Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,72

Before I had a chance to get a good look at it, he was ramming into me like a maniac. When he came down to the car, there was glass in my eyes. I couldn’t see. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You did great. Now get some rest. I’ll wake you if there’s any news.”

Thirty-Nine

They walked back to the house. The kitchen was cold and dark. No Hanna. No dinner cooking on the stove. In the foyer, Alex saw why. Frances’s body lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the steps. One of his legs was twisted at an unusual angle. For a moment, Alex thought he was dead. A pool of blood circled his head like a halo, and he wasn’t moving. Alex peered hard at him, trying to see if his chest was rising and falling, but he couldn’t tell. Then Frances blinked. Alex jumped back. Zandra giggled. Her laughter went on for several minutes. Alex looked over to see Hanna sitting barefoot on the steps. Her elbows were on her knees and from one hand dangled a metal bar which Alex recognized as a leg from one of her easels.

When Zandra’s laughter stopped, Hanna looked over, as if noticing Alex for the first time. Her eyes were wider than he’d ever seen them. With the bar, she pointed toward Frances. “He wasn’t like us,” she said.

Alex walked over and tried to take the bar from her, but she clutched it to her chest. “No,” she said. “They’ll think you did this. You’ll be in trouble. They’ll make you go away. I did this for you, do you understand?”

“No you didn’t, you selfish bitch,” Zandra said as she walked over to Frances and stared down into his face. She let a long string of spit drip from her puckered lips into one of his eyes, and giggled some more.

Hanna ignored her. Her eyes pleaded with Alex. “He wasn’t like us, do you understand?”

“No,” Alex mumbled.

Zandra kicked Frances in the ribs. “He’s not our father, dummy. That’s what she’s trying to tell you. He wouldn’t marry her because she had two bastards.”

Alex looked to Hanna for confirmation. She nodded. He tried to remember a time when Frances had not been in their lives, but he couldn’t. Frances had always been their father.

“I’m sorry,” Hanna whispered.

“Save it for the police,” Zandra said, now sounding bored. “I’m going to get something to eat.”

Forty

As Noah promised, the next day Josie was discharged. He and Gretchen drove her back to Denton with Shannon and Christian following. Josie wanted to go back to the stationhouse, but no one would let her. She needed rest, they said. Rest, rest, rest. No amount of rest was going to bring Trinity back. Noah left her at home and went back to the station to join the rest of her team. Sitting on her living room couch with Lisette on one side and Trout on the other, Josie tried for hours to recreate the shorthand symbol she had seen on the side of the Bone Artist’s truck. Each time she attempted it, Lisette studied it and frowned, uttering an, “I’m not sure, dear.” When Josie’s head hurt too badly to keep her eyes open any longer, she gave Shannon and Christian her library card and asked them to go to Denton’s local library to see if they could find a book on Gregg shorthand.

Josie swallowed some ibuprofen dry and sprawled out on her bed with her eyes closed. Sleep wouldn’t come, only thoughts of Trinity and the case. In her head, she went over the Bone Artist file again and again. What had Trinity seen that Josie couldn’t? What was she missing?

Symmetry. Male. Female. Symbols. Games.

Her eyes snapped open. She was overlooking a major piece of what Trinity had been studying. Creeping downstairs, she saw Trout cuddled up beside Lisette on the couch. Shannon and Christian were still out. She managed to get to the kitchen to retrieve the bag that Gretchen had gotten out of Josie’s mangled car before they left Callowhill. Josie carried it upstairs and into her bedroom. She fished out the Bone Artist file and spread the pages out on the bed, searching for the notes that the Bone Artist had sent to members of the press in 2014 before his last victim was found and he went off the radar.

She lined the notes up next to one another. All of them had been delivered within the same week, addressed to different anchors. There