Breathe Your Last: An addictive and nail-biting crime thriller (Detective Josie Quinn Book 10)

by Lisa Regan

  “It’s a lot,” Gretchen agreed.

  Josie finished typing up her reports for the day. She texted Noah before she left to see where he was—still out with Mettner running down leads on the hospital patients and the animal shelter. She was relieved when he followed up with: Won’t be much longer.

  Josie pulled into an empty driveway but her downstairs lights were on. In her mind, she catalogued the people who had a key to her house. If any of them were inside, it stood to reason that their car would also be in the driveway. At the front door, she unsnapped her holster, keeping one hand on the butt of her pistol while she turned the key in the lock as silently as possible. She heard the telltale clickety-clack of Trout’s nails on the foyer floor and the huffing sound he made when he got really excited.

  Wouldn’t he have gone crazy if someone was inside? Had she or Noah left the lights on all day?

  She turned the knob and pushed the door so that the latch didn’t catch anymore but it still looked closed. Then she drew her Glock, holding the barrel toward the sky. With her foot, she nudged the door open and stepped inside, using one of her legs to keep Trout at bay while she panned the foyer, steps, and living room.

  From the kitchen doorway, a male voice sounded. “Hey, Trout. Where are you, boy?”

  The dog stopped his excited wiggling, ears pointed, head turned.

  Josie called, “Who’s there?”

  FBI agent Drake Nally appeared in the kitchen doorway, a fork in one hand and a plate topped with a slice of cheesecake in the other. “Quinn,” he said. “Nice to see you too.”

  Josie let out a breath and holstered her weapon. “You scared the shit out of me, Drake. I could have shot you. What are you doing here?”

  She knelt to give Trout some attention. Once he was satisfied, she walked over to Drake. He stared down at her. He was taller than most men she knew, wiry and rangy, and very serious about his work. He was also very serious about his relationship with Josie’s twin sister, Trinity Payne, a famous journalist based in New York City. Drake said, “What? Trin and I can’t come to visit? She wanted to get out of the city for a while. She misses you.”

  “You could have called,” Josie said. “Not because you’re not welcome, but so I didn’t shoot you. Speaking of Trinity, where is she? There’s no car out front.”

  “She went to see Pat, I think,” he told her as she studied the cheesecake on his plate, noting that it was still completely intact.

  “You think?” Trinity had been kidnapped several months ago, and Josie knew for a fact that there was no way in hell Drake would lose track of her sister.

  “No, I’m sure. She went to see Pat. On campus. That’s what she said.”

  Josie was about to ask more questions when he stabbed at the cheesecake with his fork and lifted a bite to his mouth. She reached up and placed two fingers on the stem of the fork before it could reach his mouth.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked.

  Consternation crossed his features. “What?”

  “The cheesecake. Where did you get it?”

  “We picked it up at Sandman’s. Trinity wanted some. She said it’s the best in Denton. We got a whole pie. Expensive as hell, by the way, but she had to have it. You’re welcome to have a slice.”

  “No,” Josie said. She took the fork and the plate from him and pushed past him into the kitchen in search of the rest of the cheesecake. Relieved to see his was the only slice missing from it, she picked up the entire container and threw it into the trash bin, then scraped Drake’s slice in after it.

  “Hey,” he protested. “What the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?”

  “No,” Josie said. “Just trust me.”

  “You’re weird,” he said. “You got weird since the last time I saw you.”

  Josie opened the fridge and shuffled some things around until she found a banana cream pie Misty had made and dropped off over the weekend. She put it on the table. “You can eat this.”

  “Okay, food inspector. You want to tell me why I can’t eat the delicious, creamy, really expensive cheesecake that my girlfriend bought?”

  Josie took two forks from her silverware drawer and plopped into a chair. “Because I think we’ve got someone going around the city slipping a very dangerous drug into people’s food.”

  Drake straightened up a little. He took two strides and sat down at the table beside her, accepting the fork she offered him. “A poisoner?”

