Page 32 of Heartbreak Bay

The second I focus back on the piece of paper where I’ve taken down the notes from Gwen’s info, I feel everything else fade away. The chase pulls me in 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 shewas,” 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—ifhe 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 theone 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 wordcoldresonates 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 theyhavemoved 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.

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