The Bones She Buried

Eighteen

An hour later, Josie and Mettner stood in Beth Pratt’s living room watching the medical examiner, Dr. Anya Feist perform a cursory examination of the body. The medics helped her turn Beth Pratt onto her back so they could hook her up to the AED machine to ensure there was no cardiac rhythm, but it quickly became obvious there was no need for the machine. Livor mortis blackened the skin of Beth Pratt’s arms where they had touched the floor. Dr. Feist sighed. “I’d guess she’s been dead about two hours.”

Mettner tapped notes into his phone. Josie grimaced; if only they’d got here sooner.

“She’s definitely the homeowner?” Dr. Feist asked, looking up at them both.

Josie said, “Yes. The killer dumped her purse onto the dining room table—at least, we assume it was the killer who did it by the way everything was tossed onto the table. Her driver’s license was there.” With gloved hands she pulled out her phone and brought up the picture she’d snapped. Dr. Feist took the phone and studied Beth Pratt’s smiling face, looking back and forth from the phone to the dead woman before her. It was difficult to tell from the body before them with its waxy, lifeless face, but from her photo ID, Josie could see that Beth had her father’s square jaw, thin lips and dark hair. She knew from her research that Drew Pratt had been over six feet tall but Beth, at only around five foot two, would have had difficulty fighting off a larger, aggressive attacker.

Dr. Feist handed the phone back to Josie with a sigh. “I’d say that’s a positive ID, all right.” Pulling a small flashlight from her jacket pocket, she shone it into Beth Pratt’s glassy eyes. “Petechiae here as I would expect. I’ll know more when I get her on the table, but my initial impression would be death by asphyxiation.” Gently, her gloved fingers probed Beth Pratt’s lips, pulling them away from her teeth methodically. She then pressed a finger to the middle of Beth’s chin to draw her mouth open so she could examine inside with her flashlight.

“There are cuts on the insides of her lips and what looks like carpet fibers on her tongue, suggesting someone held her face down against the carpet.” Dr. Feist pointed to the pillow near Beth’s head. “They probably used that to hold her down and keep her quiet.”

The entire scene sent a chill down Josie’s spine.

Mettner said, “It looks like there was somewhat of a struggle with all this stuff knocked onto the floor.”

“So, let’s imagine she was probably sitting on her couch,” Josie agreed. “Reading a magazine, having a cup of coffee, waiting for us to arrive.”

Mettner pointed toward the large front window of the living room which overlooked the driveway, now filled with police vehicles, Dr. Feist’s van and an ambulance. “The killer pulls up. She probably had her heavy door open because she was expecting us.”

Josie said, “The screen door isn’t damaged. Maybe she even went over and opened it when he got here?”

Mettner walked over to the front screen door and pushed it open as though he were letting someone in. “By the time she realizes her visitor is not with Denton PD, it’s too late, he’s already standing in the open doorway. He comes right in.”

“Or,” Josie proposed, “she was still on the couch, waiting for him to knock, but instead he tried the door, realized it was open and came right in. Took her by surprise and attacked her then and there. They struggled. He got her face down on the carpet, put the pillow over her head and suffocated her.”

“Then he goes through the house.”

“And we have no idea if he found whatever it was he was looking for,” Josie said with a sigh. “When Gretchen talked to Beth on the phone, do you know if she mentioned whether she lived with anyone else?”

Mettner said, “Gretchen told me that she broke up with her live-in girlfriend three months ago, so she lived alone.”

“That’s not that long ago,” Josie said. “First thing: alibi the ex-girlfriend. If she clears, maybe then she can have a look around and tell us if anything is missing.” To Dr. Feist, she said, “You think this is the work of the same guy who killed Colette?”

Dr. Feist stood and peeled off her gloves, stuffing them into her jacket pockets. “Clinically, I can’t really say. Once I get her on the table, I’ll know more. I think the cause of death is going to be the same—asphyxiation—but you know as well as I do that doesn’t mean the same person did it.”

Mettner stepped back into the room. “The scene looks damn similar. A single woman, living alone. No forced entry, the victim suffocated in a pretty brutal way, the house ransacked but no valuables taken—that we can tell at this point anyway.”

“Right,” Josie said. “Exactly what I was thinking. There’s a lot of jewelry in Beth Pratt’s bedroom, a lot of electronic devices throughout the house, and about three hundred dollars in her wallet. So whatever the killer was looking for was something very specific, valuable only to him.”

“Exactly like Colette’s,” Mettner said.

