Page 39 of The Couple’s Secret (Detective Josie Quinn #23)

Thirty-Five

Chief Bob Chitwood’s voice boomed, echoing through the stairwell.

Josie, Noah, Gretchen, and Turner were all at their desks when they heard him from the second-floor great room.

If he was hollering before he even walked through the door, it wasn’t good.

Seconds later, he appeared, his acne-pitted face flushed, and his eyebrows drawn down in a dark scowl.

Wisps of his thinning white hair floated over his balding pate.

“What in the hell is going on?” he said.

“The couple from Brighton Springs. Now one of their kids? Is this for real? Quinn, Palmer. Tell me you’ve got something.

The press are outside multiplying like maggots on a damn corpse.

Pretty soon I’m gonna have the Mayor breathing down my neck, and I can’t stand that woman. ”

“Pretty sure no one likes her, Chief,” Gretchen muttered.

He folded his arms and looked down his nose at the four of them. “Well? What do you have?”

“On Riley Stevens?” Gretchen said. “Waiting on the autopsy, but it looks like she had a heart attack or went into cardiac arrest.”

The Chief frowned. “Natural causes?”

“Possibly. Probably.”

“What about the couple? What do you have on that case?”

“A big fat nothing,” Josie answered honestly.

Turner gave a low whistle. “Damn, Quinn. You’re not even trying to save your own ass here.”

“Shut up, douch— Turner,” she said without looking at him.

“Palmer?” the Chief said.

“We’re still working on some leads.”

All none of them. Josie kept the thought to herself.

“So nothing, then,” the Chief said.

Gretchen didn’t answer.

With a disgusted shake of his head, he turned his back on them, stomping toward his office. “Get something!” he shouted. “Fast!”

Once his door slammed, Noah spun in his chair to face Josie. “Let’s go over it then, while we’re all here.”

Their collective shifts would only overlap for another half hour.

Turner threw his foam basketball at its net and missed, as usual. “You know what’s missing from this investigation?”

“Leads,” Gretchen said flatly.

“My exceptional detective skills,” he said arrogantly.

At this point, Josie would take anything they could get, even if it came from Turner. Still, she couldn’t let his remark slide. “If they’re on par with your report-writing skills, then we’re well and truly screwed.”

Gretchen snickered.

Noah tapped a hand against his desk. “Come on. What’ve you got?”

Josie leaned back in her chair, rubbing her temples with her fingers. A headache was brewing. Had been since she left the boat ramp.

She and Gretchen walked them through the case, from all of Detective John Fanning’s findings to what little new information they’d uncovered: both Tobias and Cora had been shot in the head; Cora had had a mysterious skeleton key in her purse; Cora’s abusive ex, Dalton Stevens, now claimed Cora had been having an affair at the time the couple were killed; and Hollis had revealed that Cora had intended to leave Tobias.

Then they went over the uselessness of the new information.

According to everyone closest to the couple, Cora hadn’t owned anything that required a skeleton key to open it.

In fact, the key might not mean anything at all.

Dalton Stevens was unreliable, which meant that the assertions that Cora was having an affair and that he’d seen her in the parking lot of the Majesty Motel were questionable.

Hollis denied having an affair with Cora, claiming that any conversations they had before the murders were about her intention to break up with Tobias.

Whether Cora truly intended to leave him was immaterial. He had been murdered, too.

“We’ve still got to talk to the private investigator that Riley hired,” Josie concluded. “He’s agreed to meet with us tomorrow. But I’m expecting more of the same.”

“Every person in their lives had an alibi,” Noah said.

“Correct.” Gretchen caught Turner’s foam basketball as it ricocheted off the tiny net in her direction. “Also, keep in mind that to have pulled off the murders and the disposal of the bodies inside the car, there had to be more than one person.”

Noah folded his hands over his stomach. “Which means you’re back to murder for hire.”

At this point, Josie was getting sick of hearing the words.

“We’ll start looking for anyone arrested for, charged with, or convicted of murder-for-hire plots in or around that area in the past ten years,” Noah suggested. “Murder for hire isn’t usually a one-off and like you said, this crime doesn’t seem like the work of amateurs.”

