“Looks like it’s family owned,” she told Josie. “Been around forty years. Father passed it to his son. Current owner is George Newton. He is in his forties. They have a staff of ten.”
Josie skirted around the flooded portion of the city, taking a circuitous route until she reached North Denton, which was a more sparsely populated and mountainous part of the city. Newton Basement Waterproofing was housed in a flat-roofed cinderblock building with a large parking lot. Two pickup trucks sat in front of the building, their beds filled with equipment. Josie and Gretchen parked next to them and made their way inside. A ding sounded overhead as they opened the front door and stepped in. A few chairs sat unoccupied to their left. Directly in front of them was a tall, unmanned desk. Brochures were spaced in neat piles across its surface. From a doorway behind the desk, a male voice called, “Be right there!”
They waited five minutes and finally, a ruddy-faced man with short brown hair emerged from the doorway. He wore dirty jeans and a black T-shirt with white lettering that said, Newton Basement Waterproofing. Since 1980. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
Josie and Gretchen were getting their credentials out when he pointed at Josie and said, “Hey, I know you. You’re that detective.”
Josie handed him her credentials. “Yes, Detective Josie Quinn.”
He gave Gretchen’s ID a passing glance, his attention focused on Josie. “What can I help you with?”
Josie said, “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to watch the news in the last twenty-four hours, but we recovered human remains from beneath the foundation of a home on Hempstead Road.”
He grimaced. “Oh yeah, I saw it on the news. It was a body, huh?”
“Yes, unfortunately. It was the body of a girl who lived in the house between 1997 and 2004. She had been buried beneath the foundation. We pulled city permits to see if anyone had worked on the basement of that house, and we found that your company applied for a permit for underpinning in 2004.”
His face clouded with confusion. “You think I had something to do with this?”
Gretchen said, “Mr. Newton, is it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “George.”
“Right now, we’re just trying to establish when and how the body came to be under the house. Do you remember working on Hempstead?”
His eyes were wide. “No. I mean if we applied for a permit, then I’m sure we did the work, but I don’t personally remember it.”
“Were you working here back then?” Josie asked.
“Oh yeah,” he answered. “I wasn’t in charge or anything, but I worked for my pops for a long time before he handed over the company. I was on the crews. He sent us to places and we did the jobs.”
On her phone, Josie pulled up the PDF document Noah had sent her and showed it to him. He patted his collar and then searched the underside of the desk until he came up with a pair of reading glasses. “You mind?” he asked, reaching for her phone.
“Not at all,” Josie told him, handing her phone over.
He studied the document for several minutes before saying, “Looks like my dad filed for the permit on this one. This is his signature. They had some pretty extensive plumbing and sewage problems. We had to tear up the whole basement and lower it, re-pour the foundation.”
Gretchen asked, “Is your dad still around?”
“No, I’m sorry. He passed last year.”
Josie said, “I’m so sorry to hear that. Do you have any records of your own from this job?”
George shook his head. “We only keep records going back seven years. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know anyone who might have been on the crew who did the job on Hempstead?” Josie persisted.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he admitted. “I was probably on the crew. You’ve got to understand, we work hundreds of jobs a year and this is going back, jeez, almost twenty years.”
Josie took her phone back and pulled up the last existing driver’s license photo for Vera Urban to show him. “Do you remember her?”
He rubbed his chin. “She looks familiar.”
Gretchen used her own phone to show him Beverly’s yearbook photo. “How about her?”
He stared at the photo. “Oh, her,” he said. “Yeah, I remember her. She was a real pain in the ass, that one.”
Josie felt a tug of excitement at her core. “Why do you say that?”
“I remember this job now. Look, I don’t remember a lot of jobs. Like I said, we do hundreds every year. Can’t remember them all. It’s the ones that are a pain in the ass that stick in your mind, you know?”
“Yes,” Gretchen and Josie said in unison.
“Her mom was sick or something. Disabled. I don’t know. She had a hard time getting around. We never saw her. She was up in a bedroom all the time. But this girl was there to let us into the house in the morning and then she’d come home from school and hang around. We couldn’t get a damn thing done. She had a thing for one of our guys.”
“Which guy?” Gretchen asked.
“I don’t remember his name. He was only with us a couple of months. My dad hired him. We tried to train him, but he wasn’t interested in learning the work. He just wanted the money to put up his nose.”
“He had a drug problem?” Josie asked.
“Big time. Like I said, he lasted like two months and then one time, the day after payday, he was a no-call, no-show for his shift. Never heard from him again and then saw in the local paper he overdosed.”
“So he is deceased,” Josie said. Another dead end. “What did Beverly want with him?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t have time to spy on them. We had to get the job done. But whenever she was there, he’d be off in another room with her or outside with her, their heads together.”
“You don’t remember anything else about him?” Josie asked.
George took a long moment to think it over, rubbing his chin again; his eyes squinted as if the act of calling up the memories was strenuous. Finally, he said, “Name began with an A. Andrew, Ambrose, something like that.”
Gretchen took out her notebook and jotted the names down. “How old was he then? Do you remember?”
“Probably my age, so back then he would have been in his mid to late twenties.”
Josie asked, “Do you know if he saw Beverly outside of work?”
“No, sorry. I wasn’t friends with the guy. Only reason I remember him is ’cause he was such a bad hire, and I wanted my dad to get rid of him. It was bad enough he was slacking off on the job. Then he was flirting with a high school girl? That’s not cool. I didn’t like him.”
“Do you know, Mr. Newton, if that gentleman owned any firearms?” Josie asked.
“I don’t think so, but I couldn’t say for sure.”
“How about you?” Gretchen asked. “Do you own any firearms?”
“No, not me,” he answered.
“How long did the job take?” Josie asked, before he could ask why they were so concerned with whether or not he owned guns.
He shrugged. “I don’t remember specifically. Probably the same amount of time they always do. Coupla months.”