Her Final Confession

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Gretchen had given Detective Heather Loughlin a hand-written confession. It was terse, the handwriting a scrawl. Josie knew Gretchen’s handwriting—it was usually neat and precise. Josie could practically feel the tension and desperation oozing from the hastily written words. She and Noah read it over while Loughlin sipped coffee and Chitwood paced near the head of the table. When they were finished with it, Josie handed it to Chitwood, who barely glanced at it.

Josie asked Loughlin, “Do you believe her?”

Loughlin shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. She confessed. She had an answer for everything.”

Chitwood tossed the pages onto the table, and Noah picked them up once more. “She says she met Omar in Philadelphia a few years ago. That’s pretty vague.”

“A few years ago, Omar wasn’t even in Philadelphia,” Josie said. “He lived in Idaho and did his undergrad in Indiana. He started at Drexel after Gretchen had already left Philadelphia to come work here.”

“So what?” Chitwood said. “She had friends in Philadelphia. Maybe she met him when she went back to visit. Maybe she’s got her timeline mixed up, and she saw him last summer.”

Josie was fairly certain Gretchen had not been back to Philadelphia since her move to Denton, even for a visit, but she had no way of proving that, so she kept quiet. Instead she asked Loughlin, “Where did Gretchen say they met?”

“Jogging along the Schuylkill—he was jogging, not her. She says he bumped into her and knocked her down. She hit her head. He helped her get up, find a bench, and sit. They talked, and when he found out she was a cop, he had all kinds of questions about the job. She had a headache and didn’t feel like talking, so she gave him her number and said he could call her any time if he had questions about police work.”

“That’s pretty thin,” Josie said.

Loughlin shrugged. “I have no reason to disbelieve her, although her story about him being interested in her position as a police officer seems like just that—a story. I don’t know that she’s telling the truth about how they knew one another. But she says he tracked her down here, and she felt threatened by him, especially by the fact that he had driven two hours to her home.”

“What did she say the altercation was about?” Noah asked. “All this says is she asked him to leave multiple times, and he refused and became combative.”

Josie looked over his shoulder at the confession again. It was written in the broadest and vaguest terms possible.

“She says for some reason he had become obsessed with her. She doesn’t know why and said she doesn’t believe it was a sexual thing, but that him showing up at her home without an invitation felt very intrusive and threatening. She says he’d been harassing her by phone for two weeks.”

Josie remembered that the phone records from Gretchen’s phone showed only two calls from Omar’s number to hers. That hardly constituted harassment.

“If she thought he was harassing her,” Josie asked, “why didn’t she report it?”

“Like I said,” Loughlin replied, “I don’t think she was being truthful about whatever it was between them. I think maybe whatever was going on—she was embarrassed and thought she could make it all go away on her own, and when it went south, she ran.”

“You think they were having a sexual relationship?” Noah asked, and Josie could tell by the skepticism in his voice that he was having an equally difficult time envisioning Gretchen carrying on some kind of affair with a college student in his early twenties.

Loughlin shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

Noah pointed to the second page of the confession. “She disabled the MDT and threw it, as well as her and Omar’s phones and her gun, into the river. Then she ‘drove around’ for a few days before she decided to turn herself in. She wouldn’t say where she went?”

Loughlin shook her head. “She got agitated when I pressed her on it.”

“Why did she park on the block behind her house when she went to meet Omar?” Josie asked. “Did she tell you? And what about the photo of the boy? Did she say who it was and why she pinned it to Omar’s collar?” She snatched the pages away from Noah and riffled through them. “She doesn’t mention the photo of the boy at all.”

“I asked her about it,” Loughlin said. “About both of those things, actually. She said she parked on the block behind her house and snuck onto the property from the back because she was afraid Omar might be dangerous, and she wanted to assess the situation before she made herself known.”

“And the photo?” Josie asked.

“She said she found it on the ground near Omar after she shot him. She assumed that it was his and had fallen out of his pocket, so she pinned it to his shirt.”

“Where did she get the safety pin?” Josie asked.

“Her grandmother’s sewing kit, she said,” Loughlin answered.

“You’re telling me she snuck up on this kid, they argued about something, she felt ‘threatened,’ so she shot him in the back as he was leaving, and then she went back into her house to dig up a safety pin so she could fix the photo she says fell out of his pocket to his shirt?”

Loughlin frowned. “Yeah, that does sound thin. But why would she confess to killing this kid if she didn’t do it?”

That was what Josie hadn’t figured out yet. Without even thinking, Gretchen had confessed to cold-blooded murder. But why?

Chitwood said, “She shot this kid. Maybe she’s not being honest about why or how they knew each other, but she had prior contact with Omar. They were both at her house at the time of the shooting. The bullet they dug out of his back was the same caliber as Gretchen’s service weapon. Plus, she confessed. Wrap it up. You’ve got the Wilkins homicides to work.”

Chitwood strode out of the room. The three detectives slowly ambled into the hallway. “Heather,” Josie said. “What about her jacket? Did you ask her where her jacket was?”

Heather nodded. “She said she lost it.”

There was no way in hell Gretchen lost her jacket. But Josie was tired of being the only one in the room arguing for Gretchen’s innocence. She needed proof that someone else was there the day Omar was killed—that there was something more going on.

Josie and Noah said goodbye to Loughlin and went back to their desks. Josie picked up the receiver of her desk phone.

“Who are you calling?” Noah asked.

“The only person besides Gretchen who would have any idea what Omar was really doing here on the day he was killed is Ethan Robinson.”

“The roommate? He’s missing.”

“Yeah, but his dad’s not.”