Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,51
killing in the seventies, then took an eight-year break before killing three more people. His last murder was in 1991, and he was inactive until 2004 when he contacted the media again. He was out there living a perfectly normal life all those years.”
“Didn’t the Bone Artist contact the press as well?” Gretchen asked. “I think I remember seeing that on the news.”
“Yes,” Drake confirmed. “It was right before his last victim was found. The press had dubbed him the Boneyard Killer, but he didn’t like that. He wrote to several reporters demanding to be called the Bone Artist. We were never able to trace him through any of those communications though.”
Josie asked, “Was Codie Lash one of those reporters?”
“No,” Drake said.
“Why was Trinity obsessed with this case?” Mettner asked.
Drake sighed and gave his head a little shake. “She thought she could ‘make contact’ with him.”
Josie looked down at Terri Abbott’s remains, staged like some kind of obscene art installation. Oh Trinity, she thought. What have you gotten yourself into?
Twenty-Seven
Hanna ran a brush across the palette of skin-colored powder and then swiped at Alex’s face. “Close your eyes, my love,” she instructed. The make-up brush tickled his forehead, nose and the side of his mouth. “Okay,” she told him when she’d finished.
He opened his eyes and watched her facial expression as she surveyed her work. “Much better,” she assured him, but he could see fine lines at the corners of her eyes, a tightening in her cheeks when she pursed her lips.
“You can barely see the scar,” she told him. A moment later, she said, “Zandra, darling, don’t you think the make-up works well? You can barely see Alex’s scar?”
Zandra met her mother’s eyes. “I guess.”
Hanna stared at her. “Zandra.”
“What?”
“It’s really important that we don’t have any more incidents.”
Zandra said, “You’re joking, right?”
Hanna looked stricken. She threw the make-up brush onto the vanity with a clatter. “This is no joke. You cannot hurt me anymore. Alex tries to stop you, but he can’t and then he gets punished. So you have to stop, do you understand? Restrain yourself. I don’t want Alex sleeping in the shed like a dog. I don’t want you locked away.”
Zandra looked up at Hanna defiantly. “Then do something about it.”
Alex saw Hanna’s hands trembling as she fisted them at her sides. He stood up.
“Hanna,” came a voice from the doorway. “What’s going on here?”
The tension in the room was so thick and all-encompassing that none of them had heard Frances come into the house and up the steps. He leaned into the bedroom, watching them.
Hanna put her hands on Alex’s shoulders and turned him away from the mirror. “Nothing,” she said. “Everything’s fine. We were just spending time together.”
He took another step inside and folded his arms across his chest. “You know that the children can’t be trusted. They shouldn’t be in here.”
“Zandra has promised not to hurt me again. They’ve both promised to be good.”
“They’re lying, Hanna.”
She dropped her hands from Alex’s shoulders and stepped in front of him, as if shielding him from the accusation. “I’m right here, Frances. I’m watching them.”
A sneer curled his upper lip. “The way you were watching Alex the day he nearly burned his face off?”
Alex felt Hanna’s whole body quiver—with rage or regret, he couldn’t tell—but she said nothing.
“Zandra,” Frances said. “Go back to your room.”
Twenty-Eight
Josie felt a cloying sense of dread overtake her as she watched Gretchen sift through the Bone Artist file Drake had brought, making piles for each of the four victims across the table. Josie said, “Four victims, multiple jurisdictions, a task force. This can’t be the entire file.”
“It’s not. Those are just the highlights.”
Noah said, “Trinity had access to all this?”
Josie noticed a vein in Drake’s forehead bulge. “There’s no way you would have let her view classified FBI files,” she said.
“I’d lose my job, get into legal trouble,” Drake agreed.
“But she found a way, didn’t she?” Josie went on. “You’re not even here for her, are you?”
Drake said nothing.
“Agent Nally?” Mettner prompted.
“Whatever she managed to take or copy from the FBI files, you don’t want it going public,” Josie accused. “Because if it ever got out that she had tricked you or stolen some information from you while you were dating, your career would be over.”
The vein in Drake’s forehead pulsed.
Josie kept going. “You said the photos were never released to the public. What else? The expert reports? Autopsy reports?”
His voice was so quiet, Josie strained to hear it. “Everything we