Page 55 of The Couple’s Secret (Detective Josie Quinn #23)

Fifty-One

Jackson Wright’s reaction to seeing Bruce Olsen being led out of the other interview room in handcuffs was exactly what Josie had hoped for.

On the way up from the holding cells, hands cuffed in front of him, Jackson had been expressionless, his body loose with defeat.

Gone was his confident, purposeful swagger and in its place was the slow, sad walk of a man who now found life so pointless that every step hurt.

Josie could have worked with that but she had a feeling that the nervousness that swept over him after seeing Olsen was going to be even more to her advantage.

Inside the small interview room, he hesitated, looking around as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.

The walls were cinderblock, painted in a depressing periwinkle blue.

A scarred metal table sat along one of them with three vinyl chairs pushed under it.

“Take any seat,” Josie instructed him. “Officer Conlen will take off your cuffs.”

Jackson folded his large frame into the chair furthest from the door. Once Conlen removed the cuffs and left the room, Josie took the seat closest to Jackson. She placed the folder of documents she’d amassed for this interview in the center of the table.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “Water? Food? A coffee or soda?”

He shook his head. Since Denton transferred people to the Alcott County jail for booking and processing, Jackson was still dressed in the T-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing when he crushed his brother with a soda machine.

They were stiff and wrinkled and streaked with dirt.

He’d lost his hat and his dark locks were wild and unkempt.

Ignoring her offer, he said, “How’s Zane?”

Josie took it as a good sign that his first concern was his brother, even if he’d been the one to harm him.

“Jackson, I’m going to read you your rights before we discuss your brother and the other things we need to talk about.”

“Then you’ll tell me how he is?”

“Yes.”

She recited his Miranda rights. He confirmed that he understood them. When a couple of minutes passed and he didn’t request an attorney, Josie forged ahead.

“Zane is in bad shape. He underwent several hours of surgery today and he’ll probably need more. It will be a very long recovery.”

Jackson visibly flinched. Lowering his head in shame, he said, “Did he have internal injuries?”

“No. He was very lucky. Just a lot of broken bones. Comminuted fractures. Crush injuries.”

“Fuck.” Jackson put his head in his hands. “Is Hollis with him?”

“Yeah,” Josie said, softening her tone. “Hollis isn’t leaving his side.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt him, I just…I don’t know what happened. I…” His words were muffled by his hands.

Josie turned her chair and scooted it forward so that their knees were almost touching. “We talked about a lot of disturbing things today. Painful things. You were dealing with a lot already—burying your dad and Cora. Riley’s death.”

She was deliberate with her wording and careful to keep any hint of accusation from her voice.

“Then Detective Palmer and I showed up and asked you to relive your mother’s death and Gabrielle’s death. You were talking with us about those very traumatic memories and then Zane showed up and, being your little brother, he got upset. He had a lot of questions, didn’t he?”

Jackson nodded into his hands.

“He was upset with you.”

Finally, he lifted his head, grimacing. “He’s always upset with me.”

“Not like today. We need to talk about some of the things he said.” She left out “the things that made you drop a soda machine on him.”

“What the hell else is there to talk about? I figured out my dad was a lying murderer. I couldn’t prove it. Then he vanished.”

Josie pulled the file folder toward her, leaving her palm on top of it. “That was a tidy solution to your problem, wasn’t it?”

He snuck a glance at the folder. “My problem?”

“The problem of proving that he was a killer.”

“I mean, yeah, I guess. It didn’t matter once he was gone.”

Josie sighed and flipped the file open. “Jackson, we can dance around this all night. I have nowhere to be but there’s no point. You and I both know that. So let’s get down to it. Tell me about the night you killed Tobias and Cora.”

An incredulous laugh bubbled up from his chest, dying when he met her unwavering gaze.

“I didn’t kill them, and I didn’t kill Riley. I know my brother was saying some outlandish shit earlier, but I didn’t do it.”

“Interesting you should say that.” Josie thumbed through the documents in the file until she found the statement that Bruce Olsen had given to Fanning shortly after Tobias and Cora disappeared. “Why would Mr. Olsen need to give you an alibi for something you didn’t do?”

“He didn’t—that’s not what happened. I?—”

Josie slid the statement over to him. “This is filled with lies. We just took another statement from Mr. Olsen where he admitted to lying in this one. Pretty much the only thing he told the truth about was that you were a guest at Karl Staab’s retirement party.

But you didn’t get drunk. You weren’t there all night. ”

“That party started at six,” Jackson said, pushing the statement back to her. “Everyone there was drunk as hell, including Olsen. How could they possibly remember anything? I was there all night.”

“You make a fair point,” Josie said. “And if it was just Olsen who said you left after ninep.m., I would be inclined to believe you, but we found two other men who were at the party who admitted that they saw you leave just after nine and not return.”

His face paled. “Wh-what?”

“Remember what I said earlier? Olsen was a highly respected member of the law enforcement community. When he was with Brighton Springs PD he received a commendation of valor. His credibility was unimpeachable.” Josie snagged another statement from the file, this time waving it in his face rather than giving it to him.

It was Olsen’s recent statement, but it didn’t contain the things she was about to tell Jackson.

