I’m going to need to play this game with more than one police department. I tap my pen against the pad in front of me as I consider strategies, but really, I don’t know enough yet to get fancy with it. I don’t know how long it’ll be before the Iowa chief sends me his file—if he sends it; cordiality is no guarantee—and I feel time burning away with every second.
I pick up the phone and call the police department associated with the second name Gwen provided . . . in Kentucky. I feel a little knot of tension ease when I hear the familiar notes of a black man’s voice on the other end of the line. “Detective Harrison,” he says. A nice voice, deep.
“Hello, Detective, I’m Detective Kezia Claremont, Norton Police Department out in Norton, Tennessee. How y’all doing today?”
He makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh, isn’t quite a sigh. “Same as usual, ma’am. What’s up?”
“I need to see if you’ve got an open file on . . .” I check the name again, just to be sure. “Tammy Maguire.” I spell it out for him, and hear keys clicking. “This would have been about seven years ago, maybe eight.”
“You ought to work for a mining company,” he tells me after a moment. “’Cause you just struck gold. Tammy Maguire’s wanted here for felony theft. You got her in Tennessee?”
“Not quite,” I say. “She’s a missing person.”
“Here too. Skipped out before we could make the arrest, no sign of her since.”
“Out of curiosity, what kind of theft?”
“She cleaned out her boyfriend’s bank account—wasn’t that much, a few thousand—and stole his car on top of it. Plus, she swiped checkbooks from a couple of old ladies she was cleaning houses for, pretty much drained their accounts as well. Real piece of work, this one.”
I think about her husband, Tommy. Bank accounts, car, house, all transferred to her just before his disappearance. Maybe Sheryl had stepped up from stealing and ghosting to something more brazen. “You think you could send me that file? I’d like to compare the prints you have on file.”
“You’re welcome to it,” he says. “I’d love to see this one taken down. Stealing from your boyfriend . . . well, okay, fair enough, we all get burned time to time with bad choices. But she had no call to ruin those old ladies who trusted her in their houses. Cold.”
“Very,” I agree. I’m starting to think I understand how Sheryl sees people: obstacles and opportunities.
But if that’s so, why have the babies? She must have known they’d tie her down, commit her to a life that was infinitely riskier than the one she’d been living even if she hadn’t killed Tommy for his cash and belongings. Staying put means a chance arrest, getting fingerprinted, maybe even for something as simple as speeding. And that leaves her wide open to being discovered, especially since she’s got a felony on her record.
I provide my email to this detective, just like before, and check my in-box ten minutes later. Detective Harrison from Kentucky is fast on the draw; I have the file on Tammy Maguire, and it’s fairly thick. I print it out and start reading the particulars, including complainant statements. It’s fairly pathetic stuff, even through the dry language of a police report. Mrs. Rhodes states that she did not realize her checkbook was missing until she went to the bank to withdraw money for shopping and was told her account was overdrawn. This caused Mrs. Rhodes to miss payments to her electric and water bills, and these were only paid due to the charity of her fellow church members. In other words, Tammy had left an eighty-year-old woman dead broke in the wintertime in Kentucky, without giving a single shit if she froze to death.
Like Harrison had noted: cold.
I’m mostly done reviewing that file when the Penny Carlson file comes through, and unlike Harrison’s thorough and concise documentation, this one . . . isn’t that. The statement is written longhand, and whatever patrol officer wrote it down wasn’t exactly a calligrapher by nature; I have to puzzle over scribbles until my head hurts to figure all of it out, especially since he was no wordsmith. I finally start transcribing it into a document for clarity, making my best guesses at some of the words.
It’s verbose, with lots of digressions about Penny’s family members, her grades, friends, and general state of mind. The Rockwell City police are used to dealing with other kinds of crime . . . probably the same we have here in Norton: petty thefts, domestic violence, drugs. Missing persons investigations are not their specialty, and I could drive a truck through the holes I spot in the questions they asked.
But it boils down to a simple set of facts, in the end: Penny Carlson didn’t much like her life. For all that her friends and family claimed to think the best of her, nobody had seemed overly upset—or surprised—when she’d suddenly pulled up stakes and vanished. I wondered if that had ever changed with the years she’d been gone. The word cold resonates with me again, because Penny clearly hadn’t cared anything about the worry she’d cause the people she left behind. Maybe because she knew that while people professed to love her and like her, they’d move on pretty quickly.
I find myself doodling a note to myself. Some people are hard to love.
Interesting. Not that I’d put it in the file, but I wonder if her folks sensed something about Penny/Tammy/Sheryl that wasn’t that obvious to most. I’m on the fence about calling the family to find out; on the one hand, if they have moved on—and the file kind of indicates they have, since they stopped pestering the police after just a few months—then I don’t want to open up healed wounds. But if they haven’t, if they’re existing in a hell of not knowing, maybe I can help them grab a breath of free air.
And what if Sheryl’s really dead this time? Or a child murderer?
That’s what stops me. Until I know more, I can’t pull that string. I don’t know what it would unravel, and I don’t want to be responsible.
Prester would tell me that I’m being stupid, that maybe the reason her family stopped asking about Penny was that she got in touch. Maybe so. But I have other things to do before I have to take that road.
Gwen still hasn’t gotten anything in the way of video yet from the woman we talked to out in the sticks, and though I know it might not be smart, I’m too restless to stay still. I tell the sergeant where I’m going and head out.
It’s a long, cool drive out into the budding green hills, and I have to stop and check my directions twice along the way. It’s easy to get turned around out here. I don’t pass many cars on that tight little back road, just one rusted pickup that looks like it’s mostly held together with Bondo, and a shiny SUV that makes me briefly curious before I recognize the tags. It takes up most of the road, and I have to drive right on the precarious edge to avoid getting my mirror taken off as it whizzes past.
The SUV belongs to the Belldenes, our local Dixie Mafia hill folk with a compound not too far from here . . . and a pretty substantial drug business. We play tag with them pretty often, but I don’t bother to pull them over today. One thing about the Belldenes: they aren’t going anywhere. They succeeded in driving Gwen Proctor out of Stillhouse Lake through threats and leverage, and I’m not giving up that grudge anytime soon, but I got other fish on the line right now.