Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,47

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.

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