The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(35)

“Yeah, she’s never heard of or seen Colette Fraley.”

“So that’s a dead end.”

“Afraid so. I put in a request to the prison where Patti Snyder’s incarcerated, but the warden warned me that she never talks to cops or reporters.”

“Sounds promising,” Josie muttered.

The door at the front of the coffee shop swooshed open and then came the sound of Chief Chitwood’s voice booming across the dining area, making them both wince. “Quinn! Palmer!”

Gretchen gave a small wave and he strode over toward them. He looked at the table. “What the hell is this?”

“Sir?” Josie said.

“I thought they had cheese Danishes here? What’s this crap? Pecan?”

Josie glanced across the table at Gretchen who fought to keep a smile from breaking across her face. “Don’t,” Josie said under her breath.

Gretchen blurted, “Quinn ate them all. They’re her favorite.”

Chitwood gave Josie a look. “No shit. Well, we have something in common.”

“Shocking,” Josie muttered.

“Move over,” Chitwood told her, squeezing his tall, thin body into the booth beside her before she even had a chance to move. His bony elbow knocked against hers as he picked up one of Gretchen’s pecan-crusted croissants and sneered at it.

“Sir,” Gretchen said. “Would you like me to get you something from the front? Coffee? Cheese Danish?”

“No,” Chitwood said. “Thanks.”

Gretchen said, “You didn’t come here for a cheese Danish.”

Chitwood rubbed at the spotty facial hair on his chin and gave Josie a sideways glance. “No, I’m here because Patti Snyder, who hasn’t talked to anyone in law enforcement the entire time she’s been in prison, has agreed to talk to Quinn.”

“What?” Josie and Gretchen said in unison.

Chitwood turned his head and gave Josie a long, penetrating look. Josie made sure he looked away before she did. “Quinn, do you know this woman?”

“No, sir. Never met her.”

“She specifically said she would only talk to you. Not Mettner. You. Why the hell is that?” Chitwood’s voice held more wonder than contempt, which was a welcome change.

Josie said, “I don’t know, sir.”

Chitwood put the croissant back on the plate in the center of the table and sighed. “It doesn’t much matter, does it?” His face twisted into a grimace, as though what he had to say next pained him deeply. “Good job, Quinn. She can see you this afternoon. I set it all up with the warden. Muncy prison is about two hours from here so you better get going. We need to get a handle on this Pratt thing yesterday. I’ll only be able to keep the press off this for a short time, and there are spies in the Department of Corrections. Soon as word gets around that Snyder met with a cop after all these years, the vultures will be circling.”

Gretchen’s phone chirped. She pulled it out and looked at it. “Mettner’s headed over to the morgue for Beth Pratt’s autopsy. I’m going to work on the alibi for her girlfriend. We’ll meet and regroup when you get back.”





Twenty-Four





Three times on her way to Muncy prison Josie glanced at her cell phone and then tossed it onto the passenger’s seat of her Ford Escape, but there were no calls or texts from Noah. She thought about what Gretchen had said—about the way people dealt with grief. She understood that losing his mother had spun Noah into entirely new territory; that the loss was too raw and too big for him to handle; and that he had lashed out at Josie because she was close, but she still wondered if she was supposed to be pushing back or not. This was new territory for her as well.

Muncy State Correctional Institute was the only maximum security state prison for women in Pennsylvania. Josie knew this because Lila Jensen, the woman who had torn her family apart and destroyed her childhood, was currently serving life without parole there. Josie had hoped she would have passed away from the cancer that had been eating her insides for several years now, but she was still hanging on.

Located in a lush valley of Lycoming County, at first glance, Muncy SCI looked more like a college campus than a prison. A large, tree-lined road led from State Route 405 to the prison grounds. Josie parked in the visitors’ parking lot outside the barbed wire fence, behind which was a stone building with a white clock tower—the centerpiece of Muncy’s sprawling grounds. Its perimeter circled thirty acres but beyond it was over seven hundred fifty acres of dense wooded area. Josie knew there were over seventy buildings within the fenced perimeter, nearly twenty of which housed the inmates.

She went through processing at the front gate. Then she was shuttled to the visitors’ center by one of the correctional officers who waited for her at the warden’s instructions. At the visitors’ center she checked her weapon and followed another correctional officer down a lengthy maze of hallways until finally she was deposited into a beige room with a long metal table in its center. She sat facing the door while one of the guards brought Patti Snyder in. The guard uncuffed her and left the room, standing just outside where a large glass window allowed him to keep careful watch on Snyder, although Josie had been told that she’d been a model prisoner since her incarceration. Josie had only seen photos and video of Snyder right after her capture and during her trial. Back then, Patti had been slightly overweight with a soft, round face and long, lank brown hair that showed strands of gray. The woman in front of Josie now was lean muscle and hard angles. Her brown hair had been shorn off, leaving behind a shapeless cut that didn’t leave anything for anyone to grab onto. There was a hardness about Patti Snyder that hadn’t been there before.