Her Deadly Touch: An absolutely addictive crime thriller and mystery novel (Detective Josie Quinn Book 12)

by Lisa Regan

  Both parents looked at her. Gloria tried to speak but all that came out was a strangled cry. Nathan said, “No. We didn’t. I mean we were talking about whether or not to go to the police when we got the call about the accident. We didn’t even think about any of that until much later. We—we decided together not to tell anyone. It didn’t seem… relevant.”

  Mettner said, “You were afraid you would somehow be blamed.”

  Nathan nodded. “Not just for our own kids’ deaths but for Krystal’s daughter, too. It was too much. Too horrible. Gloria was already getting so much flak in the press for being a mother and the head of a company—as if that had anything to do with anything. We just didn’t think it was a detail that ever needed to come out. It didn’t change the outcome.”

  “Then how would Krystal Duncan have found out two years after the fact?” Josie asked.

  Nathan shrugged. “I don’t know. The orthodontist, maybe?”

  “What does it matter?” Gloria asked. “How does this relate to her murder? If she found this out, she had every right to be furious with us. If I were her, I’d want to kill us both. So why are we here and she’s not?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Mettner said.

  The real question was, why had Krystal started searching for information in the first place? Josie thought about what Paige Rosetti had said: that Krystal had found out some things. What else had she found out? What had she found out that had sent her to the East Bridge to ask Skinny D for painkillers? Had it been the revelation about Nathan canceling the orthodontist appointments or something else? Gloria was correct. The revelation about Nathan and Gloria meeting at their home on the day of the crash was not something that would result in Krystal’s death.

  What were they missing?

  “Boss?”

  Josie looked at Mettner and then realized all of them were staring at her. “Yes?”

  Gloria said, “We asked if that was everything? Can we go? I’m exhausted, and I just want to go home.”

  “Okay,” said Josie. “Yes. That sounds like a good idea.”

  Mettner drove Nathan Cammack home while Gloria left on her own. Josie scarfed down some cheese Danishes while finishing up her reports for the day. By the time she got home, it was almost ten o’clock. As she approached her front door, she heard Trout’s claws scratch the other side along with his high-pitched whining. Exhaustion warred with regret. She’d gone from being home with the dog twenty-four hours a day to now being away from him most of the day. Added to that was the fact that today had been one of Noah’s days off and she hadn’t even made it home in time for them to eat dinner together. This was the job though, and it had never bothered her before. But the cloak of grief hung heavy on her. The West Denton bus crash parents not only shared the kind of trauma Josie was intimately familiar with, but they were a reminder to hold close the ones you loved most. They could be taken in a second.

  As Josie reached the door, Noah swung it open. Trout rushed out at her, jumping at her legs and whining excitedly. She herded his wiggling body back into the foyer and gave him enough attention and praise to settle him down. When she looked up, Noah was grinning at her. She looked beyond him to see flickering light in the kitchen doorway.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “I have a surprise for you. Come on.”

  The kitchen was lit by a dozen candles. The table was set with what looked like shrimp scampi. The smell was overpowering, and Josie’s mouth watered at the prospect of a real meal. As Noah pulled out a chair for her and she sat, he told her, “I didn’t make this, obviously. Misty did. She was worried about you, this being your first week back and all. She dropped this off. Mett texted me a while ago to say you were finishing reports so I heated it up.”

  “This is wonderful,” Josie said, feeling some of the heaviness lift.

  He sat across from her and that was when she noticed the wildflowers in a vase in the center of the table. Her breath caught.

  Noah’s gaze followed hers. “Your grandmother—before she died—she told me to gather wildflowers for you every now and then.”

  Josie took in a shaky breath. “Yes. We used to do that. When I was a teenager and I lived with her. We’d collect wildflowers and leave them on the foyer table for one another. It was silly. It was—”

  She broke off, tears burning her eyes.

  “I can get rid of them,” Noah said. “If they’re too upsetting.”

  “No, please,” Josie said. “Don’t.”

