The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(26)

“So, let’s imagine she was probably sitting on her couch,” Josie agreed. “Reading a magazine, having a cup of coffee, waiting for us to arrive.”

Mettner pointed toward the large front window of the living room which overlooked the driveway, now filled with police vehicles, Dr. Feist’s van and an ambulance. “The killer pulls up. She probably had her heavy door open because she was expecting us.”

Josie said, “The screen door isn’t damaged. Maybe she even went over and opened it when he got here?”

Mettner walked over to the front screen door and pushed it open as though he were letting someone in. “By the time she realizes her visitor is not with Denton PD, it’s too late, he’s already standing in the open doorway. He comes right in.”

“Or,” Josie proposed, “she was still on the couch, waiting for him to knock, but instead he tried the door, realized it was open and came right in. Took her by surprise and attacked her then and there. They struggled. He got her face down on the carpet, put the pillow over her head and suffocated her.”

“Then he goes through the house.”

“And we have no idea if he found whatever it was he was looking for,” Josie said with a sigh. “When Gretchen talked to Beth on the phone, do you know if she mentioned whether she lived with anyone else?”

Mettner said, “Gretchen told me that she broke up with her live-in girlfriend three months ago, so she lived alone.”

“That’s not that long ago,” Josie said. “First thing: alibi the ex-girlfriend. If she clears, maybe then she can have a look around and tell us if anything is missing.” To Dr. Feist, she said, “You think this is the work of the same guy who killed Colette?”

Dr. Feist stood and peeled off her gloves, stuffing them into her jacket pockets. “Clinically, I can’t really say. Once I get her on the table, I’ll know more. I think the cause of death is going to be the same—asphyxiation—but you know as well as I do that doesn’t mean the same person did it.”

Mettner stepped back into the room. “The scene looks damn similar. A single woman, living alone. No forced entry, the victim suffocated in a pretty brutal way, the house ransacked but no valuables taken—that we can tell at this point anyway.”

“Right,” Josie said. “Exactly what I was thinking. There’s a lot of jewelry in Beth Pratt’s bedroom, a lot of electronic devices throughout the house, and about three hundred dollars in her wallet. So whatever the killer was looking for was something very specific, valuable only to him.”

“Exactly like Colette’s,” Mettner said.

“We have no way of knowing what he was looking for at Colette’s, but let’s assume it was the bag of items we found in her sewing machine,” Josie said. “In that bag was a flash drive which led us to Drew Pratt and then his daughter. I don’t think her murder is a coincidence.”

“Me neither,” Mettner said with a grimace.

Dr. Feist went to the door and called for the paramedics to come in and take Beth’s body for transport to the morgue. Josie and Mettner gave them a wide berth, retreating to a corner of the living room near the stripped bookshelves. “So what did Beth Pratt have that was worth being murdered for?”

Mettner shook his head. “What could she have? She couldn’t have evidence of what happened to her dad. No way she would sit on that all these years.”

Josie looked around the room—an otherwise bright and cheery place now marred by violence. “Maybe she had something important, but she didn’t know it was important. Or maybe the killer just thought she had something relevant.”

“Like the flash drive that Colette had? There is nothing even remotely worth killing over on that flash drive.”

“Not to us, maybe,” Josie said. “We’re missing something. Something big. Who is Beth’s next of kin?”

“Mason Pratt,” Mettner said. “Samuel Pratt’s son. He and his mother are her next of kin—at least the closest around here. Beth’s mother’s family lives in Texas. I already had Gretchen put a call out to Mason before we got here.”

“Maybe we need to pay him a visit,” Josie said. She checked the time on her phone. “Hummel’s just coming on shift. Call him and tell him to pick Mason Pratt up. We’ll meet him at the station.”

As Mettner made the call, Josie studied the floor where the paperback books and photo albums lay in heaps near their feet. One of the albums was open and from where she stood, Josie saw what looked like photos of Drew Pratt’s wedding. She squatted down to have a better look. They were candid photos taken by friends or other family members, old and yellowed. She scanned a few of them until she spotted one with what had to be Drew Pratt and his older brother, Samuel. Both were dressed in dated, blue tuxedos, smiling at the camera. Samuel looked older with a neatly trimmed goatee. His eyes were brown like Drew’s but closer together beneath bushier eyebrows. The shapes of their chins and noses were the same, as was the dark brown of their hair. Samuel was a few inches taller than his brother.

“Maybe Mason can tell us more about his father, too,” Josie mumbled as Mettner finished up his call. She turned some pages in the album, finding more photos of Drew and his wife, then a small swaddled baby between them in nearly every photo. When she came to the end of that album, Josie picked up another one. Gone was baby Beth and her mother in this album. Instead there were photos of Drew and a teenage Beth alongside Samuel, looking much older, and a teenage boy who was clearly Mason Pratt. Occasionally, a woman joined them in the photos. Josie assumed she was Samuel’s wife. But most of the time it was the two brothers and their teenage children—hiking, canoeing, white-water rafting and embarking on all kinds of outdoorsy adventures. Samuel Pratt’s wife only appeared in their less physical activities like a visit to New York City where they stood outside a Broadway theater and a trip to Disneyworld.