Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,49

up. “With all due respect, Agent Nally, you’re not here in your official capacity. You’re here as a known associate of a high-profile citizen who was abducted from our town, so we’re going to be the ones asking questions.”

Drake’s lips were a thin line. Josie could see the barely perceptible movement of his jaw as he ground his teeth together. He removed his hand from the file, pushed it toward Mettner and sat down, adjusting his suit jacket and tie. He said, “I will answer any questions you have, but I need to know one thing before we start. The news reports state that some personal items may have been taken from Trinity’s vehicle along with her. May I ask what those were?”

“Why?” Josie asked. “Why do you need to know?”

“Because she took something from me, and I have a right to know if that thing was one of the items taken during her abduction.”

Mettner didn’t open the file. Instead he pushed it over to Gretchen. She put on her reading glasses and opened it up. Josie glanced at the contents and saw the familiar layout of an autopsy report.

Mettner told Drake, “Two letter boxes. One of them had the personal effects of the late news anchor, Codie Lash, which Trinity’s assistant had shipped to her from New York. We don’t know what the other box contained.”

Drake let out a long sigh and rubbed his hands over his face. His shoulders slumped.

Noah said, “I’m guessing you do know what was in it.”

“It was a file. A very large file. Trinity had compiled it over the last two months. She was obsessed. It was a story she wanted to tackle. A serial killer.”

Gretchen turned more pages in the file until she came to some photographs of a skeleton—except that it wasn’t a normal skeleton. “Mettner,” Gretchen said, the tone of her voice higher than normal.

Josie had to grip the arms of her chair to keep from jumping out of it. Gretchen flipped through more of the photos. All of them were the same. Torso in the middle circled by small bones. The bones of the arms together at six o’clock with the pelvic bone sitting at their knobby ends, along with the skull, and the leg bones at two o’clock. In one of the photos, the pelvic bone and skull were at the two o’clock position, at the ends of the leg bones instead of the arm bones.

“Mett,” Josie said.

She pressed her back into the chair so that he could lean across her and see the photos for himself. Drake opened his mouth to speak, but Mettner held up a hand to silence him. He glanced at Noah, who stood, walked around the table and stared at the photos. A moment later, his hand settled on Josie’s shoulder. He looked at Drake. “What is this?”

“That’s the serial case I was just talking about. The Bone Artist.”

Josie said, “Why does that sound familiar?”

Drake replied, “He was active in Pennsylvania beginning in 2008.”

Gretchen said, “One of his victims was found in Philadelphia, but it wasn’t my case. Someone on day shift caught that one, but the FBI swooped in and took over. That was the last I heard of it. I had my own caseload. I never heard anything about it after that. There was a task force, although they never caught the guy.”

A muscle ticked in Drake’s jaw. “The Philadelphia victim was a thirty-three-year-old guy named Kenneth Darden. He lived in a suburb. Left his house after dinner for a late doctor’s appointment. His car was in the doctor’s parking lot, but he never made it to the appointment and never made it home.”

“No cameras in the doctor’s lot?” Mettner cut in.

“Nope. Not back then. Not in a low-crime suburb. Exactly thirty days after he disappeared his bones were found arranged on the bank of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.”

“Arranged?” Josie said. “Like these photos?”

Drake held a hand out to Gretchen, and she gave him a stack of photos. He riffled through them, plucked out a color photograph, and handed it to Josie. She stared at an eerie facsimile of the scene she’d found behind Trinity’s cabin that morning. “The case was covered on the news from time to time, but they never showed… this.”

“These were never made public. There were some witnesses who saw the bones who talked about it, but no photographs were ever released.”

Noah asked, “They were all like this?”

Drake said, “Always. The torso—rib cage and spine—is always in