“Calm down, Mett,” Noah said, his voice low but tinged with a warning. He took a step, angling his body so that he was between Mettner and Josie. “After the shit you pulled today, you’re lucky you’re not in an interrogation room, but we can do it that way if you want. Is that what you want?”
A long, tense moment crept past. Josie heard the tick, tick, tick of the wall clock over the stairwell door. Finally, Mettner’s posture relaxed. He turned away from them and stalked back to his chair, plopping down into it. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. Josie took the diary to her desk and sat down. With her phone, she took photos of the diary and the list of numbers while Mettner stared over her head.
She said, “You said you two were planning a future. What do you mean by that?”
Another moment of silence. Josie wasn’t sure he was even going to answer. The second hand of the clock ticked onward. Mettner met her eyes long enough to purse his lips and flash her a nasty look. This was another of her techniques. Saying nothing. She stayed relaxed, like she had all the time in the world. Easy silence. Most people scrambled to fill it. Mettner knew that. He also knew that Josie would wait as long as it took.
“Fine,” he said. “I had asked her to move in with me. She said yes. This was last month. But we had to wait because she rents her house, and she couldn’t get out of the lease early. But we were starting to go through my things, throw out some stuff, make room for when she came. Not that she had much.”
“You were going to move in together, but you don’t have a key to her house?” Noah asked. “Did she have a key to your place?”
“Yeah, she did—she does. I don’t have one to her place ’cause like I said, it’s a rental, and she said the landlord won’t allow it.”
Josie knew there wasn’t anything stopping Amber from making Mettner a key anyway, but she didn’t mention that. “Was she excited to move in?”
A hint of a smile flickered across Mettner’s face. “Yeah, we both were. We are.”
“But you said you’d gotten into a fight. A fight so bad that she stopped taking your calls,” Josie said. “What happened?”
His face closed up. That was the only way she could describe it. He shut down completely. “What happened is that we had an argument. Like all couples do.”
“About what?” asked Noah.
Mettner didn’t look at him. “Private stuff.”
“Mett,” Josie said.
“It’s not relevant,” he argued. “Trust me. It’s not. It has nothing to do with this investigation.”
“You don’t know that,” Noah said.
Mettner’s hands came back out, gripping the edge of his desk now until his knuckles turned white. “Yes. I do. I do this job too, remember? Why are you treating me like an idiot? Why can’t you just trust me? Nothing that we argued about has anything to do with Amber disappearing or the woman in the river.”
The stairwell door slammed. They looked up to see Gretchen carrying a tray with four mugs of steaming coffee on it. She pulled up short next to the desks, looking at each of them with one brow raised. Josie knew she could sense the tension. “What’s going on?” she asked, putting the tray on Josie’s desk. No one spoke.
“Okay,” Gretchen said. She turned to Josie. “You ask him about the sister?”
“We’re getting there,” Noah said.
“What are you talking about?” Mettner said.
Josie took a coffee mug from the tray Gretchen held and handed it to Mettner. After having worked together for so long, Josie could tell by the precise hue of the coffee which mug belonged to whom. Gretchen distributed the other mugs.
Josie replied, “The woman in the river. We think it might be Amber’s sister.”
“Because of her hair?” Mettner asked.
Gretchen sat at her desk and sipped her coffee. “There’s a resemblance, Mett. What can you tell us about her sister?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Amber never talked about her family. I don’t even know her sister’s name.”
Josie put her coffee onto her desk and nudged her computer mouse, bringing the screen to life. “Never talked about them, or refused to talk about them?” she asked.
Mettner took a moment to consider this and then said, “She refused.”
Josie pulled up one of their databases and typed in Amber’s name and her address. Josie found results immediately but no known associates. “She never told you any names,” Josie asked. “Parents? Siblings? Anyone?”
Mettner shook his head. “No.”
The database showed a woman who had entered the world at age eighteen completely alone. There was a driver’s license, several addresses, most of them in the town in which she had gone to college. Utilities in her name, a car, a couple of former employers. That was it. “Was she in foster care?” Josie asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Mettner.
Josie looked up Amber’s surname, Watts, in the database. There were far too many people with that last name in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for their department to track down, and that was assuming Amber had grown up there.
Noah said, “Did she ever tell you any stories about her childhood?”
“No. She hated talking about that stuff. She only said she moved around a lot.”
“Do you know where she was born? Was it here in Pennsylvania?”
“I don’t know,” Mettner said.
With a sigh, Josie closed out the database. “I need you to get in touch with her friend. What did you say her name was?”
“Grace Power.”
“Yes,” Josie said. “Go home with Gretchen. Grab a few hours of sleep and in the morning, Gretchen can track Grace down and talk with her while Noah and I meet with Dr. Feist. It can’t be a coincidence that we found a message leading us to Russell Haven on Amber’s car and then we find a woman who looks almost identical to her. If this is Amber’s sister, then someone from their family is going to have to identify the body and claim it.”
Fourteen