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

by Lisa Regan

  Josie went to the closet to retrieve another bin. Gretchen said, “It’s strange that she kept these, don’t you think? She went into hiding, changed her name, but kept all this evidence of her former life.”

  Josie set the next bin onto the bed. “True, but by all accounts, she genuinely loved her daughter. We still don’t know what happened at the end of Beverly’s life and how much involvement Vera had with it. We know that Vera knew she was pregnant, but we have no idea how Vera felt about Beverly by that time. Vera returned to Denton after Beverly’s body was found. Why would she do that?”

  Gretchen didn’t answer. Josie lifted the lid of the bin and started pulling out items. There were yearbooks from Denton East High School. “I think these were Beverly’s things,” Josie said. There were some CDs from bands Josie had liked in high school, a few items of costume jewelry, and a handful of photos of Beverly with her best friends: Lana Rosetti and Kelly Ogden. There was a journal which gave Josie a jolt of hope until she opened it to find one unenthusiastic entry about how her “dumb mom” thought she should “write down her feelings” and then empty pages after that.

  “Guess Beverly wasn’t much for a diary,” Gretchen sighed.

  There were three paperback books, all of them well-used and dog-eared. One of them was False Memory by Dean Koontz. The other two were by V.C. Andrews, one titled Ruby and the other Pearl in the Mist. Josie remembered how the girls in her school loved to pass around the V.C. Andrews books, whispering about the scandalous stories within them. She opened Ruby and flipped through its pages. A photo fell out and fluttered to the bed. Gretchen picked it up as Josie fanned through the rest of the book to see if there was anything else pressed into it. There was nothing. She tossed the book back onto the bed and studied the photo. It was of a young man with blond hair. He wore a white T-shirt and jeans with a workbelt hung low around his waist. Something about the tension in his smile suggested he was uncomfortable being the object of the photo. Behind him was a wall with a blue tarp hung on it and next to that, a doorway that looked as though it led to a set of steps going downward. Josie said, “This is Ambrose, the guy from the basement waterproofing company that Beverly was flirting with.”

  Gretchen peered at it. “Yeah, that matches up with the driver’s license photo we have of him.”

  “This must be the house on Hempstead.” Josie pointed to the doorway. “He’s on his way down to the basement to work.”

  “Yeah,” Gretchen agreed. “And I’ll bet that tarp is one of the tarps the killer used to wrap up Beverly.” She took the photo from Josie and turned it over, but the back of it was blank.

  Josie picked up Pearl in the Mist and shook its pages. Only an old bookmark fell out. She set it down and grabbed False Memory, flipping the pages. Three photographs fell out. One by one, Josie lined them up so they could study them. One photo was of Vera and a man standing in a kitchen, a sink and stove behind them. The photo had caught them in profile, facing one another. The man was thin and a head taller than Vera. He looked as though he was in his mid-thirties from what Josie could tell. He had short brown hair and light stubble covering what they could see of his face. It looked as though the picture had been taken from behind a doorway, as half the photo showed a close-up of wooden molding. Josie pointed to it. “She took this without them knowing.”

  Gretchen nodded. “You think this was Vera’s drug dealer? Or her friend?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. We really have no way of knowing when this was taken, but it’s the only contact we can definitively establish between Vera and someone besides her co-workers and old clients.”

  They turned their attention to the next photo. Josie’s breath caught in her throat as her late husband’s face smiled up at her. It was Ray at sixteen years old in his baseball uniform. His cap was pushed up just a little, the way it used to get when he’d wipe the sweat from his forehead. He was leaning on a fence, his elbows hanging over it. Behind him, Denton East’s baseball field was filled with other players, out-of-focus blobs against the green grass.

  “It’s creased,” Gretchen said, pulling Josie from her memories of that time. She picked up the photo, and Josie saw where it had been folded. Gretchen turned the flap up and there was teenage Josie, only part of her face visible. She’d been standing on the opposite side of the fence to Ray, leaning in to give him a good luck kiss. There had been many games and many moments like this, Josie remembered. It had been an exciting season for the Denton East Blue Jays. Josie hadn’t missed a single game. The players had always come to that section of the fence before each game to receive a last round of well-wishes from family and other students. There was always a crowd there. What Josie had never realized was that Beverly had been somewhere behind her in that crowd, taking a photo of Ray without either of them knowing. Or had Ray known? Had he seen Beverly take the photo? Had he let her? Had something been going on between them after all?

