Her Final Confession

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Josie sat in the county jail infirmary with an unused ice pack next to her on the gurney. Noah leaned against the wall across from her, arms crossed, as they waited for the doctor.

“This is ridiculous,” Josie said. “I’m fine. I didn’t hit my head.”

“Just let the doctor have a look at you,” he said.

“I’m not injured,” Josie said. “She didn’t injure me. It was an accident.”

Noah laughed. “She accidentally pushed your face into the wall?”

“She didn’t push my face into the wall. I didn’t hit anything. I don’t want her punished in any way.”

“She’s already in solitary. Now she’ll just have to be chained when she has visitors.”

Loughlin breezed in behind the doctor. As the doctor shined a small flashlight into Josie’s eyes, Loughlin said, “She’s not going to give you a composite.”

“No shit,” Josie said. The doctor asked her a series of questions, which she answered as quickly as she could. Finally, she was cleared to go.

The three detectives walked out to the parking lot together. Noah and Loughlin discussed the day’s revelations while Josie’s mind kept returning to the words Gretchen had hissed into her ear.

More time for what?

She waited until she was alone in the car with Noah to tell him what Gretchen had said, but he couldn’t make sense of it either. “We should go back and ask her,” he said. “Ask Bowen to ask her.”

“No,” Josie said. “She obviously only wanted me to hear, or she would have just said it in front of Loughlin. That was meant only for me.”

“And you’re telling me.”

She swatted at his shoulder. “I need you to help me figure this out.”

“Well, I don’t know what she needs more time for. She’s sitting in jail.”

Josie’s cell phone rang. She took one look at it and groaned. “It’s Chitwood,” she told Noah. She pressed answer and barked, “Quinn.”

His scratchy voice was just as loud over the phone as it was in person. “Quinn, you got your DNA match from the Wilkins scene. Nothing on your hair from Gretchen’s car yet. The Wilkins DNA came up in the federal database as a match for this Strangler from Seattle. So, good work. Now get your ass in here, because we have to give a press conference, and seeing as this guy is a lady-hater, I think you should be the one to do it. That’ll really get under his skin.”

He hung up before she could say anything.

Noah said, “I heard every word. I can’t figure out which part of that was the weirdest: when he said you did a good job, when he said, ‘lady-hater,’ or him suggesting that you try to get under the skin of a serial killer.”

Josie laughed, then Noah laughed, and then she laughed some more. It felt so good after the week they’d been having.

But in just a few minutes, all the levity in the vehicle leached away. They still had a murderer to catch.

“You know,” Noah said, sensing the shift in mood, “I think Gretchen’s going to get that time she wants.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, does it make sense to have a press conference when we have absolutely zero leads? So we tell the public that this serial killer everyone thought was dead has struck here instead of his old hunting ground, fourteen years after his last-known murder. So what? Then he knows we know it’s him. We still don’t know who he is.”

Josie groaned. “You’re right. I’m not sure we should tell the world without having solid leads. He can just go back underground. No one will ever see him again.”

“Unless we find Ethan. Ethan knows who he is—Ethan and James found him,” Noah said.

“Yes, but I think all the research they did is on Ethan’s computer, which he has with him. That doesn’t help us.”

“Okay, well Gretchen thinks the killer is Seattle PD. Can we track down any members out there who either moved East or are on vacation right now?” Noah suggested.

“We can,” Josie said. “And we might have no choice but to do it that way, but if this guy is really in law enforcement, I’m not sure we should risk alerting him before we have a better handle on this situation. We make one phone call to Seattle PD, this guy finds out what’s going on, and he’s gone. Although…”

“What is it?”

“If this guy was law enforcement, his DNA would be in some database somewhere. They would have matched it by now.”

“True.”

“So maybe he’s not. I need to have a look at the case materials again,” Josie said.

Noah slowed the vehicle. Josie looked around and realized they were only a few blocks from the station house.

“What is this?” Noah muttered as they pulled to a stop behind a snarl of traffic. Ahead of them, patrol cars and an ambulance blocked one half of the residential street. Josie could see patrol officers loitering outside of a house.

“Pull over,” she said. “We’ll check it out.”

Noah found a spot near the curb that they would probably never get out of with all the backed-up traffic. As they approached the house, Josie saw the ambulance bay doors were open. Inside, a woman sat on the gurney, her face battered and bloody. Owen leaned over her, gently wiping at the blood with a piece of folded gauze. Josie squinted at the woman and recognized her as the person who had made the domestic violence call that Josie handled the other day. She climbed into the back of the ambulance as Noah walked on, over to the uniformed officers.

The woman said, “I’m ready to press charges.”

Josie nodded. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.” She turned to Owen. “Take her to the hospital so we can document her injuries.”

“You got it,” Owen said.

Josie began climbing out of the ambulance. “I’ll meet you over there,” she said.

She heard Owen telling the woman about the new women’s center and the new shelter the city had just built. The difficulty the woman would have in staying safe until her husband was prosecuted was not lost on Josie.

“It used to be near the hospital,” he was telling the woman. “But this new one is a lot nicer. It’s a little out of the way. You know that road by Denton East…”

Josie didn’t hear anything else. Her heart did a quick double tap.

She searched for Noah. When their eyes locked, he said something to the officers he’d been speaking to and walked over to her. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Can you take this domestic?” she said. “I really need to go back and get another look at Omar’s phone records.”

“Of course,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“I think I know how to find the identity of the Strangler.”