Her Final Confession

Chapter Eight

The Prime Car Rental agency was located on a wooded two-lane road at the edge of town, just a quarter mile from the interstate. A large parking lot surrounded the squat, one-story building. Shiny sedans and small SUVs of every color filled the spots. Fluorescent lights glowed through the glass walls at the front of the building, illuminating a small, tiled lobby area with a smattering of vinyl chairs and a table packed with various brochures. Across from the lobby was a high countertop. As Josie and Noah entered, a long, high-pitched ding dong sounded somewhere in the back of the building, and a young woman with black hair piled high on her head in a messy bun emerged from a door behind the front counter. She wore a simple black dress with a gray sweater over top of it. She pulled the lapels close together as she shot them a perfunctory smile. “What can I do for you?”

Josie slid the warrant across the counter to her and flashed her credentials. “I’m Detective Quinn; this is Lieutenant Fraley with the Denton Police.”

The girl’s eyes widened as she took in Josie’s department ID. “Oh my God, I know you!” she exclaimed. “You used to be the chief of police. Your sister is that reporter—”

“Yes,” Josie cut in. “That’s me. But I’m not here—”

“Oh my God,” the girl went on. “I watched the Dateline about you. I mean the third one. You solved that case where—”

“I’m sorry, Miss…” Noah interrupted with a megawatt smile, edging in front of Josie. “I know that Detective Quinn is a bit of a local celebrity, but we’re actually here about a case. It’s really important. We were hoping you could help us out.”

She pressed a hand against her chest, and Josie noticed her fingernails were bitten to the quick, and the red polish had faded to jagged streaks. “Me?” she said. “I would love to help.”

“Yes,” Noah said, tapping a finger against the warrant. “We have a case involving one of your rental cars. This warrant allows you to release the name of the person who rented it.”

She picked up the warrant and looked it over, her brow furrowing. Her eyes kept darting behind Noah to Josie. “Is this, like, a big case?” she asked in a hushed tone.

Josie said, “We treat all of our cases with equal care.”

“Of course,” said the girl. Carefully, she placed the warrant beside her keyboard and began typing. “James Omar,” she said. She turned the screen so they could see a copy of his driver’s license. “From Boise, Idaho.”

Josie would need to compare the license to the body, but she was quite certain that James Omar was the man who had been shot in Gretchen’s driveway. His license showed a young, olive-skinned man with curly black hair and hazel eyes. He was unsmiling in the photo, but Josie could see he was attractive. As if reading her mind, the girl said, “He’s cute. And only twenty-three.”

Josie suppressed her grimace. She couldn’t help but think of all the people James Omar would never get to date. What had he been doing there?

“I thought you couldn’t rent a car if you were under the age of twenty-six,” Josie said.

The girl waved a hand in the air. “Oh, that’s an old rule. Not all rental agencies abide by that. Newer companies, like us, lowered the rental age to twenty-one. It brings in a lot more business.”

Noah was busy taking down information in his notebook. To the girl, Josie said, “Any chance you could print that out for us?”

She smiled. “Of course!”

A moment later came the sound of a printer whirring from behind the desk. The girl bent beneath the counter and came back up with a sheaf of pages, which she handed to Josie. “His rental agreement is there as well.”

“We understand he rented the car in Philadelphia two days ago,” Noah said.

The girl turned her screen back and clicked the mouse a few times. “Yep, that’s right. At our 3300 Chestnut Street location. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Josie took a pen from the countertop and marked the address on the top of the sheaf of papers the girl had handed them. “No, but thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

In the car, Noah studied the printout of James Omar’s driver’s license. “What is a kid from Idaho doing in Philadelphia?”

“Work? School?” Josie suggested as she fired up the Escape and pulled out of the parking lot, headed toward the morgue.

“He’s twenty-three—he was twenty-three. Too old to be a student.”

“Not if he was a grad student,” Josie pointed out. “Or maybe he took a job with a company in Philadelphia.”

“Then what was he doing here?”

“We’ll find out,” Josie assured him. “Is there a cell phone number on there for him?”

Noah shuffled through some pages. “Yep,” he said, pulling out his phone and dialing. He put it on speaker so they were both able to hear it ring once and go directly to voicemail. A young man’s voice said, “You’ve reached James. Leave a message.”

Noah pressed the End Call icon with a sigh. “We’ll have to get a warrant for his cell phone provider too. We’ll get records for the last week or two and then see if we can triangulate his phone as well as Gretchen’s. There was no phone on the body or in the rental car.”

Josie nodded. “We’ll do that. Let’s get a positive ID first.”

Denton’s city morgue consisted of a large windowless exam room and one small office presided over by Dr. Feist. It was housed in the basement of Denton Memorial Hospital, an ancient brick building on top of a hill that overlooked most of the city. The smell hit them before they even entered the exam room—a strange mixture of stringent chemicals and decay that Josie never quite got used to. With a pang, she remembered standing in the exam room beside Gretchen, who had been completely unaffected by the odors of the morgue—or its sad and often gruesome contents.

The boy lay naked on the examination table, a large circular lamp blazing down into his face. Josie could see that he was lean and muscular, with a runner’s physique. His chest and legs were thick with dark, wiry hair. A tattoo of a wolf’s head sprawled across his left upper arm, its gray eyes penetrating. Dr. Feist’s back was to them as she organized her instruments on the counter. She had on navy blue scrubs, and her silver-blond hair was tucked up beneath a matching cloth skull cap. She turned when they entered, offering a grim smile. “I hope you’ve got something for me.”

Josie handed her the copy of James Omar’s license. Dr. Feist studied it, her smile fading. “This looks like a match if I ever saw one. Of course, when we get in touch with the family, verification of the tattoo will seal the deal.”

She walked over to the exam table and held the license photo up next to the boy’s head. Josie and Noah crowded around and stared. For Josie, death always seemed to steal something essential from a person’s physical appearance so that they no longer resembled the person they’d been in life. It was the same for Omar. The thing that made him James Omar was gone, leaving only a lifeless shell behind. Still, the bone structure, hair, eye and skin color were all identical.

Noah let out a heavy sigh. “That’s him.”

Dr. Feist held up the copy of his driver’s license. “Can I keep this?”

“Of course,” Josie said. She took out her phone and snapped a picture of it.

Standard protocol when an out-of-state murder victim was found in their jurisdiction was for the medical examiner’s office in Denton to contact the medical examiner in the county and state where the victim resided, and then that office would make the death notification and put the family in touch with Denton’s police department.

Dr. Feist said, “I’ll ask the Boise medical examiner’s office to contact you once they make the notification. I expect you’ll want to talk to his family.”

“Yes,” Josie said. “We’ve got a lot of questions for them.”