dealt drugs to his wife and her friends for years. He would ruin her. I asked him why, if he’d already killed Beverly sixteen years ago, he didn’t just kill Vera, too, and he said he wasn’t thinking straight and hadn’t meant to kill Beverly. Vera was so freaked out that she just did what he said. They made some kind of deal. I don’t know what it was or how it worked—just that he paid her, and she kept quiet. But he said Vera came back after Beverly’s body was found. She begged him to go to the police, explain it had been a mistake, and said she would go herself if he wouldn’t. He couldn’t risk it—especially not now, with the mayoral race going on—and so he killed her. He knew where she was staying so he followed her and killed her. I slept in that day. I just assumed he was here all that time, but he wasn’t. I was his alibi and I didn’t even know it. Then he said he would kill me too if I told. I tried to get to my phone, and he started to beat me.”
Sirens sounded outside. Marisol collapsed onto the bed, weeping. Noah brushed past Connie and out of the room to meet the cavalry outside. Josie felt for Kurt Dutton’s pulse again, but it was gone.
Forty-Seven
One Week Later
Josie sat at her desk at the Denton PD stationhouse, flipping through pages of records recovered from Vera’s apartment. She felt a presence behind her and looked over her shoulder to see Chief Chitwood lingering. “You still on that Urban thing, Quinn?”
“We never found evidence that Kurt Dutton was supporting Vera Urban financially. I asked Marisol’s attorney if we could have the Duttons’ financial records, and he said he’d look into it, which means I’m never going to see a single record.”
Chitwood pulled over an empty chair from Gretchen’s desk. He sat in it and leaned toward Josie. “Quinn,” he said. “The case is closed. We have the wife’s statement. The ballistics on Kurt Dutton’s gun match up to the bullet found in Beverly’s skull and to the shell casings found in the old bowling alley. It fits. Hummel couldn’t pull any prints from the casings but the ballistics match and that’s good enough for me.”
“Chief, some things don’t fit. Mostly Vera.”
“You think someone else killed Vera?”
With a sigh, Josie leaned back in her chair. “No. I think he did kill her.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Josie picked up a stack of pages on her desk and let them fall loosely back to the surface. “Vera was a loose end. He had no trouble killing her when she returned to town after being in hiding for sixteen years. Why didn’t he just kill her right away? Why spend all that money supporting her? Money I can’t account for, by the way.”
“Quinn,” Chitwood said. “Has it occurred to you that maybe he was having an affair with Vera?”
“No,” Josie said. “Marisol said he liked younger women. Connie Prather confirmed that.”
“Have you corroborated that? Talked to any young women Dutton had affairs with?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Quinn,” Chitwood said. “Let it go.”
“I think Marisol knew something,” Josie blurted.
“Like what? You think she knew her husband knocked up a minor sixteen years ago, killed her, buried her, and paid her mother off for almost twenty years to keep quiet about it, and she just chose last week to confront him?”
“No,” Josie said. “Not exactly. I don’t know. I just think she knew something. I’m not sure if she knew something in a concrete way or if she knew it in the sense that something was always off, but she chose to ignore it and not ask questions because she liked her comfortable life and there was nothing particularly glaring in front of her face. Either way, she knows a lot more than she’s told us.”
Chitwood appraised her. He folded his hands over his stomach.
“Quinn, I’ve been at this a long time—”
“I know, I know. Since I was in diapers,” Josie said with a groan. Immediately, she regretted it. She waited for Chitwood to leap out of his chair, point a crooked finger at her and berate her. But none of that happened. Instead, he laughed. Josie was so stunned she momentarily wondered if she had hallucinated. She looked around the room, devastated to find that none of her colleagues were there to witness it. They’d never believe her. Chitwood said, “Since the time you were in diapers, Quinn,