Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,79
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 didn’t kill. She always uses hands-off methods, seems like: poisons, falls down stairs, drownings.”
We both think about that for a while. What it takes to embark on a career of ice-hearted murder like that and slip away without a trace every single time. She’s never been arrested for anything serious enough to get her into a national database, and by moving state to state, she’s been keeping herself off the radar.
We may never know exactly how many people she’s killed. Only that it’s probably more than we have found.
“Best write it all up and send it to TBI,” he says. “They’re going to want to take it federal, most likely, since it’s a multistate investigation now. This goes far beyond our little town, Kez. Let it go. If she’s out there somewhere, she’s going to be found.”
While I’m finishing the write-up, an email comes in from the TBI. The bones we found on the grid search belong to Tommy Jarrett. He’s been lying up there in those hills since the day he disappeared. He didn’t leave Sheryl and those soon-to-be-born kids. And I sincerely doubt it was any kind of an accident.