Her Mother’s Grave
Absolutely gripping crime fiction with unputdownable mystery and suspense
Lisa Regan
Also by Lisa Regan
Vanishing Girls
The Girl With No Name
Her Mother’s Grave
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
The Girl With No Name
A Letter from Lisa Regan
Hear More From Lisa
Also by Lisa Regan
Vanishing Girls
Acknowledgements
For my brother, Andrew Brock, for showing me you can always rewrite your own story!
Prologue
She started the fire in the nursery. Her lips curved into a smile as amber flames licked the walls and spread throughout the room, consuming the perfectly matching furniture and the carpet from which she’d spent so many hours scrubbing invisible marks. The gossamer crib canopy she painstakingly arranged every day went up in a satisfying whoosh. Don’t wake the babies. Don’t go in there till the children are up. Don’t, don’t, don’t. This’ll teach her.
As the air thickened and began burning her nose and throat, she backed out of the room. Tendrils of thick, black smoke slipped around the edges of the door, coating the ceiling and chasing her out into the hallway. She used her forearm to cover her mouth as she ran. Soon the flames would rage through the house, burning up every fancy thing that spiteful, snobby bitch owned. It was going to be wonderful.
She fled downstairs, stopping to hold a match to the heavy drapes and valances that adorned each window in the living and dining rooms until the taste of fire in her throat became unbearable. She made her way to the kitchen, intending to leave through the back door before she was caught. She was never supposed to set foot in the house again after they’d accused her of stealing.
She was halfway there when a glimpse of something in the family room stopped her dead in her tracks. A frisson of excitement spiraled inside her. Here was something even more destructive than fire, a way to bring down that bitch for good. The grin spread further across her face as she darted into the room, hands outstretched.
Chapter One
PRESENT DAY
Six-month-old Harris Quinn giggled from his high chair as the small plastic pot of pureed baby peas hit the kitchen floor with a splat, covering Josie’s sneakers with drab green mush. Startled, Josie took one look at his little food-covered face and laughed too; it was impossible to get mad at him. Plucking a paper towel from above the sink, she bent to clean the mess from the floor, muttering “Rookie mistake” to Harris, who banged his palms against the tray in delight. Throwing things on the floor and watching Josie pick them up was his new favorite game.
Dumping the clump of paper towels into the garbage can, she turned back to see Harris’s pea-covered little fists pressed into his eyes for just a moment. Josie looked at the clock on Misty’s microwave. “Time for a nap, little man,” she told him.
She looked around her for any further traces of food on the floor or walls of Misty Derossi’s immaculate home. It wasn’t often that she asked Josie to look after her son, but every once in a while, if Harris’s grandmother wasn’t available, she would get the call. Josie looked forward to these rare visits and didn’t want to jeopardize her status as one of Harris’s trusted babysitters by leaving a mess for his mother.
Grabbing a cloth from the sink, she cleaned Harris’s face and hands as he squirmed and wailed in protest. “All done,” she announced as she unfastened the straps of the high chair and lifted him out of it, marveling at how big he had grown in such a short amount of time. She could still remember the first time she had held him, pinned against her chest after rescuing him from the deathly cold currents of the Susquehanna River. He had only been a few days old then, tiny, frail, and lucky to be alive. Now he was chunky and solid, his blond locks growing thicker each day, with a real personality beginning to emerge.
Now that Harris was older, Josie enjoyed making him giggle, watching him spread his meals across his rosy cheeks, cleaning him up and then falling asleep together in the rocking chair that Josie had bought for Misty. It was one of only a handful of modern pieces of furniture in the house, and completely out of place in the sitting room, which looked as though it had been torn from the pages of Victorian Homes magazine.
Harris rested his head on Josie’s shoulder as she settled there now, using her feet to gently rock the chair back and forth. From the cloth pocket beside her, Josie pulled out one of Harris’s pacifiers, which he reached for greedily. Shifting him a little lower so that his cheek rested on her chest, Josie stroked his hair until he slipped into a deep sleep. There was nothing quite like this feeling, she thought as she began to doze off herself.
