Save Her Soul: An absolutely unputdownable crime thriller and mystery novel (Detective Josie Quinn Book 9)

by Lisa Regan

  “Body.”

  He gave a frustrated sigh. “Tarp,” he emphasized. “You don’t actually know that it’s a body. My point is that you put yourself in a position where we might have had to rescue you, which would have put the rest of us at risk. The city’s resources are already stretched thin.”

  Josie narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t have to tell me how bad things are, Hayes. When’s the last time the emergency department used city detectives to do water rescues?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Listen, Hayes,” she said. “You’re an EMS guy, right?”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “I’m a paramedic. I’m also certified in swiftwater rescue.”

  She lifted her chin toward the patch on his dry suit. “You work for Dalrymple Township, is that right?”

  He said nothing, glowering at her.

  “Dalrymple Township isn’t even a part of the city of Denton. You’re volunteering here, which we appreciate. But I work for the city police department,” she added. “As you know.”

  “I know exactly who you are,” he spat, droplets of rain cascading down his face. “Don’t think that your celebrity is going to get you out of this.”

  Josie took a step toward him and he backed away. “Out of what?”

  “You endangered lives today by going after that tarp.”

  She poked his chest. “Take it up with my Chief, but know this: I don’t leave people behind. Dead or alive. Whoever is in that tarp was someone’s child. Maybe someone’s sibling or parent. Would you want someone you loved wrapped in a tarp and buried under a house?”

  Again, he remained silent. His eyes bore down on her, and he pressed his lips into a thin line.

  “I didn’t think so,” Josie said. “Your job is rescuing people, mine is handling dead bodies. How about you stick to your job and let me do mine? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get to the morgue.”

  Three

  “What an asshole,” Josie groused as she and Gretchen drove to the city morgue, the tarp-covered remains in the back hatch of Josie’s new Ford Escape. The odor of damp earth filled the car, overpowering the new car smell Josie had enjoyed for the past week. On top of that, her seatback was becoming increasingly soaked with every minute that passed. She and Gretchen had changed out of their dry suits at the park and stowed their gear on the backseat floor. Josie had done her best to dry her hair before getting into the vehicle, but she’d only found one small towel in the backseat. Normally, she used it to wipe the mud from her Boston Terrier, Trout’s paws after taking him for a hike in the woods.

  “Boss,” Gretchen said as she scrolled through her phone. “That guy had a point.”

  “What?” Josie said.

  Gretchen tapped against her phone screen. “I’m going to text Hummel and tell him to get Officer Chan and meet us at the morgue with some equipment. I’ll have him call the morgue and make sure Dr. Feist is waiting for us.”

  Josie stopped for a red light and stared at her colleague. “Gretchen,” she said.

  Gretchen looked up.

  “What do you mean, he had a point?”

  Gretchen sighed and put her phone into her pocket. “Don’t take this the wrong way—”

  Josie cut her off. “Whenever someone says ‘don’t take this the wrong way,’ I know I’m going to take it the ‘wrong’ way.”

  Gretchen laughed. “Listen, since last month, since your sister’s case, you’ve been a little off.”

  Josie felt anger bubble up inside immediately. Defensiveness. She bit back a sharp reply, waiting for Gretchen to elaborate. The light changed and Josie punched the gas, heading up the long hill that was home to Denton Memorial Hospital.

  Gretchen said, “You’ve been a little brash. Quicker to anger. A little more…”

  She drifted off and with a sinking feeling, Josie knew the word she was avoiding. “Emotional,” she supplied.

  Gretchen said nothing.

  “I haven’t been—” Josie began but stopped herself. Gretchen was right. A month earlier her twin sister, Trinity Payne, had been abducted, and Josie had taken point on the case. It had been especially complicated because of Josie and Trinity’s relationship. They hadn’t even known they were sisters until a few years earlier. For Trinity, being reunited was a happy occasion, but for Josie, it came with the realization that her entire life had been a lie, and that the trauma she had endured as a child could have been avoided. Trinity’s kidnapping had stirred up old feelings of grief, loss, and rage for Josie. She’d thought that after they found Trinity alive, those feelings would go away, but they hadn’t. It had helped to have Trinity near, but two weeks earlier she had had to return to New York City to try and salvage her journalism career. Josie missed her terribly. All of it was causing a swell of confusing, difficult emotions. She thought she’d just been tamping them down the way she always did. Apparently not very well.

