Page 42 of The Couple’s Secret (Detective Josie Quinn #23)

Thirty-Eight

The air in the office suddenly felt cold.

Josie could tell that even uttering the words pained Bruce Olsen.

Regardless of the fact that the two men had drifted apart, he truly had held Tobias Lachlan in high regard.

Josie thought back to all the photos she’d seen of the man.

Round from middle age, thinning hair, always smiling.

In most photos, especially with Cora, his happy eyes held a note of disbelief.

A silent question: how did I get this lucky?

He didn’t have the dark, intimidating look of a killer, though in Josie’s experience, that meant nothing.

Then there was his reputation. Unimpeachable.

Was it so overwhelmingly positive as to reek of fakeness?

No, she decided. The people closest to him hadn’t painted him in a perfect light.

All of them had admitted to his moodiness, to anger at times—not an unreasonable amount—and to him not being faultless.

He’d argued with Hollis plenty over the expansion and his partner’s meddling in his personal life.

He’d argued with Cora over issues within their blended family.

Namely, handling Riley and Zane, who’d indulged in underage drinking.

None of that guaranteed that he wasn’t a killer, but Josie could certainly understand Bruce Olsen’s dismay at the very idea.

Which begged the question, why had Cora come to him ?

He’d been a lifelong friend to Tobias. Or was that the very reason she’d approached him?

Because he’d known Rachel, had been the police officer to respond to the 911 call the day she left?

If she was after information about Rachel Wright and her fate, Olsen was probably the best and most reliable source.

She could have gone to Hollis but did she trust him not to rat her out to Tobias? Why would she trust Olsen?

There was only one explanation. “Cora hired you so that you couldn’t tell Tobias anything the two of you discussed.”

She hadn’t been saving up for a security deposit on an apartment.

Or she hadn’t only been saving up for that.

Josie was certain that Olsen’s retainer, even back then, wasn’t cheap.

The only thing that ensured that Tobias would never find out that Cora was poking around in his past were the strict confidentiality laws between private investigators and their clients.

Olsen nodded. “I think that’s why she hired me, yeah.

One of the reasons, anyway. She kept asking for reassurance that I wouldn’t—and couldn’t—talk to Tobias behind her back.

She paid in cash so there would be no record.

The other reason she hired me was that I knew Rachel and I was there the day she left—or as Cora believed, the day she was killed. ”

“Why did Cora think Tobias killed Rachel?” Gretchen asked.

Olsen gazed at the photo in front of him for a long moment. Then he turned it on its face and stood up, fidgeting with the lapels of his jacket. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Not after all this time. Come with me.”

They rode the elevator in silence down to the basement of the building.

Olsen led them through a maze of brightly lit concrete halls to a door marked Storage 5.

From his pocket, he produced a set of keys, fitting one into the lock.

The door swung open. Olsen flipped a light switch on the wall, revealing a windowless room with shelves and filing cabinets lined up in orderly rows.

Josie and Gretchen followed him as he searched the shelving units until he found an unmarked cardboard box.

It was the only unmarked box in the place as far as Josie could tell and it was buried behind two other boxes, deep in the recesses of the room.

Dust motes swirled in the air as he swept a hand over its lid.

“There’s a table in here somewhere,” he muttered.

Moments later, he located it, against a wall, tucked between two tall filing cabinets. From the box, he took an old purse. It was medium-sized and navy blue with a gold zipper and a shoulder-length strap.

“Cora found this.” He opened it and began pulling items from inside. “At their house. It was hidden under a floorboard in their bedroom, near Tobias’s side of the bed.”

Olsen lined up the contents in neat rows.

A small pack of tissues, a compact, a tube of mascara, a lipstick, a travel-sized bottle of Tylenol, a hairbrush, a set of keys, a pen, and a maxi pad.

The last thing was a woman’s wallet, easily the size of his hand.

He flipped it open, revealing cash, rows of credit cards tucked inside and an ID window that contained the driver’s license of Rachel Wright.

Josie leaned in, studying her picture, recognizing her dark hair, so similar to Jackson’s, and her heart-shaped face from the photos Jackson and Riley had on display in their home.

Like most people in their driver’s license photos, Rachel was unsmiling but striking.

The expiration date was March 25, 1999. Josie did the math, based on Jackson’s age. She had left him behind in 1998.

Gretchen said, “If she ran off with some guy, why did she leave this behind?”

“Exactly,” Olsen said. “After Cora brought this to me, I started looking for Rachel. I called in some favors. Rachel never renewed her license. Never opened another credit card account. Never filed another tax return. There were no addresses listed for her after she ran off. Basically, she ceased to exist the day she left Tobias and Jackson.”

