Her Deadly Touch: An absolutely addictive crime thriller and mystery novel (Detective Josie Quinn Book 12)

by Lisa Regan

  “After less than twenty-four hours?” Josie asked.

  Gretchen nodded. “Krystal lived alone. She was a single mother. Never married. No boyfriends. She’s got no close family. Never knew her dad. Mom lives several hours away. No siblings. According to coworkers, her friendships fell away one by one after her daughter died. Evidently, she met regularly with a support group for the parents of children killed in the crash. I called several of them over the weekend to find out when they had last seen her. All the other parents said the same thing: they saw her at their last meeting, which was the Monday before she went missing. They said she was upset but then again, they all were with the bus driver going on trial soon. Krystal’s coworkers said she’d been become very emotional the last couple of months. Volatile. Weepy. When she didn’t show up on Friday, they thought maybe she’d harmed herself.”

  “Dispatch did send someone out for the welfare check, then,” Josie said.

  “Yep. Her front door was unlocked. Car in the garage. Purse, cell phone, and house keys on the coffee table inside. Nothing disturbed. It was like she just walked out the door and didn’t come back.”

  But no one went anywhere without their cell phone anymore.

  “Neighbors see anything?” Josie asked.

  Gretchen shook her head. “A couple of them reported seeing her come home on Thursday evening—pulling into her garage, getting the mail from her mailbox, but that was it. A few of them had home security cameras but no one picked up anything. None of the cameras are positioned within view of the front of her house anyway.”

  “You get anything from her phone?”

  “Nope. Nothing unusual. Calls to and from work, to and from coworkers. A couple of calls to and from the district attorney’s office. I spoke with their office. She was preparing to testify at trial so they’d been in touch with her to make sure she would be ready. Other than that, all we could find were appointments with doctors, that sort of thing. No red flags. The only thing that was unusual was that her boss said she logged into their firm’s database on Saturday night.”

  “Meaning she was at the office?”

  “No. She did it remotely, they said. They don’t know why or what she was doing on it. They have a remote feature so that employees can work from home when necessary. They can login and access all the firm files, download or upload work, that sort of thing. The system shows who logs in and out and if they make any changes to a file, it will record that.”

  “But Krystal didn’t make any changes to any files,” Josie guessed.

  “Right. She logged in at 9:08 p.m. and logged out at 11:14 p.m. We have no idea what she looked at or why she was in there.”

  “Can you tell where she logged in from?”

  “We’ve got a subpoena out to the company who handles the firm server to see if that’s information they’re able to provide. If we can get an IP address, we can probably pinpoint where she was within a reasonable degree of certainty when she accessed the database. Other than that, there have been no leads in her disappearance, and you know how hard we’ve been hitting this in the press.”

  “Yeah,” said Josie. “You can’t turn on the TV or the radio without hearing about her. You get any leads from the coverage?”

  “Nothing solid. A few people thought they saw her on Friday, but all the sightings turned out to be other women with long brown hair and an average build.”

  Josie sighed. “She hasn’t been seen by anyone since Thursday night, but she was obviously alive until a few hours ago.”

  Gretchen said, “Now that she’s been found dead, I’ll have another conversation with her boss about which cases she was working on.”

  They turned toward the road at the sound of tires over asphalt. Another patrol unit pulled up and parked behind Dr. Feist’s truck. A young officer got out and jogged over. Josie recognized him before she was able to see the name on his uniform. Brennan. “Detective Palmer,” he said as he reached them. “Detective Quinn.”

  “You talk to the caretaker?” Gretchen asked.

  He nodded. He took off his hat, used a sleeve to wipe his brow, and put it back on. “He said to take as much time as we need. He was here at six a.m. when he opened the front gate—that’s what time it’s opened every day for mourners. It’s closed at ten p.m. Four employees showed up at six thirty and he put them to work getting a burial site ready, but they were on the opposite side of the cemetery and didn’t see anything unusual. Anything at all, actually. Not even any vehicles. Also, there are no cameras on the premises.”

