The Bones She Buried

Fifty

An hour later, Josie sat by Earl Butler’s bed in the Emergency department of a nearby hospital. On the other side sat a sheriff’s deputy from Lenore County. Since the attack on Butler had taken place there, it was out of her jurisdiction, but because she was trying to solve a string of murders and she had saved Butler, she was allowed to sit in on the interview. An oxygen tank whirred in the corner of the room, and Earl strained to talk over it. Some color had come back into his face. A lifetime of wrinkles jostled when he spoke, and the nasal cannula bobbed on his upper lip.

“This man came yesterday. Said he wanted to talk about my old friend, Craig Bridges. We were in Vietnam together, me and Craig. Real close. We used to be roommates, but then Craig disappeared. Police thought maybe he killed himself but I knew better. So this guy shows up. It’s been almost thirty years. I thought… I thought this is it, I’ll find out what happened to Craig. So I let him in.”

He sucked in several breaths before continuing, “He was stocky and muscular and bald. Shaved head, not bald from genetics. He was probably in his sixties but real fit. He just attacked me. Knocked me down, got on top of me, put his hands over my mouth and nose. I knew he was trying to kill me so eventually I stopped fighting. I went real still. I was betting he wouldn’t check my pulse and he didn’t.”

“But he knocked over the cabinet,” Josie said.

Earl nodded. “Pinned my legs. I couldn’t get out. I heard him going through the house like he was looking for something. I didn’t dare try to move in case he wanted to finish the job. Then he left. I heard the police come this morning and tried to call out, but I couldn’t. Thank God you came. I’m not as young as I used to be. Have a lot of trouble getting around.”

Josie smiled at him. She glanced at the sheriff’s deputy and he nodded at her, giving her permission to ask her questions. “Mr. Butler, I want to show you a photo.” She took out her phone and found the photo of the belt buckle to show him. “Do you recognize this?”

He fidgeted with the nasal cannula, pressing his lips together and puckering them, pressing and puckering. Finally, he spoke, his voice husky. “That was Craig’s. Where did you get that? He loved that thing. You know, he struggled when he came back from ‘Nam. We all did. But he told me joining the shooting league helped him. He was good at it, and he said it was nice to shoot targets and not the enemy.”

“Did he wear it all the time?” Josie asked.

Earl nodded.

“Was he wearing it the day he disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Butler, I’ve read the police file in connection with his disappearance. Can you tell me what you think happened?”

Earl nodded again. He looked away from her, straight ahead, as though he was staring into the past. “I think they got him. He always said they would.”

Josie’s spine straightened. “They who?”

“When we came home from the war, I went back to Maryland, and Craig went home to Pennsylvania. He was real depressed, didn’t do much with himself at first. Then he started at the shooting league, met some friends there. One of ‘em got him a job at a quarry. Good money.”

“Wait,” Josie said. “A quarry? The Sutton quarry?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. He liked working there. Was just a laborer but it was work. He was getting his life together. Then something happened. I asked him, cause it was in all the papers back then, if he was there when they had the big accident.”

Josie could have kicked herself for not looking more closely at Sutton Stone Enterprises, but why would she? None of the clues they’d found had implicated the company except perhaps the elusive Ivan. She had found out about Ivan before she knew what the belt buckle meant, and Bridges had worked for Sutton before Colette became employed there. “What accident?” she asked.

“One of the cranes failed and fell on a trailer. Killed four people. Craig was there. He never set foot in that place again after that. He injured his leg somehow. The company gave him a lot of money. I guess so he wouldn’t get lawyers involved. Anyway, he took the money and came down to Maryland. Showed up on my doorstep. He was real messed up after that. More messed up than when we came home from the war.”

Josie kinked a brow. “But surely what you two saw in Vietnam was worse than anything he saw as a civilian.”

Earl shrugged. “I thought so but it was the quarry accident that gave him nightmares. He never got over it. I thought there was more to the story. I tried to get him to tell me—many times—but he wouldn’t. Finally one night we were real drunk, and I brought it up again and he told me he couldn’t tell me what really happened. That it would put me in danger. He said even though he took the money, he wasn’t really safe, that one day they would come for him because he knew too much. He was always looking over his shoulder.”

Josie calculated the dates in her head. She could look up the accident in the library in Denton, if it had been covered in the papers, but it would have had to have taken place in the mid-to-late seventies. Before Colette came to work for the Suttons and even before Zachary Sutton took over for his father. Which meant that whatever happened had been handled by Zachary Sutton’s father, who was deceased and had been for many years. What could possibly be so damning that even now, Sutton Stone Enterprises would kill to cover it up? Was Sutton Stone behind it? Josie was betting that Ivan Ulrich was the man who had set Colette’s house on fire and tried to kill Earl Butler. But according to Zachary Sutton, he hadn’t worked for them that long. Why was Ivan targeting people? He wouldn’t even have been working for the quarry when the accident happened or when Bridges went missing. Unless Sutton had lied.

Josie said, “Will you excuse me for a minute?”

