The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(72)

Josie could have kicked herself for not looking more closely at Sutton Stone Enterprises, but why would she? None of the clues they’d found had implicated the company except perhaps the elusive Ivan. She had found out about Ivan before she knew what the belt buckle meant, and Bridges had worked for Sutton before Colette became employed there. “What accident?” she asked.

“One of the cranes failed and fell on a trailer. Killed four people. Craig was there. He never set foot in that place again after that. He injured his leg somehow. The company gave him a lot of money. I guess so he wouldn’t get lawyers involved. Anyway, he took the money and came down to Maryland. Showed up on my doorstep. He was real messed up after that. More messed up than when we came home from the war.”

Josie kinked a brow. “But surely what you two saw in Vietnam was worse than anything he saw as a civilian.”

Earl shrugged. “I thought so but it was the quarry accident that gave him nightmares. He never got over it. I thought there was more to the story. I tried to get him to tell me—many times—but he wouldn’t. Finally one night we were real drunk, and I brought it up again and he told me he couldn’t tell me what really happened. That it would put me in danger. He said even though he took the money, he wasn’t really safe, that one day they would come for him because he knew too much. He was always looking over his shoulder.”

Josie calculated the dates in her head. She could look up the accident in the library in Denton, if it had been covered in the papers, but it would have had to have taken place in the mid-to-late seventies. Before Colette came to work for the Suttons and even before Zachary Sutton took over for his father. Which meant that whatever happened had been handled by Zachary Sutton’s father, who was deceased and had been for many years. What could possibly be so damning that even now, Sutton Stone Enterprises would kill to cover it up? Was Sutton Stone behind it? Josie was betting that Ivan Ulrich was the man who had set Colette’s house on fire and tried to kill Earl Butler. But according to Zachary Sutton, he hadn’t worked for them that long. Why was Ivan targeting people? He wouldn’t even have been working for the quarry when the accident happened or when Bridges went missing. Unless Sutton had lied.

Josie said, “Will you excuse me for a minute?”

Earl nodded. As Josie stepped out of the room, the deputy started asking him more questions. She called both Mettner and Gretchen to fill them in. Then she asked Gretchen to call Sutton’s records department and ask them to check for Ivan Ulrich as an employee for the last thirty-five years, not just for the time period that Josie and Sutton had discussed. She promised to be back in an hour and hung up. Once she was assured that Earl Butler was going to be just fine, she left her contact information with the deputy and headed back to Denton, her head spinning.

The pieces didn’t fit. There weren’t enough connections between all the victims. What did Colette Fraley have to do with any of them? By all accounts, she hadn’t even known the Pratt brothers or Craig Bridges. She worked at the same quarry as Bridges a couple of years later, but that was it. Where did Ivan fit in? The affair theory no longer seemed viable once Bridges was figured into the equation. Still, she wondered, was Ivan working alone? No, she thought, clearly he wasn’t because they’d found two different shoe prints at two different scenes. Was there a connection to Sutton? There had to be. But if Sutton was somehow involved, what did any of it have to do with Drew and Samuel Pratt? Were the Pratt brothers’ cases not connected to the Bridges case? But why did Colette have personal items from both the Pratt brothers, who had no connection to the quarry, and Bridges?

When the Denton station house came back into view, it was a welcome relief. Except for the press vans parked out front. “Oh no,” she muttered. She parked in the municipal lot and called Trinity, trying to keep the note of accusation out of her voice. “There’s an awful lot of press down here at the police station,” she said to her sister. “Do you know anything about this?”

“No,” Trinity snapped. “I don’t. You could have given me a heads-up that there was some kind of development with the Drew Pratt case. Instead I had to find out from someone at WYEP.”

“And what did your WYEP contact say?” Josie asked.

“That Drew Pratt’s daughter was murdered and a few days later, someone torched her house.”

“That has nothing to do with Drew Pratt,” Josie argued.

“Maybe not but given the fact that her father went missing under such suspicious circumstances, you know that his case is going to be in the limelight again. Reporters will try to make connections between the two.”

Before Josie could stop it, a laugh erupted from her lips. “Good luck with that.”

“What’s so funny?” Trinity asked, an edge of annoyance to her voice.

“I have to go,” Josie said. “We’ll talk later, I promise.”

She fought her way through the onslaught of reporters shouting questions at her and thrusting their microphones and cameras her way, keeping her eyes on the door and saying nothing. Chitwood could be heard hollering all the way in the first-floor lobby. Josie took the stairs and poked her head into the great room, where he paced like a caged lion, yelling about “the damn press” and “this unholy circus” he now had to deal with because someone on the staff “obviously couldn’t keep your damn mouth shut” and that when he found out who leaked about the Beth Pratt case, he was going to “have their ass.” Never mind that all any enterprising reporter had to do was ask around Beth Pratt’s neighbors or co-workers to find out she’d been murdered. It had never been a matter of keeping her death and the arson of her home a secret, it had simply been a matter of making sure as little attention was drawn to it as possible.