Page 25 of The Couple’s Secret (Detective Josie Quinn #23)

Twenty-One

The homes flashing past got further apart.

Streets narrowed and sidewalks were replaced with gravel.

They passed by a mile or two of woods on both sides.

Geerling Road. This was the area in which Tobias and Cora’s phones last pinged.

Josie searched for breaks in the trees where cars could pull over.

There didn’t appear to be any but then Fanning found one and drove into a dirt clearing large enough to accommodate at least two cars, maybe three.

Josie had no idea what it had looked like seven years ago but now, the foliage concealed most of it from passersby.

“This is what I figure,” Fanning said quietly.

His long fingers curled around the steering wheel as he stared straight ahead.

“They stopped here. Tobias’s house is about four miles away.

This is all overgrown now and with the drought, everything’s dried up but there used to be a creek straight ahead.

With the whole car missing, you gotta think waterways. ”

“If you’d assumed there was no foul play,” Gretchen said.

Cool air drifted through Fanning’s open window.

The remote area was preternaturally still, the only sounds coming from birds chirping overhead.

Josie felt like they were a million miles from civilization.

Through the windshield, she saw where new vegetation had sprouted and flourished between tall trees.

It spanned the width of a car. An old path to the now-barren creek.

“Yeah, but Tobias and Cora didn’t have any issues with anyone,” Fanning said.

“Hell, everyone loved Tobias like he was their own son or brother, and people knew Cora from the diner as a nice, hard-working woman who was always in a good mood, even when Dalton knocked her around. Of course we thought it was an accident. One of the first things we did was call the state police and ask for their marine unit. They searched the creek and every other pond, lake, and river in and around Brighton Springs. It was when nothing turned up that I started thinking it was something else.”

“I read through your file, Fanning.” Josie watched a cardinal flit from the branches of one tree to another. “There were no shell casings, no blood evidence or tire tracks that matched Tobias’s car here or anywhere nearby.”

“Now we know why,” he said. “But back then, we still had to search the waterways. I was grasping at straws. It really was like they up and vanished into thin air.” In the reflection of the rearview mirror, he rolled his lips together and then let out a “Poof!”

He’d had no reason to believe they’d ended up in Denton.

Gretchen’s stomach growled. “Keep talking. Why are we here?”

“Two scenarios.” He lifted his hand, curling his fingers into his palm and sticking his thumb out.

“One is that they were driving past and there was something happening here, something that made them stop but when they did, it became clear they were getting into the middle of some kind of crime. Whoever they stumbled on took them to Denton and killed them. It would have been dark so it’s possible Tobias slowed down when he saw headlights.

” His index finger popped up. “Second scenario is that they were ambushed. Someone waited for them along their route home. This would be the perfect spot. Put your car close to the road. Make it look like you broke down. Hood up, tire jack out, something that telegraphs that you need help.”

“Because Tobias was the kind of person who would stop to help someone,” Gretchen said.

“Yep. I have no way to prove it, but I’ve always believed that whatever happened—it started here, in this place. Their phones put them within half a mile of here. I’ve combed the area a thousand times. This place right here is the only one that makes sense.”

Regardless of where things had started, no physical evidence had been found in seven years, no witnesses had come forward to report that they’d seen the couple in this area.

“This kind of crime,” Josie said. “Killing two people in cold blood, disposing of their bodies along with their car, knowing to turn their phones off, transporting them to a place three hours away, doing it so efficiently that there’s not a single trace of them left…

it’s ruthless and meticulous. If we’re looking at your first scenario, where they happened onto a crime in progress, then we’re not talking about some low-level drug deals or anything like that. ”

“I know,” Fanning said. “No one has thought about this more than me. We’ve got some neighborhood gangs running drugs and illegal firearms. They get pretty violent, especially when it comes to protecting their territory.

They’ve been known to kill informants before or witnesses planning to testify against them. ”

“Did Tobias or Cora have any connections to them?” asked Josie.

