the tiny foyer and appeared to still be in mid-sentence as they left it. Josie reset the footage to the beginning and replayed it, trying to read Ethan Robinson’s lips. Again and again, she watched it. She couldn’t tell what he was saying, but she was pretty sure it was five words.

“He’s saying, ‘when you get there, don’t,’ and then he’s out the door.” Noah’s voice over her shoulder made her jump so violently, she knocked her pen and pad off the desk.

She swiveled in her chair, shaking her head, and bent to pick up her things. “You scared the hell out of me.”

Noah was dressed in his usual khakis and Denton PD polo shirt. His hair looked freshly washed, and the intoxicating scent of his aftershave made Josie’s earlier anger toward him slip just a little. He smiled. “Sorry.”

“Thanks for the Danish,” she said. “How can you tell what this kid is saying? You never told me you can read lips.”

He shrugged and walked around to his desk, plopping into his chair. “Only a little.”

“You read Gretchen’s lips on the CCTV footage of her.”

“I had a girlfriend once who was partially deaf. She read lips. She taught me how to do it. We used to make a game of it.”

It was the first time he’d told her anything about his former girlfriends besides their names and how many there had been. He was a couple of years younger than Josie, had never been married, and hadn’t had a steady girlfriend since joining the force.

Noah said, “Is that James Omar?”

“Yes,” Josie said. “It’s from the morning of Omar’s murder. Omar and his roommate, Ethan Robinson, left their apartment together.”

“But it doesn’t sound like they were going to the same place,” Noah pointed out. “Robinson said, ‘when you get there.’”

“So, Robinson knew what Omar was doing—where he was going and why—and according to professor Larson, Ethan is still missing.”

“The Philly PD are working on that, right?”

“Yes,” Josie said. Changing the subject, she told him about the walk-through of the Wilkinses’ home and the mug that Robyn insisted didn’t belong to Joel and Margie Wilkins.

“You have a photo of it?” Noah asked.

Josie pulled it up on her phone to show him.

“No one from our team brought this to the scene,” he said.

“Hummel and I double-checked. It was there when the ERT arrived.”

“There were two travel mugs in the drainboard if I remember correctly,” Noah said.

“Right. The Mr. and Mrs. mugs.”

“But only one beside the coffee maker.”

“Because it’s not theirs and they didn’t put it there,” Josie confirmed. “There is the slight possibility that a friend or houseguest brought it to the house and that’s why it’s there.”

“But why next to the coffee maker?”

“Right,” Josie said. “Makes no sense. I think the killer brought it and left it there.”

“On purpose?”

“It would be a strange thing to do intentionally, but I’m inclined to think so. This guy was seen by no one, had the foresight to toss their phones into the toilet, and managed to control two victims. There’s some degree of sophistication there. It’s hard to believe he would just accidentally leave his clean, empty coffee cup at the scene. At 2:00 a.m.”

“Well, he did leave the murder weapon,” Noah pointed out.

“Yes, but lots of killers leave their murder weapons at the scene. Besides, he left his DNA on Margie Wilkins, so it’s not a matter of him not wanting to leave behind something that has the potential to identify him. The mug is something else entirely.”

“Okay,” Noah said. “Let’s say he brought the mug with him and left it at the scene on purpose. Why?”

“It’s a game,” Josie said. “I mean look, if we hadn’t had the walk-through with Robyn—if she hadn’t noticed the mug—we would never even know it was important. This guy killed for the sake of killing. The mug is his way of taunting us, or at least enjoying how stupid he thinks we are.”

Noah leaned back in his chair, using one of his feet to swivel his chair back and forth in a semicircle as he thought about what she said. “We don’t have Wawas in Denton. Wawas are in Philadelphia.”

Josie said, “Right. When I was in Philadelphia, there was a Wawa practically every few blocks.”

“You think the killer came here from Philadelphia,” he said.

“Not exactly.”

Josie used one hand on her desktop computer’s mouse to pull up the electronic file on James Omar’s murder, specifically the photos the evidence response team had taken inside Gretchen’s house. She found the photo of the end table with the shiny circle in the dust where some round object had been. She clicked to enlarge the photo and turned her monitor toward Noah. She expected skepticism, but instead he sat forward, took a long look at the photo, and asked, “Does the size match up?”

She grinned at him. With some finagling of the mouse and computer software, she was able to pull up a photo of the same dust-free circle with bright yellow rulers alongside it measuring its size. She then pulled up a photo of the bottom of the Wawa mug she and Hummel had taken into evidence that morning. Josie had held the same yellow rulers to measure its size for the shot. On screen, she brought both photos up side by side. “Yes,” she told Noah. “They’re a match.”

“But we have no way of asking Gretchen whether or not it’s her cup,” Noah said. “No way is Bowen going to let us talk to her. I mean, I guess we could get Loughlin to ask her.”

Josie said, “I already called Denise Poole—my contact in the state police lab.”

“I remember her,” Noah said. “She’ll expedite getting the prints?”

Josie nodded. “Well, she said it could be hard to get prints from a curved surface, but she’ll try her best. I had Hummel drive it out to her.”

Noah’s eyes bulged. “Are you kidding me? Isn’t that a four-hour drive? Chitwood’s going to flip when he finds out.”

Josie smiled. “But Lieutenant Fraley, the mug was found at the scene of a double homicide that the press is now covering. In fact, Chitwood went on television last night and told the public that we’re doing everything we possibly can to find the killer.”

Noah returned her smile. “Good point. So let’s say we find Gretchen’s prints on this Wawa mug. Then what?”

“Then we know there was someone else at her house the day that Omar was killed.”

Slowly, Noah shook his head. “No, we don’t. All we can infer from finding Gretchen’s prints on the cup is that she was at the Wilkins scene.”

Josie’s heart did a double-tap. Gretchen was unaccounted for on the night of the Wilkinses’ murder. Still, Josie didn’t believe for a second that Gretchen had been there. “Well, we know Gretchen didn’t leave semen on Margie Wilkins’s body,” Josie shot back. “I don’t think we can infer that from her mug being found at the scene.”

Before Noah could respond, Chief Chitwood’s voice boomed across the room from where he stood in the doorway to his office. “You two! Loughlin’s here. She’s got Palmer’s confession. Get your asses down to the conference room.”