Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (books to read in your 20s female TXT) 📕

I ask for surveillance, but she wasn’t born yesterday; she wants a warrant. The fake one’s in my pocket, but I know better than to serve it on her, or show her the badge. She’s seen far too much of the world.

“Thank you,” I tell her. I don’t really need anything else. I have Len’s home address.

I need to get back to Sam and the kids, because I feel it in the air: this is going to get bad.

14

KEZIA

Wednesday starts with problems. Car problems, which are no damn joke out here in Norton; our cabin is a long way from town, and getting a tow truck out could take hours. No Uber or Lyft out here either.

Luckily, I grew up poor with a dad who knew how to fix things. I find a loose wire and fix it with electrical tape and a prayer. Seems to work.

I’m half an hour late to the station, and I find Prester there looking considerably better. We nod to each other, and I get coffee, and when I come back Prester says, “You might want to check your messages. Phone’s been ringing off the hook for you.”

I meet his gaze for a second, then nod. I have a wild impulse to tell him about the baby, but I control that fast. Like telling my father, I want to wait. There’s some strange dread in the back of my mind; I want Javier with me to make this real. Until that happens, I want it to be my secret. Well, mine and Gwen’s. It just feels . . . right.

I hit the voice mails on the office phone. I have six messages. One’s from a TBI detective complaining to me that one of my friends (that would be Gwen) has been up in Valerie interfering. I ignore it. The next is from his commander. I pay slightly more attention, and make myself a note to kiss and make up. Don’t need that TBI commander crawling up the chain of command. I’m doing a good job, but success is a fragile thing.

The other four are from different cities I called yesterday about potential matches to Sheryl Lansdowne’s identity. The fact that all four gave me a call back is shocking, but what’s even more concerning is that every one of them leaves me a name and direct number and says they want to talk. Not just “send info,” but talk. Three out of four of these are small towns, granted, but still . . . that’s one hell of a batting average for cases that should have been long gathering dust.

I start from the top: with the detective from Wichita. She tells me that their missing person fits Sheryl’s description, and I confirm it from prints they’ve sent in. Then the detective starts telling me what isn’t in the missing person’s notice. “Took about two weeks for us to locate a relative of the old lady who passed on,” she says. “He came into town about a week after that to settle her affairs, and found out that she’d been writing a hell of a lot of checks out of her savings account—about ten thousand dollars’ worth—to our gal Mary Hogue here. Who by that time had been reported as missing by a friend from down the block. The old lady kept a good supply of cash at home, and all that was gone, as well as a few pieces of nice jewelry.”

“And Mary?”

“Gone like a summer breeze. She left all her stuff behind, but it wasn’t much at all . . . a bank account with just enough to keep it going for another month, rental furniture, an old car that turned out to not be worth what it cost to tow it off. First glance, she looked normal as anything. But when you dig into it, she really had no roots.”

“Just had to look presentable long enough to find somebody to con,” I say. “Jesus. So, the old lady—”

“Yeah, getting to that. The son demanded an autopsy and got one. The old lady was poisoned. Antifreeze. A real bad way to go too.”

I’ve never worked such a case, but I’ve heard how painful that is, and how deadly. It can take days, weeks, months. Poisoners are some of the coldest murderers there are. “Any idea how she ingested it?”

“Drinks are the easiest method. Iced tea. Pop. Anything like that. It tastes sweet.”

“Let me guess, Mary was a real good neighbor who had that nice old lady over for a glass of iced tea before she turned up sick?”

“We think so.”

“But you didn’t charge her with murder?”

“Couldn’t,” the detective says briskly. “There was never solid evidence Mary Hogue poisoned the old lady, only that the old lady was poisoned; hell, the coroner wasn’t even sure it wasn’t accidental or suicide. If we’d been able to get Mary in and really press her, we might’ve been able to build a case. But we had nothing—no evidence, no leads on where she’d gone off to. Everything went cold. But trust me, we remember.”

The Wichita call is a template, as it turns out. Sheryl’s name changes, but the circumstances are always similar. She moves to town, builds up a good reputation, lives a normal but poverty-level life . . . and finds some kind soul to pull her out of her desperate circumstances. Who’s left dead broke, or dies of apparently natural or accidental causes, or just plain vanishes. But there’s never enough to put out a murder warrant on her. Never.

In every case, the prints match to Penny Carlson / Sheryl Lansdowne.

I put the phone down, finally, and turn to Prester. He’s waiting expectantly, fingers poised over his keyboard. “Sheryl Lansdowne might be one of the coldest damn serial killers nobody’s ever heard of,” I say. “I figure we can pin at least six prior victims to her easily, and there are likely more. That’s not even counting the number of people she’s stolen from and conned but