“She didn’t leave,” Gretchen muttered.

“How many times did you meet with Cora?” asked Josie.

“Twice. The first time she gave this to me.”

“The second time you gave her the news,” Josie said. “That Rachel had vanished without a trace all those years ago.”

He nodded.

An image of Cora Stevens behind the wheel of her parked car in the Majesty Motel assaulted Josie.

Crying. Unhinged. That’s how Dalton had described her laughter.

He’d threatened to tell Tobias she was having an affair, and her response had been manic laughter directed at the man who’d left over fifteen fractures on her body.

Gretchen motioned toward the purse and its contents. “She left this with you?”

“Yes. I asked her if she was worried about Tobias realizing it was no longer there. She said it didn’t look as though he’d checked it since the day he put it into the floor.

The second time she came to me, she was so upset, I’m not sure she meant to leave it.

She wanted me to go to the police, but I told her I couldn’t.

The purse didn’t prove anything. Certainly not murder. ”

“It strongly suggests foul play though,” Josie said.

Olsen sighed. “Yeah. There was no convincing Cora that it was anything but murder. I was going to ask her to let me keep looking into the matter, but she took off, crying. I figured I’d let her cool down.

She wouldn’t give me her number anyway. Said she didn’t want Tobias seeing my name come up on her phone.

I thought she’d be back but then, a few months later, they were both gone. ”

“And you were left with this purse,” Josie said.

“Like I said, it doesn’t prove that Tobias murdered Rachel.”

It was damning though, that was for sure.

While it was possible that Rachel Wright could have left her life behind without taking her identification and credit cards, the fact that she never renewed her license or did anything that left evidence of her continuing existence again was a massive red flag.

“What about the guy she supposedly ran off with?” asked Gretchen. “Victor? The note she left behind for Tobias telling him that he could raise Jackson?”

Olsen shrugged. “All I had was a first name which I got from a very distraught child. There wasn’t much I could do with that.

Jackson didn’t make for a reliable witness.

As far as the note? Tobias showed it to us that day.

We had no reason to question it. No reason to look for someone who had voluntarily run off. ”

“The last time you saw Cora,” said Gretchen, “what else did you talk about?”

Slowly, Olsen began putting Rachel Wright’s personal items back into the purse.

“I told her I’d known Tobias for years and he wouldn’t do something like that.

There had to be some other explanation for what happened to Rachel.

She wouldn’t listen. Like I said, she didn’t even give me a chance to ask her to extend our contract so I could take a deeper look. ”

“She probably couldn’t afford it,” Josie pointed out.

“True,” Olsen admitted. “Instead, she asked me about Gabrielle, Zane’s mom.

If I thought Tobias could have killed her, too, but the autopsy findings were pretty clear on that.

Anyway, I suggested that Cora talk everything over with Tobias instead of jumping to conclusions and sneaking behind his back so she could hire me to investigate him for murder. ”

Gretchen huffed a laugh. “You suggested that this woman ‘talk’ with her husband about whether or not he killed one or more of his previous partners?”

“That’s a pretty fast way to end a relationship,” Josie mused.

Maybe even get yourself killed.

Olsen’s face flushed slightly. “It sounds insensitive when you say it like that but I’m telling you, I knew Tobias. He wouldn’t kill anyone, especially not a woman he loved.”

“You never mentioned any of this to Detective Fanning,” said Josie. “Why?”

“It wasn’t relevant. Still isn’t. First of all, Tobias wasn’t a killer and if this got out—that his fiancée was having him investigated for murder only days before they disappeared—all it would do is ruin his reputation.

Needlessly. If they were found alive and there was some logical explanation as to what happened to them, then Tobias would know that I betrayed him and that Cora did, too.

I didn’t want that. If they weren’t found alive, I didn’t want to ruin his kids’ memory of him.

It was the last thing they needed. They were already a mess.

Second of all, Cora and Tobias vanished together.

If it had just been her and he was swanning around playing the bereaved fiancé, then I might have approached Fanning, but they were both gone and they stayed gone.

Whatever happened to them wasn’t Tobias’s doing or else he’d still be here. ”

Josie couldn’t appreciate his logic, especially when it was steeped in his obvious and long-standing—possibly blinding—loyalty to Tobias, but they needed to move things forward.

“The first time Cora came to you, she said she’d found this in a hidden spot,” she said. “Did she say if she found anything else?”

“No. She never said.”