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

by Lisa Regan

  Josie held up a hand to stop her in mid-sentence. “I’ve been here,” she complained. “I’ve been here all week. I’ve wanted him to come home. I’ve wanted to see him. But as you can see, he’s not here.”

  Trinity stood up and took her mug to the sink, dumping the rest of its contents and rinsing it under the faucet. “You two have to take a day off sometime. Or even an evening off. A few hours. How about Saturday? Late afternoon, early evening? I’ll call Misty. We’ll get everything ready and send the two of you off on your date. You’ll be forced to reconnect.”

  Josie rolled her eyes and picked up her phone, looking for Denise Poole’s phone number. “Fine. But I’m not getting my hair done. I have to be at work in two hours, and salons aren’t even open this early.”

  Trinity turned back toward her, looking crestfallen. “At least get your nails done. Come on. There’s a nail place in South Denton I used to go to when I worked for WYEP. I know the owner. All I have to do is make a call, and she can get the two of us in before you have to be at work. Drake and I won’t be in town much longer. I know you’re on a big case. Spend a half hour with me so I can tell you all about my new show!”

  Josie punched the call button beneath Denise Poole’s name. “Fine,” she groused. “Let me make this call and then I’ll get ready.”

  Trinity clapped her hands with delight and hurried out of the room, no doubt to set up the nail appointment.

  Denise didn’t answer, so Josie left her a voicemail. While Trinity was out of the room, Josie tried Robyn Arber again to see if she could come up with a list of Doug Merlos’ friends, but got her voicemail as well.

  Making sure that her volume was on in case either woman called back, Josie scarfed down a couple of pancakes and went to get ready to get a manicure with her sister. She was pulling into the stationhouse two hours later with freshly painted pale pink nails when her cell phone rang. Denise Poole’s face appeared on her phone screen.

  Josie parked her rental car in the municipal lot and answered.

  “Quinn,” Denise said. “This better be important. You called pretty damn early.”

  As surly as Denise sounded, Josie knew it was a lot of bluster. They’d helped each other out on a major case five years earlier—one that nearly cost them both their lives—and that was a bond that couldn’t be broken.

  “I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important,” Josie replied. “I’m calling about the food samples we sent in.”

  “Yeah. Hold on, would you?”

  Josie heard shuffling and rustling and then Denise came back on the line.

  “I’ve got brownie crumbs from the bottom of a baggie. I’ve got stomach contents from a twenty-year-old female. Also brownies, by the way. Then I have… let’s see… more brownies and brownie crumbs from a vehicle belonging to Daniel Lamay, and a large bag of baked goods from a non-profit called Precious Paws which includes brownies. I’m seeing a theme here. Anyway, the cookies and Rice Krispie treats were negative but guess what all the brownies and brownie residue have in common?”

  Josie held her breath.

  Denise didn’t wait for her to answer. “They all had varying but significant levels of scopolamine and datura stramonium in them.”

  Josie closed her eyes, relief washing over her. Proof. They had proof. Opening them, she said, “What’s datura stramonium?”

  “Jimsonweed,” said Denise. “In addition to scopolamine, you asked me to look for derivatives of scopolamine or any substances—naturally occurring or man-made—similar to it. That’s what I found. You want this report emailed?”

  “Yes,” Josie breathed. “Please. Denise, I owe you big time.”

  “No,” Denise said. “No you don’t.”

  Josie raced inside, but none of the team were there yet. Chitwood’s door remained closed. She was bursting at the seams by the time the team got there—Noah and Mettner returning from having served the warrant on Merlos’ residence, and Gretchen, whose shift started late that day. She knocked on the Chief’s door and then waited until everyone was seated at their desks in the great room with Amber lingering nearby and the Chief standing before them, arms folded across his chest as usual. “Quinn,” he barked. “You look like you’re gonna shoot right out of that chair. You go first.”