  “Not even at the entrance?” Gretchen asked.

  He shook his head.

  Josie said, “They’ve never had problems here. Not even with vandals. That’s why we chose this place for Ray. This part of West Denton is the safest part of the city. They wouldn’t need cameras here.”

  With a sigh, Gretchen looked back over her shoulder where the ERT continued to work. “All right,” she said. “Brennan, drive us over to the caretaker’s office, would you? We’ll need formal statements from him and from the employees about when they arrived, when they left, and that they didn’t see anything of note.”

  Josie was grateful to get into the air-conditioned car for the ten-minute ride to the office. The Vincent Williams cemetery was the largest in Denton. As she watched the rolling hills dotted with gravestones flash past, she realized it was entirely possible that the crew working on the other side of the premises really hadn’t seen anything. The location of Krystal’s body was closer to the main entrance. It would have been relatively easy to slip in, leave her at her daughter’s grave, and slip out unnoticed, particularly if it was done early in the morning before any mourners arrived. At the caretaker’s office, which was a sprawling, single-story, stone building, four men waited inside the lobby.

  Again, Josie was grateful for the air conditioning as she and Gretchen met with each worker and the caretaker to get formal statements. Josie knew that as soon as they returned to the stationhouse, Gretchen would run each one of their names and other personal information through various databases to see if there were any red flags in their histories or connections to Krystal Duncan.

  Gretchen was finishing up with the caretaker when Josie felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She took it out to see Dr. Feist was calling and swiped answer.

  Dr. Feist said, “I’ve been trying to get Gretchen but she’s not answering her phone.”

  “She’s been taking statements,” Josie said. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re ready to move the body back to the morgue, but you two are going to want to see this before we do.”

  Chapter Five

  Dr. Feist waited beneath the tree that Josie had led Dee Tenney to after she discovered Krystal Duncan’s body. Crime scene tape still cordoned off the area and the patrol officers remained in place, guarding the scene. In the road, Hummel and Chan packed up their equipment as well as several bags of evidence. Dr. Feist held a skullcap, which she waved back and forth in front of her face, trying to move some of the hot air. When Josie and Gretchen reached her, she started walking toward the body. They trailed behind her. The officer with the clipboard wrote their names down and lifted the crime scene tape so they could duck under it.

  Two EMT workers stood behind Krystal’s kneeling form, a gurney between them, waiting to take the body away. Josie was relieved to see that neither one of them was Sawyer Hayes. Sawyer worked for the city’s Emergency Services department as a paramedic. He had been Lisette’s grandson, although he and Josie were not blood related. The night that Lisette was shot and during her last days in the hospital he had been angry with Josie, all but blaming her for Lisette’s death. Josie hadn’t seen him since the funeral although she had called him several times to check on him. He never returned her calls. A swell of relief rose in her chest that she wouldn’t have to confront him now in a cemetery hotter than hell next to a kneeling dead woman.

  As they drew up in front of Krystal Duncan, Dr. Feist said, “Chan thi
nks the substance on her lips is wax. She scraped some to have it analyzed, and I’ll save the rest when I do the autopsy and enter it into evidence.”

  Gretchen said, “Someone poured melted wax into her mouth?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Feist said. “I have to get her on the table, but it sure looks like it.”

  “Why does her color look so good?” Josie asked. “She’s been out here for hours since we found her and probably a few hours before that.”

  Dr. Feist frowned. “This kind of color in a body—the bright-pink appearance of the skin—in the absence of prolonged exposure to a cold environment, suggests death by carbon monoxide poisoning or cyanide poisoning.”

  Gretchen raised a brow. “Twenty years on the job, don’t think I’ve ever seen a death by cyanide poisoning. With carbon monoxide poisoning, it’s usually accidental or suicide.”

  “This is not a suicide,” Josie put in. “There’s no way this woman poured hot wax down her throat and staged herself kneeling by her daughter’s grave.”

  Dr. Feist said, “Indeed. She went into rigor while she was in this position.”