“Olsen knew that you’d been seen leaving the party early by at least two of his former colleagues so as soon as Fanning started checking alibis, he took those guys aside and told them that if they were asked, you were at the party all night.

They went along with it because they figured Olsen had his reasons.

After a year or so went by with no sign of Tobias and Cora, they both wanted to come clean but realized that doing so would put them at risk of prosecution. Perjury. Obstructing justice.”

Jackson splayed one hand over his stomach but said nothing.

“We offered not to bring charges against them if they gave us Olsen,” she continued. “And Olsen, well, he’s getting a reduced sentence for telling us all about you.”

“So I left the party around nine or whatever,” Jackson said. “That doesn’t prove anything. Olsen is lying. He doesn’t know anything.”

That wasn’t too far from the truth, but Josie wasn’t going to let him know that. Instead, she pulled a pile of photos from the file and placed it in front of him. “Recognize this car?”

He stared at the top photo. “I don’t…no. It’s just a car.”

“That is a 2017 Chevrolet Equinox that was registered to Mr. Olsen at the time that Tobias and Cora were killed. One of three vehicles registered to his household.”

She spread out the other photos which she’d borrowed from a different file. They were taken while Hummel was processing the interior of a car that had almost identical upholstery for latent bloodstains.

“Mr. Olsen sold this vehicle in 2019 to a retiree in Harrisburg,” Josie continued. “But she was happy to give us permission to process it for latent bloodstains and DNA.”

Jackson’s fingers trembled as he touched a photo of the steering wheel with three faded fingerprints on the top of it, glowing red.

“We used a selective turn-on NIR fluorescence dye. NIR is near infra-red radiation. Basically, when you’ve got a latent bloodstain—not visible to the naked eye—you can use this dye on it.

The dye itself isn’t very fluorescent but when it binds with a particular protein found in human blood, it lights right up.

The great thing about this dye is that even if latent bloodstains have been cleaned up or diluted a thousand times, they can still be detected. ”

Jackson’s fingers shook so badly that he clapped them between his knees.

“The thing is,” Josie went on, “Mr. Olsen told us that the night of Karl Staab’s retirement party, you asked to borrow his Equinox even though your own car was already there.

That was something else he never told anyone.

Until now. He said you left in it just after nine and returned it around six the next morning. ”

That part was true. Olsen had admitted that to Josie in his interview.

He’d also given them the name and address of the woman he’d sold his Equinox to but Josie hadn’t had time to contact her, much less get her car impounded and processed for blood and DNA.

Those types of things required warrants and lots of time for test results to come back.

Jackson had picked up a lot from Tobias’s law enforcement friends over the years, but evidently he hadn’t learned that processing and analyzing most evidence could take weeks or months.

She tapped a finger against the photo of the prints and then against a photo of the driver’s seat where the dye had lit up red in uneven streaks.

“Guess whose prints those are? Guess whose blood that is right there? Whose DNA? All of it in Mr. Olsen’s old car just waiting for the police to come along with their fancy dye? ”

This was her biggest bluff. Neither she nor Bruce Olsen had any idea what had actually happened after Jackson left in the Equinox. It had been returned in mint condition with a faint bleach smell on the inside.

Everything else was supposition on Josie’s part. There was no actual blood. There were no actual fingerprints. No physical proof. She just needed Jackson to believe that there was.

“Jackson?”

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the pictures. The trembling in his fingers spread to his forearms.

“I understand why you did it,” Josie said in her most sympathetic voice.

“You were angry with your dad before Cora came along. Realizing what he’d done and knowing there was nothing you could do about it.

Believe me, I get how frustrating it is to know in your bones that someone did something criminal and realize that they’ll never pay for it because there is simply no proof. Nothing definitive, anyway.”

“I didn’t—it wasn’t about revenge,” he said, so quietly that Josie had to lean in to catch the words.

Inside her, a dam broke. Relief poured through her body like the sweetest drug. There it was—the first crack. She just hoped the camera had captured his words.

“Oh, I know,” she said.

His blue eyes searched hers. “You do?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“If it was simply about revenge, you would have done it a lot sooner,” Josie said.

“Probably a lot more impulsively, too. I have to hand it to you, Jackson. The meticulous planning that went into this is impressive. You had everyone stumped for seven years. If it wasn’t for the drought, your streak might have lasted decades.

You committed a flawless crime. I took in the scope of what you did, and I knew that there was only one reason you could have done it. ”

He watched her with a sort of hopefulness in his eyes. The desire to be seen and understood fully was powerful. Josie had leveraged it in many of these types of interrogations.

She dropped the word like a bomb. “Love.”

Time stopped. She could feel it. Jackson’s body was as still as the dead. She wasn’t sure if he was even breathing. Then, the first tear broke free, rolling down his cheek, fat and heavy.

“I didn’t think anyone would understand,” he croaked. “It wasn’t evil. It wasn’t cold or callous. It came from the best possible place. It had to be done. He never would have stopped and he would have kept getting away with it.”

“I know,” Josie said. “And Jackson, I know everything that happened that night. What I don’t know is whose idea it was to kill Tobias—yours or Cora’s?”