The Bones She Buried: A completely gripping, heart-stopping crime thriller(76)

“The thing we’re missing?”

“Don’t know, but this is a good place to start.”

They sifted through pages and notes for an hour, speaking little, each of them making their own notes on individual notepads and Mettner using his phone app.

“You know what I don’t get?” Josie said finally. “All Colette had were three random items that would mean nothing to almost anyone who found them. So why is Ivan or his accomplice or whoever working so hard to silence so many people—Colette, Beth and Mason Pratt, Wolicki, Earl Butler— and burning down Colette’s house?”

“Maybe he thought someone would start asking questions once they found the flash drive?” Gretchen suggested. “I mean that’s what set us on this path.”

As Josie paged through the report from the murder scene at Colette’s once more, she came to the photos of the various rooms in the house, the backyard and Colette’s body. “No,” Josie said. “I don’t think that’s it. I mean, earlier we talked about the possibility of Ivan having brought her the items. Only he and Colette would have understood the significance of them.”

Mettner put down the slice of pizza he’d been chomping on and leaned forward. “And what was the significance?”

“He was showing her what would happen if she didn’t keep quiet,” Josie answered. “They were warnings, not proof. We’re looking at this all wrong. We need to know what Colette found—what she still had—that this guy has been looking for. She had to have had something. Something incriminating.”

“And Ivan didn’t know what she did with it,” Gretchen said, following Josie’s train of thought.

“Right. For all he knew, she might have sent something to one of the Pratt children. Maybe that’s why he had to kill her. She was about to blow the whistle,” Josie said.

“Why now, though?” Mettner asked. “If she knew about something incriminating as early as 1990 when Craig Bridges went missing, why would she suddenly decide to blow the whistle now?”

Josie paged through more photos, coming to a picture of the empty dining room where she and Noah were supposed to sit down with Colette for dinner that evening, then one of the kitchen where the drawers had been riffled through but no attempts to cook anything had been made. Josie felt a piece of the giant, confusing puzzle click into place. “Maybe because she knew she had dementia,” she said. “I mean, she was in the early stages of it. She didn’t know how long she would be lucid.”

“So she decided she’d come clean with whatever she knew. Except she didn’t get the chance,” Mettner said. “Neither Beth Pratt nor Mason Pratt had received anything from Colette or ever even heard of her before we came asking questions.”

“Which means she was still in possession of whatever it was that she was murdered for,” Josie said.

The next photo Josie came to was of Officer Chan holding up a dirt-encrusted rosary. Then photos of the small shovel Colette had been using to dig up the garden. “Oh my God,” Josie said. She stood up abruptly, her chair scraping the tile.

“What are you doing?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m going to wake Noah up. I need to know the address of the house he grew up in.”





Fifty-Three





By seven the next morning, Josie, Noah, Gretchen, Chitwood, Mettner and Hummel were all assembled outside of Noah’s childhood home. It was only a few blocks away from Denton’s city park—a two-story Cape Cod with gray siding and bright blue trim. It was larger than the home Colette had been living in at the time of her death, but Noah had told Josie that after her husband left, she had had to downsize.

While the rest of them stood on the sidewalk, Noah sat in the passenger’s seat of Josie’s vehicle, his cast dangling out the open door. “You sure about this?” he asked Josie.

She wasn’t, but it was worth a shot. They could bring in Ivan and Zachary Sutton and question them relentlessly, but without some actual evidence or knowledge of what it was that Colette was hiding, they were likely to get nowhere. Both men could ask for attorneys and without being able to tie them to any crimes, they’d be out of reach permanently. While they had a little bit of leverage on Ivan Ulrich since Earl Butler could identify him, Josie didn’t think it was enough for Ivan to give them a full confession accounting of all his crimes.

“Yes,” Josie said. “I’m sure.”

Chitwood squinted against the morning sun as he turned to look at her. “You sure it’s not at the other house? She was digging at the other house.”

“No,” Josie said firmly. “It’s here. Laura said she’d been burying rosaries since they were kids. Whatever Colette found, she found when her children were young. This is where they were living. What better way to keep it out of the wrong person’s hands than to leave it buried here when she moved?”

“Then why was she digging when she died?” Noah asked.

Josie grimaced. “I think she may have been confused, because of the dementia.”

Chitwood sighed. “You better be right about this, Quinn. I’m about to knock on this family’s door and ask to dig up their backyard, and we don’t even know what the hell we’re looking for. By the way, I’m going to call on Laura Fraley-Hall, you and Gretchen are picking up Ivan Ulrich, and Mettner and Hummel are going to round up Zachary Sutton before they serve the warrant. I don’t really have the manpower for this nonsense.”