Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,10

hand to carefully pop the passenger side door open as I open the driver’s side. Swamp comes out in a firehose gush, but is quickly down to a muttering trickle. He pulls the net to his side carefully to preserve any potential evidence that will have been trapped in it, and takes it off to the side to go pick out anything that might decompose if left damp: paper, particularly. I move the work lights so they shine on the interior of the car. I still don’t look in the back, though it pulls at me like a magnet; I can see the unfocused pallid forms out of the corner of my eye, but I know that once I look at them directly, I won’t be able to look anywhere else.

I focus on the front.

The seat’s pulled up, which means a shorter person was driving. On the passenger-side floorboard, drowning in muck, is a woman’s brown purse. It’s a hobo-style, shapeless thing that seems stuffed. I mark and photograph the bag in situ and put it up on the seat. This doesn’t look good at all. No driver, no mom, purse left behind. My instincts immediately bend toward abduction.

I carefully open the bag, and though the contents are wet they’re not completely saturated, which gives me a good guess how long it’s been in the water. I tease out a wallet and flip it open. “Sheryl Lansdowne,” I say out loud, though why it would matter to anyone else in earshot I don’t know. I lay the wallet out and take a photo of the driver’s license. Sheryl’s twenty-seven years old, slender and delicate and mildly pretty. Blondish hair worn in shoulder-length, soft curls. Skin tone’s pale but burnished by a tan. Not the worst DMV picture I’ve ever seen. I open my notebook and write down the name and address. That needs to be my next stop. I’m already bracing myself for the relatives.

There’s nothing else in the front seat of any relevance. The upholstery looks clean, and if there was any blood, it’s been soaked away by the pond. Forensics will go over it for trace evidence. I pop the glove box, then take out the wet documents inside and give them to Winston to lay out for preservation. Looks like standard stuff: insurance paperwork, registration, car manual.

I’ve run out of distractions, and I feel a knot of tension wrapping up in my chest, tighter and tighter.

I take a deep breath and turn my head to focus on what’s in the rear seat.

My first thought is, They’re so pale. White babies, yes, but they’re an unnaturally luminous color now. One has her pale-blue eyes open like a little doll, but she’s not a toy, and the wrongness of it moves deep in me like an invisible snake. The other, eerily similar girl next to her has her eyes closed, thin lashes beaded with water. Their identical little pink outfits are stained from the green water.

They’re so still.

Even seasoned cops lose their stomach over something like this. But I can’t. One wrong step, and the deputy won’t shut up about the black woman who couldn’t hold her nerve. It’s not just me I’m holding together. It’s a line of women coming up behind me.

“No sign of obvious injuries,” I say. I can’t look away, now that I’m staring. Limp hair plastered against their soft little heads, probably blonde when it dries. One has a little yellow ribbon tied in her hair, but the other doesn’t. Maybe that’s how the mother tells them apart; I can’t really spot any other differences. I swallow hard. “Winston?”

The coroner steps closer. “Foam at the mouth and lips,” he says, “but don’t put money on it yet.”

He’s telling me he thinks they drowned, and that’s . . . worse. These babies strapped in, helpless and crying while the car rolls and splashes into this pond. While cold water spills in through the windows and around the door seals. While the compartment fills up.

Someone wanted these children to suffer. Or, at the very least, didn’t give a shit if they did.

There’s nothing else to see here, but I can’t stop staring. The one with closed eyes looks like she’s just fallen asleep, except for the water dripping from her hair, from the feet of the pajamas she’s in. I was shopping for baby clothes earlier. I saw some just like these.

My mouth feels sour when I step away, and the air smells filthy and close.