The Bones She Buried

Fifty-Eight

“I got nothing, boss,” Lamay said when Josie reached him on his cell phone. “I’m gonna have to dig up the whole yard. You got someone set up for that?”

“Shit, no. I’ll have to talk to Chitwood.” They hadn’t had a plan B.

Lamay was still talking. “I’m thinking if we start at the end of the yard where this grotto is—”

“What did you say?” Josie asked. “About a grotto?”

“There’s a small garden grotto here in the backyard. Has a statute of the Virgin Mary in it. Homeowners say it was left there by the Fraleys when they sold the house. It’s pretty nice. They never took it down even though they’re not religious. They said it felt wrong.”

Josie squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Dan,” she said. “It’s under the grotto.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure. Can you move it? Is it small enough for you to move on your own so you can get under it?”

There was a long moment of silence followed by some panting breaths. “I think I need help, boss.”

Josie looked over to hers and Gretchen’s desks in the great room where Gretchen was now talking with Mettner and Hummel. By the looks on all their faces, the search warrant they’d served that morning hadn’t turned up anything useful. “I’m sending Mett and Hummel,” she said. “Sit tight.”

She dispatched Mettner and Hummel to go help Lamay. They hadn’t turned up anything at Sutton Stone’s records storage facility other than what Gretchen had already found in the newspapers.

The DA himself showed up a half hour later with one of his assistant DAs in tow. After meeting with Josie, Gretchen and Chitwood and hearing everything they’d already discovered, the prosecutor offered to keep the death penalty off the table if Ivan was willing to testify against Sutton for any part he had in the murders of Beth Pratt and Brody Wolicki; the attacks on Mason Pratt and Earl Butler and the arsons at Beth Pratt and Colette’s houses. It took another hour of negotiating with Ivan and convincing him that, given all he’d confessed to already, avoiding the death penalty was the best he could hope for.

“Ivan,” Josie told him. “Mr. Sutton is only a few rooms away with his lawyer—don’t worry, he doesn’t know you’re here—this is our chance to make him pay. We’re so close. We just need more from you. Tell us what happened after Colette died.”

With a long and tortured sigh, Ivan began speaking. “Laura was in contact with Mr. Sutton after Colette’s murder. She told him that the police had found certain items hidden in Colette’s home.”

Josie said, “The flash drive, arrowhead and belt buckle.”

“Yes. He asked me why she had such things, and I told him. I didn’t think it mattered since Colette was dead. No one would really know what any of those things meant. Maybe the flash drive was a problem because someone might figure out it belonged to Drew Pratt, but she told me it wasn’t hers to begin with. The other two items were so random, I didn’t think anyone would question them. Then he said that I needed to be sure.”

“Sure of what?” Gretchen asked.

“Sure that there was nothing in her possession and nothing she had given to anyone else—one of the Pratts or anyone connected to Craig Bridges—that could implicate him. I told him there wasn’t. Even if someone could make the connection between the three of them, no one would ever suspect why they were connected. No one alive knew what Colette knew.”

“Except you.”

He shrugged. “Even I don’t know exactly what happened. I never saw the documents. I don’t know where they are. I was afraid maybe the person who killed her had taken them. Laura told Mr. Sutton about her murder. How whoever killed her was looking for something and had ransacked her house. How she was digging in her garden. He was convinced that he was going to be found out. There were too many variables. He wanted whatever Colette had—whatever she took from his father’s office. I told him I didn’t know where she hid it. He said to torch her house although I didn’t at first. I hoped to get over there and search so burning it wouldn’t be necessary, but Colette’s son was there every day. Finally, I had no choice. I never wanted to hurt her children.”

“But you almost killed Noah,” Josie said. “And me.”

“I’m so sorry. I had no choice.”

“You couldn’t tell Sutton no?” Gretchen said. “What did he still have over you?”

Mournful eyes turned in Gretchen’s direction. “Laura. He told me he’d kill her, and he’d do it himself. He said he’d covered up bigger crimes, and he would make sure he didn’t get caught. I didn’t care for my own life, but as I said, I didn’t want Colette’s children to be harmed. And Laura was having a baby.”

“So you did whatever Sutton told you to do,” Josie said. “And he paid you to do it.”

“Yes.”

Josie said, “When you couldn’t find the documents that Colette had, what happened then?”

“He said he wanted the two remaining Pratt children eliminated.”

“Killed?” Josie asked.

He nodded. “Yes, killed. I tried to tell him that this would only draw more attention, which it did. So he told me to burn Beth Pratt’s house down. He told me to find anyone who could connect Craig Bridges to the belt buckle found in Colette’s home and eliminate them.”

“Kill them.”

“Yes. He wanted me to burn Brody Wolicki’s cabin down, but it would have caused a forest fire. More attention. So I burned all his documents.”

“Earl Butler?” Josie asked.

