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

  Her Deadly Touch

  An absolutely addictive crime thriller and mystery novel

  Lisa Regan

  Books by Lisa Regan

  Detective Josie Quinn Series

  Vanishing Girls

  The Girl With No Name

  Her Mother’s Grave

  Her Final Confession

  The Bones She Buried

  Her Silent Cry

  Cold Heart Creek

  Find Her Alive

  Save Her Soul

  Breathe Your Last

  Hush Little Girl

  Her Deadly Touch

  Available in Audio

  Detective Josie Quinn Series

  Vanishing Girls (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Girl With No Name (Available in the UK and the US)

  Her Mother’s Grave (Available in the UK and the US)

  Her Final Confession (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Bones She Buried (Available in the UK and the US)

  Her Silent Cry (Available in the UK and the US)

  Cold Heart Creek (Available in the UK and the US)

  Find Her Alive (Available in the UK and the US)

  Save Her Soul (Available in the UK and the US)

  Breathe Your Last (Available in the UK and the US)

  Hush Little Girl (Available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  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

  Hear More from Lisa

  Books by Lisa Regan

  A Letter from Lisa

  Vanishing Girls

  The Girl With No Name

  Her Mother’s Grave

  Her Final Confession

  The Bones She Buried

  Her Silent Cry

  Cold Heart Creek

  Find Her Alive

  Save Her Soul

  Breathe Your Last

  Hush Little Girl

  Acknowledgments

  In loving memory of the most extraordinary human I’ve ever known, my dad, Billy Regan. I let them tell me no, Dad, and they didn’t.

  Chapter One

  The bus was full but Wallace and his little sister, Frankie, and super annoying Bianca from his class were still sitting along the wall outside school. The bus kept belching out fumes, making Wallace’s stomach feel queasy. Frankie tugged at his wrist. “Wallace, come on! We have to get on the bus or we’re going to get stuck at school. I don’t want to get stuck at school. It’s like, my worst nightmare.”

  Bianca laughed. “We wouldn’t be stuck here. Eventually someone would come find us and take us home.”

  “Like your mom?” Wallace said. “She works so many hours she can’t even take you to your own appointments.”

  Bianca reached across Frankie and punched his arm. It hurt a little, but he didn’t show it. “Don’t talk about my mom.”

  “Why not?” Wallace sneered. “What’re you going to do?”

  Frankie jumped up, her brown ponytail bouncing. She shifted the straps of her hot pink backpack. “Come on, you guys. Don’t fight.”

  “I don’t take orders from fifth graders,” he told her.

  A stern female voice from behind them said, “But you will take orders from me, young man.”

  The principal. Cringing, Wallace turned and pasted a smile on his face, wondering how much she had heard. But she didn’t reprimand him. Instead, she made a shooing motion with her hands. “Go on, then. The three of you. Onto the bus.”

  Bianca stood up. “But today we were supposed to—”

  The principal didn’t let her finish. “You’re supposed to be on the bus. That’s what I was told. Now get going, and no fighting.”

  Chapter Two

  Dr. Paige Rosetti’s office was designed to soothe. The walls were cream-colored. The couch and chairs were soft and gray. Wall art showed paintings of faraway places that looked too beautiful to be real. Josie counted at least fourteen potted plants even though the large bay window to the left of her seat looked out onto a well-tended garden. It was August and the lush colors of the various flowers were difficult to tear her eyes from, even as she squirmed beneath Paige Rosetti’s patient stare. She couldn’t quite get comfortable. She’d never felt at ease in therapy although she’d only been coming for two months.

  “Josie,” Paige said softly.

  Josie’s heel tapped out a muted beat on the carpet making her knee bob up and down frenetically.

  “Josie,” Paige said again.

  Slowly, Josie met Paige’s gaze. Crow’s feet gathered in the corners of her brown eyes. She was old enough to be Josie’s mother. In fact, Josie had gone to high school with her daughter. Her long, wavy blonde hair and open manner made her seem more youthful than her age.

  Paige smiled. “This only works if you talk to me.”

  She said that every session.

  Paige added, “You are paying for my time. I’d like for you to get as much from it as possible.”

  She also said that at every session.

  “Sorry,” Josie said. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the tops of her thighs, trying to still her jumpy leg. “What—what were we talking about?”

  Paige smiled again but this time, Josie could see a tightness at the corners of her lips. She was getting impatient. “I was asking you how you felt about going back to work tomorrow. You’ve been on suspension for almost four months.”

  “Right,” said Josie.

