Her Mother’s Grave_Absolutely gripping crime fiction with unputdownable mystery and suspense

by Lisa Regan

  “Okay,” Lisette said. “Fine. Take her, but at least let her go to her friend’s birthday party. We were on our way there now.” Lisette held up the gift. “I even bought a present. It will only be a few hours. I’ll take her and then drop her off to you afterward.”

  Her mother pushed Lisette aside and clamped a hand down on Josie’s bicep, yanking her across the threshold. “I don’t give a damn about some stupid kid’s birthday party. Let’s go, JoJo. And you, Lisette, I don’t know who you think you are, trying to make decisions about my daughter’s life. You’ll never get her. I’ll never let you have her. You just remember that.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  After calling in a robbery in progress, Josie parked across the street under a neighbor’s large oak tree. She got her bulletproof vest out of the back of her Escape, strapping it on before checking her Glock. After that, she circled the house twice, her steps silent, her movements covered by darkness. She knew where her own motion sensor lights were and carefully avoided them. It only took one lap to figure out that whoever was in her house had broken in through one of her kitchen windows.

  Anger boiled inside her, warring with the anxiety that raged beside it. Who was in her house? What were they doing in there? Just the thought of strangers in her private space, touching her things, felt like a violation. She had bought the house with her own money after she’d left Ray. It was huge and airy, with plenty of windows to let in the sunshine—the exact opposite of the coffinlike trailer she had grown up in. This home held only good memories for her. It was her safe place in a world that never ceased to horrify her—her sanctuary. Or it used to be, until tonight.

  She was pulled from her thoughts by the arrival of two marked units, followed closely by Noah in his own vehicle. Vest already on, Noah jogged over to her, checked his weapon, and signaled for the uniformed officers to join them. They formed a small knot behind her Escape, heads bent together as Josie gave instructions. “There are two points of entry—front and back. The screen door out back is locked from the inside, so there’s no getting in there from the outside—at least not quietly. They broke in through a kitchen window out back. I have no idea how many are in there, or if they’re armed. I couldn’t hear anything. Please exercise extreme caution.” She held out a set of keys, which Noah took from her. “We’ll go in the front using these. Lieutenant Fraley and me on one team, and two of you on another. You two stay out here and keep eyes on the house. Lieutenant, you have a notebook?”

  Noah pulled a folded notepad from his back pocket. One of the other officers handed her a pen. She quickly scratched out a diagram of the layout of her house. “Lights are on here,” she said, pointing to the square representing her bedroom. “Fraley and I go this way, you two go that way; we clear the first floor and then go to the second and proceed down this hall.”

  Nods all around.

  Adrenaline shot through Josie’s bloodstream as she and Noah crept up to the front door, followed by two of her uniforms. She’d done this dozens of times before, but never in her own home. Again, fear pushed itself to the front of her mind.

  “Boss.” Noah’s whisper interrupted her thoughts.

  She had to keep focus. This was just a regular house with potential burglars inside it. That was how she had to think of it. She clamped a hand onto Noah’s shoulder, and he slid a key into her front door. The door swung open without a sound, and they padded over the threshold in a column, two teams splitting off, moving soundlessly until they met back up at the steps, giving all-clear signals. No one was on the first floor.

  As they ascended the stairs, Josie heard the sound of voices—two, from what she could gather. Noah must have thought the same, lifting his hand to signal with his index and middle fingers—two perpetrators—then he pointed down the hall toward the last door, Josie’s bedroom, where a sliver of light outlined the doorframe.

  The voices coming from within were male. “Yo, is he coming back or what?”

  “Nah, he said he got what he needed. We’ll just mess this shit up real good and get going. He said this bitch ain’t ever home anyway.”

  There were three empty rooms between them and the master bedroom—the bathroom, the guest bedroom, and a room full of surveillance equipment Josie used as a home office. Stealthily they checked each of the rooms with flashlights, but each one was dark and empty. Finally Noah stopped outside of Josie’s bedroom, and the rest of them stilled behind him. Inside her chest, Josie’s heart took two extra beats. Josie gave the hand signal for go, and then they were through the door with a bang, weapons panning the room, voices hollering, “Freeze! Police! Hands up! Get down on the ground!”

  Two teenage boys in sweatpants and hoodies froze, dumbstruck. One of them stood on top of her bed, a can of red spray paint in one hand. On the wall above her headboard he had sprayed the letters S, L, and U. Josie guessed the last letter was probably a T. Across from him, the other boy had been yanking drawers out of her dresser and dumping the contents all over the floor. He immediately threw his hands up. The other boy dropped the can in his hand and made to jump down from the bed, only to fall face-first onto the carpet. Within seconds, the uniformed officers had both of them cuffed and ready to be transported to the station. Both teens were read their rights, then patted down, but they had none of Josie’s personal property on them.

  “Yo, dude,” Spray Paint said as the officer pushed him into the hallway. “I hit my head. Hey, be careful all right?”