  Trout nudged Josie’s leg and she reached down to touch his head. Assured that she was okay, he circled once and laid down near her feet.

  Noah said, “She told me that you would need to be reminded of what she told you before she died.”

  Lisette had said a few things to Josie before she passed away, but Josie knew exactly which bit Lisette had meant when she gave Noah these instructions.

  “You have to live with them both, dear,” she had said. “The grief and the happiness. If you can’t live with them both, you’ll never make it.”

  Josie reached forward and turned the vase to get a better look at the wildflowers. “This one,” she said, “With the tiny pink beads all clustered together is called lady’s thumb. These flowers with the four white petals and the yellow starburst at the center are quaker ladies.”

  Noah laughed. “Do they all have the word ‘lady’ in their names?”

  “No,” said Josie. “A lot of them do, but not all. This little thing—” She pointed to a tiny purple flower that shot straight up from the green leaf below and then burst open with one petal dangling downward like a lolling tongue. “This is called henbit, and this—” She moved her index finger over to a gathering of flowers that looked like a bulb with clusters of purple petals erupting from every part of it. “Is called heal-all.” She met his eyes, which sparkled in the candle light. “Did you know the names when you picked them?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I don’t know anything about wildflowers, but your grandmother said you could name every one of them.”

  “I can,” Josie said.

  “Do you want to talk about today?”

  Josie picked up her fork. “No. I want to eat and then I want you to take me to bed.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Bianca’s head slammed against the window as the bus swerved violently to the left. Before she could even cry out or check her scalp for blood, the bus veered the other way. Her body crashed into Gail’s, nearly knocking her onto the aisle floor. A round of cheers went up. Someone said, “Way to go, Mr. Lesko!”

  Bianca rubbed her head and looked out the window. Everything seemed to be going by entirely too fast. Normally, the bus ride was so slow, she felt like she could have walked home faster.

  “You okay?” Gail said.

  “I think something’s wrong,” Bianca told her.

  “Are you bleeding?”

  “No, not with my head. I mean with Mr. Lesko. This isn’t normal.”

  Gail laughed. “Oh come on, he’s just having a little fun.”

  “How can you tell from all the way back here?” Bianca asked.

  “I don’t know. Everyone’s cheering.”

  “Because they’re idiots,” Bianca said. “People shouldn’t drive like this, especially not adults in charge of a bunch of kids.”

  Gail rolled her eyes. “You sound like someone’s mom right now, do you know that? If something was really wrong with him, would the principal have let him drive us? Relax. We’re almost at our stop anyway.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Josie and Noah stopped at Komorrah’s the next morning before work to get coffees for themselves, Gretchen, Mettner, and Amber. As they parked in the municipal parking lot, Noah gave a low whistle. “Look at this circus.”

  Surrounding the door to the station, which was the private entrance for police personnel, were a handful of reporters. As Josie and Noah approached, they crowded in, thrusting their phones i
nto Josie and Noah’s faces. Questions came from every direction.

  “Have you found Krystal Duncan’s killer yet?”

  “Is it true another mother of one the West Denton bus crash victims is missing?”

  “Will this delay Virgil Lesko’s trial?”

  “Should the public be worried?”

  “Is the killer targeting the West Denton bus mothers specifically?”

  WYEP had sent a cameraman who moved in tandem with the crowd, capturing every “no comment” that Josie and Noah tossed out. Upstairs in the great room, Gretchen was seated at her desk, intent on something on her computer screen. Mettner and Amber were standing next to her desk, their bodies close, heads bent toward one another. As Noah dispensed coffees, Gretchen looked up. “You guys get caught by the paparazzi out there?”

  Josie said, “Yeah. They’ve got a lot of questions.”

  Amber slid away from Mettner. “I think we should hold a press conference. That would quiet them down, at least for a little while.”

  Mettner said, “First we need to decide if we’re going to tell them that Faye Palazzo is missing.”

  “They already know,” Noah said. “Unofficially. Word got out. They know someone else is missing.”