  Josie gave them the news, passing around copies of the report she’d received from Denise. After that, she briefed Chitwood on what she’d learned from Robyn Arber the day before. Gretchen recapped their interview with Doug Merlos and noted that she was waiting to hear back from Chief Hahlbeck about Merlos’ roommate and other known associates on campus. When she finished, Josie turned to Mettner and Noah. “What about you guys? You were on Merlos this morning, and Mett, you were supposed to track down the patients from the hospital yesterday. Did you get anywhere with that?”

  Noah said, “Merlos had a number of powdered substances in his apartment that we could not identify. He refused to tell us what they were, but the bedroom in his apartment looks like a damn high school chem lab.”

  “Meth?” Gretchen asked.

  Noah shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. We pushed pretty hard, trying to get him to tell us what he’d been making and when we brought up meth, he said it was beneath him.”

  Gretchen laughed.

  Chitwood said, “We’ll find out for sure when the lab results come back in, and then hopefully we can nab that little shit on drug charges. What else did you two get?”

  Mettner held up a finger to draw their attention to him. Looking at his phone, he read from his notes. “I tracked down five of the hospital patients yesterday evening, and they were willing to talk to me. I could connect all but one of them to the Precious Paws table outside the mini-market where Dan was last seen before he came to work the other day. All of them stopped at the table and all of them bought—guess what?”

  “Brownies,” everyone filled in.

  Mettner picked up a stack of pages from his desk and handed one to each of them. “In light of that, I thought I’d take a closer look at the animal rescue, as per the boss’s suggestion. What you’ve got in your hands is a list of employees and volunteers. The ones with the asterisks are the people involved in the last couple of weeks of fundraising efforts and community outreach, meaning they set up these tables throughout the city and try to get people to donate or buy baked goods. The names that are circled are volunteers who baked things for the fundraising. I got in touch with their director this morning and she said that basically, anyone on the schedule to make a batch of cookies or brownies or what have you, is instructed to drop their goods off by seven thirty in the morning at the shelter. Then the volunteers who are actually going out into the community come in before eight thirty and take what they need.”

  Josie looked at the seven names circled: Lori Guerette, Neil Sidebotham, Mary Lyddy, Samantha Vogelpohl, Jen Rector, Joanne McCallum, and Darlene Skwara.

  Chitwood said, “Is there any way to tell who made the brownies?”

  Mettner sighed. “Lots of people made brownies, just like lots of people made cookies and Rice Krispie treats as well. It’s a city-wide fundraiser. They don’t keep track of who makes what. People just drop off as much as they can bake at the shelter, the more, the better.”

  “What about any way of telling whose baked goods were at the mini-market the day that Dan was there?” Chitwood asked.

  Mettner shook his head.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Josie said. “We have proof that some of the brownies from the batch I removed yesterday as well as the brownies that Dan bought earlier in the week had scopolamine and jimsonweed in them. We could have the results from the blood tests from Dan as soon as today.”

  “Quinn’s right,” Chitwood said. “One of you should track down the bakers on that list. See what you can come up with.”

  The phone on Gretchen’s desk started ringing. She snatched it up and said, “Palmer here.”

  “Maybe talk to the director of the rescue again, or go over there and se
e if they’ve got cameras that might have caught people dropping things off for the bake sale.”

  Gretchen hung up the phone and cleared her throat. All heads swiveled in her direction. “Hahlbeck found out the name of Doug Merlos’ roommate.”

  “Yeah,” said Noah. “What’s the name?”

  “Hudson Tinning.”

  Thirty-Nine

  I tried to move through my day as if everything were normal, but one word loomed in the back of my mind. Failure. Had I failed? Why hadn’t the baked goods I dropped off at the shelter been distributed? Or had people eaten them, but because no one was there to give instructions, they just sat around like a bunch of duds? I thought it would be so fun for the drug to pop up all over the city without any rhyme or reason—people acting bizarrely and doing anything anyone told them to do. Still, there was nothing. Either the police had figured out a lot more than I anticipated and confiscated the brownies, or the dosing had caused other problems. I’d only run into other problems once.

