The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(36)

Patti folded her hands on top of the table and gave Josie a long look. “You’re smaller than I thought you’d be.”

Not what Josie was expecting. “You’ve seen me on the news, I guess.”

“A few times.”

Silence descended between them. Josie waited a beat to see if Patti would offer anything but she didn’t. Josie got right to the point. “I need to ask you some questions about Drew Pratt.”

Patti’s gaze drifted to the window where the guard stood watching, arms crossed over his burly chest. Slowly, her head swiveled back to face Josie. “Do you know what killed my son?”

Josie took only a few seconds to mull over her answer. She knew Patti wasn’t speaking in a literal sense. “Greed.”

A smile broke across Patti’s face. “Close. Very close. Greed had a hand in it, but that’s not what killed my son. Corruption killed him.”

“I can see that,” Josie agreed. The men on the board of Wood Creek Associates had been greedy, sacrificing teenagers to line their own pockets, but the judge had been the one to buy into the scheme. The judge was supposed to be fair and impartial. Instead, he had passed sentences that were far in excess of what was warranted, ruining the lives of countless children to fatten his own bank account.

“I knew that you would understand. You’ve seen corruption up close, too, haven’t you?”

Josie swallowed. She knew at once that Patti was talking about the missing girls case that had catapulted her into fame around Denton. “Yes.”

“Corruption killed your husband, didn’t it? Never mind what happened to all those girls and the old Chief…”

“You could say that,” Josie answered.

“I’ll never trust a cop or a lawyer or a judge again after what happened to my son, but I’ll talk to you. Today only. This is your one shot, so ask all your questions, and I’ll answer them honestly, but if you try to use anything I say to screw me over or get me tangled up in something I got no business being tangled up in, I’ll deny everything.”

Josie bobbed her head toward the glass window. “This is being recorded, Patti.”

Patti shrugged. “Don’t mean nothing. People make stuff up all the time. Maybe I’ll tell you anything you want to hear cause I want to meet a hometown celebrity.” With that, she winked, and Josie had the sense she would tell the truth. Depending on what Patti knew, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. If she told Josie something terribly incriminating, Josie wouldn’t be able to use it—or, at the very least, it would be difficult to use—but if she knew something that could prove important or useful to the Colette Fraley and Beth Pratt cases, then this whole game would be worth playing.

Josie said, “Did you kill Drew Pratt?”

Patti laughed and gave Josie an admiring glance. “Well, you sure as shit don’t mess around, do you? No. I didn’t kill Drew Pratt. He would have been on my list, but by the time I got around to making that list, he was gone.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“No. I do not, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

“Did you meet with him on the day he disappeared?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you give him a flash drive with evidence of what Sanders was doing?”

Patti’s brown eyes went wide with shock, but she quickly got her expression under control. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“When?” Josie asked.

“About five or six months before he went missing.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes. Drew Pratt used to eat breakfast at the counter of this diner in Bellewood almost every morning.”

“The one across from the courthouse?”

Patti nodded. “That’s the one. My boss had a crush on him. Pratt was single—or widowed, or whatever—and she had it bad for him. Eligible guy with a good job, well-respected in the community, not too old. She was over there almost every morning too before the bank opened. That’s where I got the idea to try talking to him.”

“Did your co-worker set it up?”

“No, she never even knew. She was off on Thursdays so I gathered what I could and one Thursday, I went and had breakfast at that diner. Sat right next to him at the counter.”

“What month was it?” Josie asked.

“Early December,” Patti answered. “It was after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. I know that because I was struggling. It was my first ever holiday season without my son.”

That lined up with what Patti said about it being five or six months before Drew’s disappearance. He’d gone missing in April.

“Did you tell him what was on the drive?”

“No. I didn’t want anyone overhearing us. I just told him there was something he should have a look at on there.”

“Did he look at it?”

“Not at first, I don’t think,” Patti said. “I found him in the diner on a Thursday about a month later. It was tough even waiting that long, but I didn’t want to come on too strong or for other people to see us together too close in time and get ideas. Back then it seemed like those Wood Creek men had so much power. So much power. I didn’t know if it was dangerous for me to try blowing the whistle or what.”