  Gretchen said, “You’ve been short with the team lately. You snapped on that drunk and disorderly we brought in the other night, and last week, in the bathroom, I heard you crying.”

  Josie kept her eyes on the road. She couldn’t deny any of it, as much as she wanted to. Still, the words came, as if of their own volition. “I wasn’t crying in the bathroom. I don’t cry, I—”

  She stopped. What did she do when she was upset or stressed or anxious? When her demons threatened to overtake her? She used to drink until she blacked out. But she had stopped doing that two years ago because it didn’t lead to anything good.

  “Right,” Gretchen said. “You were trying not to cry, then.”

  Josie’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “That was the day that drunk driver crashed into a tree. I did the death notification. He had a—a six-year-old daughter.”

  Still, it wasn’t like Josie to break down. She’d given dozens of death notifications in her career. The number of grieving children she’d comforted, as well as the children she’d helped rescue from abusive situations, was in the hundreds. She had always maintained a professional demeanor even when every cell in her body yearned to break down and weep. Compartmentalizing was one of her greatest skills. What was happening to her? Why had that case gotten to her? Why was everything getting to her lately?

  “Today,” Gretchen went on, “you put the rest of us at risk by going back into the water. Surely you realize that. I just think that under more normal circumstances, you would have thought more clinically about the situation and let that body go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Josie said without looking at Gretchen.

  They crested the hill, the large brick edifice coming into view. The city morgue was located in the basement of the hospital. Josie didn’t know whether or not the city planners had taken flooding into account when they decided to build the hospital there, but the tall brick building sat high enough over the city that it was well out of the danger zone.

  “Boss, I’m always on your side,” Gretchen added. “I’m just saying I’ve noticed a difference in you lately. Hayes got frustrated today. His job is to rescue people. It was tense out there. Everyone’s on edge. We’re all just trying to save lives.”

  “I know,” Josie said.

  “Anyway,” Gretchen said. “Forget about that guy, okay? What are the odds you’ll have to work with him again—or even see him again after these floods are over? Right now, we’ve got work to do.”

  Josie sighed. She swiped a lock of wet hair out of her face. She needed coffee. “Good point,” she conceded.

  They pulled up to the Emergency entrance and Gretchen went inside to secure a gurney. Ten minutes later, they were pushing their charge down the dank, gray hallways in the bowels of the hospital toward Dr. Anya Feist’s large exam room. The doors to the morgue slid open as they approached. Dr. Feist and her assistant, Ramon, stood on either side, ushering them through.

  “I just got a call,” Dr. Feist said, “Your Evidence Response Team should be here any minute.”

  “Great,” Jos
ie replied.

  Ramon moved the gurney into the middle of the room, and he and Dr. Feist transferred the tarp onto one of her stainless-steel exam tables with a movable overhead light. “We’ll wait for the ERT so they can take photos,” she said. She looked over toward Josie and smiled as she tucked her shoulder-length silver-blonde hair up into a skull cap. “You had quite the morning, didn’t you? Exciting stuff. I saw the whole thing on the news. They streamed it live.”

  “Oh jeez,” Josie muttered. Great. Now her humiliation was on video, preserved for the ages. Another thought occurred to her, making her chest feel tight—not only had she jumped back into the water and put the team in danger, but just about anything could have gone wrong on live television.

  Gretchen said, “Good thing it was a successful rescue and recovery.”

  Relief flooded Josie when Officer Hummel and his ERT colleague, Officer Jenny Chan, walked in, stopping the conversation in its tracks. All of them gathered around the table that held the rolled tarp. Hummel and Chan unpacked their equipment. Gretchen took her notebook and pen out, ready to take notes as they worked. Chan snapped photographs while Hummel took measurements and notes of his own.