“I was supposed to burn his house to the ground, but he didn’t have anything that could come back to Mr. Sutton. So, I—I suffocated him.”

Ivan still didn’t know that Earl Butler had survived. Josie decided she’d let him find out later.

“Have you ever met Laura Fraley-Hall?” Josie asked.

“No. I’ve seen her from afar. Colette talked about her. I have never met her.”

“Do you believe she knows about any of this?”

“No.”

“You know that Mr. Sutton was grooming her to take over the company?”

“Yes. That was why it was even more important to put all of this to rest. The records that Colette had were the only evidence of the bodies near the encampment where the crane fell. Once those were destroyed no one would ever know.”

A knock sounded on the door. Josie excused herself to find Hummel standing before her, his uniform covered in dirt but a grin on his face from ear to ear. In his hands was a small plastic insulated cooler.

“A cooler?” Josie said. “Really?”

Hummel slid the top off. “It was duct-taped. Don’t worry, we photographed everything before we sliced the tape off. It held up,” he said. “Look.”

Inside was a folder that had been wrapped in what had to be two dozen plastic freezer bags. “Did you look at it?” Josie asked.

“No, figured you’d want first crack, boss.”

“Take it down to the conference room. Get Chitwood and the DA—they’re in the Chief’s office—I need gloves, and I want photos and video. I’ll get Gretchen. Write up a warrant before we open this and have a judge sign it.”

“You got it.”

It took an hour to get everything and everyone in place. Ivan had been placed under arrest and moved to the holding area. The next day he would be picked up by the county sheriff and taken to their county-wide processing facility in Bellewood. Zachary Sutton and his lawyer waited impatiently in one of the interrogation rooms. Chitwood had handled some initial questioning mostly to keep the lawyer from taking his client and storming out. Those questions had to do with why Sutton had lied about Ivan and his employment status. Sutton had cited his age and poor memory which was all his attorney would allow him to say.

“Sutton’s gonna walk if we don’t get in there soon,” Chitwood told her as they gathered in the conference room.

“The DA’s office is working on charges right now based on what Ivan Ulrich told us,” Josie said. “This is the final piece. After I see what’s in this file, I’ll take a crack at Sutton. Even if his lawyer instructs him to say nothing, we can still place him under arrest.”

“Here we go,” Gretchen said as they all circled the table and she began to peel away the plastic layers with gloved fingers.

As she laid the pages of the document out on the table, they all leaned over and tried to read it. “This is an internal memo,” Josie said.

Chitwood said, “I didn’t bring my glasses. Who wrote it?”

Josie moved to the end of the table as Gretchen laid out the last typed page. “Sutton Stone Enterprises’ head of security in 1974. It’s addressed to Zachary Sutton, senior.” She returned to the first page which was marked CONFIDENTIAL in large, faded red letters. Scanning it, she read off the pertinent parts to the rest of the crew. “‘On May 14, 1974, an accident was reported at the employee encampment on the north side of the quarry…’ there are some coordinates here and a hand-drawn map. ‘I was asked by Mr. Sutton, Senior to inspect the encampment. One trailer had been completely crushed by a construction vehicle. Its occupants appeared to be deceased from injuries sustained when the crane struck the trailer. There were sixteen employees onsite. Three employees were inside the trailer which was struck…’” Her heart seized in her chest, and her voice faltered as she summarized the next part. “Eleven employees were found in the remaining trailers, each with gunshot wounds to the head, neck, face and back. One female was found approximately one mile from the encampment with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. One employee, Craig Bridges, was unharmed as he had gone for a brief walk outside the perimeter of the encampment. Upon his return, Bridges reported seeing Zachary Sutton, Jr. exit the driver seat of the crane and then walk from trailer to trailer carrying a rifle. Bridges also reported hearing shouts, screams and gunshots. He then observed Mr. Sutton walk into the woods where he heard a final gunshot. Of the fifteen deceased individuals listed in the appendix to this report, eleven were undocumented workers. This writer was instructed by Mr. Sutton, Jr. to assist him in using heavy equipment to dig a hole…” Josie pointed to the third page. “There are dimensions here and a map with coordinates. Then he says they ‘deposited’ the bodies of the eleven undocumented deceased into that hole and filled it up. The deaths of the female and the three documented workers in the encampment were publicly reported to have died in a crane accident. Their families were compensated as was Craig Bridges who signed a non-disclosure contract. Jesus.”

A heavy silence filled the room as each one of them took in this information. The deaths weren’t the result of some accident involving construction equipment. Zachary Sutton had purposefully and coldly murdered fifteen people and then made a calculated effort to cover it up.

“Why would this be documented?” Chitwood said out loud. “Was Sutton’s dad some kind of idiot?”

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “But at the end of the report there is a notation that the land where the grave is located should not be used or sold for development. They wanted to make sure it was never found.”