  Josie took the Saran wrap off the banana cream pie and plunged her fork into the center of it, digging out a large forkful and stuffing it into her mouth. She closed her eyes, reveling in the rich, creamy taste of it. Misty really was the best cook she knew. When she opened her eyes, Drake was regarding her with an amused look on his face. “That bad, huh?”

  Josie swallowed and went in for another forkful. “I think so.”

  Drake started on the edge of the pie and worked his way toward the center. “This is really damn good,” he noted. “You have any suspects?”

  “A college kid,” Josie said. “Actually, ex-college kid. And possibly a swim coach. Since you’re here, you’ve worked a lot of different cases, right? Worked with the Behavioral Sciences Unit out of Quantico?”

  Around a mouthful of pie, Drake said, “Yeah, well, we call them in sometimes to lend assistance developing profiles of criminals. Speaking of which, I worked a poisoning case before. Pretty big one, too.”

  “Strictly speaking,” Josie said, “I’m not sure this constitutes poisoning.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “We believe that someone is using a drug called Devil’s Breath, or a synthetic of it, and putting it into baked goods which the victims then consume. Some appear to be targeted and others appear to be random.”

  “Devil’s Breath like the shit they have in Colombia?” Drake said.

  “You know about it?”

  “I’ve heard some tall tales. But listen, this still sounds like a poisoning case to me.”

  “Tell me about the case you had,” Josie prompted.

  “Okay,” said Drake. “I handled one early on in my time at the New York field office. Someone was hitting salad bars at city fast food restaurants and lacing the dressings with drain cleaner. The SAC asked the BAU for a profile.”

  “That’s awful,” Josie said. She used her finger to dislodge a small piece of flaky crust from the edge of the pie and fed it to Trout, who waited eagerly at her feet for any scrap of table food Josie might be willing to share—or drop.

  “They did an in-depth profile for a suspect in our particular case and a more generalized one that applied to poisoners. Every case is different, but there are some aspects that are the same or similar across the board a large percentage of the time.”

  “Like what?” Josie asked.

  Drake swallowed another bite of pie and said, “A pretty good percentage of poisoners are female,” he said.

  “I’ve got no female suspects,” Josie said.

  “That’s okay. I’m not saying poisoners can’t be male—most of the large-scale medical poisoners we see are male—it’s just that with poisoning there’s a pretty even split between male and female offenders. I’ve heard some criminal psychologists refer to it as a ‘female crime’ because it typically takes careful planning, patience, and cunning. Plus, it’s not as overtly violent as, say, stabbing or beating someone. That’s the difference between male and female offenders—a male is more likely to bludgeon someone to death, whereas a female is more likely to kill someone in a gentler way, if you get what I’m saying.”

  Josie thought of Nysa Somers drowning and of Clay Walsh nearly burning to death. “The way the murder victim in this case died was not what I’d describe as gentle,” Josie said. “And our other victim is clinging to life. His experience was also far from gentle.”

  “No death is really gentle, is it?” Drake said. “My point is that with poisoning, the offender isn’t always right there to see the outcome. That’s why to
them it doesn’t feel as brutal as if they stabbed someone or strangled someone up close. There’s a distance there. Plus, the fun for the poisoner is the sense of power and control they get knowing they’ve wreaked all this havoc but being removed from it. It’s about manipulation, not confrontation. I’m talking about serial poisoners, mind you.”

  Josie pushed the pie away from her and put her fork on the table. “I can see that. What else does the profile say?”

  “Poisoners are sneaky, lack empathy. They’re emotionally stunted. Almost childlike in the way they think, sometimes. Entitled.”

  Coach Brett Pace immediately came to mind. “Go on,” Josie said.

  “There is sometimes a history of trauma or abuse in childhood, but what’s more likely is that they were spoiled. Extremely, extremely spoiled.”

  “Really?” Josie said. “That seems odd.”

