Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,10

eyes scanned the note again, landing on the words:

I know I only stayed for a week.

“A week?” she muttered.

That would mean Trinity had left three weeks ago. But she hadn’t. Her car was sitting outside the cabin with her suitcase and purse inside.

Josie raced back out to the driveway, rounding the driver’s side of the Fiat. Without touching the car, she leaned over and peered inside. Keys dangled from the ignition. In the center console, beneath the dash, at the level of the gear shift, was a small opening where Trinity usually kept her phone. Josie’s heart stuttered when she saw the phone there.

She reached out to fling the door open but stopped herself a fraction of a second before she touched the car. The police officer in her wouldn’t let her contaminate any fingerprint evidence that might be left on the outside of the car. Her hand trembled as she snatched it back.

She turned around, eyes panning the grass and the trees beyond it, then the driveway. She walked out past her own vehicle to the perimeter of the property, searching for footprints or any sign of Trinity. Had she walked off into the woods? Had someone come onto the property and taken her? If so, had they simply dragged her into the forest, or had they driven off with her? The gravel driveway would make it near impossible to get casts of tire tracks. And, she realized, even if there were tire tracks, Josie had just driven over them.

She rounded the back of the cabin. The first thing she saw was a clearing with two Adirondack chairs bracketing a fire ring made from an old tire rim. Against the back of the cabin was a rack filled with firewood. No way had Trinity been making a campfire out here. She wasn’t the woodsy type. Josie’s eyes were drawn to the fire ring. Old ash and pieces of burnt logs lay tamped down inside of it. It looked as if it hadn’t been used in a long time. Josie looked up from the fire ring toward the trees at the back of the property. On the ground, about a foot from the treeline, something white caught her eye. She took two steps forward and froze. Her mind couldn’t quite process what she was seeing. The grass was a few inches tall. It hadn’t been cut in some time although they were just entering spring after a cold winter so the grass wouldn’t be growing very fast during this time of year. The landlord had probably had it cut just before Trinity moved in, a month earlier.

She forced her feet to move another step. Her throat constricted, and she worked hard to push the air in and out of her lungs. Arrayed on the grass before her were bones. Human bones. Not left there or dumped, but arranged.

Displayed.

A rib cage and spine made up the centerpiece of whatever it was that Josie was staring at—some kind of symbol? Remnants of some kind of satanic ritual? Surrounding the rib cage and spine were smaller bones. Some clinical part of her mind recognized those as the tiny bones of the hands, fingers, feet, and toes. Intermingled with those were the clavicles. At the bottom of the circle, pointing from the outer edge toward Josie’s feet were longer bones. Arm bones, the cool investigator in the back of her mind whispered, because they were too small to be leg bones. Beneath those bones were the skull and pelvic bone. The empty eye sockets of the skull stared back at Josie, making her chest feel tight. She tore her eyes away from it and looked toward the upper right-hand side of the circle, where the leg bones lay, angled away from Josie.

A violent trembling took over her body. Her feet turned and tried to carry her away, but her shins knocked against one of the Adirondack chairs and she went flying over it, tumbling toward the back of the cabin. Her head smacked against the rack of firewood and some of the logs toppled into her lap. She closed her eyes and tried to slow her breathing. There was a calm, firm voice in the back of her mind—the one that gave her orders when her body shut down from fear or panic. The police officer inside her. Take out your phone, it told her. Call for back-up.

It went on like a mantra until she opened her eyes, pushed the logs off her body,