across her face, and strode into the Chief’s office.
“What was that about?” Gretchen asked.
Josie waited for the Chief’s door to close before she relayed the conversation to Gretchen.
“Wow,” said Gretchen. “There may be an unforeseen advantage to having a press liaison.”
“Really?” Josie asked. “What’s that?”
“He might be on our side more often now.”
Josie’s cell phone buzzed several times. She punched in her passcode and studied the text messages from Noah. “We’ve got a lead,” she said. “Looks like there were some major plumbing issues at the house on Hempstead while Vera and Beverly were living there. One of the load-bearing walls got rotted. That work was handled by Zurzola Contracting.”
Gretchen wheeled her chair over to her desktop computer and started typing. “Looks like they closed in 2007.” She picked up a printout of the email she’d received from Tammy and studied it. “They’re not even on this list. Does it say anything about who did the plumbing work?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “You don’t have to look it up, the plumber is dead.”
“Great,” Gretchen sighed. “We’re really on a roll here.”
“Hold on,” Josie said, scrolling through the texts and PDF documents Noah had sent over. “Look up Newton Basement Waterproofing, the one Noah mentioned earlier. Around that same time, they applied for a permit to underpin the basement. If the plumbing issue was that large that they needed to dig up some or all of the basement, maybe Plummer decided to go ahead and have the whole basement lowered at the same time.”
Gretchen’s hands flew across her keyboard. A smile lit her face. “We’re in luck. They’re still in business—and their office is not in one of the flood zones!”
Sixteen
After taking care of the warrants, they headed to Newton Basement Waterproofing. The rain had stopped, but the clouds overhead were thick and gray. They showed no signs of clearing. Josie longed for the sight of blue skies and sunshine. The gloomy weather did nothing to help her mood. She turned briefly to Gretchen. “You find out anything about this company?”
“Looks like it’s family owned,” she told Josie. “Been around forty years. Father passed it to his son. Current owner is George Newton. He is in his forties. They have a staff of ten.”
Josie skirted around the flooded portion of the city, taking a circuitous route until she reached North Denton, which was a more sparsely populated and mountainous part of the city. Newton Basement Waterproofing was housed in a flat-roofed cinderblock building with a large parking lot. Two pickup trucks sat in front of the building, their beds filled with equipment. Josie and Gretchen parked next to them and made their way inside. A ding sounded overhead as they opened the front door and stepped in. A few chairs sat unoccupied to their left. Directly in front of them was a tall, unmanned desk. Brochures were spaced in neat piles across its surface. From a doorway behind the desk, a male voice called, “Be right there!”
They waited five minutes and finally, a ruddy-faced man with short brown hair emerged from the doorway. He wore dirty jeans and a black T-shirt with white lettering that said, Newton Basement Waterproofing. Since 1980. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
Josie and Gretchen were getting their credentials out when he pointed at Josie and said, “Hey, I know you. You’re that detective.”
Josie handed him her credentials. “Yes, Detective Josie Quinn.”
He gave Gretchen’s ID a passing glance, his attention focused on Josie. “What can I help you with?”
Josie said, “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to watch the news in the last twenty-four hours, but we recovered human remains from beneath the foundation of a home on Hempstead Road.”
He grimaced. “Oh yeah, I saw it on the news. It was a body, huh?”
“Yes, unfortunately. It was the body of a girl who lived in the house between 1997 and 2004. She had been buried beneath the foundation. We pulled city permits to see if anyone had worked on the basement of that house, and we found that your company applied for a permit for underpinning in 2004.”
His face clouded with confusion. “You think I had something to do with this?”
Gretchen said, “Mr. Newton, is it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “George.”
“Right now, we’re just trying to establish when and how the body came to be under the house. Do you remember working on Hempstead?”
His eyes were wide. “No. I mean if we applied for a permit, then I’m sure we did the work, but I don’t personally