  “It does, but that’s what they’ve found, and yet, poisoners often have feelings of inadequacy, although they hide it well because, again, they’re non-confrontational and very cunning. They tend to be extremely immature so, while you or I might want revenge on someone who killed a loved one, for example, they’re going to want revenge on someone who did something pretty insignificant to them. There was a case in Idaho where a fifteen-year-old girl dumped a Tide pod in her mother’s coffee because the mother banned her from social media for a month.”

  “My God,” Josie said.

  “Yeah, and there was a case in Florida where an intern at a web design company was going into the fridge in the company break room and putting rat poison into people’s lunches because he didn’t feel he was getting enough credit for his ideas.”

  “That’s horrifying.”

  Drake nodded, lifting more pie onto his fork and taking a bite. After he finished, he said, “We had one in Alabama where a mother-in-law was slowly poisoning her daughter-in-law with arsenic because the daughter-in-law didn’t like her cooking. You get the gist here, right?”

  Josie gave a dry laugh. “The gist? That if I cut one of these people off in traffic, they’d want to poison me to death? Yeah, I get it.”

  “Well, it’s just that the infraction doesn’t match the response. These people think they deserve everything, regardless of their own behavior. They’re used to getting everything they want because they’ve been spoiled. They grow into adults who expect the world to spoil them like their parents did and when it doesn’t, they have to get revenge. Then there are people who work in healthcare who poison large numbers of people. Those cases are a little different, but usually we see the same psychological markers: non-confrontational, clever, entitled, spoiled, lacking in empathy, and just absolutely ruthless. Regardless of which column the poisoner falls into, they crave the power they get from doing what they do.”

  Yet, neither Brett Pace nor Doug Merlos struck Josie as power-hungry, ruthless, or even cunning. Certainly, Brett Pace was manipulative and lacked empathy. Merlos was wanting in the empathy department as well. No one who could do what he had done to Robyn Arber could be empathetic. By his own admission, though, he hadn’t taken any of the four videos last year as a type of revenge. In his mind, he was starting some grand enterprise, a “get rich quick” scheme of sorts. Buy this drug and have fun with your drunk friends might have been his slogan if he’d gotten things off the ground—if he hadn’t gone too far with Robyn. If, a year later, he had slipped Nysa Somers or Clay Walsh his iteration of Devil’s Breath and told them to harm or kill themselves, what was the motive? There didn’t seem to be a revenge element that Josie could glean. Brett Pace obviously had a cruel streak, but was he callous enough to slip his star swimmer—and his lover—an illicit drug and then convince her to drown herself? Doing so would have ruined his own life as well by exposing their affair. Even if he had, where was the connection to Clay Walsh or the animal rescue? Was the animal rescue even in play? Without lab results from the pastries Josie had confiscated from the charity table or the brownies found in Dan Lamay’s car, the connection between the Somers and Walsh cases and the animal rescue was tenuous at best.

  Before she and Drake could continue their conversation, Trout jumped up and ran toward the front door. Seconds later, they heard Noah and Trinity. Josie hadn’t seen her sister in weeks. She forced thoughts of the case out of her mind and sprinted into the foyer to embrace Trinity.

  Thirty-Eight

  The next morning, the sounds of pots and pans clanking downstairs woke Josie a half hour before her alarm went off. Sitting up in bed, she yawned and looked around. Trout was nowhere to be found, which meant whoever was in her kitchen was definitely cooking. The scent of something delicious—pancakes or French toast—wafted up into Josie’s bedroom. Noah’s side of the bed was cold. A glance at his dresser told her he had already left the house for the day since his wallet, phone, and gun were all missing.

  With a sigh, Josie padded downstairs to find her twin sister, Trinity, cooking pancakes. On the floor next to Trout’s food bowl was a plate with tiny squares of dough lightly covered in maple syrup. Trout rooted, sniffed, and gobbled, the noises coming from him like those of a percolator. He glanced up when Josie entered the room, and then quickly went back to work, eating even faster this time, like he was afraid she’d take the plate away. Which she did.

