Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (red white royal blue TXT) 📗

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. For a second I feel perilously dizzy, and I find my hand pressed to my stomach. I don’t know if I’m trying to soothe myself, or the child still hidden deep in there.

“You okay?” Winston asks.

“Sure,” I lie. “Call me when you get ready to proceed.”

“Gonna be a while,” he warns me. “I got two suspicious deaths came in earlier this afternoon.”

I meet his gaze and hold it. “Those cases can wait.”

He pauses for a second before he says, without a flicker, “Okay. You sure you want to observe the autopsies? Pretty tough. I could just get you the report.”

Somebody needs to be a witness, I think. These two girls died alone, not even their momma by their side. Alone, cold, terrified. The least I can do is stand that lonely watch. “I’ll be there,” I say. “Call me when you’re ready to start.”

Winston nods. The deputy climbs out of his car and says, “I’ll secure the scene. Y’all want the pond searched?”

“If there’s so much as a tadpole in there, I want it,” I tell him. “You’re here until relief comes. Don’t leave for nothing.”

He nods, miserable, cold, and unhappy as hell, but he knows better than to cross me on this. Or should.

I head down the road while Winston loads the two limp bodies, still in car seats, into the coroner’s van. Once I’m in my car with the door safely shut, I just sit and shake and breathe for a while. It feels like I’m decompressing after walking on the bottom of a very deep sea. I find myself sucking in short, shallow gasps, and force them slower. My hands are too tight on the wheel.

I need to go to Sheryl Lansdowne’s address in Valerie. Someone will be waiting there, I hope—a husband, a father, a mother. Not that I’m looking forward to breaking the worst news of their lives. Fact is, every day in this job I see people at their lowest points, but nothing’s as difficult as delivering news of a death.

Like attending the autopsy, it isn’t something I can turn away from. Not and stay the person I want to be.

I put the car