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“You can’t prove this was a homicide,” Josie said. She looked up in time to see Trinity’s severely arched brow and added, “And I’m not saying that to somehow protect Anya. I’m saying it because it’s true. You can’t prove murder.”
“The injuries prove it,” Trinity argued. “Josie, you’ve been doing this a long time. Those are the kinds of injuries you only see when someone falls from a tall building or is hit by a car or—” Here her hands waved excitedly. “If someone is smashed in the head with a baseball bat or something!”
Josie said, “It’s hard to make a judgment call without having seen the place she was found, but if the ravine was as steep as these reports suggest, she could have died from a fall.”
Trinity riffled through the pages of the file again until she came up with a photograph. She slid it across the table. “This girl did not die from an accidental fall.”
Jana Melburn smiled up at Josie. It was a school photo. Senior year would be Josie’s guess. Just as in the graduation photo, her curly blonde hair tumbled to her shoulders. This photo was crisper and showed freckles across a pert nose. Brown eyes with flecks of gold.
“What do you know about Mathias Tobin?” Josie asked.
Trinity found another photo in the file and handed it over. This one was a candid shot of a young man standing in a small kitchen, monitoring a pot on a stove. The same man from the graduation photo, only much younger. He wore a pair of white football pants and a black T-shirt, the sleeves of which had been torn off, revealing muscular arms. His dark hair was long and slicked back. An embarrassed smile played on his lips as he turned his head to look at the camera. His nose was slightly crooked as if it had been broken and never reset properly. He didn’t look a day over twenty.
Trinity said, “Nothing yet other than what I’ve told you. I’m supposed to meet with Hallie the day after tomorrow to go over the file and try to fill in the things I don’t know yet.”
She pushed another photo toward Josie. In this one, Jana, Mathias, and Hallie were on a beach. A teenage Jana sat atop Mathias’s shoulders, her arms thrown out to the sides. Next to them, Hallie looked up at Jana, her head tossed back in laughter. Behind them, ocean waves rolled in.
Josie said, “I am pretty sure Mathias Tobin went to prison for a while after the Melburn case. For shooting his wife in the head.”
“What?” Trinity gasped. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I have a source, too. If what she told me is accurate, his wife’s name was Piper. Check it out.”
Trinity flipped open her laptop. “Oh, I will. I did an internet search on him and didn’t come up with anything at all.”
“Try accessing the Everett County criminal dockets then,” Josie said. She shuffled through the documents Trinity had shared. “In terms of the Melburn case, I can’t imagine what you don’t know yet. This file looks pretty complete.”
“I doubt that,” Trinity said. “The Bly Police Department is hiding something. I can feel it.”
On Josie’s second pass through the witness statements, a name caught her eye. Carolina Eddy. The clerk at the gas station. The other last person to see Jana Melburn alive.
It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Josie’s phone rang. Anya Feist’s name flashed across the screen.
Trinity sighed. “More work.”
Josie pressed the phone to her ear. “Dr. Feist?”
There was no response, just dead air followed by some rustling. Then came the voices, as if from far away.
A man:“I just want to talk.”
Dr. Feist:“There’s nothing for us to talk about. Please leave my home.”
A snicker.“You gonna call the cops? Like you did the other day when a body turned up in this city? Why would you bring me into some shit like that? Why? After all this time?”
“I was doing my job, Vance.”
The name was a hot poker to Josie’s gut. Clutching the phone in her hand, she ran out to the backyard. “Noah,” she called. “Anya’s in trouble.”
SEVENTEEN
Josie’s body slammed into the passenger’s side door as Noah took a sharp turn onto a backstreet. Her phone bobbled in her hands, but she caught it before it fell onto the floor. Pressing it against her ear, she heard Anya and Vance’s voices still. Noah punched a finger against the screen on the console, where the hands-free call feature displayed his conversation with Mettner. The call disconnected.
“He’s on his way,” Noah said. “With a backup unit.”
Josie kept half her attention on him and the other half on Anya and Vance, although now it was mostly Vance lodging ten years’ worth of built-up complaints about his ex-wife. “You did me real dirty,” he was saying. “After everything I did for you…”