  Josie was a detective for the Denton, Pennsylvania, police department. Denton was a small but bustling city in Central Pennsylvania nestled among several mountains, resting on the banks of the Susquehanna River. The population, which swelled when Denton University was in session, was large enough to keep the police department consistently busy. Her last case had been a double homicide that happened on her wedding day at her wedding venue. She and her husband, Noah Fraley, who worked as a lieutenant for Denton PD, had been thrust into the case when they realized that Josie knew the murder victims. During the course of the investigation, Josie’s grandmother, Lisette Matson, had been murdered. Afterward, when she was supposed to be grieving at home, Josie had left her gun and badge and gone looking for a missing person associated with the case. She hadn’t told anyone on the force, not even Noah, where she was going or that she had f
igured out the location of the person.

  “Josie?” Paige prompted.

  The next day, their Chief of Police had suspended her for not looping in the team on her activities. The official report had said she was insubordinate. He’d kept her out far longer than anyone expected. Josie suspected it was because he wanted to give her extra time to grieve her loss.

  “I’m not worried about it,” Josie murmured, looking out at the garden again. A brightly colored cardinal flitted through some low-hanging tree branches at the outer edge of the yard.

  “You’re not worried about returning to work after being out for four months?” Paige echoed. “Isn’t that the longest you’ve ever been out?”

  “Sure,” said Josie.

  The truth was that she hadn’t minded the four months off. For the first time in her life, she didn’t care about work. She didn’t care about anything, really, besides her husband and their dog, Trout. The world without Lisette—who had basically raised her—was hollow and colorless. Joyless. Josie felt muted inside and out, like she was trapped beneath a mile of sludge and too exhausted to fight her way up and out of it.

  From her peripheral vision, Josie saw Paige check her watch. She gave her credit for not letting out a lengthy sigh. Paige changed topics. “How are you sleeping?”

  “The same,” Josie said.

  “So you’re not, then?”

  She shrugged. “I keep having the nightmare,” she offered.

  “The one where your grandmother gets shot?”

  Josie looked at her. “Yeah. I mean I guess it’s a memory, not a nightmare. Only this time, I know what’s coming. I try to throw myself in front of her, to take the bullet myself, but my feet are stuck to the ground. I can’t move at all. Then the shots come, and I…”

  She trailed off. I wake up screaming, she continued silently. Crying, soaked in a cold sweat. Then Noah would hold her while their sweet Boston Terrier whined and tried to lick her face. “She shouldn’t have been out there,” Josie would cry again and again while Noah rocked her like a small child. It was the only time she allowed herself to cry and that was mostly because she woke up already in tears. Unfortunately, she couldn’t control her dreams or her body’s response to them.

  Paige said, “Josie, eventually we are going to need to really talk about this. We need to go deeper. This is a safe space for you. You can cry and scream and rage and freak out here with me and I won’t judge you. I won’t be scared. I won’t be upset. My feelings won’t be hurt, and I’ll never tell another soul.”

  Avoiding Paige’s eyes again, Josie returned her gaze to the window. The cardinal was gone. Her eyes traced the flowers, some of their petals limp in the searing August heat. “I know,” she said.

  Paige’s chair creaked. Josie turned her head in time to see her stand up and walk over to her desk, where she placed her notepad. Not for the first time, it was blank. “I think that’s all the time we have for today, Josie.”

  Josie stood up. “Same time next week?”

  Paige’s chin dipped toward her chest. Finally, she let out the sigh that Josie knew she’d been holding in the entire forty-five minutes Josie had been there. “Josie, I’m glad you’re here. I really am, and I want to help you. I think you could benefit from therapy a lot. I’m happy to continue seeing you, but again, I’m not sure that you’re getting anything out of this.”

  “Dr. Rosetti,” Josie said, smiling for the first time that morning. “Are you dumping me?”

  Paige looked at her and laughed. “No, not at all. I’m just—” she broke off, wearing that tense smile that Josie seemed to provoke with every session. After a few awkward seconds, she said, “How about this? In the next week, I want you to make a list for me.”

  “What kind of a list?”

  “A list of things that make you feel…”

  “Sad?”

  “Out of control.”

  Josie felt a small flutter of discomfort in her chest. “Out of control?”

  “Yes,” said Paige. “Three things. At least. When you come back, we’ll discuss them.”

  Josie swallowed, throat dry. “Sure,” she said.

