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

by Lisa Regan

  “We don’t like to violate the privacy of our guests.”

  “I’m not asking you to violate the privacy of one of your guests, I’m asking you to check and make sure she’s not dead or injured inside that room. What is hotel policy, by the way, if you believe one of your guests may be in imminent danger? How many hours are you required to wait before you check inside the room?”

  His fake smile never faltered and yet, somehow, he managed to glare at her. “Is it the Denton Police Department policy to send the chief of police to do welfare checks?” he asked.

  Josie leaned her elbows onto the counter, moving closer to him. “Trinity Payne is a close personal friend of mine. She’s also a bit of a celebrity, as I’m sure you know. If she is, in fact, injured or dead inside her room, do you really want to bear the scrutiny of nationwide press because you refused to allow the police to do a proper welfare check when they made it clear to you that Ms. Payne may be in danger?” Josie read off an invisible headline above his head. “Concierge refuses welfare check. National news reporter, Trinity Payne, dies. I can see that going viral.”

  With a sigh, he tapped the keyboard of the computer. Then a keycard appeared in his hand. “Let me have my associate take you to her room.” He made a phone call, and five minutes later a different man led Josie back to room 227.

  Wordlessly, he let her into the room and stood by the door with his hands clasped at his waist while he watched Josie nose around. The bathroom and closet were clear. Trinity wasn’t there. Josie felt both reassured and anxious. She hadn’t really expected to find Trinity’s dead body in the hotel room, but she was relieved all the same. But if Trinity wasn’t in her hotel room, then where the hell was she? Where had she gone after killing Heinrich?

  “Are you finished?” the man asked.

  “Just a second,” Josie said. Trinity’s open suitcase lay across the bed. On the small circular table in the corner of the room was a closed laptop, a Gucci purse, a set of car keys, and Trinity’s phone. The sight of her phone sent a prickle up Josie’s spine. Trinity never went anywhere without her phone. Josie pulled a pair of latex gloves from her jacket pocket—even as chief, the habit had never died—snapped them on, and picked up Trinity’s phone, pressing its power button to bring up the lock screen. It asked for a password.

  Josie had no idea what Trinity might use as her password, and she couldn’t spend much time trying to think of it. Tara was clearly focused on Josie for Heinrich’s murder, but Josie knew that once she let Gretchen and Noah out of her sight, their first line of inquiry would be Trinity Payne. They’d be on her heels any moment. Gretchen would know how to get the phone unlocked, Josie was certain.

  Josie turned to the man. “I’m going to need to see your CCTV of this hallway, the entrance, and possibly the parking lot.”

  The man looked bored. “Let’s go back to the lobby,” he told her. “I’ll call the manager.”

  The manager, a balding blond man in his forties, was both more personable and more helpful than both the concierge and the man who had let Josie into Trinity’s room. He didn’t ask for her credentials either, and within moments of meeting him, Josie understood why. “I saw you on TV after the Lloyd Todd arrest,” he said. “You’re much more attractive in person—and I don’t mean that in an inappropriate way.”

  Josie smiled uncomfortably as they stood behind one of his staff members in the CCTV room behind the lobby, waiting for the young woman to pull up any footage of Trinity she could find. The manager prattled on, “Anyway, I just wanted to personally thank you. My son has been hooked on drugs for years now. We haven’t been able to help him. Turns out his dealer was one of Todd’s guys. Soon as those guys were arrested, my son went into rehab.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Josie said.

  “Who knows if he’ll stick with it, but we’re very hopeful. You know, since the day he was born, he was always giving us trouble.”

  Before the manager could launch into the story, the employee seated in front of the screens said, “Here you go—she left her room yesterday afternoon around two p.m.”

  On screen, they watched Trinity emerge from her hotel room wearing the same clothes she had on in the Heinrich surveillance. She held nothing in her hands as she rushed down the hallway. At the elevators, she pressed the down button frantically and was through the doors before they were even fully open.

  “Here she is in the lobby,” the woman said, pointing to a different screen. Both Josie and the hotel manager watched as Trinity exited the elevator in the lobby. She made a beeline for the door, walking so fast she was nearly jogging.

  “And here she is in the parking lot,” the employee added. She indicated three of the other screens, and they watched Trinity make her way through the parking lot to the outermost edge of the camera’s view, where she walked rapidly off-screen. “I’m afraid that’s it,” the woman said. “That’s as far as these cameras go.”

  Where had Trinity been rushing off to without her phone or car keys or even a purse?

  “What about the rest of the day and night? Can you see if she ever came back to her room?” Josie asked.

  The employee turned her attention to the screen showing the hallway outside of Trinity’s room, fast-forwarding the footage until it caught up to present time. Trinity never returned.

