“We need to search your house. We’ll get a warrant to do it if you don’t agree, but I think it would be best for everyone concerned if you just gave us permission to do it.”
Mettner’s jaw clenched. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Search it, then. Search all of it.” He pulled his keys and phone from his pants pocket and tossed them into her lap. “You know where I live. I’ll stay with Gretchen until you’re finished. I don’t want my family to know I’m under suspicion for making the woman I love disappear—or for murder. Jesus. Process my truck. It’s in the lot. The key is there. Impound it if you want. Look through my phone, too. That will be next. The passcode is 5231. You can check everything from there—my email and social media platforms. None of this is going to help you find Amber. Josie, I need to know what happened to her.”
“What did you fight about?” Josie asked.
“I already told you. It’s private and completely irrelevant. It’s not going to help you locate Amber.”
“You don’t need to be embarrassed if it’s something—”
Mettner slapped the table. “It’s nothing embarrassing. It’s just private, and I want to keep it that way. Now go, do whatever you have to do to eliminate me as a suspect so that you can focus on finding Amber—and whoever killed her sister.”
Josie took his phone and keys and went back upstairs to the great room. Noah was still on the phone, tapping one unsuccessful password after another into Amber’s work tablet. Gretchen pecked away at her keyboard, working on the warrant for Amber’s phone.
Hummel, the head of their Evidence Response Team, was there, writing out a chain of custody vouchers for the surveillance camera, printed news article, and Thatcher Toland book before he took them with him. “You just want prints, right?” he said.
“Yeah,” Gretchen said. “I mean, see if you can pull anything off the camera first, but I’m not sure the data is stored on it. I think it goes right to the cloud.”
Hummel opened one of the brown paper evidence bags and peered inside. “Yeah, I’m not getting anything off this. It goes with an app. But if you get into her phone, the app should be on there. You should be able to see whatever videos it captured that she hasn’t erased. By the way, I pulled prints from the outside of her car. I found her prints, Mettner’s prints, and a half dozen prints we can’t match to anyone in the system.”
“A dead end,” Gretchen sighed.
Josie pulled a key from Mettner’s keychain and handed it to Hummel. “This is to Mettner’s truck. It’s parked outside. Can you have a look at it?”
Hummel stared at her as if she’d just sprouted another head.
“Please?” Josie said.
“Sure,” he mumbled before leaving.
Gretchen looked up at the clock hanging on the wall. “I’m going to run this warrant over to get it signed by the judge. I also need food,” she announced. “You guys?”
Noah gave her a thumbs-up.
“Would love it,” Josie said.
Once she was gone, Josie made a half-hearted effort to straighten up her desk. She took another look at the diary and the numbers inside. She stared at them for several minutes, again racking her brain for what they could possibly mean. Sighing in frustration, she put them aside once more and pulled up a photo on her phone that she’d taken of the clipping she’d found in Amber’s Thatcher Toland book. A nudge of her mouse brought her computer screen to life. It took her less than five minutes to find the online version of the article in the Sullivan County Review. It was dated two weeks ago.
On Thursday morning, the body of real estate mogul, Nadine Fiore, was found in the pond located on her 760-acre estate in Eagles Mere. Local handyman, Christopher Wills, arrived for an appointment with Fiore that morning. When she didn’t answer her door or her phone, he took a walk around the property. “I was supposed to hang some pictures for her. I thought maybe she was in one of the other buildings. Then I saw her in the pond. I jumped in and pulled her out, but it was too late. I called 911 but they couldn’t do anything either. It’s real sad.”
When it became clear to first responders that foul play had led to Fiore’s death, they called in the state police. State Police Detective Heather Loughlin indicated that Fiore had defensive wounds on her body and that the coroner would likely rule the manner of death as homicide. “Unfortunately, Ms. Fiore lived alone and did not have surveillance cameras in this section of her property. In the coming days, we’ll be processing the scene as well as Ms. Fiore’s residence for additional evidence.”
Anyone with information is being asked to contact state police.
Josie printed the article out. She and her team had worked with Detective Heather Loughlin on several cases in the past. Loughlin was a skilled investigator and a team player. Picking up her phone again, Josie dialed Loughlin’s cell number. After five rings, Loughlin answered. “Josie Quinn. What can I do for you?”
One of the things Josie loved about Heather was that she got right to the point. Josie said, “What can you tell me about Nadine Fiore?”
“Seventy years old. Married once. Widowed. Lived alone in a two-million-dollar home right on the edge of World’s End State Park. I’m talking a huge estate.”
“Huge enough to have people coming in and out to maintain it? Landscapers? House cleaners? Snow removal? Repairmen?”
“I know what you’re getting at. The answer is yes, it took a lot of people to maintain a property that large. Even so, she kept the list of people coming on and off the premises small. Keep in mind this is Sullivan County, though. One traffic light in the entire county. It’s not teeming with people waiting to work for this lady. The locals hated her, and she hated them right back, even after maintaining a home there for over twenty years. Anyway, all the people working for her checked out, including Christopher Wills.”
“The man who found her?”
“Right,” Heather confirmed.
“Tell me about the body,” Josie said. “The paper said she had defensive wounds.”
“Bruising around her wrists, skin under her fingernails. Some bruising on her forearms. Fingerprint bruises around her throat,” Heather listed. “Someone held her under the water. We’ll have a DNA profile from the skin under her nails, but you know how it goes.”
“It’ll take weeks, if not months, to get it back and match it to someone,” Josie filled in. “And it will only match if the perpetrator is already in the system for an arrest or conviction.”
Heather sighed. “You are correct.”
“Was she restrained?” Josie asked, thinking about the abrasions around Eden’s wrists and ankles.
“No. It looks like someone grabbed her wrists, struggled with her, pushed her into the water and held her there until she drowned. Autopsy confirmed.”