Her Final Confession

Chapter Six

Josie and Noah followed Mettner beyond the crime-scene perimeter, out to the street and nearly a block down from Gretchen’s house, where a blue Ford Fusion was parked curbside. Mettner stood behind it, fingers flying over a tablet in his hands. “A couple of the neighbors told us they’ve never seen this car before. It’s been here since this morning. We ran the plates. It’s a rental,” he explained. “I already called Prime rental company, and they confirmed it was rented two days ago in Philadelphia.”

“Who rented it?” Noah asked.

Mettner frowned. “They want a warrant to give out that information. I already called Lamay. He’s writing one up.”

“There’s a Prime right outside of town,” Josie said. “We might have some luck if we pay them a visit. All we need is a name.”

“We’ll head over after this,” Noah said. Addressing Mettner, he said, “Did any of the neighbors see anything?”

“The lady across from Detective Palmer’s house thought she saw Gretchen walking up her driveway not that long ago, but she couldn’t say when.”

“Walking?” Josie said. “Did she see Gretchen’s vehicle?”

“She doesn’t remember. The officers canvassing pressed her, but she really couldn’t remember anything of use. She also said that Gretchen is in and out all day.”

Josie sighed. “So she could have seen Gretchen walking in her own driveway an hour ago or this morning.”

Mettner grimaced. “Pretty much, yeah. A couple of neighbors heard the shot, but most of the neighbors who were home were sitting down to dinner or watching the evening news. Plus, between the privacy fence on one side of the property and the bushes on the other…”

“No one can see anything,” Josie finished for him, frustration starting a small headache behind her eyes. “All right. I think we’re done here. You guys can finish processing the scene. Fraley and I will swing by the station to see what the MDT turned up, get that warrant, and see what Lamay found on the CCTV.”

As they drove through Denton to police headquarters—a large, three-story, gray stone building with ornate molding over its many double-casement arched windows and an old bell tower at one corner—the sun sank below the horizon, its last rays suffusing the horizon with a pink and yellow glow. Neither of them spoke. Noah studied the notes and sketches he had made at the crime scene. Josie ignored the insistent buzzing of her cell phone—her new family texting about the birthday dinner she was missing. It was her and Trinity’s birthday, and this would have been their first family birthday dinner together. Guilt pricked at her, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Gretchen needed her. Josie parked in the municipal lot, and they went in through the front lobby. The desk sergeant, Dan Lamay, gave them a nod and then waved them back to the CCTV room behind the lobby desk.

“Boss,” he said as Josie and Noah crowded into the tiny room behind him, “I found what you were looking for.”

“It’s Detect—” Josie began but stopped. As Lamay settled into a creaky desk chair in front of the large bank of screens streaming various areas of the building, Josie put a hand on his shoulder. “Dan,” she said, “just call me Josie, okay?”

He smiled and nodded at her. Lamay had been with the department nearly forty years. He had seen the coming and going of five chiefs of police—Josie included—and survived a huge scandal. He was now past retirement age, with a bum knee and an ever-increasing paunch. Josie had kept him on as a desk sergeant during her tenure as chief because his wife was recovering from cancer, and his daughter was in college. He had been fiercely loyal to her, helping her when she needed it most. Now she was worried that Chief Chitwood would let him go, but so far, he had stayed off Chitwood’s radar, performing his duties quietly and efficiently.

“What did you get from the MDT?” Josie asked.

Lamay pointed to a laptop open on one end of the table that showed a GPS map of south Denton. “We lost the signal here,” he said, pointing to a thick line that Josie knew represented a bridge that ran over the Susquehanna River.

“Lost the signal?” Josie asked.

“That’s impossible,” Noah said. “Did you send units out there?”

“Of course we did,” Lamay answered. “There’s nothing there.”

Which meant that someone had tampered with or destroyed the MDT in Gretchen’s Cruze. Either that, or someone had driven the car off the bridge into the river. “Was the guardrail still intact?” Josie asked.

Lamay stared at her a moment, chewing the inside of his mouth. “I assume so,” he said. “Patrol didn’t report anything out of the ordinary.”

“We’ll take a ride out there before we go to the rental car company. What’ve you got on CCTV?”

Lamay swiveled the chair to face the large computer screen directly in front of him, which showed the hallway on the first floor. Lamay had paused it. The timestamp in the upper right-hand corner read: 3:06 p.m. Standing outside the door to the kitchen was Gretchen, wearing the same uniform Josie wore but with an old, worn leather jacket over her shirt. Gretchen was never seen without it, but no one on the force dared pry into the story behind it. In one hand she held a mug of coffee.

Lamay pressed play. They watched as she walked slowly away from the kitchen, sipping her coffee and running her free hand through her short, spiked hair. Then she stopped and pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket. With a frown, she studied the screen. She seemed to hesitate before answering, her scowl deepening as she pressed the phone to her ear. There was no audio, so they couldn’t hear what Gretchen said, but it didn’t look good. The conversation lasted about three minutes. Then she hung up, put the phone back into her pocket, left her mug on top of the water cooler in the hallway, and walked out of the frame.

“Where did she go?” Josie asked.

Lamay swiveled in his chair to face another screen, where he pulled up footage of the lobby. “She walked right out the door,” he said, playing the footage. Sure enough, Gretchen entered the lobby from the first-floor hallway and strode out the front door without looking back.

“Was that a department phone or a personal cell phone?” Noah asked. “If it’s department-issued then we can find out who called her pretty quickly.”

Josie shook her head. “It’s her personal cell. I gave her the option of having a department-issued phone when she started, and she declined. Dan, when we’re done here, write up a warrant for her phone provider. We’ll see if we can triangulate her cell phone signal. Can we go back to the other footage?”

Dan turned his chair back to the first screen and queued the footage up again. Josie had him play it three times, but her attempts at reading Gretchen’s lips failed. “What is she saying?”

Noah leaned in and took the mouse, resetting the footage one more time. “Right there,” he said. “Before she hangs up she says, ‘I’ll be right there’.”

“Well that doesn’t do us any good,” Josie said. “We have no idea where she went. Can you figure out anything else she said?”

They watched it twice more, but none of them could make out any more of Gretchen’s words. “Where did she go? Did you guys get anything from the MDT?”

Lamay nodded. “MDT tracked her to one block over from her house. The vehicle was there for a half hour, then it traveled south, and the signal disappeared midway across the bridge.”

Lamay pulled the laptop toward him and clicked a few times, bringing up a different screen that showed a grid of streets, one of which was the 400 block of Campbell Street. Gretchen’s house was in the middle of the block. The icon representing Gretchen’s vehicle had stopped on Miller Street, the block behind Gretchen’s house. From Josie’s calculations, it didn’t appear as though she’d parked directly parallel to her own home, but she still could have snuck onto her own property from the back. But why would she? If she’d been headed to her own house, why hadn’t she parked in the driveway? If Gretchen had left the station after that phone call and gone directly to her own neighborhood—that meant she’d been at the crime scene. Didn’t it? If she had been there, where did she go afterward and why had she disabled her car’s MDT? Or had someone else disabled it? Had someone else shot the boy and taken Gretchen?

Noah said, “I’m going to get that BOLO issued.”

“Good idea,” Josie said, tearing her gaze from the laptop. She patted Lamay’s shoulder. “Thanks, Dan. How about that warrant for the rental car company?”