Her Final Confession

Chapter Five

Already clad in a Tyvek suit and skull cap, Dr. Anya Feist knelt next to the body, carefully unpinning the photo and depositing it into a brown paper evidence bag that Mettner held out for her. As he sealed it and marked it, Dr. Feist turned back to the body, her gloved fingers probing the jagged bloody circle the bullet had punched into the man’s shirt. She didn’t look up as Josie and Noah approached.

She said, “Whoever this guy is, he never stood a chance.”

Noah took his notebook out and turned to a fresh page.

Dr. Feist continued, “I’ll have to get him on the table, but I can tell you right now that the bullet probably perforated his lung, maybe even went through the heart. He was probably dead in seconds, if not before he hit the ground. You guys find a shell casing?”

“Nine millimeter,” Josie offered.

Dr. Feist nodded, moving up toward his head, smoothing the curly black hair away from his forehead. “Yeah, nine millimeter will do it. Jesus. He’s young.” She went back to his torso and slowly curled the shirt up his back to reveal the bullet hole just below his left shoulder blade, an inch from his spine. “I don’t see any stippling or tattooing, so this wasn’t a contact shot.”

“We think the person who shot him was standing on the porch,” Josie said. “At the top of the steps.”

Dr. Feist looked from the porch back to the body. “Then your shooter is either really lucky or a really good shot. I mean, this kid wouldn’t have even had time to cry out. Death was likely instantaneous.”

It was only a small relief to Josie that the boy hadn’t suffered. Dr. Feist was right—he was young—and Josie felt the weight of what his parents were about to endure. She didn’t need to be a mother to know that the loss of their son would shatter their lives completely. His life had ended, but their torture was only just beginning.

With a heavy sigh, Dr. Feist got to her feet, brushing off her knees. “All right. Get him in the ambulance and bring him over. I’ll get started right away. I’ll make sure he gets fingerprinted too.”

Mettner signaled to Hummel, who let a couple of EMS workers through the crime-scene tape with a gurney. Josie recognized one of them as Owen. He wasn’t much older than the dead boy, but Josie knew he had twins under the age of one, and he worked so much overtime that members of the Denton PD were likely to see him at every scene that required an ambulance. He waved at her and Noah as they laid out a body bag next to the boy and then turned him onto his back so that he was lying over the opening of the bag. Noah checked the front pockets of his jeans as Owen and his colleague tugged the flaps of the bag up over the body and sealed it.

“No wallet,” Noah groused as the EMTs lifted the bag onto the gurney and steered it toward their open ambulance with Dr. Feist in tow. “You think he was robbed?”

Josie stepped back toward the house. “No. I don’t know. We don’t even know if he was in the house, and if he was, who else was here. Assuming it wasn’t Gretchen.”

“An accomplice?”

Josie walked down the driveway, around the side of the house, and Noah followed. “I think we can safely say this wasn’t a robbery,” she said. “If there were two guys, then what happened? They came here—for what, we don’t know—then they turned on each other and the killer shot his accomplice in the back, took his wallet, and left him here with a mysterious old photo pinned to his collar? Again, without taking anything from the house? Without even disturbing the house?”

Noah said, “Maybe once he shot the kid, he got freaked out and took off. Besides that, we don’t actually know that nothing was taken from the house. We’re just assuming that since the place wasn’t trashed, and we found the cash and jewelry in her bedroom. There could have been something else here that was valuable to them that we don’t know about. We really need Gretchen to go through and tell us if everything is as it should be.”

Josie stopped in front of each window along the side of the house and studied it. None of them looked disturbed, but all of them appeared to have a homemade burglar deterrent on the outside sill. “Look,” she said as Noah stepped up behind her. The windowsills were about a foot above her. Nearly a head taller than her, Noah was almost eye-level with the sill. He reached up to touch the sill.

“Careful,” Josie said.

“Jesus,” Noah said as he extended an index finger to gently touch the sharp point of one of many small nails pointing up out of a strip of wood on the sill. “She’s made her own deterrents.” He tried to dislodge the strip of wood, but it wouldn’t budge. He stood on tiptoe and looked at either end of the strip. “Yep,” he said. “She nailed this onto the sill.”

“So if anyone ever tried to climb up and break in, they’d take a bunch of nails through their palms,” Josie said.

She walked briskly around the house with Noah in tow, noting that every one of the downstairs windows had the same trap. Back inside the house, she pushed the gauzy curtains of the living room windows aside and found wooden dowels jammed between the top of the window frame and the top of the movable window. You wouldn’t be able to open the window without removing them. Of course, nothing would stop someone from simply smashing the glass and climbing through. Perhaps Gretchen figured the noise of glass shattering would be enough to alert her to an intruder if she was home.

Beside her, Noah gave a low whistle. “Talk about paranoid.”

“Yeah,” Josie agreed. “Something’s not right here.”

“What do you mean?” Noah asked.

Before Josie could answer, they heard Mettner calling from outside. “Boss, we got something.”