December 6th, 2016
Las Vegas, Nevada
Sarge had just finished his ham and cheese omelet when Pickett pulled out her notebook and said, “I want to start this from the beginning.”
“Make sense of what seems crazy?” Sarge asked, laughing.
“With luck,” Pickett said.
He could tell she was feeling better after a couple cups of coffee and breakfast and he most definitely was.
He took out his flip notebook and pen and said, “Fire away.”
“We have a young college girl by the name of Heather Winston who died locked in a room in August of 1990,” Pickett said. “Best guess at cause of death is heat.”
“Check,” Sarge said. “And we figured out how she and whoever locked her in there got into the shuttered hotel.”
“We know a week later Connie Downs returned,” Robin said, “claiming to be Heather and has lived as Heather for twenty-five years now.”
“Check again,” Sarge said. “We do not know why or if she or someone else killed Heather’s parents when they started to get suspicious. Or if that was an accident.”
“From there we have almost no information that is not tainted completely,” Robin said. “We think there might have been a party there the night Heather disappeared, but we have nothing but the dead Cinda’s word for that, who more than likely was lying to us.”
Sarge nodded to that. Pickett was right, they needed to toss out completely every lead that Cinda had told them, including the idea that Heather had been Darling Black, the bookie and columnist.
“We do know, for a fact, that there was an office in a well-protected storage unit with millions in a safe and a lot of files,” Pickett said.
“And we know that someone rented the storage unit in Heather’s name,” Sarge said, “about a year before she vanished. It might have been Heather, it might have been someone else.”
“We should know that when DNA and fingerprints come back from the storage unit,” Pickett said.
Sarge nodded and wrote that down in his notebook as a reminder to check later in the day if Robin didn’t bring that information to lunch later.
“We also know that Cinda wanted what was in the storage unit enough to let us go in and open it and take that risk and then attack police with a gang of thugs.”
Sarge nodded. “And we know that someone else wanted to stop her enough to kill her.”
Pickett stared at her notes. “Let me see if I can express what is not making sense to me at all.”
“Fire away,” Sarge said.
“I do not believe that Heather Winston had the ability to run a major gambling operation, do a major column, and build bombs to protect her stuff all while going to college and getting perfect grades without help. In fact, I’m betting she was only a front, if even that, for an operation run by someone called Darling Black.”
“I agree with that,” Sarge said. He was bothered by exactly the same thing. It wasn’t that Heather might not have been a capable person, but over the decades he had learned to trust his instincts and everything they had learned for sure pointed to a far more experienced person than Heather.
“We do not know Cinda’s part in any of this,” Pickett said, “including if she had a hand in killing Heather, which I have a hunch she did.”
“Agreed,” Sarge said. “Do we know anything about her husband?”
“Nothing,” Pickett said.
Sarge wrote that in his notebook as a reminder to find out information about Cinda’ husband, if she had one.
“So somewhere out there, clearly still living to this day as evidenced by the sniper,” Pickett said, “are the person or people responsible for the bomb, Heather’s death, and who know how much more.”
Sarge nodded.
“Did I hit the high points?” Pickett asked, looking up from her notebook and smiling.
“You did,” Sarge said. “And I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea where to start with all this.”
“The files,” Pickett said. “We start there and we might at least figure out what this is all about.”
“I sure hope so,” Sarge said, “but first I’m going for some bread pudding.”
“A serving for me as well, please,” Pickett said. “I’ll call Robin and tell her we are heading to the safe house in thirty minutes, see if Cavanaugh is there to meet us.”
“Sounds perfect,” Sarge said.
And then, not surprisingly after a couple near death experiences yesterday, the bread pudding tasted even better this morning.