“None that I could find. They never ran in the same circles.”

“What about the kids?” Gretchen said. “Zane? Jackson?”

“No association,” Fanning answered. “I even looked into Riley but nothing there either. Hollis and Dalton? Same thing. Anyway, about four years back, Brighton Springs put together a task force to deal with these little shits. The Feds were part of it and everything. Before I retired there was a big bust. About a dozen gang members were rounded up, charged with a whole bunch of nasty stuff. I got to talk to them, see if there’d ever been any chatter about Tobias and Cora.

None of them even knew what I was talking about.

They could have been lying, of course, but regardless, it was a dead end. ”

There was nothing but dead ends in this case.

The sound of a car passing by the clearing seemed far away even though it wasn’t.

A tingle worked its way up Josie’s spine to the nape of her neck.

Even in broad daylight, there was something creepy about this place, as though it held the residual energy from whatever had happened here.

The beginning of Tobias and Cora’s demise.

The beginning of their children’s nightmare.

“Scenario two, then,” she said. “The ambush. Tobias took a different way home than he did to the restaurant. How did the killers know he’d come this way?”

“No idea. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just took a chance that Tobias would take this road home, and it worked out.”

“Which would mean, in the second scenario, that whoever killed them was biding their time, waiting for an opportunity to do it.”

Gretchen’s head swiveled, taking in their surroundings for at least the fourth time since they’d parked. “Which brings us back to murder for hire.”

“I always figured that Hollis was behind it and that he’d somehow managed to get the car—with them in it—to one of the junkyards where they dump their stuff.

He’s got access to a couple of them. I checked them all, interviewed the staff, reviewed camera footage and all that but got nowhere.

Then again, I always figured that if Hollis paid some guys to do it—let’s say guys who worked at one of the junkyards—then I definitely wouldn’t find anything.

They would have made sure of that. Of course, now I know they were in the river in Denton. ”

“It’s always been Hollis then,” Josie said. “In your mind.”

Fanning turned the car around and pulled back onto the road. “He had the motivation, the means, and an alibi. I checked his financials. Everything was clean. I looked into his employees, old friends, even the woman he was seeing in Denton. None of them made any big purchases, even years later.”

“You think Hollis paid the killers cash,” Gretchen said.

“Hollis is a little rough around the edges, disorganized as hell, but he’s not stupid.

Not by a mile. He could have easily paid someone cash, and no one would be the wiser.

As co-owner of the company, he had access to plenty of it.

For all we know, he sold something valuable like that artifact Tobias found years ago and didn’t report it.

Who knows how much unreported cash he had laying around? ”

Josie saw his logic. She and Gretchen considered Hollis their main suspect, but she wondered if Fanning had overlooked something in his relentless pursuit of the man. His investigation had been thorough and dogged, but the absence of other suspects didn’t mean there weren’t any.

Moments later, they pulled up in front of the Lachlan home again. While Fanning turned the car around again, Josie said, “You searched the house.”

It was standard procedure. Police would have wanted to make sure that there hadn’t been any domestic issues or anything in the home that might help them locate the couple. Fanning hadn’t needed a warrant. According to the file, Jackson had given permission.

“Sure did,” Fanning confirmed.

“Do you recall if there was anything—some piece of furniture, a trunk or box of some kind—that required a skeleton key to open it?”

Fanning caught her gaze in the rearview again, one bushy brow arched high. “No, not that I recall, although I wasn’t really looking for that sort of thing. Why do you ask?”

Gretchen said, “Cora had a small skeleton key in her purse. It’s too corroded for us to figure out what it was from.”

“A skeleton key?”

“I’ll show you a photo when we stop,” Gretchen said.

“I know what that is,” Fanning said, sounding mystified. “But why would she be carrying one around with her?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” said Josie. “It could be nothing, but?—”

“It could be something,” Fanning finished for her.