Page 57 of The Couple’s Secret (Detective Josie Quinn #23)

Fifty-Three

Jackson lifted his chin, his watery blue eyes awash with grief and pain.

His shoulders curled in. Everything about his slumped posture radiated defeat.

In this moment, he looked not just harmless but pathetic.

Pitiful. Yet, he’d had the size and strength to push a soda machine onto his brother.

He’d loaded two bodies into a sedan and pushed that sedan into the river by himself.

Jackson Wright was a contradiction in many ways, but one thing was crystal clear: he was deeply, irrevocably sick.

Using the tissues to blot his wet cheeks, he whispered, “About seven months. We didn’t mean for it to happen.”

Josie could practically hear Gretchen’s sarcastic remark from the video room. The slogan of adulterers everywhere.

“There was no digital footprint,” she said. “No texts or social media messages.”

Jackson sniffed. “Cora was really strict about that. Everything had to be in person so Dad wouldn’t find out or even suspect.

I’d stop at the house to see Zane or pick something up when no one else was home.

Sometimes we’d say that Dalton came by and I’d had to head him off.

Or I’d go to the diner where it wouldn’t be weird if we were seen talking together. ”

It was exactly as the team had theorized, except they’d thought that if Cora had had an affair, it was with Hollis. Dalton Stevens had been right even though the reasons he’d suspected an affair had been related to something else entirely.

“So,” Josie said softly. “You and Cora were going to murder Tobias, convince everyone that he had simply left, like Rachel, and then what? You and Cora could finally be together?”

“Eventually, yeah. We were going to keep hiding it until things blew over. Then I was going to propose to her.”

Josie wondered if they’d ever considered how strange and inappropriate, maybe even suspicious, it would have looked to everyone else in their lives. Jackson ending up with his dad’s older fiancée whose daughter was closer in age to him than her. It didn’t matter.

“She was the love of my life,” Jackson muttered. “I knew I had to put her into the river with him. I hated that but she wouldn’t have wanted me to go to prison. Not over him.”

The urge to ask him if Cora would have wanted him to go to prison for murdering her daughter was strong but Josie suppressed it. She had one more confession she needed to get from him.

“You kept Cora’s jewelry so you could feel close to her,” Josie said.

He nodded. “It was stupid. I should have left it.”

“Stupid because Riley found it?”

A fresh wave of sobs erupted from him. “I thought I hid it where she’d never find it but she went back to the house for the cat’s meds and her toys.

Those stupid fucking toys. Two of them got stuck between my dresser and the wall.

We have a dozen of those dumbass fake mice but she just had to try to get to those.

Never for a second did I think she would try to move the dresser herself. ”

“But she did,” Josie said.

His chest heaved as he struggled to get his breath under control.

“She could only move it enough to fit her arm behind it, but it was enough for her sleeve to catch on the tape. I used duct tape to attach the cloth pouch with Cora’s jewelry in it to the back of the dresser.

She knew it was her mom’s right away. When she came back to Hol’s, she woke me up. She was a mess.”

“You fought?”

“I didn’t want to kill her but she didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand. Wouldn’t listen to me. She was going to go to the police. I tried to tell her it was a mistake, that Cora was never supposed to be killed, but she didn’t care.”

“You injected her with insulin?” Josie asked.

“I had no choice. It was the only way. I asked her to sit down and try to compose herself so we could talk things over while I grabbed her a drink.”

“You weren’t getting her a drink.”

“No, I…I knew she wasn’t going to listen to reason.

I sat next to her on the bed. Kept her talking.

She was so upset and she’d been drinking already.

She didn’t even realize what I was doing.

I told her I’d go to the police, confess everything if she just gave me some time.

A few hours. She promised me she wouldn’t tell Zane or Hol, that she’d let me do it.

She wanted to get away from me and I let her go because I didn’t think she’d get very far.

I didn’t want to do it. Didn’t want to kill her.

It was so bad. So bad.” His voice went up two octaves.

“It was like losing Cora all over again.”

Josie managed to suppress a cringe as he fell apart before her eyes again.

Before she knew about the true extent of his relationship with Cora, she’d wondered why he had started a relationship with Riley.

He had pursued her, according to Zane. It didn’t seem healthy, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that it had been an organic thing.

That he’d fallen in love with her and just couldn’t fight the pull, but this confirmed for her that the fractures in Jackson’s soul that allowed him to justify the most horrific and despicable acts ran deeper than she imagined.

Riley had just been a facsimile of Cora.

A replacement. A disposable replacement.

The exhilaration of coming up with theories, developing a plan to test them out, and eliciting a confession wore off quickly, replaced by bitter disappointment.

One of the silver linings of her job was that sometimes, she was able to help get justice for people who were wronged.

Certainly Tobias and Cora had been wronged.

They definitely hadn’t deserved to die but neither had they been innocent.

Solving their case didn’t bring the usual satisfaction.

At least she’d know that she’d played a part in getting justice for Riley.

Hours later, by the time Jackson had finished writing out his statement, reviewing and signing it, Josie only cared about one thing: getting home and laying eyes on Wren.