Save Her Soul (Detective Josie Quinn #9)(57)
Mettner said, “I’ll have someone go by the parking lot and run all the plates there.”
Josie said, “I want to talk to the manager. She must have left some things in her room.”
The Chief raised a brow. “You almost got killed today, Quinn. Twice. You’re taking the day off.”
“Chief—” Josie protested but he held up a hand to silence her.
“We’ll get a warrant written up for you to take to the Patio first thing in the morning. I’ve already got two patrol cars sitting out there, ’cause the flooding is damn near in the Patio’s parking lot now. It’ll keep. I can’t spare Fraley or Mettner right now anyway. I need all bodies over at the command post.”
Relieved, Josie let her head sink into the pillow. Noah gave her hand a warm squeeze.
The Chief added, “Fraley, get these two some damn pants so they can go home and rest.”
Twenty-Eight
Rest didn’t come easy. Each time Josie moved, her leg throbbed. Whenever she began to drift off, she saw Vera’s face—her last attempt at words—and heard the gunshots, then the wail of the emergency siren. The only other thought in her head as she lay on her couch and tried to sleep, was of Wild Turkey. She thirsted for it in a way she hadn’t in a very long time. She could practically taste it, feel it burn its way down her gullet into her stomach where it would sit all warm and tingly and help blot out her heart-sick thoughts for a while.
Except she didn’t have Wild Turkey in her home anymore. They had no alcohol. Only coffee, some green tea concoction that Misty made, and apple juice for Harris. She wished Misty and Harris were there, but Misty was at work and Harris was with Ray’s mom for the day. Noah was at work. She thought about calling her sister, Trinity, in New York City, but her phone had been destroyed. She’d need a new one. Beside her, Trout whined, as if sensing her inner turmoil. Pepper sat across the room on the armchair, unperturbed. Josie stood and looked out front where her vehicle sat in the driveway. Someone on the team had retrieved it from Lockwood for her. The keys were on a table in the foyer. She could just run over to the nearest liquor store. It was late afternoon, the store would still be open. Plus, it wasn’t in the flood zone.
Without even realizing it, she picked up the keys. But she didn’t have her ID. Her wallet and credentials had been soaked in the river. Noah had laid everything on the kitchen table to dry out. Josie turned away from the front door to go get her ID, but the doorbell rang. Trout and Pepper jumped up from their spots and ran to the door, barking furiously until Josie opened the door and saw Gretchen and Dr. Feist standing on her doorstep. Gretchen was freshly showered and dry in a pair of jeans and a white tank top under a light sweater. Dr. Feist wore khakis and a blue button-down blouse, her silver-blonde hair loose around her shoulders. A small laptop was tucked beneath her arm. Gretchen thrust a box of pizza into Josie’s hands. “I was going to call,” she said. “But we’ve got no phones.”
Josie stepped aside and let them in. They congregated in the living room, eating the pizza right from the box. Josie sat on the couch with Dr. Feist beside her. Gretchen disappeared momentarily and returned with napkins and three bottles of water, which she set on the coffee table next to the pizza and Dr. Feist’s laptop. “I couldn’t stay at home. Too antsy.” She sat cross-legged on the floor facing them.
Dr. Feist wiped a splotch of sauce from the corner of her mouth with a napkin and said, “She showed up at the morgue asking if I’d finished Vera’s autopsy.”
Josie laughed but it came out sounding nervous. She should have been the one showing up unannounced at the morgue looking for information about Vera Urban. Instead, all she could think about was Wild Turkey. If Gretchen noticed anything off, she didn’t point it out. Instead, she said, “Then I thought you would want to hear whatever Dr. Feist had to say, so I convinced her to come over here with me.”
“And we figured you’d be starving,” Dr. Feist added. “So here we are.”
Somehow, Josie didn’t feel hungry at all, but she took a slice of pizza anyway. “Thank you,” she said. “What can you tell us about Vera Urban?”
The doctor opened her laptop, clicked a few times, and then began to read off some of her findings. “I estimate her age to be between fifty and sixty.”
“That tracks,” Josie said. “She was fifty-eight.”
Dr. Feist nodded. “The cause of death was the gunshot wound to her abdomen. Her lungs weighed more than expected and when I opened her up, they were somewhat overinflated, indicating that she had taken in some water before she died, but based on the damage in her abdominal cavity, I believe she died before she had a chance to drown.”
Josie put her half-finished pizza back into the box and leaned back into the couch. Trout jumped up and crawled into her lap, whining. Absently, she stroked the back of his neck. Gretchen said, “We did everything we could, boss.”
“Did we?” Josie asked. “We should have brought some kind of backup. Going there alone was stupid.”
Gretchen said, “To meet one person with information about a sixteen-year-old murder? There was nothing to indicate we needed to bring in an army to meet with Vera Urban. We didn’t even know it was her when we went there. We only knew we were meeting a woman named Alice.”