  She left without thanking the doctor. So far, she’d managed to avoid doing what Dr. Rosetti kept telling her was the “heavy lifting” in therapy. She knew that the doctor wanted to ask her why she kept coming if she wasn’t going to fully engage in the sessions. The truth was that Josie wasn’t going for herself. She was going because of a little girl she’d helped during her last case. That little girl had lost just as much, if not more, than Josie on that case and yet, she’d faced up to the trauma with grit and steely determination. She always, as she had described it to Josie, “felt all the feelings until they were gone.” She had even done it toward the end of the investigation when Josie had asked her to recall some particularly traumatic moments. The girl had since moved away with relatives, but Josie felt like a fraud having asked that courageous little girl to face her demons so that Josie could solve a case when she could not even bring herself to go to therapy to try to resolve a lifetime of trauma and then, most recently, Lisette’s murder.

  So Josie had gone to the sessions with Paige so she could live with herself. I’m trying, she kept telling herself. If she talked with the girl, which she did about once a week via Zoom, she could tell her that yes, she was still in therapy. Still trying to work up the nerve to feel all her feelings even though after two months of therapy, she hadn’t shed a tear in Paige Rosetti’s soothing office.

  “Next week,” she muttered to herself as she got into her car and fired up the engine.

  She put the AC on full blast and then turned up the radio as loud as it would go, hoping for some music to drown out her thoughts, but instead the host of one of their local FM stations was giving their hourly news report. “Denton police are still searching for Krystal Duncan, a thirty-two-year-old legal secretary who went missing three days ago. Duncan was reported missing by her boss when she failed to show up for work last week and didn’t answer any calls. Authorities are asking anyone with information to contact Denton police. You can find a photograph of Krystal Duncan on our website.”

  Josie punched at the buttons on the console until she found a station playing eighties music. Noah had mentioned the Krystal Duncan case at home, but Josie hadn’t asked any questions. Together they’d watched local news coverage of Krystal’s disappearance. Josie had studied the photo of the woman as it flashed across the screen. It had been taken from the website for the law firm where Krystal worked. In it, she was dressed in a casual skirt suit. She was posed artificially beside a large mahogany desk, her long brown hair cascading over her shoulders. Close-set brown eyes peered over her nose, which had a small bump on it, as though it had been broken once but not properly fixed. Her smile was thin and forced. The woman’s face stayed in Josie’s mind for three days and still, she asked Noah no questions. It was that strange, muted feeling again that she’d had since Lisette’s murder. She knew she should be interested in the disappearance of a local woman. Before Lisette’s murder, Josie would have been obsessing over it—even if that meant, because of her suspension, she had to comb the internet for news coverage from home while her colleagues solved the case.

  But now she pushed thoughts of Krystal Duncan out of her head. Josie knew the investigative team at Denton PD were already working Krystal’s case and they were the best. If Josie ever went missing, she’d want them looking for her. She knew she’d be elbow-deep in all the details tomorrow when she returned to work. For now, she didn’t want to think at all. She wanted to be swallowed deeper into the mental and emotional sludge that kept her from the empty ache of real life.

  A bead of sweat ran down Josie’s spine. Her fingers toggled the AC dial again but there was no more cold air to be had. With a sigh, she pulled away from Dr. Paige Rosetti’s house, which doubled as her office, and weaved through the streets of Denton. Noah was at work and although Josie knew their Boston Terrier, Trout, would be ecstatic to
see her, she didn’t feel like going home just yet. Instead, she drove to the cemetery where she’d buried her first husband, Ray. Josie’s grandmother, Lisette, had requested to be cremated and her remains now sat in a shiny urn on a shelf in Josie and Noah’s living room. But Josie had come to see Ray as she often did when she felt like life was spiraling away from her.

  “I guess I should put this on my list,” she muttered to herself as she parked the car near Ray’s headstone and got out. Why was she feeling out of control now, she wondered. She didn’t want to examine it. What she wanted was a searing shot of Wild Turkey. But she’d given up drinking long ago because she made poor choices when she drank and while alcohol dulled her emotional pain temporarily, it never made it go away.

  The sun beat down on her as she weaved her way through the headstones to Ray’s grave. A light breeze drifted past, but it gave little relief from the oppressive heat and humidity. By the time she stood before Ray’s stone, her shirt was damp beneath the collar. It had been six years since Ray’s murder, and things between them hadn’t ended well, even before his death, but Josie had known Ray since she was a child. They were high school sweethearts. For most of her life he’d been her anchor, her North Star, much the way Lisette had been. Josie usually felt a sense of peace when she visited this place. Closing her eyes, she let her body sway slightly in the breeze. Around her birds chirped and the only other noise that could be heard was the faint sound of cars whirring past on the road that led to the cemetery.