Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Eleven

Josie went inside and got cleaned up without making a mess anywhere. But even after she had scrubbed her hand several times and assured herself the excrement hadn’t gotten on any of her clothes, the smell still lingered deep in her nostrils. She’d ended the call with Noah abruptly, but he was on his way to her house, and that knowledge settled her agitation a little. She went into one of her spare bedrooms, where she kept her laptop on a small desk in the corner of the room. She pulled out the chair, sat, and booted it up.

She’d had a security camera installed in her driveway a month earlier, after she’d found all four of her tires slashed—just a week after all the department vehicles at the station house had suffered the same fate. Replacement tires for her Escape had cost her a small fortune, and she wouldn’t let the vandal get away with it a second time.

She queued up the footage from the moment she’d pulled in the night before, and then fast-forwarded until she saw a figure slink into the driveway. Josie looked at the time stamp: 3:12 in the morning, when she had been fast asleep. The person wore baggy pants and a hoodie pulled down low over their face. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman, but based on the height—she guessed about six feet—Josie thought it was probably a man.

She watched the hooded figure reach into a paper bag, come out with a handful of dark matter, and push it up under the door handles of Josie’s car. So she would have to clean all four handles.

“Great,” she muttered to herself.

When the figure was done, Josie could see him peeling off latex gloves, shoving them into the paper bag, and then jogging off down the street, bag in hand. Resetting the footage to when the figure first appeared, Josie leaned back in her chair and sighed. At three in the morning, none of her neighbors would have been up. Even if they were and had seen the guy, it was unlikely they’d seen anything more than what Josie had caught on camera.

Noah arrived ten minutes later. She let him in, and they reviewed the footage together. Josie saved it to a flash drive and handed it to him. “I want a report filed. By you. No one else.”

Noah sighed. “You’re documenting this, but you’re not letting me do anything about it.”

Josie gave him a dismissive look as she stood. “There’s nothing to be done. These are little teenage pricks doing pranks. I don’t need a detail.”

He knew better than to start that argument with her again. Instead, he took the flash drive from her and dropped it into his pocket. “The craigslist ad is a dead end. You were right. All we can get from the IP address is that it was somewhere here in Denton—this time near the mall. Probably someone piggybacking off the free wifi of one of the stores, or something like that.”

“Figures,” Josie said.

Noah didn’t move from the doorway. His gaze made her face feel hot. She put her hands on her hips. “What?” she said.

“We need to talk about Belinda Rose—and your mother.”