“We have no way of knowing what he was looking for at Colette’s, but let’s assume it was the bag of items we found in her sewing machine,” Josie said. “In that bag was a flash drive which led us to Drew Pratt and then his daughter. I don’t think her murder is a coincidence.”

“Me neither,” Mettner said with a grimace.

Dr. Feist went to the door and called for the paramedics to come in and take Beth’s body for transport to the morgue. Josie and Mettner gave them a wide berth, retreating to a corner of the living room near the stripped bookshelves. “So what did Beth Pratt have that was worth being murdered for?”

Mettner shook his head. “What could she have? She couldn’t have evidence of what happened to her dad. No way she would sit on that all these years.”

Josie looked around the room—an otherwise bright and cheery place now marred by violence. “Maybe she had something important, but she didn’t know it was important. Or maybe the killer just thought she had something relevant.”

“Like the flash drive that Colette had? There is nothing even remotely worth killing over on that flash drive.”

“Not to us, maybe,” Josie said. “We’re missing something. Something big. Who is Beth’s next of kin?”

“Mason Pratt,” Mettner said. “Samuel Pratt’s son. He and his mother are her next of kin—at least the closest around here. Beth’s mother’s family lives in Texas. I already had Gretchen put a call out to Mason before we got here.”

“Maybe we need to pay him a visit,” Josie said. She checked the time on her phone. “Hummel’s just coming on shift. Call him and tell him to pick Mason Pratt up. We’ll meet him at the station.”

As Mettner made the call, Josie studied the floor where the paperback books and photo albums lay in heaps near their feet. One of the albums was open and from where she stood, Josie saw what looked like photos of Drew Pratt’s wedding. She squatted down to have a better look. They were candid photos taken by friends or other family members, old and yellowed. She scanned a few of them until she spotted one with what had to be Drew Pratt and his older brother, Samuel. Both were dressed in dated, blue tuxedos, smiling at the camera. Samuel looked older with a neatly trimmed goatee. His eyes were brown like Drew’s but closer together beneath bushier eyebrows. The shapes of their chins and noses were the same, as was the dark brown of their hair. Samuel was a few inches taller than his brother.

“Maybe Mason can tell us more about his father, too,” Josie mumbled as Mettner finished up his call. She turned some pages in the album, finding more photos of Drew and his wife, then a small swaddled baby between them in nearly every photo. When she came to the end of that album, Josie picked up another one. Gone was baby Beth and her mother in this album. Instead there were photos of Drew and a teenage Beth alongside Samuel, looking much older, and a teenage boy who was clearly Mason Pratt. Occasionally, a woman joined them in the photos. Josie assumed she was Samuel’s wife. But most of the time it was the two brothers and their teenage children—hiking, canoeing, white-water rafting and embarking on all kinds of outdoorsy adventures. Samuel Pratt’s wife only appeared in their less physical activities like a visit to New York City where they stood outside a Broadway theater and a trip to Disneyworld.

“Hey,” Josie said, waving Mettner closer. “Look at this.”

Mettner squatted beside Josie, taking the open album into his hands. “What am I looking at?”

Josie pointed to a photo of the two Pratt brothers and their children standing on the summit of a mountain, all in hiking boots with backpacks on, sweaty, red-faced and smiling in the sunshine. “That’s Samuel Pratt, I think.”

“Stands to reason,” Mettner agreed.

Josie pointed to his right hand where a small light-colored object was clutched in his fist. “What is that?”

Mettner squinted. “I can’t tell.”

Josie reached over and turned a page, pointing to another photo of the four of them standing on a riverbank, two canoes behind them. They had their arms around one another. Samuel Pratt’s left arm was slung over his son’s shoulder, but his right hand hung at his side, his fist again closed around something, part of its pale surface just visible.

Mettner quickly turned more pages of the album. “He’s holding it in almost every photo.”

“Yes,” Josie said. “Except this one.” She turned back several pages to one of the canoe photos. In it, Drew and Beth stood on the bank in front of a campfire, the canoes now to their right. To their left, Samuel Pratt sat on a camping chair, peeling an apple with a paring knife, eyes focused on the task at hand. He hadn’t been part of the photo, just picked up in the background. Josie pointed to his lap. Against the navy blue shorts he wore rested the small, pale object.

Mettner brought the photo closer to his face. “Holy shit,” he said. “Is that—”

“It’s kind of blurry,” Josie said. “But it looks like an arrowhead, doesn’t it?”