  Her officer said nothing, and the sound of the other boy telling his friend to shut the hell up faded as they were both led out of the house. Josie stood, gun at her side, eyes roving every inch of the room. The word WHORE had been spray-painted on one of the other walls. Most of her pillows had been slashed open, their stuffing pulled out and tossed all over the room. Clothes had been pulled from her closet and strewn everywhere. Muddy boot prints punctuated her clean carpet and her bedspread. The mirror over her dresser was shattered. Her nightstands were overturned, the lamps broken but still lit, casting strange shadows across the destruction. Her jewelry box lay in pieces on the dresser-top.

  She strode over and sifted through the remains. “Oh God,” she whispered.

  Noah put a hand on her shoulder. “Boss,” he said, “I think we should have the evidence response team come through. You heard what I heard in the hall, right? There was someone else working with them. You can come through after and figure out if anything is missing.”

  “My jewelry,” she said. She didn’t have much, but she had amassed a small collection of earrings, necklaces, and bracelets over the years. Gifts from her grandmother, Ray, and her fiancé Luke when they’d been together. Pieces she’d bought for herself for different events. Most of it she could live without, but there were three pieces of jewelry she owned that she really cared about.

  “My wedding ring,” she croaked. “My engagement ring from Luke and the diamond pendant Ray gave me when we graduated from high school. They’re gone.”

  She couldn’t stop staring at the dark wooden shards spread across her dresser. The jewelry box hadn’t even had a lock on it. There was no need to break it, but they had anyway. Why? Why so much destruction? The rest of the house was untouched. Why had they destroyed the room in her home that she loved most? What had they done with her jewelry?

  “Those little bastards,” Josie blurted. Finally, she looked at Noah.

  His face wore an uncomfortable expression. He wanted to comfort her, she realized, but he had a job to do, and he knew she would want him to do his job first. She holstered her weapon but remained in place, staring at Noah, focusing on his face instead of the detritus around her. Gently, he took hold of her elbow and guided her out of the room.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Boss,” he said as they moved down the stairs, his mouth so close to her ear she could feel his breath tickling her hair. “I promise.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  JOSIE – TEN YEARS OLD

  Their steps ech
oed loudly in the halls of the county courthouse. Josie walked behind her mother, cold air flying up the stiff brown skirt her mother had made her wear. She stopped at a water fountain and gulped greedily before her mother could slap her and hiss at her to hurry up. But it didn’t come. They were in public, in the courthouse where things were formal and official, and everything was cold and grown-ups stared at you like you were a bug.

  “JoJo,” her mother said sweetly, smiling. “Let’s go, hon.”

  Josie knew she was the only person who could hear the edge beneath her mother’s words. Hanging her head, she followed her mother to a set of large, wooden doors that opened into a huge, shelf-lined room filled with more books than Josie had ever seen. A massive desk sat in the middle of it. In front of the desk, several chairs were lined up. They were divided into sides, and Josie’s gram sat in one of them, a man Josie didn’t recognize beside her.

  Josie followed her mother deeper into the room. Her gram reached over and squeezed Josie in a hug while Josie’s mother glared. “Remember what I said,” Lisette whispered into her ear before releasing her.

  A tiny pinprick of fear spiked Josie’s chest. How could she forget?

  Her grandmother had decided months ago—after missing the skating party—that she would simply sue Josie’s mother for custody. There had been endless meetings and appointments and lots of stuffy grown-ups asking Josie all kinds of questions she knew she couldn’t answer honestly. She’d even had to meet with a psychologist. Of course, what none of them understood was that every time Josie was forced to talk to them, it made her mother more enraged and crueler than usual behind closed doors. She was careful not to leave any marks on Josie’s body, but she didn’t have to—she knew how much the closet terrified her daughter. The only reason Josie had coped with the increasingly long periods of time in the dark cell was the backpack Ray had given her to hide inside the closet. It contained a flashlight, extra batteries, a dog-eared copy of the first Harry Potter book, a Stretch Armstrong doll, and a couple of granola bars. As she waited out the endless nights, shivering in her nightdress from fear and cold, Josie liked to imagine that Ray was there with her.

  The only good thing to come out of the custody battle was that Josie’s mother was forced to let her spend short periods of time with Lisette. It was purely strategic on her mother’s part. Josie had overheard her mother’s lawyer say that in her petition to the court, Lisette had painted her mother as unreasonable, mean-spirited, and spiteful. He said that allowing Josie to spend time with her grandmother would go a long way toward debunking Lisette’s claims. But Josie’s time with Lisette was mostly spent being grilled over what her mother did to her. When Lisette realized that Josie would never confess the things that her mother did, she spent the rest of their time together trying to convince Josie that if she told the truth, she would get to live with Lisette forever.

  “Josie, this is very important,” she had said. “You have to tell the judge what your mother does to you. If you are very brave and tell the truth, your whole life will change. I know you’re scared of her, but I’m telling you that you don’t need to be. I can help you. I can protect you, but I can only do that if you tell the truth.”

  But Josie knew that no one could help her. Not her father from heaven, not her grandmother, not the teachers at school or the psychologist she had seen, and certainly not the judge who swept into the room and started shaking everyone’s hands.