  She was only the second name on my list. I had to see her every day for months, and every day for months she nitpicked at every little thing I did, from the way I parked my car to the way I organized things before classes. She was intolerable. Really, not killing her right away showed amazing restraint on my part. The final straw was the day she complained about the way I talked to a student. I was condescending, she said. That was rich, coming from her. I had to do something to shut that bitch up. She wasn’t a coffee drinker. I had to come up with something else.

  I baked the powder into some cookies. I had to make sure she got the right one, but I made several different kinds, including her favorite. She actually thought I had done it for her. That’s how important she thought she was and how self-centered she actually was. She smiled at me so sincerely before she gobbled it down and gave me a patronizing “thank you, that was wonderful” after she wiped the crumbs from her mouth. I waited for the drug to take hold. I had my instructions prepared. But she never reached any state of docility at all. Death still came for her, luckily, so it wasn’t a complete waste. It just didn’t go off the way I planned. Still, it was deliciously dramatic. Lots of flair, even if it was unintentional. The left side of her body just stopped working. Her mouth drooped. She tried to speak but all that came out was gibberish. She was having a stroke, I realized. It was a rare side effect—extremely rare—but it did happen. For the briefest second, I considered whether she would survive or not. Then I threw caution to the wind and leaned close to her face. “You got what you deserved,” I whispered. Then I grinned. I’m not sure if she registered my words or the grin, because at that moment she collapsed, and the screaming started all around us.

  I wondered now if scenes like that were popping up all over the city, and I just didn’t know it.

  Forty

  Josie paced the great room while they waited for Gretchen to drive over to the campus, find Hudson Tinning, and bring him in for questioning. Mettner had gone off to run down the Precious Paws leads. Noah sat at his own desk, tapping away at his computer. She knew he was preparing a warrant to search Hudson’s residence, but every so often he glanced up at her, his eyes moving like two metronomes in time with her movements.

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered.

  “You know,” Noah said, “none of us had any reason to suspect him.”

  Josie stopped walking and pointed to the map she and Mettner had left on the wall showing the coordinates from the triangulation of Nysa Somers’ cell phone. “He lives in Hollister Way too. I looked back over all the notes in the case file. His current roommate can only account for his whereabouts up to one a.m., and Nysa was dropped off at the entrance to Hollister Way at two a.m.”

  “That’s weak, Josie, and you know it.” He went back to typing.

  “He was in love with her. Maybe even obsessed for all we know. She had rejected him.”

  Without looking up, Noah said, “Lots of women reject men. Not all of those men poison those women. You followed all the evidence where it went, and here we are.”

  “Did I?”

  The clicking of his keyboard paused. “You’re wondering if you could have prevented the fire at Clay Walsh’s house or Dan’s incident? No. These investigations don’t move at warp speed. You know that better than anyone. We’re not psychics. We follow the leads. Nothing pointed to Hudson Tinning until now.”

  “You and Mettner and Gretchen have been running all over this town looking for connections between Nysa Somers and Clay Walsh, between those two and Brett Pace. No one’s been trying to connect them to Hudson Tinning.”

  “We already know he’s connected to Nysa Somers. We can go back and try to connect him to Walsh now—and the animal rescue.”

  “Or we can see if he owns a vehicle and get the GPS coordinates to see if he was at Clay Walsh’s house the day and time of the fire.”

  Noah grinned at her. “As soon as I finish what I’m doing, I’ll check for a vehicle registration and get a warrant for that.”

  An hour later, Hudson Tinning sat at the interview table with an untouched cup of coffee in front of him. He slouched in his chair, shoulders rounded, his blond hair falling across his face. This time he wore a Denton University T-shirt and distressed jeans. Flip-flops completed his surfer look. Josie turned away from the CCTV in the adjoining room and asked Gretchen, “Did he give you any trouble?”

  “No, not at all. Noah’s over there with Officer Chan executing the search warrant for his residence. Kid didn’t even care. As for the car, he doesn’t have an active navigation system, so Hummel had to impound it to get the GPS coordinates. Hummel should have the car back here by the time we’re done with the kid. Hudson wasn’t thrilled about losing his car for a couple of hours, but other than that, he was perfectly willing to come down and talk to us. In fact, I asked for his phone and he gave it to me.” Gretchen held up a sleek black Android phone.

