The Bones She Buried

Twenty-Five

Back at the station house, Josie sat at her desk, typing up a report on what she had learned from Patti Snyder. She smelled the comforting scent of coffee even before Gretchen walked up and deposited a cup of it in front of her, the words Komorrah’s Koffee wrapped around the midnight blue paper cup. For just a moment, Josie felt a small ache in her heart. It was usually Noah who kept her caffeinated and shored her up during a big investigation. He hadn’t called or texted all day.

“Mettner’s on his way up,” Gretchen said as she sat at her own desk.

A few moments later, Mettner appeared, looking pale, his brown hair in disarray.

Josie said, “You were at the autopsy?”

He nodded.

“Takes a while to get used to,” Gretchen offered.

He didn’t look at either of them. Instead, he took out his phone and started skimming over his notes, reporting what he had learned from Dr. Feist. “Nothing surprising about the autopsy. Beth Pratt was suffocated to death after a brief struggle. I interviewed a bunch of Colette Fraley’s friends and a bunch of people she knew from church. No one had anything helpful to offer. I then cross-checked all those people to see if I could find any connections between them and Drew Pratt. Nothing. Then I went out to the quarry office and talked to her boss and co-workers. Nothing helpful there either, and none of the people I talked to have any connection to Drew Pratt. Also, I don’t know what the hell to do about that belt buckle. Can’t get prints. I don’t even know where to start looking for men who wore gaudy belt buckles in 1973.”

Josie laughed.

“Maybe we should put it out in the press,” Gretchen suggested. “Or at least social media. Ask for the public’s help.”

“No,” Josie said. “I don’t think we can risk that right now. Someone is obviously looking for this stuff. For some reason, it’s important. I don’t want to tip our hand to the killer.”

“If this stuff is important, then wouldn’t its meaning be more obvious to us?” Mettner joked, finally meeting her eyes.

Josie smiled. “You would think. It’s never that simple. Start with Google. Then eBay. Also, have Hummel take it around to both pawn shops and antique places to see if anyone recognizes it.”

“Good idea,” Mettner said, tapping out a note on his phone. He looked at Gretchen. “You get anywhere with Beth Pratt’s girlfriend’s alibi?”

Gretchen said, “Yes. She cleared. She was at work and I verified that with three of her co-workers.”

“How about Noah’s dad?” Mettner asked. “Did you have a chance to talk to him?”

“I alibied him. He was in New York City. I got confirmation from the hotel he was staying at, and he had tickets to a Broadway show. He sent me photos of the stubs.”

Josie said, “What did he say? About Colette, I mean?”

“He was sad, but he said they hadn’t seen one another in over ten years. There was no reason to—Noah was their youngest and he was eighteen when they divorced. He said he had no idea who would want to hurt her. Even though their marriage didn’t work out, she was a good person, he told me.”

“What about the kids?” Josie asked. “Did he ask about them?”

“He didn’t ask about them, but he did say that he tried over the years to reach out to them, but they were so angry with him for leaving that they didn’t want to talk to him and eventually, he just gave up. He said it would have made it worse for them if he’d come to the funeral.”

“Yeah,” Josie said. “I got that sense from Noah and his sister.”

Mettner said, “I think we should keep looking at the Pratt brothers because that’s what we’ve got to go on and because another Pratt has just been murdered. Let’s go down that rabbit hole and see where it leads for now.”

“Fair enough,” replied Josie.

Mettner asked, “How’d it go with Snyder?”

Josie sipped the coffee, feeling its warmth spread throughout her body and the mental fog of fatigue lifting. She gave Mettner and Gretchen a rundown of her meeting with Patti Snyder.

“Do you believe her?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m not sure,” Josie said. “I mean she had nothing to hide so why would she be so secretive all this time? Why not just come out and say that yes, she had given Drew Pratt the drive, but he never did anything with it?”

“Because that just makes it look even more like she was involved,” Gretchen said. “Before today, we had no firm connection between the two, only speculation. Now we know they did meet, and they did talk, and she gave him evidence of what Judge Sanders was doing. If the public knew that all along—she’d be the main suspect in his disappearance. The Patti Snyder theory would go straight to the top of the list. Although from reading the files, I know she was investigated anyway, and no law enforcement agency could find any evidence that she had an associate who possibly killed Pratt for her.”

“True,” Josie conceded.

Mettner said, “Regardless of whether she killed him or not, now we know Pratt definitely saw the contents of the drive and didn’t investigate.”

Gretchen said, “I can check out Judge Sanders and the Wood Creek guys to see if there’s any connection to Drew Pratt, but if they were involved in his disappearance, they’ve successfully kept it hidden this long. We may not find proof.”

“I’m not sure the Kickbacks thing had anything to do with it.” Josie looked up at Mettner. “Remember what Mason said? Drew started acting strangely two or three weeks before he went missing. He’d already known about the Kickbacks thing for months before that. So what did he find out, or what happened in the two or three weeks before he disappeared to make him so distraught?”

“How the hell could we know, if his own daughter couldn’t figure it out?” Mettner groused.

“It’s worth trying,” Josie said. “Sometimes a fresh set of eyes makes all the difference.”

Mettner slid his phone into his back pocket. “How would we go about figuring out what Drew Pratt was so distraught over right before he died?”

Josie shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe we can take another look inside Beth Pratt’s house? Start there? We can talk to Mason again, too. Maybe he can tell us if Beth kept any notes or documents that belonged to her dad before he went missing. She might have kept some of her dad’s personal effects—maybe all of them. I’d also be interested to see if Drew had notes on Samuel’s death. He was a prosecutor who asked police to take another look at his brother’s death every few years, there’s no way he didn’t maintain some personal file on Samuel’s death.”

“You think that’s something Beth Pratt would have had?” Gretchen asked.

“I think it’s worth looking into,” Josie answered. She looked at the clock. It was already evening. “We’ll get started on it tomorrow. First thing.”