Gretchen used gloves to remove the outdoor camera from its seating and deposited it into an evidence bag. “I’m going to have Hummel come get this to take prints from it,” she told Josie. She wrote Mrs. Norris evidence receipts for Amber’s phone, purse, camera, news article, and Thatcher Toland book, and then she and Josie headed back to police headquarters. Once they turned off Amber’s street, Gretchen gave a low whistle. “I can’t tell what the hell is going on here.”
“Me either,” Josie said, watching the streets of Denton flash past. “What I can tell is that no crime was committed in that house, though. Other than Mett breaking in. If Amber was taken from there, she did not put up a struggle, which tells me she either knew and trusted the person or she was taken at gunpoint. I’m guessing gunpoint since she left everything behind.”
“I agree,” said Gretchen. “But none of this makes any sense. It’s like having pieces to two different puzzles and trying to force them together.”
“Meaning what?”
“We’ve got two cases here: Eden’s murder and Amber’s disappearance, and the only thing connecting them is the dam and the fact that they’re sisters except that Amber wasn’t in contact with her sister, according to everyone we’ve talked with so far. If they haven’t spoken in a decade, then how did they both get caught up in something that got one of them killed and the other…”
“Abducted?” said Josie. “We’re missing a bigger connection here. By all accounts, even by her own mother’s, Amber wasn’t in touch with anyone from her toxic family, except possibly her brother.”
“Which we have not confirmed,” Gretchen reminded her. “But if he was the man Sawyer saw her with, that means he had a physical altercation with Amber before she went missing.”
“I’ll text my contact at the sheriff’s office and see if she’s tracked him down yet,” said Josie, firing off a text to Deputy Judy Tiercar. “But I think this is coming together. We’ve got two, possibly three members of the family—the children—all involved in this somehow.”
“Do we?” said Gretchen.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we only know for certain that Nadine Fiore and Eden Watts were murdered in two different jurisdictions and that Amber is missing. We don’t actually know who she had a run-in with the day Sawyer saw her. I don’t want to look too closely at the family and miss something else. Lots of people have shit families. Most of them aren’t murdered or kidnapped by shit family members.”
Josie’s phone buzzed with a text. Glancing at it, she sighed. “That’s Deputy Tiercar. Gabriel Watts is not home. She’s going to stop back in a couple of hours and see if she can catch him. Anyway, what are we not examining that you think bears more scrutiny?”
“Mett,” said Gretchen. “They were going to move in together, and she never even told him that she’d run into her brother. Why not?”
“Because she didn’t want to answer all the questions that would come from that conversation,” Josie said. “Come on, Gretchen. She had a crappy upbringing. You and I both know what that’s like. She didn’t want to talk about it.”
“It doesn’t sit right,” Gretchen said. “She never told him. Sawyer saw her on the street with some guy. What if Mettner saw her with him too, and thought she was cheating on him? What if she was cheating on him?”
Josie opened her mouth to immediately shoot down Gretchen’s theory, but then she thought about how Mettner had immediately assumed Russell Haven was a person. He’d worried about it. “There was nothing on her phone to indicate she was cheating on Mett—well, that was according to Mett, though. Besides, wouldn’t he just confront her? Wouldn’t he just go to her and flat-out ask if she was cheating?”
“Would he?” Gretchen replied. “He’s pretty smitten with her. I’d say it borders on obsession. How well do we really know him? Can we really say with any degree of certainty that we know what he’s like behind closed doors?”
Josie thought about the birthday card she’d found in Amber’s desk. Mettner’s handwritten note flashed through her mind: I’ll never stop loving you. That one sentiment could be either delightfully sweet or darkly menacing depending on the context.
Gretchen continued, “To that end, we really can’t say for certain that Amber wasn’t cheating. Like you said, as of right now, we only know there was nothing of any significance on her phone from Mett. We have to consider the source. He could have erased all evidence of her infidelity from her phone. He would have a pretty good idea of how to do it, given that he is law enforcement.”
“There are ways to find those things even if they’re deleted,” Josie pointed out. “Ways even Mett couldn’t get past.”
Gretchen shook her head. “Not by anyone on Denton PD. That’s forensic work we’re not equipped for.”
“So? We’d send it out to a department that has that capability,” Josie argued. “And Mett knows that as well. What are we really talking about, Gretchen? You think Mettner did something to Amber? But what about Eden?”
“Maybe he did something to her, too. Maybe she showed up at the wrong place, wrong time, he had to kill her, too, and then figure out a way to set things up to make it look like something else was going on.”
“No,” said Josie.
“It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility,” said Gretchen. “Mett’s one of us. He’d know what to do to confuse us and throw us off.”
Josie thought about his reaction in the dam parking lot when they thought it was Amber who had drowned and then when they told him it wasn’t her—how desperate he had been to see the body for himself.
“I don’t know,” said Josie. “He seems sincere.”
“He broke into her house, boss,” Gretchen reminded her.
Josie sighed and turned her gaze to the window where the streets of Denton flew past in a blur. The sun was out but there was no warmth to be had. Even with its rays streaming down on the city, everything felt cold and gray. Oppressive. Josie didn’t want to think the worst of Mettner, but she knew the price of letting corrupt police officers get away with murder. A chill drilled down through her spine. “I hate this,” she said. “But we have to look at this objectively. As if it wasn’t Mettner.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” said Gretchen. “Let’s look at it. Boyfriend has fight with girlfriend. Two days later, boyfriend says he hasn’t heard from her. He breaks into her house. Nothing in the house is missing or destroyed—”
“Except all of her things have been left behind, her lights are on, and the surveillance camera appears as though it was tampered with,” Josie interjected.
“Yes.”
Gretchen said, “Someone wrote ‘Russell Haven 5 a.m.’ on the windshield of her car in frost which is not really a reliable way to leave anyone a message.”
“We only know about that message because the boyfriend brought it to our attention,” Josie said.
“He brought it to the attention of a friend. You weren’t in your official capacity as a detective, Josie. He came to your house. Off duty. It was your idea to go to Russell Haven,” Gretchen reminded her.
“True,” Josie agreed. “The message leads us there where the girlfriend’s sister has been assaulted, restrained, and dumped among the rocks to drown. The girlfriend is still nowhere to be found.”