  Josie said, “Gretchen, you’re the lead. What do you want to do?”

  Gretchen took off her reading glasses and leaned back in her chair, sighing. “I don’t want to fan the flames here. If we take a lot of this public then we expose these families, and they’ve already been through more than anyone should ever have to deal with. We could potentially be creating a public panic.”

  “Or making the public safer by warning them,” Mettner argued.

  Gretchen picked up her coffee and took a sip. “True. That’s a possibility, but I think the press will spin it as a West Denton bus crash parent thing—that would get them the most ratings. The issue here is that we have no leads in these cases. None. Absolutely nothing.”

  Noah said, “Let’s go through it then, piece by piece.”

  Together, Josie and Gretchen brought him up to speed. Josie concluded, “We know a lot about what happened in the months and even the hours leading up to the West Denton bus crash now but connecting that in some way to Krystal’s murder and Faye’s disappearance is an issue.”

  “In that it doesn’t seem to connect at all,” said Mettner. “Except for the fact that Wallace Cammack’s nickname was written on Krystal Duncan’s arm. If it wasn’t for that, there would not be any connection to the crash at all.”

  “Except that two mothers of children who died in the crash went missing,” said Noah. “And one of them is now dead, and she was left on her daughter’s grave.”

  Mettner replied, “Yeah, but I’m saying maybe you’re looking too hard at the bus accident. Maybe that’s a distraction. Boss said that in the months—possibly the year—leading up to the crash, things in the homes of the Palazzos and the Cammacks were going missing, right? But there were no break-ins. No police reports were filed.”

  Gretchen said, “Except for the one for Faye Palazzo’s earrings, which were returned to her home when she disappeared, so far as we can tell. They could be replicas. I’ve asked the Evidence Response Team to see if they can verify whether or not they’re real Tiffany earrings.”

  “Right,” Mettner said. “But we’re still looking at someone who was coming in and out of the homes of these residents with access to valuables—someone who definitely took things from at least two homes. I bet if you canvassed that neighborhood, you’d find a lot of similar stories.”

  Josie said, “You think we’re looking at a thief turned murderer?”

  Mettner shrugged. “Sometimes criminals escalate from non-violent crimes to more violent crimes. It’s not unheard of, but what I’m saying is that we shouldn’t be honing in on just one theory—like the bus crash connection.”

  “I agree with that,” Noah said.

  Josie and Gretchen stared at Noah, then looked to Mettner and back to Noah. Gretchen said, “Holy crap. That might be the first time you two have ever agreed on anything.”

  Everyone laughed. Then Gretchen said, “Well, Mett, why don’t you work that angle? Get over to West Denton and start asking around. If the thievery was more widespread, there’s a chance that someone saw something.”

  Josie said, “I think that the thief and the killer—whether they’re the same person or not—was someone known to both the Palazzos and the Cammacks. Like Gloria and Nathan said—and even Sebastian—there were always people in and out of each other’s houses for parties and other gatherings. Also, neither Krystal nor Faye put up a fight. There was no sign of struggle. Faye was about to sit down to eat lunch with her husband.”

  “Krystal had a half-finished glass of wine on her coffee table. We covered this when we started looking into her disappearance. Before you came back to work,” Noah said to Josie.

  Josie said, “You wouldn’t be worried about walking away from a meal or a glass of wine or your purse or phone if it was just a neighbor popping over, wanting to talk to you or asking you to come outside for a moment.”

  Gretchen said, “Someone’s got to make a list or a diagram or something of the families over there and their level of familiarity with one another.”

  “I’m on that,” Mettner said. “I can run criminal background checks on everyone I speak with as well.”

  Noah said, “I can help Mett with that stuff. That’s going to be a lot of knocking on doors. We’ve still got the issue of Faye Palazzo though. Speaking of which, the ERT did call with one very important detail this morning, which is that there were two boxes of vigil candles on Faye Palazzo’s kitchen table when she disappeared.”

  “I remember,” Josie said. “They were marked as having fifty in each box.”