  Josie’s brow furrowed. “Really?”

  Gretchen set it back down on the table. “Yeah. But the GPS isn’t enabled. There’s nothing on it. Nothing useful, anyway. Nothing incriminating and nothing that would lead you to believe that this kid is the kind of garbage human being who would randomly drug people with a potentially fatal substance for fun.”

  “Calls to and from Nysa? Texts?”

  “Nothing recent. The ones that are on here are all about practice times and meeting up for the piece WYEP did on her.”

  “What about Merlos?” Josie asked.

  “Nothing. Merlos isn’t even a contact in his phone.”

  “He could have erased anything even remotely incriminating,” Josie pointed out. “He’s had plenty of time.”

  Gretchen slid her reading glasses up her nose and looked at the phone, swiping and scrolling. “I’ll tell you what. If he was going to erase something, he should have erased all these messages from his mother. This kid doesn’t stand a chance of having a relationship other than with her. Listen to this text: ‘I talked to your professors today to let them know you’re too distraught to turn in any assignments. They’ve all agreed to a week’s extension.’ Heart emoji, smiley face emoji.”

  “Wow,” Josie said. “Way to foster his independence.”

  “Yeah,” said Gretchen with a sigh. “To his credit, he texted back and asked her to stop interfering in his life and that he’s perfectly capable of talking to his own professors. There’s a shit-ton of calls, too, although mostly from her to him. He called her Sunday night around ten. They talked for forty-nine minutes. Then Monday afternoon for an hour.” She put the phone back onto the table. “You ready?”

  “Let’s go talk to him.”

  Hudson smiled at Josie when she and Gretchen walked in. Josie took the seat closest to him. Gretchen sat further away, her notebook out in front of her.

  “Hey,” Hudson said. “Did you find anything out about Nysa? Like what happened to her?”

  “That’s why we asked you to come down here today, Hudson. I need to advise you of som
e rights first, okay?”

  “Oh, like on TV? Am I under arrest?”

  “No,” Josie said. “Not at this time, but if we’re going to talk, I’d like you to be aware of your rights before we get started. How’s that sound?”

  “Uh, sure, okay.”

  Josie read him off his Miranda rights. He bobbed his head in agreement as she spoke. When she finished, she waited a few beats to see if he’d demand to leave or ask for an attorney, but he simply stared at her, waiting.

  “Hudson,” Josie said, “we asked you to come down here because we were hoping that you could tell us what happened with Nysa.”

  “Wait, what? I thought you said you were investigating. Why are you asking me?”

  “I think you know why we’re asking you, Hudson,” Josie said. “Nysa was with someone between two a.m. and almost six a.m. on Monday morning. Right before she walked into the pool and drowned herself.”

  Hudson’s eyes widened. He leaned in a fraction with each word Josie spoke, as though he were listening to a riveting story. “Who was it?” he asked.

  “You don’t know?” Gretchen put in. “Hudson, we don’t have time for lies. Nysa is dead and her family wants answers.”

  “Lies? What do you mean?”

  Josie said, “Cut the shit, Hudson. This doe-eyed act isn’t going to work on us. Where did you take Nysa Somers on Sunday night? Back to your house? Somewhere else?”

  “Take her? I didn’t take her anywhere. I didn’t even see her. Listen, I didn’t want to say anything before, but you should know that Nysa was sleeping with Coach Pace.”

  “We’re aware of that,” Gretchen said. “We’ve already spoken to him.”

  “What did he say? He was with her that night, wasn’t he? Who else would have been with her? If you’re looking for who she was with, I’m telling you, it was him.”

  “How do you know about them?” Josie asked.

  He sighed and looked down at the table. “I, uh, saw them once. After practice. In his office. Believe me, Nysa wasn’t the first student he slept with. I just didn’t think it was anyone’s business. I don’t think Nysa would want people to know about it.”