“It’s not a storeroom, I take it?”
“No.” She opened the door. “Take a look.”
All manner of filing cabinets covered the walls of the windowless room, at least thirty feet wide by twenty feet long. Some of the metal cabinets were painted black and pocked with bits of rust, covered in thick coats of dust. They looked decades old. Others appeared brand new.
“What’s in these?” I asked.
“An alternate set of records,” Stef said. “I come in here sometimes, when it’s quiet, and I have nothing to do. The best I can tell, pretty much forever Alber PD has kept two sets of records, public ones and private ones. These are the private ones.”
“What types of cases?”
“Violent crimes, assaults, rapes and murders. Thefts. I’ve tried to crossmatch some with the computer. As far as I can tell, none of these are in the system,” she said.
I went to the cabinets and took a look. Each of the drawers had a year inked on an index card slipped into a metal frame on the front. “Organized by date, I gather.”
“Yup,” she said. “Inside, they’re divided by type of crime.”
I pulled the most recent cabinet open and rifled through it. The tabs on the dividers read: MISSING PERSONS, SEXUAL ASSAULTS, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, and HOMICIDES. I thought about what this meant, what it might mean, and how it could fit into the missing girls.
“We’re going to pull all the sex crimes and missing persons, any homicides,” I said. “I’m going to take them with me. I’ll bring them back as soon as I can.”
Visibly alarmed as I began taking files, Stef protested, “But if the chief finds out…”
“Then he finds out. I’ll protect you as much as I can,” I said.
Stef hesitated, but then rushed to help me. We stacked the files on a long table, an old dark pine one like the kind in libraries that sat in the center of the room. There were six chairs around it, and as I worked I wondered who came in this room, what kind of secret meetings took place here. I started with the current year and worked my way back. I thought about stopping at five years, but I went back ten. In the end, Stef and I had two stacks of files, each about two feet high.
“Help me get these in my car,” I said. Apparently again having second thoughts, Stef hesitated. “Now, before someone comes into the station,” I ordered. As I walked out carrying the first, she grabbed the second pile.
We hurried through the police station toward the front door, but I had misgivings. “Is there a back door?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Show me.” We trailed down a hallway and piled the files up next to a solid steel door. “I’ll drive around.”
In minutes, we had the files loaded in the Pathfinder, and Stef rushed back inside the station to the reception desk. I drove out of the lot, just as Jeff Mullins pulled in. When I glanced in my rearview mirror, he strolled toward the back door. His eyes focused on the road, he watched me leave.
Thirty
“Doc says the girl was strangled. There’s perimortem bruising around the neck, and the hyoid bone is fractured,” Max said when I walked through the door at the sheriff’s office. “He can’t tell how long she’s been dead, but estimates that it had to be more than a couple of months. He hasn’t seen a case like this before, and it’s beyond his expertise. So Doc’s called the ME in Salt Lake to get a consult. Doc will get back with more info as soon as he has it, but that could be a few days.”
“Shoot. So will DNA. We can’t wait on any of it,” I said, frustrated that with limited resources everything took so long. “Did Doc have any more information on our victim? Age range? Is her hair really brown?”
“Doc says she has all her wisdom teeth, but they’re not fully out. He’s guessing she’s late teens to early twenties,” Max said. “After he inspected for fibers and such, he washed a small section of her hair. It didn’t lighten. Looks like a very dark brown. He emailed us more photos of the clothes, the body, and the washed hair. They’re in a file on the conference room—I mean, your office table.”
“Thanks. I have files out in my car we need to bring in. I could use some help.”
A few minutes later, we had the secret Alber PD files on the conference room table as well. “What is all this?” Max asked.
“I’ll explain later,” I said. “Where are the Heatons?”
“In interview room number three. The Coombs women are in room one.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
“So things have changed,” I said to Alma, Grace, and Savannah Heaton, the three sister-wives. “You’ve heard, I know, that we have a body. Doc says it’s female, a teenager, perhaps up to early twenties, long brown hair.”
Alma Heaton gasped, and Savannah, a thickly built woman with her hair in a messy brown bun, reached over to comfort her. “Anything else about the dead girl you can tell us, Clara?” Savannah asked.
In my prior life, I’d known Savannah Heaton. A decade earlier, when I had a desk in the town’s cinder block schoolhouse, Savannah’s children were my students. She stopped in my classroom to pick up one of her girls a month before I fled. She’d seen my bruises. “Who gave you that black eye?” she’d asked. I told her what I’d said to everyone else, that I’d walked into a door. Back then I was young, ashamed, and good at making excuses. Savannah gave me a knowing look, and I saw that she didn’t believe me.
In my conference room office, Alma reclaimed her resolve and turned to her sister-wives for reassurance. “Savannah, Grace, we don’t belong here. That’s not our girl’s body. Eliza ran away. We know that.”
“How?” I asked.
Alma hesitated. She looked at the others. “We’re not supposed to talk of Eliza. She’s an apostate, like
