Her Final Confession

Chapter Forty

Josie’s heart momentarily went into overdrive. Would she finally get some answers instead of more and more questions? “Hi, Agent Starkey,” she said. “Thanks for calling me back.”

“Well, someone on my team in Seattle called me. Said you sounded pretty bent.”

“Bent” wasn’t the way Josie would describe herself, but she let it go. “Well, it’s important,” she told him. “I’m calling about Gretchen Palmer.”

“Lowther,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I knew her as Lowther, not Palmer.”

It took Josie a moment to process what he was telling her. She knew that Palmer was Gretchen’s family name, because her grandparents had been Agnes and Fred Palmer. She pulled her notebook over to her and flipped through the pages, looking for the list of contacts that Caroline Weber’s mother had provided from Gretchen’s mother’s side. Lowther was not her mother’s family name. Which only meant one thing.

“Wait a minute,” Josie said. “Gretchen was married?”

Starkey laughed. “Yeah. She was just a kid. She was married to my buddy, Billy. William Benjamin Lowther. She must have changed her name when she moved back East.”

Josie started making notes on a clean page of her pad. Across from her Noah stared, a look of curiosity mixed with disbelief lining his face. “They lived in Seattle, then?”

“Well, yeah, Billy was an agent.”

“With the ATF?” Josie clarified, feeling like she couldn’t quite keep up. Starkey must think she was a grade A idiot.

“Yeah. He was a damn good one too.”

Josie hadn’t missed his use of the past tense to describe Billy Lowther, but she put those questions aside for now. “How long were they married?”

Starkey made a low noise under his breath like he was calculating. Then he said, “I don’t know. A couple of years. Not long.”

“You said Gretchen was a kid. How old was she when they met?” Josie asked.

“Eighteen,” Starkey said and laughed. “Believe me, we checked. Billy was on the East Coast for some training when they met. He brought her back to Seattle with him and said he was marrying her. They’d only known each other two weeks. She didn’t look a day over sixteen. We wanted to make sure he wasn’t getting himself into trouble.”

Josie wondered why Caroline Weber hadn’t told her about Gretchen’s marriage. Was it possible that Gretchen hadn’t told anyone? If the marriage hadn’t lasted that long, perhaps she hadn’t, or perhaps it had been so long ago that Caroline hadn’t thought it was relevant.

Starkey went on, drawing Josie out of her thoughts. “But they were in love, boy. Big time. Billy was about twelve years older than her, but that didn’t bother either one of them. They went to city hall and did the deed. Used a couple of secretaries there for witnesses.”

Josie tried to imagine Gretchen as a young woman, deeply and madly in love with a man she’d only known a couple of weeks, getting married in a municipal building with no one she actually knew present except her new husband. The last part sounded like Gretchen, but the young and crazy-in-love part was simply too hard for Josie to imagine.

“It didn’t work out?” Josie probed.

Starkey’s voice was suddenly heavy. “Billy died.”

“I’m sorry,” Josie said. “What happ—”

Starkey interjected, “So what’s going on there with Gretchen? I know she put me as a job reference, but since your messages sounded so urgent, I assume she’s in some kind of trouble.”

You don’t know the half of it, Josie thought. She gave him the bare bones of an explanation: Omar was found shot in the back in Gretchen’s driveway, and Gretchen had run off. She didn’t yet tell him that Gretchen had returned or that she had confessed to his murder. She wanted to know what he knew first.

“No connection between Gretchen and the kid?” Starkey asked.

“None other than Gretchen worked in Philadelphia and Omar was from Philadelphia,” Josie explained. “I went to Philadelphia and met with Gretchen’s old partner there, Steve Boyd. We talked about a particular case Gretchen caught a couple of years before she came here. A couple of Dirty Aces had murdered two Devil’s Blade members who were out here from the West Coast. Linc Shore and Seth Cole. Apparently, Gretchen really took the case to heart, worked her ass off to make sure the Aces members went to prison for life. I thought at first that maybe Gretchen was targeted by the Aces for having put their guys away, but I can’t find any evidence of that. I also can’t find any connection between Omar and either gang.”

Starkey said, “Did you say Gretchen was the one who worked the Linc Shore case?”

“Yeah, that’s what her partner told me.”

“Gretchen Palmer?” he asked skeptically.

“Yeah,” Josie replied. “You didn’t know about Linc Shore?”

“Well, yeah, I knew he was killed on the East Coast. We work outlaw motorcycle gangs in Seattle. He was the chapter president. Something like that doesn’t go down without us finding out. But I didn’t follow what happened after that. We just knew the Aces took him out. That’s all.”

“So Gretchen never called you about the case? To get some intel on the Devil’s Blade gang or find out more about Linc Shore or Seth Cole?”

Starkey erupted into a fit of laughter. He laughed so hard, he started to cough. Josie held the phone away from her ear as she and Noah exchanged a puzzled look. “Agent Starkey?” Josie said, trying to break through his laughing-coughing fit.

“The only way Gretchen Palmer would call me to get intel on Devil’s Blade and Linc Shore would be if she fell and hit her head and got amnesia. Or if someone gave her a lobotomy.”

Frustration bubbled up inside Josie’s stomach, but she pushed it down. “What are you talking about?”

“Detective Quinn, Linc Shore and the Devil’s Blade kidnapped Gretchen when she was just twenty. They held her for over a year. No one could find her. We thought she was dead. Then one day they dumped her off in front of a federal building, beaten, sliced up, and loaded with drugs.”