  Josie turned to the hotel manager. “Thank you for your help,” she said. “My colleagues will be back to collect some evidence. If you hear from Ms. Payne, please call the police department immediately.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  As Josie drove out of the parking lot in Sergeant Lamay’s ten-year-old Camry, she passed Gretchen with a patrol car trailing behind her. Neither Gretchen nor the patrol officer even glanced her way.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  From the Eudora, Josie drove to Heinrich’s auto body shop, but the entire building was cordoned off with police caution tape, and a patrol car sat outside. Of course. Tara knew Josie’s first instinct would be to go to the scene herself and investigate. She pulled away and drove through town, pushing back the strange mixture of relief and emptiness that had come over her since she’d heard about Heinrich’s death. She tried to figure out her next move. She kept coming back to Trinity. The reporter had left her hotel room willingly. There was no one with her, no gun to her head. She must have gone to meet with Lila, and from there, stolen Josie’s car, driven to Heinrich’s, murdered him, and then left—alone—to return Josie’s Escape to the street outside Noah’s house.

  But if Trinity had driven the Escape back to Noah’s house, why was the seat pushed all the way back? Trinity was the same size as Josie. She would have no reason to adjust the seat. Which meant that somewhere between the body shop and Noah’s house, Trinity had met up with someone and turned Josie’s car over to them. Someone taller than both Trinity and Lila. Lila was even shorter than Josie, so she wouldn’t have pushed the seat back.

  So, who had been in her car?

  Josie pulled over and took her phone out. She started to text Gretchen about the car but then realized that her Evidence Response Team would print the car anyway. If the person who had driven it had left prints, they would be found. Josie put her phone away and pulled back into traffic, the need to keep moving consuming her.

  Where was Trinity now? she wondered. Was she hiding because she had killed a man, or was Lila holding her somewhere? Josie had no doubt that Lila was behind Heinrich’s murder somehow, and that Trinity had gone to meet Lila because Lila had promised her a story. But what would make Trinity kill a man so willingly? Josie thought about what it would take for her to throw away her life and career and commit a murder. What would make her desperate enough to do that? Not a threat against her own life. She’d rather die than go down and lose everything. But would she trade her career and her morality to save someone she loved? It was then that Josie realized she didn’t know Trinity at all. She knew nothing personal about the reporter, her life, her family, her loved ones.


  Josie turned the vehicle around and headed back to her home. She hadn’t been inside for days, and the rooms had an empty, sterile feeling to them—as if they weren’t really hers anymore. She hoped that one day it would feel like a safe place again. But until then, she would startle at every little noise, like she did when she was in the spare room booting up her laptop and her neighbor’s garage door screeched open. Bringing her laptop down to the kitchen, she made herself a pot of coffee, still unable to shake the feeling that she was in someone else’s space now.

  As the coffee brewed, Josie pulled up her internet browser and typed in Trinity Payne’s name. The search returned more results than Josie could possibly sift through in a few hours, or even a week, so she typed in Trinity Payne biography, and that narrowed it down somewhat. She clicked through several sites, turning up the same information again and again. She had gone to NYU, where she’d graduated summa cum laude with a degree in journalism. She started out as a roving reporter for WYEP in the Denton area, then she moved quickly to the network’s morning magazine show in New York City, working as a national correspondent until a source gave her a bad story. Her fall from grace had landed her back at WYEP, until she had helped Josie crack the missing girls case two years earlier, and the network wanted her back on the national stage.

  Josie knew all this. She clicked through the sites faster, skimming over repeat information, looking for something more. Finally, on an NYU alumni website, she found a more detailed article about Trinity, written three months earlier—

  NYU Journalism Alum Rises from Tragedy to Network Royalty.

  The first paragraph read:

  Network darling Trinity Payne is no stranger to controversy. Her travails with bad sources as well as her recent rise to fame helping to crack some of the biggest criminal cases in the history of her home state are well documented. What most people don’t know about Payne is that her life was inexorably marked by tragedy when she was only a few weeks old. Her young parents were both employed by pharmaceutical giant Quarmark—Christian as the head of marketing and Shannon as a rising chemist. With their careers on track, their next goal was to settle down and have children. They found their dream home quickly—a two-story Tudor-style mansion in a small town named Callowhill. They got pregnant on the first try—with twins. “They were classic overachievers,” Trinity relates, smiling.

  “Twins?” Josie muttered. She had no idea that Trinity had a twin. She had known that Trinity grew up in Callowhill. It was a small town a couple of hours away, on the other side of Bellewood. In fact, the county seat was just about equidistant from both Denton and Callowhill. Josie stood and hastily prepared a cup of coffee for herself, returning to her laptop.

  While many first-time parents might have been intimidated by twins, Shannon Payne says she and her husband never once worried how they would handle two newborns. “The day our girls were born was one of the happiest days of our lives.”

  The day our girls were born. Something gnawed at the back of Josie’s mind, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  She read on:

  Tragedy struck just a few weeks after the twins were born when a house fire destroyed their four-bedroom home. Their nanny was home with the twins at the time, but was only able to save one of them—Trinity.

  “My God,” Josie said.

  She skimmed over the rest of it—how the Paynes had never truly recovered from the loss of Trinity’s twin sister, and how Trinity was glad she didn’t remember anything because it would be too painful. A shiver ran down Josie’s spine. She didn’t know how a person could ever recover from the loss of a child. There was no doubt in her mind that it was an open wound that Shannon and Christian Payne would take to their graves. Josie felt a wave of sympathy for Trinity, and yet, she couldn’t help but wonder if Trinity would have turned out less mercenary had she had the influence of a sister. Now they would never know.