  Once they were finished, Dr. Feist asked, “How do you want to do this? Should we cut it open?”

  Hummel studied the tarp and looked at Chan. Hummel had been the unofficial head of Denton’s ERT for the past five years, but Chan had come from a bigger department and had seen a lot more crime scenes. She turned to Josie. “How long was this in the water?”

  “A few minutes?”

  Gretchen said, “Maybe ten minutes. Once it dislodged, the boss got it and we hauled it into the boat pretty fast.”

  “There’s a slim chance that we could get prints from the tarp and possibly the tape since it wasn’t in the water very long,” Chan told Hummel. “We’d have to use cyanoacrylate fuming.”

  From the corner of the room, Ramon asked, “I’m sorry, what?”

  Josie said, “It’s a way of lifting latent fingerprints by using superglue, basically. Fumes react with the cyanoacrylate to make this sticky white film on surfaces so you can see the prints and photograph them.”

  “It works on non-porous surfaces, typically,” Chan cut in. “But we still might get something from the tarp or tape, or even both.”

  “Right,” Josie agreed. “It would be worth a try.”

  Gretchen said, “This was buried. We have no idea how long it was under that house. It could be years. You think you could still get prints?”

  Chan shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a slim chance, but Detective Quinn is right. It’s worth trying.”

  Hummel said, “Then we’ll try carefully peeling the tape and unraveling the tarp instead of cutting.”

  No one protested. Josie and Gretchen stood back and watched while Hummel, Chan, Dr. Feist, and Ramon went to work, trying to keep as much of the tape and tarp intact as they could. Beneath the tarp was a second tarp and more tape. Ramon pushed the gurney flush against the side of the autopsy table as they began removing the next layer. A musty smell tinged with the scent of decay filled the room as they got closer to revealing the body inside the tarps. Finally, after an hour of painstaking work, the tape and tarps were carefully bagged and marked, and Dr. Feist and Ramon arranged the body on the autopsy table.

  Josie and Gretchen stepped forward to take a closer look. Josie’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart did a little flutter. Hummel took out his camera and started snapping photos.

  Gretchen said, “Is she—is she mummified?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Feist answered softly, surveying the body.

  Josie’s gaze panned the tableau from top to bottom. She had expected skeletal remains given how deeply the body had been buried beneath the foundation of Mrs. Bassett’s house. While much of the skeleton was evident, its bones were held together by taut blackened vestiges of skin and sinew. Long brown hair tangled near the scalp, the skin slippage having kinked it to the side. Blackened bony fingers curled from the sleeves of a jacket, still intact, now brown and faded where it had once been blue and gold, showing the Denton East High School mascot—a blue jay—on its left breast, and the letters ‘D’ and ‘E’ embroidered on the right breast. Denim jeans clothed the legs and the shriveled feet were still encased in a pair of silver ballet flats. Both the jeans and the flats had turned brown from decomposition. A wave of sadness crashed over Josie.

  Dr. Feist said, “Wrapped as thoroughly and tightly as she was in plastic immediately after death, then buried beneath a house, she wouldn’t have been exposed to oxygen. The conditions would not have allowed for insects and bacteria to use the body as a host. The normal decomp process would have been stunted.”

  Gretchen stopped taking notes and pointed the cap of her pen to the jacket. “It looks like she might be a teenage girl.”

  “Yes,” Josie breathed. “Looks like she went to the same high school as me.”

  “Is there a year number?” Gretchen asked.

  Hummel continued to take photos as Chan used gloved hands to probe the sleeves of the jacket. “Here’s a patch for state baseball champions for…” She brushed some dirt away from the patch. “The year was 2004.”

  Josie felt as though something was crawling up her neck into her hair. She brushed a palm down over her scalp.

  Gretchen looked at Josie. “Was that the year you graduated?”

