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The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(52)
The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(52)
“Did you see his face?” Josie asked.
The man shook his head. “Not really. He had that cap on. It wasn’t as bright out here as it is now. It looked like he had dark eyes—beady, like a rat, and a flat nose like it was broke a few times. That’s all I can tell you.” He groaned and held his stomach. “It hurts. He hit me hard. I told him to stop. He never even said anything. Just punched me in the gut and ran off.”
“I know you’re in pain right now, but can you estimate height and weight?”
“Maybe five foot ten?” he said uncertainly. “Two hundred pounds?”
“Boss!” It was Mettner rushing toward her from his patrol car. Behind him trailed paramedics from a second ambulance, rolling a gurney with them.
As the paramedics lifted the elderly neighbor onto the gurney and took him off to the ambulance, Josie gave Mettner all the information she had as quickly as possible, including a description of the man seen fleeing Colette’s home. “I want units out looking for this guy,” Josie said. “He was on foot so he may have parked not far from here. Get someone to canvass residents on the neighboring streets to see if they saw any strange cars, strange men or anything unusual.”
“You got it, boss,” Mettner said, jogging off.
Josie stood alone in the middle of the street, staring down the small hill in the direction the arsonist had gone. She glanced back to where Noah was being loaded into an ambulance. The firemen were already blasting their hoses at what was left of Colette’s house, trying to contain the fire. As the ambulance with Noah in it pulled away, Josie sprinted down the hill.
Thirty-Five
As she ran, lungs burning, Josie mapped the neighborhood in her mind. Colette’s home was the last one at the top of the hill before it crested and went downhill in the other direction. Her house backed up to a short span of woods that led to a rockface. The development had basically been carved into the side of a mountain. The killer wouldn’t have gone through the back because there was nowhere to go. He could have gone through the backyards but most of them had high privacy fences and had he made a lot of noise in someone’s backyard, he might have been easily spotted back there and perhaps even trapped. If he had wanted to draw the least amount of attention after setting a fire, simply running down the street in one direction or the other would be most effective. It was still risky because he would be in plain view, but it was more direct and posed fewer potential pitfalls than trying to navigate the series of backyards that terminated at the foot of a rock wall. Also, he would be moving under the cover of night, which gave him an advantage.
He had to have parked nearby. When Josie got to the first intersection at the bottom of the hill, she turned right. Here it was darker although many houses began lighting up, probably in response to the commotion at the top of the hill. Josie ran down the street, her gaze panning right to left and left to right for anyone or anything out of place. There was nothing. The street was silent and still. Only four cars were parked on the street. She checked them all, glancing inside for any figures and then feeling their hoods to see if they were warm. Nothing. A moment later, one of Denton’s units rolled past her. She gave them a wave and kept jogging until her lungs erupted into a coughing fit that nearly made her vomit. After working through seven or eight of the surrounding city blocks and finding nothing, she took out her cell phone and dialed Gretchen.
“Come get me,” Josie told her. “I don’t think I can walk all the way back.”
Josie was beginning to hate Denton Hospital. She only had one good memory of the place and that was the night she had saved baby Harris Quinn from drowning. All her other memories of the hospital were traumatic. Her mind catalogued the last several visits as she lay on a bed behind a curtain waiting for Gretchen to return with news of Noah. Josie had looked frantically for him when they arrived, but he had been taken up to surgery. His leg break was worse than she’d thought.
“Honey, you should keep this on,” said a nurse, flitting around the bed and tucking the nasal cannula from the oxygen tank into Josie’s nostrils. She slipped a small clip onto Josie’s index finger and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around her upper arm—for the third time since Josie had arrived.
“I’m fine,” Josie said.
“Well,” the nurse said as the cuff squeezed, squeezed, squeezed and slowly released, “We’ll let the doctor be the judge of that. Your oxygen saturation is good, actually, considering what you’ve been through, but your blood pressure’s up a bit, hon.”
“That’s from stress,” Gretchen said, pushing the curtain aside and stepping up to Josie’s bedside. “Noah broke the shaft of his fibula.”
“Ouch,” Josie winced.
“Yeah, it was displaced. They had to do surgery to realign it. Should be a few hours. Want me to call his sister?”
“No, but I guess we have to,” Josie said. “She’ll want to know. Especially with all that’s happened.”
Josie pulled Laura’s number up on her cell phone, but Gretchen took the phone from her. “I’ll handle that,” she said. “You just rest a bit.”
Gretchen stepped out of the room, returning a few minutes later with a grimace on her face. She handed Josie her phone. “She and her husband will be here in a few hours.”