The Bones She Buried

Thirty-Five

As she ran, lungs burning, Josie mapped the neighborhood in her mind. Colette’s home was the last one at the top of the hill before it crested and went downhill in the other direction. Her house backed up to a short span of woods that led to a rockface. The development had basically been carved into the side of a mountain. The killer wouldn’t have gone through the back because there was nowhere to go. He could have gone through the backyards but most of them had high privacy fences and had he made a lot of noise in someone’s backyard, he might have been easily spotted back there and perhaps even trapped. If he had wanted to draw the least amount of attention after setting a fire, simply running down the street in one direction or the other would be most effective. It was still risky because he would be in plain view, but it was more direct and posed fewer potential pitfalls than trying to navigate the series of backyards that terminated at the foot of a rock wall. Also, he would be moving under the cover of night, which gave him an advantage.

He had to have parked nearby. When Josie got to the first intersection at the bottom of the hill, she turned right. Here it was darker although many houses began lighting up, probably in response to the commotion at the top of the hill. Josie ran down the street, her gaze panning right to left and left to right for anyone or anything out of place. There was nothing. The street was silent and still. Only four cars were parked on the street. She checked them all, glancing inside for any figures and then feeling their hoods to see if they were warm. Nothing. A moment later, one of Denton’s units rolled past her. She gave them a wave and kept jogging until her lungs erupted into a coughing fit that nearly made her vomit. After working through seven or eight of the surrounding city blocks and finding nothing, she took out her cell phone and dialed Gretchen.

“Come get me,” Josie told her. “I don’t think I can walk all the way back.”

Josie was beginning to hate Denton Hospital. She only had one good memory of the place and that was the night she had saved baby Harris Quinn from drowning. All her other memories of the hospital were traumatic. Her mind catalogued the last several visits as she lay on a bed behind a curtain waiting for Gretchen to return with news of Noah. Josie had looked frantically for him when they arrived, but he had been taken up to surgery. His leg break was worse than she’d thought.

“Honey, you should keep this on,” said a nurse, flitting around the bed and tucking the nasal cannula from the oxygen tank into Josie’s nostrils. She slipped a small clip onto Josie’s index finger and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around her upper arm—for the third time since Josie had arrived.

“I’m fine,” Josie said.

“Well,” the nurse said as the cuff squeezed, squeezed, squeezed and slowly released, “We’ll let the doctor be the judge of that. Your oxygen saturation is good, actually, considering what you’ve been through, but your blood pressure’s up a bit, hon.”

“That’s from stress,” Gretchen said, pushing the curtain aside and stepping up to Josie’s bedside. “Noah broke the shaft of his fibula.”

“Ouch,” Josie winced.

“Yeah, it was displaced. They had to do surgery to realign it. Should be a few hours. Want me to call his sister?”

“No, but I guess we have to,” Josie said. “She’ll want to know. Especially with all that’s happened.”

Josie pulled Laura’s number up on her cell phone, but Gretchen took the phone from her. “I’ll handle that,” she said. “You just rest a bit.”

Gretchen stepped out of the room, returning a few minutes later with a grimace on her face. She handed Josie her phone. “She and her husband will be here in a few hours.”

“I guess no one found anything—the guy running from the fire wasn’t located?” Josie asked.

“Sorry, boss,” Gretchen said. “Nothing.”

“Well that’s just great,” Josie said. “Listen, I know this is a stretch, but it’s the only lead we’ve got—I think we need to work harder at tracking down this Ivan person.”

“You think Colette’s friend from grade school is running around killing people and burning their houses down?” Gretchen asked.

“Before the fire broke out, Noah confirmed what Lance said about breaking his nose when he was thirteen—in April—the same month that Samuel Pratt died. According to Noah, his mom’s reaction was disproportionate to what happened. Evidently, he and Laura roughhoused a lot and she had had a much more serious injury before that, but Colette didn’t get upset back then. But when Noah broke his nose…”

“You think she wasn’t actually upset about Noah’s broken nose,” Gretchen said.

“Right. I think whatever she discussed with Ivan that day was the thing that upset her. It just happened to coincide with Noah’s broken nose and Samuel Pratt’s death,” Josie said. “The timeframe fits.”

“So who the hell was Ivan to her really?” Gretchen asked. “Do you think they were lovers? Are we back to the jealous lover theory?”

“She was seeing Ivan and Samuel Pratt and Ivan killed Pratt out of jealousy?” Josie said. “I’m not entirely comfortable with that theory, but I think Ivan is involved. It’s the only lead we have.”

It was only the whisper of a lead, and a real stretch at that, but Josie was desperate to stop the slaughter in Denton as quickly as possible, especially with Noah in harm’s way.

“There’s also the belt buckle,” Gretchen said. “So our plan is the same—you see what you can find at the library, I visit the church. If Chitwood will let me. Maybe if I tag along with Mettner, he’ll okay it.”

“You and Mett should go,” Josie agreed. “First thing in the morning. But I also think we need to talk to everyone Colette knew again to see if anyone else remembers this guy or anything else that raises red flags. Anyone we can find who goes back the last twenty years. Maybe they know something and they don’t know that they know it.”

“So church folks and co-workers,” Gretchen said. She took out her notebook, flipping back several pages. “Mettner told me that there were a handful of each who knew her going back that long. Not many, but a few. We can split them up. Mettner and I will take the church folks, you take Sutton Stone Enterprises?”

“You saw Colette’s boss at the funeral. He was obviously very fond of her, given the way he fawned over her children. I think I can get him to help.”

The nurse came back and checked Josie’s vitals once more, again pushing the nasal cannula deeper into Josie’s nostrils. She fussed over her for a few minutes before bustling off. Once she was gone, Josie said, “You have to get me out of here, though. I need to be there when Noah gets out of surgery.”