Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Forty-Two

Sergeant Dan Lamay ran a hand over his thinning gray hair and shook his head slowly. “A cleaning service?” he said. “In the ’80s?” He took another moment to think about it while Josie, Gretchen, and Noah stared at him. Lamay was the oldest officer on the force, and the only one who had been around in the 1980s. His career had survived the ushering in and out of four different chiefs of police, as well as one mighty scandal. He was nearing retirement age, with a bad knee and a paunch that stretched his uniform shirt more each day. But Josie knew that with his wife battling cancer, and a daughter in college, he needed both his income and health benefits, so she kept him on and assigned him to the lobby desk.

“Anything you can remember would be helpful,” Josie prodded.

He scratched over his left ear. “I’m sorry, Boss,” he said. “I don’t remember. I don’t even remember there being a cleaning service back then. I was on patrol, you know? Brand new from the academy. Didn’t spend much time in the station house.”

Josie sighed and waved toward her office door. “Thanks anyway, Sergeant.”

Lamay lumbered toward the door but stopped before crossing the threshold. “Boss,” he said, “I bet there are records of it upstairs. I had to go up there last year to get an old case file. There were records going back to the ’70s—not just closed cases, but receipts and stuff too.”

Excitement propelled Josie out of her chair. “Let’s take a look,” she said.

They hardly ever used the third floor of the Denton Police Department. The old, historic building didn’t have elevators, and no one particularly wanted to climb another set of steps, so it was used primarily for storage. Josie had only been up there a few times, mostly to help the women from the historical society lug holiday decorations back and forth from one of the storage closets. She had never noticed all the document boxes stacked in the hallways—or rather, she had never noticed just how many of them spilled out of the various rooms and into the hallway.

She, Noah, and Gretchen stood at the mouth of one of the hallways, staring at the stacks of boxes. Beside her, Gretchen said, “This is worse than the Bellewood PD storage room.”

Noah said, “This looks like a fire hazard.”

“Do we really have that many closed files and old records?” Josie asked.

They moved down the hallway, and Josie swung the door to the first room open. Inside were shelves along each wall, all of them packed with more boxes covered in dust nearly a quarter-inch thick.

Noah said, “Chief Harris kept everything.”

“So did everyone who came before him, by the looks of it,” Josie said.

Gretchen sneezed.

“I think none of them had the time to organize any of it and shred the old stuff,” Noah explained.

Josie sighed. “Well, I’m not authorizing overtime to clean up this mess, that’s for sure, but have a couple of people start doing it bit by bit on the slow days, would you?”

“Sure thing,” Noah said.

“All right, let’s see what we can find.”

They split up, each one taking a different room, quickly searching the boxes for old receipts and contracts from the mid ’80s. An hour later, Josie’s back ached from leaning over the boxes and riffling through their contents, when she heard Gretchen call from the hallway, “I got it!”

Josie and Noah met her in the hallway, where she dragged an old white document box along the floor. “Here,” Gretchen said, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. “Handy Helpers Cleaning Service. They had contracts to clean the building after hours in 1981, 1982, and looks like 1983. No personnel records, only the contract between the service and the police department. I don’t see anything after 1983. It must be in a different box.”

Josie said, “That’s okay. Pull what you’ve got. What we really need is the name of the owner. I doubt they’d keep personnel records over thirty years old, but the owner might remember my mother, or know someone who would.”