The Bones She Buried

Twenty-Four

Three times on her way to Muncy prison Josie glanced at her cell phone and then tossed it onto the passenger’s seat of her Ford Escape, but there were no calls or texts from Noah. She thought about what Gretchen had said—about the way people dealt with grief. She understood that losing his mother had spun Noah into entirely new territory; that the loss was too raw and too big for him to handle; and that he had lashed out at Josie because she was close, but she still wondered if she was supposed to be pushing back or not. This was new territory for her as well.

Muncy State Correctional Institute was the only maximum security state prison for women in Pennsylvania. Josie knew this because Lila Jensen, the woman who had torn her family apart and destroyed her childhood, was currently serving life without parole there. Josie had hoped she would have passed away from the cancer that had been eating her insides for several years now, but she was still hanging on.

Located in a lush valley of Lycoming County, at first glance, Muncy SCI looked more like a college campus than a prison. A large, tree-lined road led from State Route 405 to the prison grounds. Josie parked in the visitors’ parking lot outside the barbed wire fence, behind which was a stone building with a white clock tower—the centerpiece of Muncy’s sprawling grounds. Its perimeter circled thirty acres but beyond it was over seven hundred fifty acres of dense wooded area. Josie knew there were over seventy buildings within the fenced perimeter, nearly twenty of which housed the inmates.

She went through processing at the front gate. Then she was shuttled to the visitors’ center by one of the correctional officers who waited for her at the warden’s instructions. At the visitors’ center she checked her weapon and followed another correctional officer down a lengthy maze of hallways until finally she was deposited into a beige room with a long metal table in its center. She sat facing the door while one of the guards brought Patti Snyder in. The guard uncuffed her and left the room, standing just outside where a large glass window allowed him to keep careful watch on Snyder, although Josie had been told that she’d been a model prisoner since her incarceration. Josie had only seen photos and video of Snyder right after her capture and during her trial. Back then, Patti had been slightly overweight with a soft, round face and long, lank brown hair that showed strands of gray. The woman in front of Josie now was lean muscle and hard angles. Her brown hair had been shorn off, leaving behind a shapeless cut that didn’t leave anything for anyone to grab onto. There was a hardness about Patti Snyder that hadn’t been there before.

Patti folded her hands on top of the table and gave Josie a long look. “You’re smaller than I thought you’d be.”

Not what Josie was expecting. “You’ve seen me on the news, I guess.”

“A few times.”

Silence descended between them. Josie waited a beat to see if Patti would offer anything but she didn’t. Josie got right to the point. “I need to ask you some questions about Drew Pratt.”

Patti’s gaze drifted to the window where the guard stood watching, arms crossed over his burly chest. Slowly, her head swiveled back to face Josie. “Do you know what killed my son?”

Josie took only a few seconds to mull over her answer. She knew Patti wasn’t speaking in a literal sense. “Greed.”

A smile broke across Patti’s face. “Close. Very close. Greed had a hand in it, but that’s not what killed my son. Corruption killed him.”

“I can see that,” Josie agreed. The men on the board of Wood Creek Associates had been greedy, sacrificing teenagers to line their own pockets, but the judge had been the one to buy into the scheme. The judge was supposed to be fair and impartial. Instead, he had passed sentences that were far in excess of what was warranted, ruining the lives of countless children to fatten his own bank account.

“I knew that you would understand. You’ve seen corruption up close, too, haven’t you?”

Josie swallowed. She knew at once that Patti was talking about the missing girls case that had catapulted her into fame around Denton. “Yes.”

“Corruption killed your husband, didn’t it? Never mind what happened to all those girls and the old Chief…”

“You could say that,” Josie answered.

“I’ll never trust a cop or a lawyer or a judge again after what happened to my son, but I’ll talk to you. Today only. This is your one shot, so ask all your questions, and I’ll answer them honestly, but if you try to use anything I say to screw me over or get me tangled up in something I got no business being tangled up in, I’ll deny everything.”