  “Trin,” Josie said. “Are you trying to give my dog diabetes, or what?”

  “Oh, hey,” said Trinity, turning to Josie. A pair of sweatpants and an NYU T-shirt hung on her lithe frame. She held a spatula in one hand. No make-up. Her long black hair was twisted into a bun at the back of her head. Still, she looked shiny and glamorous, like she’d just stepped off the set of the morning show after doing a piece on cooking for college kids or the perfect sleepover. Trinity always looked like the movie star version of Josie, and Josie wondered if it was the hair and skincare products she used, or if years as co-anchor on a national news show had left some kind of residual celebrity glow on her. Josie patted the back of her own head where her matching black hair was tangled and matted from a night of uneasy sleep. Then her fingers traveled self-consciously to the thin scar along the right side of her face that ran from her ear, down her jawline, to the center of her chin. It was a memento from her traumatic childhood. One Trinity hadn’t shared because, although it sounded like something out of a cheesy movie, they’d been separated at birth.

  Trinity looked at the half-eaten plate in Josie’s hand. “I thought you gave Trout people food.”

  “Very rarely,” Josie said. She shot a look at Trout, who now lay on his bed in the corner of the room, a look of perfect innocence on his little face. She deposited his plate into the sink and moved to the coffeemaker, relieved to find it half-full.

  Trinity flipped a pancake in the frying pan in front of her. “You said he was food motivated. I want him to like me.”

  Josie laughed. “There are dog treats in the pantry. Where are the men?”

  “Drake’s still in bed. Noah left already.”

  “Left? For where?” Josie said as she finished preparing her coffee. Taking a seat at the table, she sipped it slowly.

  “Work,” Trinity said. “That is the only thing either of you do, you know—work.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Trinity slapped the pancake onto a nearby plate already piled high with pancakes and turned the stove off. She turned to Josie with a hand on her hip. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. We, uh…” she floundered, trying to think of the last time she and Noah had done anything together, besides jogging, that didn’t involve work. “Shit.”

  Trinity grabbed her own mug of coffee from next to the pancakes and sat across from Josie. “Maybe you guys need to make some time for one another.”

  Josie narrowed her eyes at her sister. “You’ve been dating Drake for what? Eight or nine months? Suddenly you’re an expert? Besides, Noah’s the one who’s not here right now. He didn’t even leave me a note.”

  Trinity sipped her coffee. “He said to check your p
hone.”

  Josie wrestled her cell phone from her pajama pants and keyed in her passcode. A series of text notifications popped up. All from Noah.

  Sorry I left so early.

  Trinity said, “I’m not saying I’m an expert. Far from it. I’m just saying that the past year has taught me that you really need to make time for the people you love, that’s all.”

  Wanted to get a jump on the day.

  “You two should have—I don’t know—like a date night or something.”

  Already took Trout for a jog and fed him.

  “You could start this weekend. Maybe today you and I could go get our hair and nails done or something. You could get a new outfit. Something slinky.”

  Mett and I are getting a warrant to search Doug Merlos’ apartment. Will let you know how it pans out.

  “I know you’ve got this whole thing about not eating outside food right now, but you know what would be really romantic?”

  Call Denise at the lab and see if she’s got anything yet.

  “A picnic,” Trinity said. “You make the food—well, actually, probably not you guys. We could ask Misty to prepare something really good, and you could pack it up and have a picnic. I heard that they revamped the outdoor area in the city park. Right near Lover’s Cave. They even have tables there now. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

  Josie looked up at her sister. She thrust her phone at Trinity so she could see the flurry of texts from Noah. “Romantic?” she said. “Look at these. I didn’t even get a standard ‘I love you.’”

  Trinity pursed her lips as she scrolled through the texts. Then she put the phone down on the table between them as if it was something explosive. “Sometimes in relationships you just get into a rut or a routine that’s hard to get out of, and you just forget to really pay attention to one another. Plus, this case you guys are on is a lot of pressure. That’s why I’m suggesting—”