  “Look at this one,” Gretchen said, setting the photo of Josie and Ray back onto the bed and picking up the last one.

  Josie shook her head slightly, trying to rid her mind of thoughts of Ray and Beverly so she could focus on the present. The photo was of a man lying in a bed. He was naked, on his side, facing away from the camera, and only his back from the shoulders down and a sliver of his hip had been captured. “Look,” Josie said, pointing to his left shoulder blade. “That’s a tattoo of a skull.”

  Gretchen leaned in, slipping on her reading glasses, and peered at the photo. “It sure is,” she said softly. She pointed to another part of the photo where one of the man’s hands reached back toward the camera, as though he was trying to shoo away the photographer. His hand was slightly out of focus, but Josie saw what Gretchen had picked up on.

  “That’s a wedding ring,” she said to Gretchen.

  “Yes.”

  “This is the guy she was seeing,” Josie said. “The one she was actually intimate with. No wonder she didn’t tell anyone about him. He was married.”

  They spent a few moments examining the picture again to see if there were any clues as to where it had been taken, but all they could glean from the background was that the man was in a bed with white sheets and it appeared to be daylight.

  Gretchen snapped a photo of the picture with her phone. “Not just that but she was a minor.”

  “He would have faced criminal charges if they were caught.”

  “His reputation and marriage would be destroyed as well, assuming he had a reputation he wanted to keep.”

  “Right,” Josie agreed. She sighed and looked back at the closet where only one small plastic bin remained. “We still have no idea who this guy was or how she met him.”

  Gretchen picked up the photo of Vera with the man in the kitchen. “Could it be this guy?”

  Josie compared the two pictures but there was no way to tell. “I don’t know. I can’t even tell if he’s wearing a wedding ring in this photo.”

  Gretchen walked over to the closet and took out the last bin, returning to the bed with it. Poppy immediately sauntered over and rubbed herself against Gretchen’s arms, her tail flicking across the lid of the bin. Gingerly, Gretchen picked her up and set her on the floor. Seconds later, she hopped back up onto the bed, only this time she kept her distance, watching the two women with suspicion.

  “Would you look at this?” Gretchen breathed as she pulled several items from the bin.

  They were driver’s licenses, Josie realized. Three of them, all with different names, all expired. Josie picked one up and ran a finger across the photo of Vera. She felt the slightest imperfection at the edge. “These are doctored,” she said. “And not very well.”

  Gretchen picked up another and with some effort, managed to peel away the photo of Vera to reveal a completely different woman. “You’re right,” she said. “Not very good quality at all.”

  Josie took out her phone and snapped pictures of each one. “We’ll look up these names when we get back to the stationhouse.”

>   They started bagging the evidence they intended to remove. As they worked, Poppy meowed loudly from the head of the bed. Josie said, “I wonder when she ate last.”

  Gretchen said, “Let’s take care of the cat and then we’ll head back and see what we can come up with in terms of these doctored driver’s licenses. Then we can try to track down the guy in the picture with Vera.”

  Thirty-Eight

  A half hour later, they were back in the car with Poppy in a carrier in Josie’s back seat. The vet had supplied all the records without any questions but then suggested they take the cat to a nearby shelter. When they arrived, Josie parked and Gretchen went inside with Poppy. Fifteen minutes later, she came back out. With Poppy. “I can’t leave her there,” Gretchen told Josie.

  It seemed Josie wasn’t the only one experiencing an overload of emotions lately.

  With Poppy settled in the backseat, they started back to Denton. Gretchen used the Mobile Data Terminal to look up Alice Adams as well as the other names they’d found on driver’s licenses in Vera Urban’s closet. “It looks as though Vera’s modus operandi was to physically steal these other women’s licenses and change the photo. All of these women reported their licenses stolen and had them replaced. All four of them lived more than an hour away from where Vera lived in Colbert, although we have no idea where she was living before she moved there.”