  Josie said, “You’re saying this is how she died? Kneeling like this?”

  “Obviously, I can’t say that for certain, and I do need to perform my autopsy to give you any official findings, but it seems most likely. Even if someone had propped her up like this before she went into rigor mortis, it’s unlikely that her body would have stayed upright. But if she had died like this and then gone into rigor without being moved, it would account for the positioning.”

  Gretchen said, “Will you be able to tell on autopsy if this was carbon monoxide poisoning?”

  Dr. Feist nodded. “I believe so. If she died from carbon monoxide poisoning then her internal musculature, tissue, and blood will all have a cherry-red appearance, which is typically found with carbon monoxide deaths. Even the removal and embalming of the tissue doesn’t get rid of that color. There will also likely be lesions in certain specific areas of the brain that are characteristic of that cause of death.”

  Josie tried to wrap her mind around this potential news. Krystal Duncan had been home on Thursday evening. Then she wasn’t home. No one saw her leave. No one saw someone abduct her. All her personal items were left behind. Yet, she was still alive on Saturday night and probably into Monday morning, just hours before Dee Tenney stumbled upon her. That meant she had been held somewhere. Had someone intentionally killed her using carbon monoxide or had it been accidental?

  Another glance at Krystal’s sealed lips told Josie that nothing about Krystal’s demise was an accident.

  Dr. Feist said, “I’ll have a better idea of her time of death after I’ve taken her internal temperature and done some calculations based on the temperature out here today, but I can tell you that in this heat I would have expected to see a greater rate of decomp by now or even by the time she was discovered.”

  Gretchen said, “You think she was kept somewhere cool before she was moved here.”

  “That would be my guess, yes.”

  Gretchen scribbled notes on her pad while Dr. Feist kneeled beside Krystal. From the pocket of her Tyvek suit, she pulled a pair of latex gloves and snapped them on. “I could have waited until after the autopsy to let you know about this, but I thought you’d want to see it now.”

  Josie watched as she gingerly pulled Krystal’s right arm away from her waist. The rigor mortis made it difficult, but Dr. Feist held the forearm away just far enough and for just long enough that Josie and Gretchen could both see why she had called them over.

  The inside of Krystal’s forearm was stark white compared to the pink of the rest of her skin. As if reading Josie’s mind, Dr. Feist said, “It’s called contact blanching. Basically, with the onset of livor mortis, a person’s blood settles into the lowest parts of their body—dependent on their position. That’s usually when you see the deep purple color in a person’s skin once livor mortis sets in. If they’re found on their back, it will usually all be along their back and legs. If they’re found on their stomach, then you’ll expect to see the blood settle in the front of their body. You can see where livor has set in here on Krystal but, because I suspect this is carbon monoxide poisoning, the color is a cherry red rather than a purple. Anyway, contact blanching is when certain areas of the body are compressed so that the blood doesn’t settle there. That’s why it looks white.”

  But the white area of skin on the inside of Krystal’s forearm was not the reason that Dr. Feist had called them back to the body. Across the pale expanse of Krystal’s arm someone had used what looked like black magic marker to write something.

  “Is that a name?” Gretchen asked, dropping her notepad and pen so she could snap some photos with her phone.

  “I don’t know,” said Dr. Feist, letting the arm snap back to its original position. “My job is to tell you as much as I possibly can about how this woman died. This is a mystery for your team.”

  Josie studied the letters, again trying to decipher something that seemed to make no sense at all. Capital letters spelled out: PRITCH.

  Chapter Six

  Josie and Gretchen stood near Bianca Duncan’s gravesite, watching as the EMT workers struggled to get Krystal Duncan’s stiff, kneeling body into the back of the ambulance. Rigor mortis could be broken by flexing the joints but that was something that Dr. Feist would handle prior to performing the autopsy. For now, the EMTs would have to transport Krystal’s corpse in its current position. Once they were gone, Josie turned to Gretchen. “Does that mean anything to you? ‘Pritch’?”