  Noah nodded. “Except there were only forty-two in each box.”

  “Okay,” said Josie. “When did Faye get them? Could Sebastian account for the missing sixteen candles?”

  Mettner said, “She’d gotten them two weeks before she went missing and he said that to his knowledge, none of the candles had been used or given out to anyone else. There should have been fifty in each box.”

  “But there weren’t,” Noah said. “And an initial comparison between the wax from Faye Palazzo’s vigil candles and the wax found in Krystal Duncan’s throat showed that there’s a high probability that it’s the same type of wax. Of course, we have to submit the samples to the state lab and maybe even the FBI lab for a more in-depth analysis, which would confirm it for sure but that could take weeks.”

  Gretchen said, “Okay, then. Let’s assume for a moment that the wax found in Krystal Duncan’s throat did come from Faye Palazzo’s vigil candles. What does that mean? Either Faye killed Krystal and is now staging her own disappearance or her husband, Sebastian, killed Krystal.”

  “And maybe Faye found out and he’s killed her too?” Josie wondered out loud.

  Gretchen pinched the bridge of her nose. “This is a mess. If Sebastian killed Krystal Duncan and did something to his own wife then he’s putting on the most Oscar-worthy performance I have ever seen. He was so hysterical last night I had to threaten to have him involuntarily committed to the hospital to get him to calm down.”

  “Then maybe it’s not him,” Metter suggested. “Maybe someone else took Faye’s vigil candles precisely to get us to look at Sebastian. Regardless, if the same person who took Krystal Duncan is behind Faye’s disappearance, then she’s in trouble.”

  Noah said, “Someone would have had to come into the Palazzos’ house to get the candles though, if they were the same ones used in Krystal’s murder. Who would that be? Your reports say that Faye didn’t see anyone but her husband.”

  Josie said, “As far as her husband knew. She was home alone all day every day except when he came for lunch. She could have had someone over without his knowledge.”

  Gretchen said, “Then we’re back to someone known to both Krystal and Faye, if that’s the case.
Faye wouldn’t let a stranger into her home when her husband was at work.”

  “True,” Josie said. “I think we need to look more closely at Krystal. That’s where all of this started. Something made her go digging into aspects of the bus crash, and we know she found out at least one thing that upset her deeply. We know she arranged a meeting with Virgil Lesko so she could ask him something about the day of the accident although we have no idea what. Why was she digging in the first place and what else did she find out? Was it something that someone would kill her over?”

  Mettner said, “I can call the orthodontist where Nathan was supposed to take their kids the day of the crash and find out if she’d been in contact with them recently.”

  Gretchen pulled her notepad closer and wrote something down.

  Noah fingered a stack of documents on Josie’s desk. “These are from Krystal’s law firm? You didn’t find anything in here?”

  “Yes, those are all the cases she was working on,” Josie said. “And no, we didn’t find a damn thing. But you guys are welcome to have another look.”

  Noah said, “When Mett and I get back, we’ll take a look. It doesn’t hurt to have a fresh set of eyes. Besides, hopefully we’ll have a new list of names of other neighbors and potential thieves by the time we get to this.”

  Gretchen interjected, “I want to put a unit on Sebastian Palazzo for now to keep track of his movements. He’s home right now as far as I know. Someone will need to get his alibi for the time that Krystal was missing and then murdered.”

  Mettner said, “We’re going to be over there canvassing anyway, we’ll take care of it.”

  Josie said, “I know we don’t want to focus too tightly on the crash, but I think it bears some examination. While Noah and Mett are working the thievery angle, maybe Gretchen can take me through the details of the crash since she was the lead.”

  Mettner said, “You think that will help find Faye Palazzo?”

  “No,” Josie said. “I think the best way to find Faye Palazzo is to notify the press. In the meantime, we can’t sit around hoping for a break. We’ve got to keep moving forward. It makes sense to look at the crash. Maybe there’s something we’re missing. Maybe someone we’re missing. Someone on the periphery.”