  Josie said, “Did Vera steal their identities as well? She didn’t open credit cards in their names or anything like that? Bank accounts? Utilities?”

  Gretchen jotted something down in her notebook. “No,” she said. “There’s no record of anything.”

  “But if she wanted to rent a room in certain establishments—even with cash—or even an apartment, she’d need identification,” Josie pointed out.

  “Don’t most landlords require a credit check these days?” Gretchen asked.

  “I believe they do but if I were Vera, and I were using stolen identities, I’d try to find someone who wasn’t going to check my credit. Although, if the landlord did, and Alice Adams, for example, had good credit, that would only work in Vera’s favor.”

  “True,” Gretchen said. “And if the real Alice Adams wasn’t monitoring her credit closely, she might not notice an inquiry. So you think she stole these driver’s licenses and put her own photo on them just to get an apartment?”

  “And also to go to the doctor. As long as she never went to collections for an overdue bill, the real Alice Adams would have no idea that she was seeing doctors or getting prescriptions in her name.”

  “That’s insurance fraud,” Gretchen said.

  “Assuming she had insurance. You said the medical bills you found in her closet showed she’d paid them in cash.”

  “That’s taking a big chance,” Gretchen noted. “Not having insurance. If something catastrophic happened, she’d be in real trouble.”

  “True,” Josie agreed. “But look at the way she was living. Speaking of cash, we don’t even know how Alice survived. Where did she get her income? How was she paying for that apartment?”

  Gretchen said, “She would also need identification to cash a check or a money order.”

  “Right,” Josie said. “The landlord said she always paid cash, but she had to get it from somewhere.”

  Gretchen took out her phone. “I’m going to call the local PD and see if they’ll interview some neighbors, ask around town, see if anyone spoke with her regularly or if she had some kind of under-the-table job.”

  A few minutes later, she hung up. “They’ll get back to us,” she told Josie. Turning in her seat, she reached into the footwell and riffled through some of the documents they’d brought with them until she came up with the lease. She flipped the pages and skimmed over it. “All the utilities were paid for by the landlord and included in the rent,” she said. “Which means Alice Adams never needed to have any utilities in her name. Unless she needed cable, I guess.”

  Josie thought about the small apartment and what it hadn’t contained. “There were hardly any electronics,” she said. “No laptop. No tablets.”

  “There was a television though and a DVD player as well as all those DVDs.”

  “She didn’t want her name on anything, and she couldn’t afford to have the real Alice Adams figure out that she’d stolen her identity. She didn’t want anyone tracking her down, but she’s been surviving all these years somehow. She had to have had help from someone.”

  “We’re missing something,” Gretchen said. “Something big.”

  As they came into town, Rockview Ridge rose high above them on the right-hand side. Josie put her signal on and turned toward it. “You know what? Let’s see if my grandmother recognizes the man in the photo with Vera. She saw Vera’s ‘friend’ a few times.”

  A few minutes later, they pulled in. Poppy snoozed in her cage in the back. They left her there, certain that the cat would be safe in the car for a few minutes, and went inside. Josie’s leg ached after having been in one position in the car for so long but she managed to keep up with Gretchen. The door to Lisette’s room was open. She sat in her recliner staring out of the window, the sunlight making her silver curls gleam. She had a white shawl pulled around her shoulders—always cold even in her room, where Josie knew the thermostat was set to seventy-five. Her walker sat in front of her, between her bed and dresser. The rooms at Rockview were nice but very small. Josie knocked lightly on the doorframe to get Lisette’s attention.

  Lisette smiled. “Hello, dear. Gretchen. Come in. Or would you be more comfortable if we went to the cafeteria?”

  Josie gave her grandmother a quick kiss and sat on the foot of the bed. Gretchen sat beside her. “Here is fine. We had a photo we wanted you to look at, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Gretchen took out her phone and found the photo. She handed the phone to Lisette.