  Gretchen flipped through several pages in her notebook. “No. I’ve got nothing. I’ll have to go back through the missing persons file but I don’t remember any person, place, or thing called Pritch.”

  “What about someone called Pritchard?” Josie wondered. “Maybe Pritch is short for that? Or whoever wrote it didn’t finish? Or maybe Krystal wrote it, and she was trying to tell us something about who did this to her but didn’t get a chance? If she was in rigor when the killer moved her with her arms wrapped around her waist like that, there’s a chance that the killer never saw it.”

  Gretchen nodded and began walking toward the road. “That’s a possibility although it would be pretty sloppy on the killer’s part. It could also be that the killer tried to write it after she went into rigor but couldn’t finish the word because it was too much of a struggle to pull her arm away from her body.”

  “You’re right,” said Josie.

  Gretchen said, “I’ll talk to her boss and coworkers again. Maybe try to get access to her work files to see if there’s anything about ‘Pritch’ there. I can also try to get some handwriting samples from Krystal’s boss and see if they match up or not. This detail is not being released to the press, though.”

  Josie followed behind her, wrinkling her nose as she smelled her own body odor after nearly an entire day out in the heat of the cemetery. “Good call.”

  Over her shoulder, Gretchen said, “You coming back to the station?”

  Josie paused at the road, looking back and forth between the vehicle Gretchen had arrived in and her own. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to go home and shower.”

  Gretchen stood next to Noah’s car, which he had left there for her. She fanned herself with the notebook. “Want to come in after? Write up your report?”

  “No, I…” Josie trailed off. What was it? Any other time in her life she would have done anything and everything to be back at work. Normally, it would have been a dream come true to get to come back a day early. What was wrong with her?

  From Gretchen’s puzzled expression, it seemed she was wondering the same thing. She didn’t press Josie. Instead, she said, “First thing tomorrow, then. If the Chief gives the okay, you can work with me on this. I’m sure Dr. Feist will have autopsy results by tomorrow. I’ll see what I can come up with in terms of this ‘Pritch’ business.”

  Josie gave her a weak smile as she retreated
to her car. “Thanks. I’ll see you then.”

  She got in and drove away before Gretchen could change her mind and try to coax Josie into the station that evening. She meant to go home but instead found herself outside the liquor store ten minutes later, staring at its glass storefront. The air conditioning vent blasted her face with cold air. Now that the sweat had dried on her body, goosebumps rose along her flesh. A memory of Wild Turkey burning its way down her throat and into her stomach, warming her, settling her muddied thoughts, called to her. A siren song. She hadn’t felt this kind of thirst in years. Just one shot, said a voice in the back of her head, two at the most. They made small bottles now. She could buy them, drink them, toss them in the trash can right here in the strip mall and go home. Noah was still at work—Gretchen had his car. No one would know. She could shower and brush her teeth long before he got home.

  Josie groaned. In the weeks she had been attending her therapy sessions, Dr. Rosetti had probably talked more than she had. Josie had given her the no-frills, emotionless version of her horrific childhood. Even after Paige probed with her several variations of the question “How did that make you feel?”, Josie refused to attach her emotions to the events she recounted. Still, they had come up whenever she discussed Lisette’s murder, no matter how hard she tried to compartmentalize her grief and trauma. The thing Paige liked to say over and over again was, “Just sit with it. Sit with the feeling. Let it pass through you.”

  Downing two shots of Wild Turkey was most certainly not an effort to sit with any of her feelings. What she wanted was to erase them, obliterate them, push them to the far ends of her consciousness. White-knuckling her steering wheel, Josie let the feelings swirling inside seep out from the place in her mind she dared never go. The discomfort became physical. A weight pressing on her chest. A pounding in her temples. A thickness in her throat. Was there a way to stop it, she wondered. Once she unleashed the feelings, could she stuff them back in? Or would she need Wild Turkey to do that? Dr. Rosetti always said they were just feelings, and they would pass, but the tightness in her chest and the tingling in her fingers told another story.