The digitized beat of her cell phone broke into the silence, and Josie’s eyes snapped open, alert and searching. The sound was muffled and coming from the other side of the room, where her jacket was slung over the back of the couch. If it was important, whoever it was would call back. Looking down at Harris, she was relieved to find him undisturbed, his pacifier teetering just on the edge of his bottom lip, about to fall. A pool of dribble fanned across her T-shirt below his head. Josie smiled, running her hand up and down his back and nudging the chair into a gentle rocking motion. The phone stopped ringing, and she closed he
r eyes again. If it was a true emergency, Lieutenant Noah Fraley and Detective Gretchen Palmer knew where to find her.
She had just drifted back into a warm drowsiness when her phone rang again. This time, Harris stirred. Josie tucked the pacifier back into his mouth as quickly as she could, and he sucked loudly for a moment before crinkling his brow in preparation for what she suspected would be an unhappy howl. She held her breath in anticipation, but his features smoothed and he let out a little sigh instead. Silently, Josie cursed her phone, knowing there was no way to get them both across the room to her jacket without waking him. Not that it mattered—a moment later she heard the front door open and close, and Misty’s voice called out, “I’m home!”
Harris stirred again, eyes scrunching, pressing his face into Josie’s chest as Misty’s voice drifted in from the hallway. “Josie? You in the living room?”
Harris lifted his head, his blue eyes bleary with sleep as he searched the room for his mother. She appeared in the doorway, a huge smile lighting her face at the sight of him. One side of her mouth still drooped, like an invisible finger was drawing it downward, but she had regained a lot more function since the assault she’d survived the day Harris was born. Clapping her hands together, Misty crossed the room and scooped him off Josie’s body, cooing and smoothing his wayward locks down. “Hi baby,” she murmured to him. “Did you have a good nap?”
Josie stretched and adjusted her T-shirt. She glanced up at Misty. “How did it go?”
Grinning, Misty pointed to her top front teeth. “Got my permanent implant. Feels great. I’m so glad to be done with it.”
When she’d had one of her top front teeth knocked out during the attack, she’d been given a temporary crown in the hospital, but it had taken a few months for her to save up the money to have it permanently repaired. Josie had been helping her when she could, but Misty used all the funds Josie gave her for Harris’s needs first. Before Harris came along, Misty made a lucrative living dancing at the local strip club, which had enabled her to purchase and furnish her lavish home. She had used her savings for an in vitro procedure to get pregnant with Harris and decided not to return to stripping once she gave birth—even if she wanted to, the injuries she’d sustained placed dancing again firmly outside the realm of possibility.
Josie stood and moved over to the couch, riffling through her pockets to find her cell phone. “Looks good,” she told Misty.
“Some fruit puffs and a bit of mashed peas. He was more interested in seeing how it looked on the floor.”
Misty laughed. “Oh yeah, that’s his new thing. No worries. I’ll see if he’ll take a bottle.”
Josie pulled up her missed calls. Both from the same number. Not one she recognized.
“Thank you again,” Misty said, although she had thanked Josie about a dozen times before she left for the dentist. “If Mrs. Quinn wasn’t so sick, she would have watched him. Some kind of stomach bug.”
Josie pulled on her jacket and walked over, patting Harris’s back. “No problem. We don’t want him catching whatever’s going around. You can call me. We’re finally finishing up all the paperwork for the district attorney on our last big case, so things are slow.”
“That drug dealer, right? Lloyd Todd?”
“More like a kingpin,” Josie said.
“Hard to believe he had such a big operation,” Misty remarked.
Lloyd Todd had been considered a pillar of the community in the small city of Denton. His general contracting company was one of the busiest and most well-known, but as Josie and her team had found out in the last two months, it had been mostly a front for a large drug-dealing operation. Todd had had nearly two dozen young men and a couple of young women working for him as mules and low-level dealers. He’d been supplying about eighty percent of the city’s illegal drugs to needy customers. It was no surprise to Josie that the number of overdoses had gone down sharply after his arrest. Of course, they’d go back up once Todd’s customers found their fixes elsewhere.
“It was a shocker,” Josie agreed.
Misty followed her through the labyrinth of lavish rooms until they reached the front door. Once on the front porch, Misty said, “Want to stay for lunch?”
