“Please don’t do this,” she croaks.
He yanks her head to the side and her body goes flying. The trunk of a tree slams into her back, and the breath whooshes out of her. As her body crumples to the ground, she tries to draw in oxygen but can’t.
Over the roar of panic consuming her brain, she hears his feet crunching over stones, twigs, and long-dead leaves. He paces before her. The moon emerges from behind the clouds for a moment, its silver light slicing through the barren trees. She sees the gleam of his gun.
“I am doing what needs to be done,” he says.
She opens her mouth to respond. Only a gasp comes out. She clutches at her throat and chest. Something hot and wet spreads across her skin. Blood, she realizes, from when she cut her palm.
“Tell me what I want to know,” he snarls. “You can end this right now if you just tell me.”
Finally, words slip from her throat. “End this? How does this end? How many people are you going to kill to cover up what happened?”
His frenetic movements stop. “You think this is about covering something up? About hiding? This is about protecting the truth!”
She pulls her shirtsleeve down, balling the fabric up in her torn hand. Her body is too cold to register the pain. “Protecting the truth?” she spits. “Do you hear yourself? Do you even know what you’re doing? You’ve gone insane! No one benefits if I tell you. No one. I can’t tell you.”
She feels him loom over her. His breath cascades down the back of her neck. “You have to tell me. If you don’t, you’ll die.”
Ten
The woman was definitely not Amber. They reached the shore, where members of the marine unit and Gretchen waited, flashlights hanging from their hands, standing around a body bag. A portion of it had been left unzipped, enough so that Josie and Noah could see the face of the woman inside it. The same auburn curls they’d seen in the rocks earlier framed her pale cheeks, but her features were not as delicate as Amber’s; her jaw was squarer, her nose flatter and wider, eyes narrower. Still, she was young, in her mid-to late twenties, and whoever she was, now she was dead. A familiar sadness rose up in Josie’s chest. She loved her job. Loved putting terrible people behind bars, loved trying to right wrongs whenever possible. But she never got used to this—life snuffed out tragically and senselessly. Josie shivered and hugged herself, feeling the full onslaught of cold without her coat for the first time since she had emerged from the ambulance.
“Any ID on her body?” Noah asked. He, too, had no coat on although if he was as cold as Josie, he didn’t show it.
“Nothing,” Gretchen answered. “There is a strong resemblance though. Does Amber have a sister?”
Noah said, “According to Mett, yeah, but she hasn’t talked to her family in a decade.”
Josie noted a split in her bottom lip, bruising on one of her cheeks and around one of her eyes as well as a large purple lump near her left temple. “Was she…?”
“She was dead when they pulled her from the water,” Gretchen said. “There was nothing anyone could do.”
“Someone’s gotta tell Mett,” said Noah.
“Someone’s gotta keep Mett from going back over to Amber’s place and busting in there, looking for answers,” Chitwood said.
“He can stay with me,” Gretchen offered. “It’s just me, my grown daughter, and a tyrant of a cat. Plenty of room.”
Chitwood snapped off his flashlight. One of the marine unit officers squatted down and zipped the bag closed.
Gretchen continued, “I already called Dr. Feist. She’ll be waiting at the hospital. Since this woman was pulled from the river, she didn’t feel a need to have a look at the scene. She said to stop by around nine thirty or ten in the morning and she should have something.”
“Noah and I can go,” Josie offered.
Chitwood said, “You all knew each other before I took over this department. I brought Mett up through the ranks and promoted him to detective because he was a great investigator. He deserved it. Stellar record. Checked all the boxes. No nonsense with him. But you tell me, is he involved in whatever the hell is going on here? I need to know right now if any of you have any suspicions.”
Josie looked at Noah and then at Gretchen. The marine unit officers hefted the body bag onto a litter. No one spoke.
“Quinn?” Chitwood said.
“I don’t know, Chief. I mean, we all know Mett from work, but we don’t see him very often socially. Do I think he did something to Amber? Based on what I do know about him, I’d say no.”
“But people do crazy shit when they’re in love,” Noah interjected. He rolled his right shoulder. It was an unconscious movement. Only Josie noticed that he did it sometimes. She had shot him once in his right shoulder. She hadn’t wanted to do it. At the time, she thought she had no choice. She did it to protect someone vulnerable, someone in trouble. Josie never forgave herself for it, but Noah insisted he forgave her. He had stood by her since that day, first as a friend, then as a lover, and now as her husband.
She shot him and he married her anyway. She tried to imagine herself in Mettner’s shoes, back before she and Noah were married, when they lived apart. What if Noah had just up and disappeared? Josie hung her head thinking about exactly which window she would have breached to break into his house just to make sure he was alive. And what if he wasn’t there? What if everything he owned was there but not him?
“What about you, Palmer?” Chitwood asked. “You have an opinion?”
“Sorry, sir,” Gretchen said. “My instinct is to say Mett is completely innocent, but in this job, who the hell knows?”
“It’s always the boyfriend,” Chitwood muttered, almost to himself.
“What’s that?” Josie said.
Chitwood turned his gaze back to her. “We want to believe Mettner just went lovesick crazy here breaking into Amber’s house with only good intentions because he’s one of us, but what if they got into a fight and he did something to her, and all this is just a smokescreen? Him covering his tracks as best he can?”
Noah said, “That doesn’t really explain who this other woman is or why she was here—or the message left on Amber’s windshield.”
“True.” Chitwood gave an exasperated sigh. “Fine. Here’s how we’ll play it. Mett’s on suspension for breaking into that house. Since Amber’s not here to decide whether or not to press charges against him, that’s not a concern right now. But I do not want him near this case. I do not want him near her house. I want to know everything he knows but I want him out of this. You need to find out if he knows how to get in touch with her family so we can find out if this is her sister. Like Palmer said, there is a resemblance.”
“Not a problem, sir,” said Josie.
“I also want eyes on him,” Chitwood said. “So he doesn’t muck things up while we’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on here.”