The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(32)

Got you something to eat. Exhausted. Went to bed. N.





She opened the fridge and smiled, a bit of relief pushing aside the sadness weighing her down since Colette’s murder. Noah always made sure she ate. The delicious smell of perfectly grilled steak wafted from a takeout container on the top shelf. Josie sat at the table and wolfed it down before heading up to Noah’s bedroom. She still had clothes there so she changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, brushed her teeth and slipped into bed beside him. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she watched his bare chest rise and fall. She ran her fingers through his hair and planted a kiss on his cheek, but he didn’t stir.

Exhaustion made her limbs heavy but after minutes tossing and turning, she knew sleep was beyond her. She snatched up her phone from the nightstand and texted her sister, Trinity.

You up?





Trinity’s response came back a few minutes later.

Always for you, sister. What’s going on? How’s Noah?





Devastated. Hey, you covered the Drew Pratt disappearance when you were still a local reporter. Do you remember?





Only one of the biggest cases in PA. Of course. Has there been a development?





Sort of, I can’t say right now. Just wondering what you think happened to him.





There was a delay. For a moment, Josie thought perhaps Trinity had fallen asleep, but then her response popped up.

I think someone killed him. Someone Patti Snyder either knew or hired. You know who she is?





Yes. Well aware. Why do you think it was Snyder?





It’s the only thing that makes sense given the mystery woman. The police let me see the video when I did my story for the local news station. I think Snyder told him what was going on and when he chose not to pursue it, she had him killed. She’ll never talk though. Then she’d have to give up the killer.





Well, thanks.





Trinity texted back almost immediately.

I want to know if there are any developments!!! FIRST.





Josie chuckled and put her phone back on the nightstand. She lay back on her pillow next to Noah, inhaling his familiar, comforting scent. Her mind swirled with questions. After twenty minutes more of tossing and turning, sleep eluding her, she picked up her phone again and googled Patti Snyder. The woman had been a single mom working as a bank teller and raising her only son when in 2002 he was arrested for simple assault after getting into a scuffle with another teenage boy. The fight had happened on the football field during a game between rival high schools and was part of a larger brawl among the players. It had been caught on tape which someone in the press dug up after the Kickbacks for Kids scandal broke, and from what Josie could see from the grainy, far-off footage—the fight between Snyder’s son and the other boy was highlighted with a circle of light—there wasn’t anything particularly brutal about it.

However, Judge Eugene Sanders sentenced Patti Snyder’s son to nearly two years at Wood Creek. His public defender had tried to enter a plea deal, but Sanders had rejected it. Snyder’s son did his time at Wood Creek and, according to his mother, came out a shell of the person he’d been when he went in. He never fully recovered, Snyder said at her trial. Nothing lifted him out of his depression, and she was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy trying to get him the help he needed. Then one day in 2005 while she was at work, he hung himself in their backyard. At her trial, Patti Snyder described finding him and cutting him down. There wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom.

But she still got life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Patti Snyder had suspicions about Wood Creek pretty early on. The investigating she did at the bank where she worked—which was illegal—turned up what she believed was confirmation. She claimed that she had tried to blow the whistle on the operation multiple times, but that no one would listen to her. Then when the story broke in 2010, all the men involved got high-priced attorneys. There was talk in the press that most of the men involved were going to take plea deals to avoid prison time. Snyder went to the home of one of the Wood Creek Associates’ financiers, knocked on his door, and when he answered, she shot him in the chest and left him there to die.

Noah shifted onto his side, the sudden movement startling Josie. Her phone fell from her grip and into her lap. She dug it from the covers and put it back on the nightstand, hooking up the charger. It was enough for one night. Tomorrow, Gretchen would work on getting an interview with Patti Snyder, and hopefully, the woman would shed some light on just how much Drew Pratt knew about the Kickbacks scandal before his disappearance—and if she was the mystery woman who spoke to him at the craft fair or not.

Josie fell into a fitful sleep and woke a few hours later to daylight shining around the edges of Noah’s shades and his arm slung across her waist. His body fitted snugly against hers, spooning her. When she stirred, so did he. Their hands sleepily explored one another, bodies warming with need and urgency, finding a sweet release in one another that left them both breathless and sweaty. Josie was just dozing in Noah’s arms, ready now to sleep for several solid hours, when a knock at Noah’s front door startled them both.

They waited, bodies tensing, to see if the knock would come again and it did.