Her Final Confession

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“Quinn!” Chitwood shouted as soon as Josie entered the bullpen. He stood at his office door, white hairs floating over his head. He looked behind her. “Where’s the other one?”

Josie riffled through the piles of paperwork on her desk. “Fraley? He caught a case on the way here. He has to go to the hospital to get a statement from the victim.”

“So the vic is still alive?”

The phone records weren’t on her desk. She moved around and started going through the reports on Noah’s desk. “It was a domestic,” Josie told him.

“We need to talk about this Strangler situation,” Chitwood said. “I want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

“So do I,” Josie said. Finally, her fingers closed on the report of records from Omar’s phone. “Give us a couple of hours.”

Josie waited for him to protest—he didn’t like giving them additional time for anything—but he merely stared at her a moment longer. Then he clapped a hand against the doorframe and said, “You and Fraley in my office in two hours. Have your shit together, you got it?”

Josie nodded and mumbled, “Got it,” but her hands were already frantically flipping pages, searching for the call she’d seen on Omar’s phone records the day they’d received them. The one she had dismissed as a wrong number because it was a one-off. The call to the Norristown volunteer ambulance company two weeks before his murder. Snatching up the pages, she moved back to her own desk and booted up her computer. She did a Google search for the name of the company, and when she was satisfied she knew who to ask for, she dialed the number.