  Josie sat beside her mother, her legs swinging nervously. She reached into the pocket of the cardigan she wore and felt for the Disney figurine Ray had given her. He had pressed the miniature fairy godmother from Sleeping Beauty into her hand the day before when they met in the woods between their houses. “Keep it,” he told her. “Maybe a real fairy godmother will come and save you.”

  Now her fist closed around it, and she concentrated hard on the pain in her palm instead of the grown-ups all around her, talking in serious voices about her as though she wasn’t there. Nobody had any power over her mother. She may only be ten, but Josie wasn’t stupid.

  “Miss Matson,” the judge said. “Josie Matson.”

  Her mother leaned in and lightly touched Josie’s arm, her hissed threat ringing in Josie’s ears: “You be a good girl now, JoJo. Go on.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Josie sat in the viewing room at the station house, staring at a large, closed-circuit television that showed one of the teenage boys they had arrested at her house. A mug of coffee sat untouched on the table beside her. She felt numb and exhausted. Her mind kept returning to the havoc they had wreaked on her bedroom, the window they had broken, the thought that strangers had been inside her home and violated her sanctuary. The door creaked open, and Gretchen stepped through it with a newly minted manila file in her hands.

  “This one is Austin Jacks. Nineteen. Graduated from Denton East last year, hasn’t been doing a hell of a lot since then. Works part-time at a fast-food place. Got picked up for possession of drug paraphernalia last year, but the charges didn’t stick.”

  “No connection to Lloyd Todd?”

  “Not that we can find.”

  “What about the other one?” Josie asked.

  “Ian Colton. He’s a minor. Sixteen. He’s in holding till his parents get here. He’s a junior at Denton East. No record. No arrests. He works with Jacks. That’s how they know one another.”

  Josie doubted that they’d be able to get to Ian Colton. The moment his parents showed up, they’d likely demand a lawyer, who would agree to let Josie’s team question the boy but then instruct him not to answer any questions. She saw it all the time.

  “Our best bet to find out who else was involved is this kid,” Josie told Gretchen, motioning to the screen. On it, Austin Jacks fidgeted in his seat. His heels bobbed up and down, drumming an uneasy beat on the floor. His teeth tugged at a hangnail on his thumb while his other hand rubbed the top of his head, brushing back and forth over blond hair that was short like peach fuzz.

  “Noah’s going in,” Gretchen responded, pulling out a chair and sitting down beside Josie.

  They watched the boy squirm, his movements growing more frenetic by the second until Noah sauntered in fifteen minutes later. He slid a crushed pack of cigarettes across the table, and Austin snatched them up. A lighter appeared in Noah’s hand, and he gave the boy a light before pocketing it and leaning against the wall. Austin sucked in several hungry lungfuls of smoke, closing his eyes briefly to enjoy it. The fevered movements slowed a little, but not much.

  Noah read him his rights again, and Austin acknowledged that he understood them. He didn’t ask for a lawyer, so Noah plunged right in. “Do you know whose house you were arrested in earlier tonight?”

  The boy shrugged. “Don’t know. Some police lady. Don’t care.”

  “Why were you there?”

  He blew smoke in Noah’s direction. “Why do you think? It don’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.”

  “You and Ian were there to rob this police lady, and yet neither one of you had any of her personal property on you when we arrested you. How do you explain that?”

  His gaze flicked around the room, looking anywhere but at Noah. “You caught us before we could take anything, man.”

  Noah stepped toward the table. “Her jewelry is missing.”

  Austin’s knees bounced beneath the table. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Who else was there with you?”

  Another shrug. “You know who was there—you got him too.”

  Noah placed both palms on the table and leaned in toward the kid. “We know there was a third guy, Austin. He came and took the jewelry and left you and Ian behind to wreck the place. Who is he?”

  A tenuous smile flitted across Austin’s face and disappeared. He put out his cigarette in the ashtray Noah had provided and balled his hands up in his lap. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Noah sighed. “Fine. We’ll get prints from the kitchen win
dow. It won’t take long to run them. Unless Ian tells us first and saves us the time. That kid is scared shitless. I’m sure him and his parents will be interested in the reduced charges the DA is offering for information on the third perp—and for throwing your sorry ass under the bus.”

  Without hesitation, Noah turned and left the room, leaving Austin’s mouth hanging open, his skin paling beneath his acne.

  Ten minutes later he stood beneath the eye of the camera, waving both arms. “Hey man, come back,” he called. “I got something to say.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  JOSIE – TEN YEARS OLD

  Josie stood frozen in place until finally a hand pushed her closer to the judge’s desk, and her feet shuffled forward until she was nearly touching its edge.

  “Young lady,” he said, “I’m going to ask you some questions now, and I want you to answer them as truthfully as possible, do you understand?”

  Josie nodded. She felt her mother’s eyes on her like a white-hot laser beam. Her mother had been smiling for the benefit of the other grown-ups, but Josie had seen the glint in her eye; they both knew that no matter what she told the judge, Josie was going home with her mother. Josie also knew that what she said right now could either make things better for herself, or much worse.