Turner waved at Gretchen, trying to get her attention and holding his palm up for her to throw back his ball. She ignored him, squeezing it in her hand like a stress toy.

“We can also start rechecking everyone’s alibis.” Josie yanked open the center drawer of her desk and fished around for ibuprofen. “Maybe we need to bring in associates of Dalton and Hollis, even if Fanning already interviewed them. Question witnesses again.”

They’d be retracing Fanning’s steps, but all they needed was one person to crack and tell them something that they hadn’t revealed before. Or one person remembering a detail they hadn’t when they were first interviewed. Or someone revealing something that hadn’t seemed important until now.

Someone always knew something.

“The diner might be a good place to start in terms of witnesses.” Without warning, Gretchen launched the basketball toward Turner, smiling smugly as it went over his head and he had to dive for it.

“Cora worked there for years. Her boss organized the GoFundMe for Riley. Coworkers and patrons might have something to say that they didn’t tell Fanning. ”

Josie kept pawing through her desk drawer for her elusive supply of painkillers.

“With respect to the skeleton key, Hollis’s sister sent over the company records Hollis promised.

A list of antiques and collectibles At Your Disposal sold on behalf of clients in the year before Cora and Tobias were killed. Nothing there.”

The sound of a can snapping open drew their attention to Turner. He guzzled some of the disgusting energy drink he loved so much. After letting out a loud belch, he said, “The skeleton key belonged to someone else.”

“No shit,” Gretchen said. “None of the kids or Hollis admitted to having any items that need skeleton keys.”

Turner shrugged. “Then she got it from someone else. Her lover.”

“We have no proof she had a lover. None.” Josie said as her hand closed over the bottle of ibuprofen. Twisting it open, she was relieved to find two tablets left. She palmed them and tossed them into her mouth, swallowing them dry.

“They could have been making arrangements at the diner,” Turner said. “That way there was no evidence on her phone. You said Hollis was there all the time. If he wasn’t messing around with her, maybe some other guy was.”

It was the same thought Josie had had but now she was struggling with whether the damn key meant anything at all.

It wasn’t like Cora had been carrying around the key to a locker or a safe deposit box.

Anything that needed to be opened with a skeleton key would be easy to break into.

In that sense, it was more symbolic than anything else.

This wasn’t like a movie where they discovered what the key opened, located it, and found loads of cash and a flash drive with deep, dark secrets on it.

“We’re getting nowhere with the key,” Noah said. “Let’s shelve that for a minute and talk about organized crime.”

Gretchen shook her head. “Fanning looked into that. Neighborhood gangs. Didn’t find anything. I don’t think they were killed by members of some criminal organization.”

Turner slugged down the rest of his drink and crumpled the can in his hand. “You’re not being liberal enough in your definition of a criminal organization,” he informed her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The Brighton Springs Police Department counts as an organization. It has a history of corruption, right? Whether it’s documented or not, it’s an open secret.”

Gretchen swiveled in her chair to stare at him. “You think someone on the Brighton Springs PD had something to do with this?”

“I’m just saying it’s possible.”

“Meredith said Fanning is clean,” Josie said. “I trust her.”

“I’m sure he is,” Turner said. “Clearly, he kicked over every rock. But it didn’t occur to him to look at his own people.

Maybe Tobias and what’s her name? Cora? Maybe they were on their way home, stumbled onto the officers of Brighton Springs doing some dirty deeds and got killed for it.

Or maybe it’s as innocent as them covering up some things. ”

Josie couldn’t help but think about the sorts of things that the Chief’s father, Harlan Chitwood, had done during his tenure with the Brighton Springs PD.

His superiors had overlooked his crimes for decades.

He’d long been retired but corruption was a deep rot that wasn’t easily excised from any department.

Josie and Noah knew that firsthand. How many others were there like Harlan in the ranks?

Meredith had said things were turning around but that didn’t guarantee that the Lachlan/Stevens case hadn’t been tainted.

She made a mental note to call Meredith about the matter, since it was delicate.

Turner shot a grin in Gretchen’s direction. “You can say it, Palmer. I’m brilliant.”

“I’m not complimenting you for having basic critical thinking skills that are required for your job.”

“Awww, come on,” he goaded. “Quinn, you know I’m right.”

“About being brilliant?” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”