Save Her Soul (Detective Josie Quinn #9)(10)
“Your late husband,” Gretchen answered easily. “Of course.”
Josie nodded. She looked out the windshield at the valley below the hospital. Where once the lovely brick buildings of the city’s main street had stood tall, now they were mired in murky brown water. “We were high school sweethearts,” she said. “We met when we were nine. I lived in a trailer park, and he lived in the development behind the trailer park. We used to meet in the woods between the park and the back of his house. Our freshman year, the friendship turned into more. We were together all of high school, including junior year. That year Ray was a pitcher for the baseball team.”
Gretchen said, “The very team that won the state championship.”
“Yes,” Josie said. “He was very good. He was being scouted. He actually went to college on a baseball scholarship. He was scouted there as well, but he only ever wanted to be a police officer, so he never pursued it.”
“He was on the team. They had letter jackets, and when they won the station championship that year, they were given special championship patches,” Gretchen said. “And his number was twenty-seven, wasn’t it?”
Josie nodded. Below them, she counted three rescue boats buzzing through the submerged streets of the city.
“The blazing baseball patch?”
“Ray got into a fight—over me—he was defending me. It was something stupid. He was a hothead. Hell, so was I. He tore his jacket. He’d just gotten the championship patch put on. He was pretty upset. Those jackets were expensive to have replaced completely. But his mom said it was no problem for her to sew it up. She did but it looked terrible, so she found the blazing baseball patch to sew over top of the tear. She said—”
Unexpectedly, Josie felt tears sting the backs of her eyes remembering the look on Ray’s face when his mother gave him the jacket and said the words to him: I’m so proud of you. Their childhoods had been so full of trauma, abuse, guilt, and shame. Something as simple as hearing those words from his mother had been like winning the lottery for Ray.
Josie swallowed her emotion and continued, “She told him she was very proud of him.”
“Ray would have been the only one on the team that year to have that patch on that sleeve, then,” Gretchen said.
“Yes.”
“But the body in the morgue right now does not belong to Ray.”
“No,” Josie said, her voice coming out huskier than intended. “I buried him five years ago. I don’t know how his jacket ended up on the body of a girl buried under a house on Hempstead. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“There’s no chance that one of the other pitchers on the team saw Ray’s awesome blazing baseball patch and got one for himself?”
Josie looked at Gretchen. “And changed their number to Ray’s?”
“Okay, then what happened to the jacket? Do you remember him losing it? It getting stolen?”
Josie closed her eyes, trying to think back, but her memories from high school seemed light years away now, like someone else’s life. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was summertime right after they got the jackets—I remember that, because it was so hot. He wore his anyway for awhile. I guess I didn’t ask questions when he stopped wearing it because I just assumed he put it away for the summer because of the heat.”
“Do you have his old things?” Gretchen asked.
“Some of them. His mother also took some and Misty has some stuff too.”
Misty was the woman Ray had been seeing after his and Josie’s marriage fell apart.
Gretchen took out her phone and started typing in a text. “The fastest way to verify if that jacket belongs to Ray would just be to have Hummel turn the sleeve inside out and check for the tear you mentioned, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “But I already know that jacket belonged to Ray.”
Gretchen hit send on her text to Hummel and said, “Then we just have to figure out who that girl is and how she got Ray’s jacket. Maybe that will help us find out what happened to her. We can check yearbooks and also look into the history of owners and renters of the house she was under. But first, we both need a shower and change of clothes.”
The Denton Police headquarters was a three-story stone building with ornate molding over its many double-casement arched windows and a bell tower on one end. Thus far, it had narrowly avoided the flooding. As the water level had risen over the last few days, emergency workers and volunteers had packed sandbags and built a wall of them near the front entrance of the building, holding the water back. A portable tube barrier, which required far less work to set up, had been allocated for the front of the police building but when members of the Emergency Services Department went into their supply building to get it, they found it was missing.
The sandbags worked well enough, but no one could get in or out through the front lobby. Luckily, the water hadn’t yet reached the ground floor of the building where their holding cells were. Josie pulled into the municipal parking lot at the rear of the building and let Gretchen out, promising to return with her high school yearbook.
Josie counted herself lucky that her house, where she lived with her boyfriend and colleague, Lieutenant Noah Fraley, was in one of the neighborhoods outside of the flood zone. She knew Noah wasn’t home as he had been dispatched to South Denton to work with emergency crews there. Misty Derossi’s vehicle, however, was parked in the driveway. Misty owned a large, beautiful Victorian home in the historic district of the city which had been under water for days. Josie had invited Misty, her four-year-old son, Harris, and their chi-weiner dog, Pepper, to stay with her and Noah until the flooding passed. As Josie turned her key in the door, she heard the click of dog paws on her foyer floor and then Pepper’s high-pitched bark mingled with Trout’s deeper bark. As she opened the door, both dogs jumped on her legs. Their tongues lolled as they huffed, trying to get her attention. Trout, who was normally very friendly toward Pepper, snapped at her as she tried to get Josie’s attention. Josie scolded him and knelt to pet both of them, rubbing their sides and reminding them both that they were good dogs.