December 5th, 2016
Las Vegas, Nevada
Sarge and Pickett thanked Cinda for all the help, then headed for the car. Once inside, Sarge glanced at Pickett. He had noticed her react to the name Darling Black, so she clearly had a memory of the pen name.
“So what was with the name Darling Black?” he asked.
“As Cinda said, a real nasty bitch,” Pickett said. “Let’s wait until we are at lunch with Robin and both of us can go over what we had to deal with on that name.”
Sarge nodded and glanced at his notebook. “I know the storage facility she mentioned. Think they might still have records from all those years ago?”
“It’s not that far,” Pickett said, shrugging. “Might as well check since our cast of possible suspects just grew to half the city.”
“And don’t forget the California date.”
Pickett laughed. “Seems we are making progress, but in the wrong direction.”
Sarge nodded. “Feels exactly that way.”
Ten minutes later Pickett had them parked outside the main building for the S&S Storage and Save. The place was in a desperate need of paint and the wire fence looked like one good wind would knock it down. The garage doors on each unit seemed rusted and that was from what Sarge could see from the parking area.
They headed into the small office to be greeted with a cloud of smoke and a woman behind the desk with a 1960s beehive hairdo and layers of purple makeup. She had to be in her eighties.
She ground out her cigarette in a full plastic ashtray and said, “What can I help you folks with?”
Her voice sounded as you would expect from a person who smoked far too many cigarettes: Low and full of gravel.
Both Sarge and Pickett introduced themselves and showed her their badges.
The woman only nodded and didn’t introduce herself.
They had decided on the way over that chances are Heather had rented the unit under her own name, so Sarge said, “We’re wondering if you have records that might date back into the early 1990s.”
“Got them into the seventies,” the woman said. “Don’t trust them tax people to not bother me, so I keep it all.”
“We’re looking into a locker that might have been rented by a Heather Winston in 1990 or before,” Pickett said.
“She rented it in December of 1988,” the woman said.
“Wow, great memory,” Sarge said.
“No memory needed,” the woman said. “I see it every month when I do the books. We needed some cash to expand, so we had a special that December for a lifetime rental and she paid the two thousand. Ten people did, but she’s the only one still here.”
Pickett glanced at Sarge. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Pickett recovered faster than Sarge. “Does Heather ever come around much?”
“Nope,” the woman said. “I can tell you for a fact that she hasn’t been here in years and years. Her lock rusted off about twelve years ago and we opened up her unit. It was still full and since she was paid up, we legally couldn’t do anything, so we just closed it back up and put one of our locks on it. No one has ever come asking for the key. Got a hunch she forgot the unit was here.”
“Can we get the number of the unit?” Sarge asked. “We’ll do some checking and see if we can get that freed up for you.”
For the first time the woman almost smiled, which Sarge wasn’t sure wouldn’t crack her layers of thick makeup. “Appreciate that. Let me know if there is anything I can do.”
The woman gave them the number and Picket and Sarge thanked her and headed back for their car.
“We need a search warrant,” Pickett said as she closed the door and started up the Jeep.
“But unless we tell someone about the real Heather being dead and the fake Heather,” Sarge said, “that is going to be damned hard to get. And I’m honestly not believing we could get this lucky.”
“Not so sure it’s luck in this case,” Pickett said. “If this case holds true, all that stuff in there is going to do is expand our suspect list, not narrow it.”
“If the contents are what we suspect it to be,” Sarge said.
Everything about this case was just getting stranger and stranger. Why would a nineteen-year-old college girl rent a storage unit for life? What did she plan on keeping in there?
And what Sarge really wanted to know was did this young girl have help with all the betting, the money, the research into all the gossip, and everything. She had also been going to college at the time of her disappearance and her grades were top line.
“I think we need lunch,” Sarge said after they had sat there thinking for almost a minute in silence.
Pickett nodded, grabbed her phone, and called Robin.
“You are not going to believe what we have found,” Pickett said. “Lunch at the café?”
Pickett nodded, then said, “See you there.”
She clicked off her phone and got the Jeep out of the parking lot and into traffic, headed toward the Bellagio.
Sarge just sat thinking, trying to make some sense out of all the details. And not a thing was coming together.