Earl nodded. As Josie stepped out of the room, the deputy started asking him more questions. She called both Mettner and Gretchen to fill them in. Then she asked Gretchen to call Sutton’s records department and ask them to check for Ivan Ulrich as an employee for the last thirty-five years, not just for the time period that Josie and Sutton had discussed. She promised to be back in an hour and hung up. Once she was assured that Earl Butler was going to be just fine, she left her contact information with the deputy and headed back to Denton, her head spinning.

The pieces didn’t fit. There weren’t enough connections between all the victims. What did Colette Fraley have to do with any of them? By all accounts, she hadn’t even known the Pratt brothers or Craig Bridges. She worked at the same quarry as Bridges a couple of years later, but that was it. Where did Ivan fit in? The affair theory no longer seemed viable once Bridges was figured into the equation. Still, she wondered, was Ivan working alone? No, she thought, clearly he wasn’t because they’d found two different shoe prints at two different scenes. Was there a connection to Sutton? There had to be. But if Sutton was somehow involved, what did any of it have to do with Drew and Samuel Pratt? Were the Pratt brothers’ cases not connected to the Bridges case? But why did Colette have personal items from both the Pratt brothers, who had no connection to the quarry, and Bridges?

When the Denton station house came back into view, it was a welcome relief. Except for the press vans parked out front. “Oh no,” she muttered. She parked in the municipal lot and called Trinity, trying to keep the note of accusation out of her voice. “There’s an awful lot of press down here at the police station,” she said to her sister. “Do you know anything about this?”

“No,” Trinity snapped. “I don’t. You could have given me a heads-up that there was some kind of development with the Drew Pratt case. Instead I had to find out from someone at WYEP.”

“And what did your WYEP contact say?” Josie asked.

“That Drew Pratt’s daughter was murdered and a few days later, someone torched her house.”

“That has nothing to do with Drew Pratt,” Josie argued.

“Maybe not but given the fact that her father went missing under such suspicious circumstances, you know that his case is going to be in the limelight again. Reporters will try to make connections between the two.”

Before Josie could stop it, a laugh erupted from her lips. “Good luck with that.”

“What’s so funny?” Trinity asked, an edge of annoyance to her voice.

“I have to go,” Josie said. “We’ll talk later, I promise.”

She fought her way through the onslaught of reporters shouting questions at her and thrusting their microphones and cameras her way, keeping her eyes on the door and saying nothing. Chitwood could be heard hollering all the way in the first-floor lobby. Josie took the stairs and poked her head into the great room, where he paced like a caged lion, yelling about “the damn press” and “this unholy circus” he now had to deal with because someone on the staff “obviously couldn’t keep your damn mouth shut” and that when he found out who leaked about the Beth Pratt case, he was going to “have their ass.” Never mind that all any enterprising reporter had to do was ask around Beth Pratt’s neighbors or co-workers to find out she’d been murdered. It had never been a matter of keeping her death and the arson of her home a secret, it had simply been a matter of making sure as little attention was drawn to it as possible.

Gretchen and Mettner stood in the corner of the room with cups of coffee in hand, watching Chitwood pace. When Josie caught Gretchen’s eye, she sauntered past her desk where she casually picked up a piece of paper, then walked over to the door and entered the stairwell. They closed the door, muffling the sounds of Chitwood’s rage.

Gretchen handed Josie the printout of an article from the Bellewood Record from May of 1974. Quickly, Josie scanned it. It confirmed what Earl Butler had told her about there being an accident at the quarry that killed four people. Except it hadn’t happened on any work site. There had been an encampment, the article said, where Sutton Stone Enterprises had set up temporary living quarters for their workers. It was basically a number of trailers. It was still under construction when one of the cranes had fallen onto a trailer and crushed it, killing all four workers inside. The company had taken full responsibility and compensated the families generously. End of story.

As Josie finished the article, she said, “So why did they pay off Craig Bridges? This obviously wasn’t a secret, and the company handled it.”

Gretchen said, “Exactly what Mett and I were thinking.”

“There’s more to this,” Josie said. “There has to be.”

“I agree,” Gretchen said. “We can look into it, but right now, Ivan Ulrich is home. I just got a call from Bellewood PD. Maybe you and Mettner should go talk to him?”

“No,” Josie said. “Not yet. I think we need more information.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I still think we’re missing something. Did you hear back from Sutton’s records department?”

“We went down there. Talked to the girl.” Gretchen handed Josie her coffee mug and took a pair of reading glasses out of one pocket and her phone out of the other. She positioned the glasses on her nose and started scrolling on her phone. “I might already have an email. Yes, here it is.” Josie waited a long moment while Gretchen read over an email. Then Gretchen gave a low whistle. “Well, this is interesting. Ivan Ulrich has been an independent contractor for Sutton Stone Enterprises since 1983.”

“An independent contractor? What do you mean?”

“He was hired as a full-time laborer back in 1981,” Gretchen said.

“Which is what Zachary Sutton told me.”

“Then in 1983, he was taken off the payroll but retained as a ‘security consultant.’ He was paid per job after that, it looks like.”

“A security consultant?”

They looked at one another. They both knew exactly what that meant. Gretchen said, “He’s Sutton’s muscle.”