The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(69)

Heather gave Trinity a long look as if trying to decide something and then popped her trunk, reached in and pulled out a Tyvek suit which she handed to Josie. “She stays out here. Suit up and I’ll take you inside.”

Five minutes later, Josie and Heather were inside Brody Wolicki’s bedroom, and Josie was trying not to dry heave at the smell that still lingered in the small cabin. Being hungover at a crime scene was not the best idea Josie had ever had, but she needed to take one last shot at finding out who owned the belt buckle hidden in Colette’s sewing machine. Wolicki’s twin bed was barely visible amongst the mounds of hunting gear and taxidermy piled into the tiny room.

Josie said, “When you said a ‘bit’ of a hoarder, I think you were being conservative.”

Heather laughed and picked up a taxidermy deer head from the floor and carried it into the hallway to make room for them to work. Josie followed suit until they had removed a stuffed rabbit, a family of stuffed squirrels and an elk head which required two of them to get it out of the room.

“Why didn’t he hang any of these?” Josie groused as they struggled to get the elk head through the doorway.

“Maybe he didn’t want them over his bed staring at him at night,” Heather joked.

When they had cleared out the animals and a few boxes of cassette tapes, they reached the photo albums, piled high from floor to shoulder height. “Tell me again what we’re looking for?” Heather asked as Josie handed her an album.

As they worked, sweat poured down Josie’s back in rivulets. She was certain Heather could smell last night’s booze oozing from her pores but she didn’t say anything. “We’re looking for a photo of the 1973 Tri-County Shooting League champion.” She took out her cell phone and showed Heather a photo of the belt buckle.

Two hours later, Josie was beginning to wonder if she had been crazy to think Brody Wolicki had kept photos of his years with the shooting league. Most of the albums were of local wildlife and hunting expeditions. There were many filled with people Brody had clearly been close to—Christmas pictures of people gathered around a tree; people celebrating what looked like a retirement party at a bar; people at a local football game together. Finally, near the bottom of the pile, they hit pay dirt; an old album, its cover nearly disintegrating in Josie’s hands, but filled with what were obviously photographs of the shooting league. A thrill of excitement flooded her body when she found the 1972 champion, proudly holding his rifle while he stood next to a bullet-ridden target. A man next to him—Josie assumed this was Brody—held out a belt buckle much like the one Colette had hidden. Gingerly, Josie pulled the photo from beneath the plastic casing and turned it over. There was a name next to the words: League Champion, 1972.

She frantically flipped through the rest of the pages until she found the next photo of a man—short, burly, wearing jeans, a western-style shirt and a cowboy hat—holding a rifle beside a shredded target. Beneath a bushy moustache, his smile was wide and toothy. Next to him was Brody Wolicki with the mystery belt buckle in his hand. On the back of the photo, it said: Craig Bridges, League Champion, 1973.

“I’ve got it!” Josie said. “I found it!”





Forty-Eight





Josie took a shower before she went to the station house, washing off the booze, sweat and shame of the night before. She had to keep her focus on the task at hand. She had a new lead in the Fraley/Pratt case, and she needed to get on it. She left Trinity at her house. As promised, Trinity’s assistant had brought Josie’s vehicle back to Denton and parked it in her driveway. On the way to the station house she called Noah, but he didn’t answer. She didn’t leave a message.

Gretchen was at her desk, tapping away at her computer.

Josie sat down across from her. “Did you guys interview Ivan Ulrich?”

“He wasn’t home. Bellewood put a unit on his apartment for us. As soon as he shows up, they’ll call.”

“Did you look up Craig Bridges?”

Gretchen nodded. “Yeah. He’s been missing since 1990.”

“What do you mean? What happened?”

Gretchen looked down at her desk where her notepad sat. “I searched every database I could and then the internet. Through the databases I found out that he had been living in Hagerstown, Maryland although he used to live in Pennsylvania—near Bellewood actually. He seemed to drop off the face of the earth in 1990, but I couldn’t find any evidence that he was deceased, so I checked NamUs.”

NamUs was the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. “What did you get?”

Gretchen handed her a printout. “I also called the Hagerstown PD to get some of the details. They had to pull the file cause it’s so old.”

As Josie studied the sparse details in the NamUs report, her body went cold. “This can’t be right.”

“Creepy, right?” Gretchen agreed. “But I talked to Hagerstown PD. Craig Bridges drove to the bank of the Potomac River, left his personal possessions in his locked car and disappeared. He hasn’t been seen since.”

“Friends? Family?” Josie asked.

“Hagerstown PD said that he had a roommate and that was it, but apparently he and Bridges were very close. They said every couple of years the roommate calls to see if any work has been done on the file.”