“Thanks, Gwen,” I tell her at the end. “Take time, okay? Take care of your fam. I got this.”
“I’ll keep digging when I can.” She seems calm and practical. I don’t know if I would be. “It’s good to have something else to think about.”
“Gwen. You got through it before. Stay strong.”
“Just once, I’d like to not have to,” she says, and I’m a little surprised at how vulnerable she sounds. “I still plan to head to Valerie once the kids are in school today and find out more about Sheryl Lansdowne. I’ll get back to you tonight, most likely.”
“You just watch your back.” I mean that on every level, from the regular worries about poking around in things that aren’t her business to the threats hanging over her.
When we end the call, I stand there staring at the coffeepot for a long few minutes before I dump what I’ve made in a travel cup.
I need to get to work.
Detective Prester is there ahead of me. He looks tired, and he looks worse than yesterday. I worry for him. “Hey,” I say, and put my bag and travel mug down on my desk. “Coffee?”
He nods without speaking, and I go fetch it. I know how he takes his; I made it a point to find out the first day on the job. He sips and turns another page. Still doesn’t speak until he finishes reading, and then looks over at me. “Sorry I dumped this on you,” he says. His voice sounds rougher than usual. “Getting old is no picnic.”
“You been to the doctor like I asked you?”
“No, and I’m not going, so you can just drop that right now. I just got tired. I need some damn vacation. I heard you found another body to add to the tally. Anything come back on that yet?”
“Nothing from TBI. They took the skeleton in for dental forensics and such. DNA if they can get it. My guess is it’ll turn out to be Sheryl Lansdowne’s ex, Tommy. His disappearance sure doesn’t smell right.”
“Neither does hers.” He shakes his head. “Those two little girls. My God. So what you thinking?”
“You saw the file.”
“You don’t put it in the file. I know you, Kezia.”
We spend half an hour talking through it—nothing either one of us wants to put on paper. Gwen’s call this morning has definitely put Sheryl in a new light, and not a good one; Prester had already been leaning toward Sheryl as a perpetrator, not a victim, and now—though I hate it with a real viciousness—I think he’s probably right. But we have no actual facts just yet.
He finally sighs and closes his eyes for a few seconds. “So what do you make of the dead husband, if those bones turn out to be his?”
“If Sheryl’s a killer, maybe she did for him, too; she did end up with a house, bank account, and car free and clear.”
“Next steps?”
“I’m going to follow up on Gwen’s leads, see what I can turn up. If the TBI comes back with a positive on Tommy Jarrett, we may have something to really sink our teeth into on this.”
He nods in agreement. “I’ll finish up reports on that domestic abuse case and the car theft at the bakery, then I’m going to take your advice and go home to rest. Kezia. You watch your ass on this one. Like you always say, there are bears in these woods.”
What he means is that there’s no clear direction, and when that happens, attacks can come from anywhere. Killers want to stay hidden. Dragging them into the light is a dangerous business sometimes.
“Bears better watch their furry behinds,” I tell him, and he laughs. “I got this.”
“I know you do.” Prester hands the file back and says, “Send me a copy?”
“I’ll put it in email.”
I get to work as Prester does his two-finger typing on his reports. I consider going back to the morgue, but I know I shouldn’t do that. It’s agonizing, and it won’t be productive in any way. But the thought of those two little girls all alone in the dark . . . it still haunts me. I feel chilled to the bone from it. Maybe I’m still coming to terms with having a small, fragile, helpless life depending completely on me, but I want those girls to know somebody loved them. Cared about them.
I guess right now it will fall to Abraham Jarrett to see to their burial when they’re released, if their mother’s still gone—or worse, if she’s the one who caused their deaths.
The second I focus back on the piece of paper where I’ve taken down the notes from Gwen’s info, I feel everything else fade away. The chase pulls me in like nothing else ever has done; it’s a little unsettling how right this feels to me. You’re not a damn superhero, I tell myself. You’re just a cop doing a job. Which is true, but not completely. Something happened to me back at that lonely, misty pond. Something important. It put motherhood—something that until that moment had been distant, misty, and unformed—into a very real, very emotional shape.
It’s not just a job. Not this time.
I start diving in, tracking down the information that Gwen’s found about Penny Carlson. Her work’s solid, but it’s still a clue, not a conclusion. I’ve got access she doesn’t, and I find two more aliases besides her Maguire discovery that match Sheryl’s general profile. It fills in some of the time gaps. If all this holds up, our girl’s been busy. She’s got only two arrests in the past ten years, each under a different name and in a different state. Both were for small offenses, and in both cases, she paid the fines and left town not long after.
The record looks minor, but it’s wrong. My instincts tell me that Penny Carlson’s been on the wrong track for a long, long time. Her juvenile records are sealed; it’ll take a court order for me to gain access, and I doubt I’ll get anybody to sign off on that yet. I’ve got plenty of other things to run down in the meantime. Gwen’s set one hell of a table, and I’m about to eat some lunch.
I start from the beginning. With Penny Carlson of Rockwell City, Iowa. It’s a dot of a town, isolated by lush fields of corn and soybeans. The kind of place where everybody knows everything, but as a stranger I’m not set to learn much. Still, I give it a try with a call to the local police department.
The chief of police answers after just a short delay, which tells me how busy a town it is; he’s pretty cordial when I explain things, but when I mention Penny Carlson, there’s a long, fraught silence. Then he says, “Ma’am, do you think you know where Penny is? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No sir, I don’t know where she is right now. I think I know where she was,” I say. “Might be able to confirm her identity if you send me her prints and file. We’ll be processing a car shortly, and if the prints match up, then this could help close your case.”
That makes me his new best friend, and I hear his tone warm way up when he says, “Well, Detective, I sure would like to be of help to you. Happy to send the file along. Email okay?”
“Yes sir, that would be just fine.” I give him my contact info, and we shoot the shit a little, meaningless pleasantries that small towns still value, and then I tell him I have to get going. I can read this man even over the long expanse of telephone wires; he’s not telling me everything he knows, and it may not be in that file either. It could take some honey and a crowbar to get the rest of it out of him, and I’ll need to be careful about when I apply either of those. Small-town chiefs like to keep a town’s secrets, in my experience. And Penny may have had good reason to be shut of the place.