Josie bobbed her head toward the glass window. “This is being recorded, Patti.”

Patti shrugged. “Don’t mean nothing. People make stuff up all the time. Maybe I’ll tell you anything you want to hear cause I want to meet a hometown celebrity.” With that, she winked, and Josie had the sense she would tell the truth. Depending on what Patti knew, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. If she told Josie something terribly incriminating, Josie wouldn’t be able to use it—or, at the very least, it would be difficult to use—but if she knew something that could prove important or useful to the Colette Fraley and Beth Pratt cases, then this whole game would be worth playing.

Josie said, “Did you kill Drew Pratt?”

Patti laughed and gave Josie an admiring glance. “Well, you sure as shit don’t mess around, do you? No. I didn’t kill Drew Pratt. He would have been on my list, but by the time I got around to making that list, he was gone.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“No. I do not, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

“Did you meet with him on the day he disappeared?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you give him a flash drive with evidence of what Sanders was doing?”

Patti’s brown eyes went wide with shock, but she quickly got her expression under control. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“When?” Josie asked.

“About five or six months before he went missing.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes. Drew Pratt used to eat breakfast at the counter of this diner in Bellewood almost every morning.”

“The one across from the courthouse?”

Patti nodded. “That’s the one. My boss had a crush on him. Pratt was single—or widowed, or whatever—and she had it bad for him. Eligible guy with a good job, well-respected in the community, not too old. She was over there almost every morning too before the bank opened. That’s where I got the idea to try talking to him.”

“Did your co-worker set it up?”

“No, she never even knew. She was off on Thursdays so I gathered what I could and one Thursday, I went and had breakfast at that diner. Sat right next to him at the counter.”

“What month was it?” Josie asked.

“Early December,” Patti answered. “It was after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. I know that because I was struggling. It was my first ever holiday season without my son.”

That lined up with what Patti said about it being five or six months before Drew’s disappearance. He’d gone missing in April.

“Did you tell him what was on the drive?”

“No. I didn’t want anyone overhearing us. I just told him there was something he should have a look at on there.”

“Did he look at it?”

“Not at first, I don’t think,” Patti said. “I found him in the diner on a Thursday about a month later. It was tough even waiting that long, but I didn’t want to come on too strong or for other people to see us together too close in time and get ideas. Back then it seemed like those Wood Creek men had so much power. So much power. I didn’t know if it was dangerous for me to try blowing the whistle or what.”

“But he looked at it eventually,” Josie prompted.

“I met him in the diner again in February, right before Valentine’s Day. He told me to take a walk with him, and I did. He said nothing that I gave him was admissible or even really proved anything. That he couldn’t indict Sanders based on a few banking statements anyway.” She blew out a breath of frustration. “I was devastated. But he said we shouldn’t give up. I was supposed to meet him two months later—give him some time to do a little investigating on his own.”

“Then he disappeared,” Josie filled in.

“Yes, then he went missing.”

“But there was no investigation,” Josie said. “I’ve been over the police files. Drew Pratt’s life in the months before he went missing was combed over repeatedly. There’s no mention of Sanders or Wood Creek in any of his personal notes, on his computer at home or at work.”

“Well, I can’t speak for what he did after we talked in February. I can only tell you what he told me at the time.”

“Do you think Sanders or any of the Wood Creek guys had anything to do with his disappearance?” Josie asked.

“I don’t know. If they did, it wasn’t one of them that did the dirty work.”

“You’re right,” Josie agreed.

“Drew Pratt’s been missing twelve years. It took you guys this long to figure out what was on the flash drive?”

“No. We just found it,” Josie said.

“That’s why you’re here?”

“No, I’m here because Beth Pratt was murdered.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Patti asked.

Josie sighed. “Nothing, it seems. But she was murdered right after we found that flash drive which led us to look more deeply into what happened to her father.”

“Well, it’s a damn shame.”

“Yes,” Josie said. “She was very young.”

“No,” Patti said. “It’s a shame that Drew didn’t live long enough to know what it feels like to lose a child.”