  She skimmed the rest of the article, but the only other new piece of information was that Trinity had a much younger brother called Patrick, who was still in high school in Callowhill. There was no mention of any love interests. Trinity didn’t strike Josie as the type who would have time for a boyfriend. Josie had what she needed though—the names of Trinity’s immediate family members. She opened a new tab and searched for a phone number for the Payne family in Callowhill. It was unlisted. Of course, with a daughter as famous as Trinity, the Paynes wouldn’t want their number so easily accessible to the public.

  Josie had only been suspended for a few hours. It was quite possible that no one at Denton PD had revoked her access to the police databases. Logging in to one of them, Josie pumped her fist in the air as her credentials were accepted. She searched for Shannon Payne first, banking on the hope that the Paynes still had a landline because cell service was spotty in the more remote areas of Pennsylvania. Luck was with her today.

  Josie punched the number into her cell phone and listened to it ring eight times before the call went to voicemail, a female voice that sounded similar to Trinity’s urging her to leave a message. At the beep, Josie said, “This is Josie Quinn. I’m the chief of police in Denton. I’m calling about your daughter, Trinity. It is very important that you call me back as soon as you get this message.” She then left her number and hung up.

  As she went to close out the browser on her laptop, the last paragraph of the alumni magazine article caught Josie’s eye.

  When asked if the tragedy of her sister’s death has influenced her as a journalist, Payne smiles bravely, and a faraway look creeps into her eyes. “I think never knowing what really happened—who set the fire—will haunt my family forever and has definitely made me more diligent in my reporting. I will never stop until I have all the answers. It’s just something that’s in me.”

  Josie looked at her cell phone and, realizing she had nothing to do while she waited for the Paynes to call her back, she opened another tab, pulled up a search engine, and typed in Payne Callowhill house fire. There were results with Payne and Callowhill in them, and Callowhill and house fire, but none with all three terms. Of course, Josie knew that Trinity was around the same age as she was, and if the fire had taken place a few weeks after her birth, that meant it would have happened in the late ’80s—before the internet was a staple of daily existence. Back then, if the fire had made the news, it would have been in one of the county newspapers.

  She finished her coffee and set off for the library.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  The Denton Library was a two-floor stone building designed by a local architect in the early 1900s in neoclassical style, complete with a grand staircase and large Doric columns. Josie had always loved the building; she had spent many hours as a teenager tucked away among the shelves, studying in the reverent hush that presided over the massive collection of books. In the intervening years, much of the building had been modernized, upgrading from tables to computer stations and expanding into conference and activity rooms. Josie explained to one of the librarians what she was looking for, and the woman led her to a computer station on the second floor.

  “Would it be on microfiche?” Josie asked.

  “Oh no, dear. We moved all that old stuff onto this new database. It’s all computerized now. You’ll see. We’ve got the Denton Tribune, the Bellewood Record, and a couple of the other local papers from the county. When you put in your search terms, it will trawl all of those papers, or only the ones you designate.” The librarian reached across Josie and maneuvered the mouse until an image of an old Denton Tribune cover popped up next to a login bar. She typed in her credentials and gave Josie a short tour, showing how to do a search and narrow down the parameters.

  Once the librarian left her alone, Josie glanced at her cell before setting it on the desk next to her—still nothing from the Paynes. Getting to work, it only took a few minutes to find two results. One was from the Denton Tribune dated October 4, 1987. It was on the front page and offered no more than Trinity had disclosed in her alumni m
agazine interview. The Callowhill fire marshal was quoted as saying the cause of the fire was still under investigation. Josie saved it and moved on to the next article, which was dated December 17, 1987. This article was from the Bellewood Record, on page four, with a number of county items that weren’t newsworthy enough to warrant space on the front page. The headline read: Cause of Callowhill Fire Arson; Police Open Murder Investigation.

  Josie skimmed the article, learning that the nanny who had rescued Trinity had died of smoke inhalation after going back into the house to rescue the other twin, making the case a double homicide. There were no leads and no suspects. Only a few months after the fire, the case had grown cold. The article ended with a quote from Shannon Payne that punched a small barb of pain into Josie’s heart. “From the day my girls were born, I never left them alone. That was the only time I ever left them alone with the nanny. I can’t help thinking that if I had been there, we could have saved them both.”

  From the day my girls were born. The amorphous shadow in the back of Josie’s mind shifted, making itself known but not becoming clear. With a sigh, Josie saved the second article and went in search of the librarian to gain access to a printer.

  As the woman clicked on several drop-down menus and selected a nearby machine, Josie asked her, “Uh, do you have kids?”

  “I certainly do,” the librarian answered. “A girl and a boy. They’re grown now, of course. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, you looked familiar,” Josie lied. “I thought maybe I had gone to high school with your daughter at Denton East.”

  “Oh no, dear,” the librarian said, smiling at Josie. “I only just moved here from Pittsburgh a few years back. Maybe I just have one of those faces. Do you have children?”