It wasn’t the first time she had asked Josie to stay a little longer, but while Josie would love to spend more time with the baby, she wasn’t sure her relationship with Misty was quite ready for a girls’ lunch. It had taken them a long time to reach the civil place they found themselves in now. Several years earlier, when Josie’s marriage to her late husband, Ray Quinn, fell apart, he had started an affair with Misty. Ray had cared deeply about Misty, and his dying wish had been for Josie to respect his choice. It was a difficult task, even on her best day. It had taken the assault on Misty and the birth of Ray’s son to finally bring the two women together. Still, Josie knew she could be abrasive, even when she tried not to be, and she was afraid the fragile relationship she had developed with Misty would be ruined if they spent more time together. “I have to work,” she lied.
Misty’s mouth sagged with disappointment, the partial paralysis of her face making the expression even more acute.
Josie felt a prickle of guilt. “Maybe next time.”
Misty’s gaze dropped to the wooden floorboards. “You always say that. Listen, I know we haven’t always gotten along, but I want you to know that I—”
The ring of Josie’s cell phone interrupted Misty’s speech before it had started. Both women stared down at Josie’s jacket pocket. Fishing the phone out, Josie gave Misty a sheepish smile and glanced at the screen. It was the same number as earlier. Desperate to avoid the topic of their reconciliation, Josie quickly swiped answer and pressed the phone to her ear.
“Quinn,” she said.
A man’s voice answered. “Josie Quinn?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“I—I—you can call me Roger.”
“I can ‘call you’ Roger? Who is this?”
Hesitation. Then, “I’m calling about your ad. You know, on craigslist?”
A sinking sensation swept through Josie’s stomach. She looked up at Misty, who was looking at her with puzzled concern. Josie stepped off the porch, using her free hand to mimic bringing a phone receiver to her ear and mouthed, “Call if you need anything.”
She turned away from Misty and strode to her car, turning her attention back to Roger. “My craigslist ad? Which one was that?”
“Which one?” Roger asked, and again Josie heard more hesitation in his voice. “You don’t—do I have the right number?”
“You called me, Roger.”
More dead air. Then Roger said, “You don’t sound like you’re looking for fun.”
“Being pranked through craigslist isn’t my idea of a good time, Roger.”
But Roger had hung up. Josie glanced back toward Misty’s house, but she’d gone inside with the baby. With a sigh, Josie got into her Ford Escape and started the engine. She used the internet app on her phone to pull up Denton’s craigslist site. It took a couple of minutes of browsing to find the ad. This time it was under Casual Encounters. It had been posted three hours earlier.
Kinky girl seeks playmate—Woman seeking man.
Dread froze her finger over the screen. She didn’t want to read it, didn’t want to know what it said, but she had to look. Better to do it now, in the privacy of her vehicle, than to do it at the police station with her lieutenant and detective reading over her shoulder. The first time it happened, her face had taken fifteen minutes to recover from the flush that had reddened her cheeks. She took a deep breath, held it, and pressed the link to the ad.
Looking for some kinky fun. Hot girl early thirties seeking afternoon delight. A tongue so skilled I will never leave you unsatisfied. Always clean, always discreet. Call to hook up.
Below that was Josie’s na
me and cell phone number.
She let out the breath she’d been holding and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat as though it had burned her hand. A movement in one of the windows of Misty’s house caught her attention. It was likely Misty peeking from behind the curtain, wondering why Josie was still sitting curbside. Josie pulled away and headed to the police station. It was her day off, but this couldn’t wait.
Chapter Two
The calls had started just after Lloyd Todd’s arrest a month earlier. They were always the result of a craigslist ad that gave her name and cell phone number, some so disgusting and graphic she could barely get through reading them. She’d changed her number three times already. Whoever was writing the ads managed to get hold of her new number each time. She’d tried to figure out how—in fact her entire staff had come under suspicion—but she still couldn’t track it. She’d gone to the cell phone store, even gone so far as to bring in the store associates for interrogation, but that lead had fallen flat pretty quickly. Even if someone at the cell phone store was giving out her new number each time she changed it, she had no way of proving it. She’d switched cell carriers after the last ad, but it was now obvious that hadn’t worked.