  “No, I graduated in 2005; 2004 would have been my junior year.”

  Chan came over to Josie’s side and probed at that sleeve. “There’s a number here. Twenty-seven.”

  The crawling sensation continued, working its way all over her skull. She clamped both hands over her head.

  “Boss,” Gretchen said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Josie said. “What else do you see, Chan?”

  Chan leaned in. “It’s another patch. A baseball with flames behind it.”

  Now Josie felt as though someone had poured cold water over her head. She tried not to flinch. She remembered the baseball state championship during her junior year. She’d been there when they won. Cheered them on. She remembered the blue and gold jackets the team received that year. Each jacket had the player’s number on one sleeve and the championship patch on the other. Only one player had had the patch with the flaming baseball. He had died in Josie’s arms five years ago during the missing girls’ case. It couldn’t be his jacket, could it? But how? How had it gotten there? And who was the girl who had been buried in it?

  Dr. Feist said, “I’ll confirm her age range once I do a full autopsy. The first order of business will be to get these clothes off her and take some x-rays.”

  Gretchen turned to Josie. “Did any girls you went to high school with go missing?”

  “No,” Josie said. “And the missing girls’ case turned up all the girls who had been missing in the town—the county—going back decades.”

  Gretchen frowned.

  Josie felt lightheaded. “Can we—can we get back to the station? Maybe we can run down some information while Dr. Feist does the autopsy.”

  Gretchen didn’t question her. She put her notebook and pen away and thanked Dr. Feist and Ramon. “Good idea, boss. We’ll talk to the owner of the house, and maybe we can get some yearbooks from Denton East.”

  Hummel said, “Chan and I will stay and get the clothing and anything else relevant tagged and bagged.”

  “Great,” Josie said. “Hummel, can you upload the photos of the clothing to the file as soon as possible?”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Four

  Josie flinched at the pungent, earthy odor that lingered inside her vehicle as she climbed into the driver’s seat. She couldn’t wait to get home and take a hot shower even though it would be her second one before lunch time. Before she could turn the keys in the ignition, Gretchen placed a hand on her arm.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Josie’s shoulders slumped. She looked at Gr
etchen and opened her mouth to speak and then closed it. Confusion clouded her mind. How could she explain the jacket? Was it the same one? It had to be. There was no other explanation. Her mind reached back to high school, sifting through memories.

  “Boss,” Gretchen said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  I did, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Gretchen said, “Start with the facts. With what you know.”

  Josie gave Gretchen a pained smile. That made it easier. “You remember Ray? Well, I know you never met him, but you do remember who he is, right?”

  “Your late husband,” Gretchen answered easily. “Of course.”

  Josie nodded. She looked out the windshield at the valley below the hospital. Where once the lovely brick buildings of the city’s main street had stood tall, now they were mired in murky brown water. “We were high school sweethearts,” she said. “We met when we were nine. I lived in a trailer park, and he lived in the development behind the trailer park. We used to meet in the woods between the park and the back of his house. Our freshman year, the friendship turned into more. We were together all of high school, including junior year. That year Ray was a pitcher for the baseball team.”

  Gretchen said, “The very team that won the state championship.”

  “Yes,” Josie said. “He was very good. He was being scouted. He actually went to college on a baseball scholarship. He was scouted there as well, but he only ever wanted to be a police officer, so he never pursued it.”

  “He was on the team. They had letter jackets, and when they won the station championship that year, they were given special championship patches,” Gretchen said. “And his number was twenty-seven, wasn’t it?”

  Josie nodded. Below them, she counted three rescue boats buzzing through the submerged streets of the city.

  “The blazing baseball patch?”

  “Ray got into a fight—over me—he was defending me. It was something stupid. He was a hothead. Hell, so was I. He tore his jacket. He’d just gotten the championship patch put on. He was pretty upset. Those jackets were expensive to have replaced completely. But his mom said it was no problem for her to sew it up. She did but it looked terrible, so she found the blazing baseball patch to sew over top of the tear. She said—”