Page 27 of Close Her Eyes

The coffee sloshed in Josie’s stomach. “What kind of accusations?”

“Three girls he went to high school with accused him of sexual assault. Charges were brought and then dismissed when the girls recanted.”

Josie raised a brow. “Trin, don’t you think this is a case of ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire?’ If he was credibly accused of violent assaults, it’s not a stretch to think he killed Jana Melburn.”

“Yes, that was the problem,” Trinity said earnestly. “That’s why when people found out he was the last person to see Jana alive—besides the gas station clerk who watched the two of them talk—they immediately assumed he had killed her. He admitted to following her in his truck. It’s not a stretch to think he killed her.”

“But there was no evidence of homicide?”

Trinity flipped through a stack of pages inside the file folder and found a report, which she pushed across the table to Josie.

Autopsy Report. Name of Decedent: Jana Melburn.

While Josie skimmed the report, Trinity recounted the salient points. “She was found in a ravine on the side of the road, next to Latchwood Lake, about two miles from the gas station. No visible signs of injury. Nothing taken from her.”

Josie felt a prickle along the back of her neck. Again, the circumstances were strangely similar to Sharon Eddy’s case. She found the cause of death: blunt head trauma. Manner of death was accidental. Reading further, she found that although Jana hadn’t sustained any bruising, lacerations, or abrasions anywhere on her body, she had sustained multiple severe fractures to both the back of her head and her eye sockets as well as a subdural hematoma and general bleeding around the brain. “Trin,” Josie said. “Someone cracked her head like an egg.”

Trinity’s eyes glowed with a steely determination. “I know.”

“But this was deemed an accidental death.”

“You see now why I want to take this on.”

Josie sighed. She found the name of the medical examiner who had prepared the autopsy report. Dr. Anya Feist. Her stomach dropped. She pointed to the name. “This is why you’re here.”

Trinity sighed. “I know Anya. I don’t need you to make an introduction.”

“But you’re going to go after her. This report—if you believe that Jana Melburn was murdered, that means this autopsy report is wrong. It means Anya was wrong and justice wasn’t served.”

Trinity stared at her.

Josie said, “You wanted me to smooth things over.”

“Not smooth them over. Mediate, maybe. If it came to that. Like I said, I know Anya. I respect her. Deeply. Especially after her work on the missing girls case. She was relatively new to Denton when that happened. The work she did was incredible.”

And it had taken its toll. On all of them, but especially Anya, who’d performed dozens of exams and autopsies on the bodies of young women.

Trinity added, “But Anya’s human, not perfect. She would have been young when Jana Melburn died. Well, not young, probably around thirty or so, but she wouldn’t have had very much experience as a medical examiner. She could have gotten it wrong.”

“And if she did?” Josie said. “Then what? You go on national television and crucify her?”

“No,” Trinity said. “I ask her to tell me her side, to explain her reasoning. If it got to TV, I would give her a chance to present her side of things. Josie, I told you, I don’t even know if there’s enough here for a show. I’m just asking questions.”

But Josie knew from the set of Trinity’s jaw and the fire in her eyes that she was already committed to doing an episode ofUnsolved Crimes with Trinity Payneon the Jana Melburn case. Maybe she had not consciously committed or devoted any show resources to it as of yet, but there was no way she was letting this go, one way or another.

“I don’t like this,” Josie said.

Trinity slid a hand across the table until her fingers touched Josie’s. “You’ve never avoided the truth, even when it meant that people you cared about and respected had made huge mistakes. All I want is to try to set the record straight once and for all—homicide or accident?”

Josie sighed. “What else do you have?”

Trinity passed over a few more reports, starting with the initial missing person’s report and the reports prepared after Jana’s body had been found. As Josie read through them, a more complete picture began to form. According to Mathias Tobin, when he ran into her at the gas station, Jana Melburn indicated that she had planned on meeting someone to discuss her birth parents, but she would not say who or where they planned to meet. However, police found no evidence among any of her personal belongings that such a person existed, much less that a meeting had been planned. Nor were they able to glean the information from interviews with friends and coworkers. Even Jana’s phone had yielded nothing. In spite of what appeared to be an exhaustive investigation, police hadn’t uncovered a damn thing. Not a name, a text, an email, a letter or even a strange phone number. If Jana had truly been in touch with someone regarding her birth parents, Mathias was the first and only person to whom she mentioned it.

“Did anyone ever try to track down her birth family?” Josie asked. “To see if she’d been in touch with them or anyone connected to them?”

“Hallie did,” Trinity said. “Turns out that Jana’s mother died in childbirth. Her dad was already in prison, which is why Jana got put into foster care in the first place. Apparently neither of them had relatives willing to take her on. Her father was killed in prison when she was five. No one ever came looking for her. The only biological family Hallie could find were distant cousins who live elsewhere in the country—nowhere near Bly. None of them would admit to having tried contacting Jana.”

Even if they had, Josie thought, there wasn’t any evidence of it. Mathias’s story sounded like a lie. Josie returned her attention to the reports. Two days after Jana was last seen, she was found at the base of a steep ravine beside Latchwood Lake, at the bottom of which were several large rocks. She had no injuries that might indicate a struggle, only massive head injuries.

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