  Josie asked, “Is that the friend you saw picking up and dropping off Vera by any chance?”

  Lisette studied the picture. “I do believe that’s him, yes. It was a long time ago, but this looks like him.” She gave the phone back to Gretchen. “I wish I knew his name. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”

  “You are being of help, Gram,” Josie told her.

  Gretchen said, “Could you think back and see if you remember any other details about him? Any little thing could be of use. Maybe something else that Vera said about him? Did Beverly mention him at all the day Vera was passed out and she came to school instead?”

  Lisette shook her head slowly. “No, no. Beverly never mentioned him. Not in front of me. I don’t remember Vera ever saying anything about him except that he was the friend who gave her a ride. But, oh, wait!” She lifted a gnarled finger in the air. “He always wore this… uniform of sorts. I only ever saw him in the car, but he always wore the same shirt. A blue thing, very thick, sometimes dirty. It had a name tag sewn onto it, but I was never close enough to see it.”

  Josie sat up straighter. “What kind of uniform?”

  Lisette lowered her hand and frowned. “I’m not sure, dear. What kinds of jobs require uniforms? What kind of establishment would have the name sewn onto the uniform?”

  Gretchen started listing some. “Delivery drivers sometimes, bus drivers?”

  Josie said, “Mechanics.”

  “Come to think of it,” Lisette said. “That makes sense. Sometimes it was quite dirty. I’ll bet he was a mechanic. I could be wrong, though. You have to remember this was such a long time ago. I really only remember these things because your ongoing feud with Beverly took up such a significant amount of time back then.”

  She winked at Josie and held out a hand, which Josie took and squeezed. “Gram,” she said. “You’ve got one of the best memories of anyone I know! We’ll look into it.”

  Before Lisette could reply, a nurse’s aide came sailing into the room with a large vase of flowers. “Hello,” she called from behind the lush, colorful arrangement. “Mrs. Matson! Delivery for you!”

  She
set the bouquet down on Lisette’s dresser and beamed at them.

  “My goodness!” Lisette exclaimed.

  The aide tore off the card that was stapled to the plastic and handed it to Lisette before leaving them alone.

  Gretchen stood and took a whiff of the flowers. “These are lovely, Lisette.”

  Smiling, Lisette struggled to get the card out of its tiny envelope. “They are, aren’t they?”

  “Need help?” Josie asked, wondering who would be sending her grandmother flowers. Did she have a suitor that Josie didn’t know about? It wouldn’t have been the first romance at Rockview Ridge.

  Lisette handed her the envelope, and Josie easily removed the card. She read it once, her heart giving a double tap. Then she read it again, not understanding.

  Lisette said, “Who are they from?”

  Feeling something uncomfortable stir inside her, Josie handed the card back to Lisette who squinted at the words. They scrolled across the screen of Josie’s mind on a loop, making her feel cold.

  Lisette, thank you for being so kind and receptive to me. It is a great honor and a thrill to finally be in touch with you. Hope we get to spend much more time together. Love, Sawyer

  What the hell was going on?

  Lisette’s smile faltered as she read. Reading the room, Gretchen said, “Boss, I’m going to check on Poppy. I’ll meet you at the car?”

  Josie nodded.

  Gretchen pulled the door closed behind her as she left. Turning to Lisette, Josie said, “Gram, why is Sawyer Hayes sending you flowers?”

  Lisette leaned forward and tucked the card into one of the pockets of the basket affixed to her walker. “Josie, I want you to stay calm.”

  Josie stood up, the agitation welling up inside too great for her to stay seated. Disturbing thoughts pinged around her mind like balls in a pinball machine. What was Sawyer Hayes after? It was one thing to run into her grandmother when he was at Rockview in his capacity as an emergency worker and strike up a conversation, but this was something else entirely. Was he trying to con her somehow? Was this Josie’s fault? Did he think because of Josie’s fame, Lisette might have something that he could trick her into giving over? Money? Some kind of inheritance? If that was the case, he was in for a rude awakening. Or worse—was he pursuing Lisette? He couldn’t be. The age difference was—