December 14th, 2016
Las Vegas, Nevada
Pickett was very relieved that Sarge didn’t think they needed to be there to arrest Heather Winston, if she was at the cabin. Pickett didn’t think they needed to do it either, but if he had wanted to go, she would have been at his side.
So now they had to sit and wait. And try to figure out the rest of this mess.
After all three of them had mostly finished their first round of breakfast and were sipping their coffees, Pickett turned to Robin. “What did the computers dig up?”
“We know the car buying cover was nothing more than that,” Robin said. “A cover.”
Pickett and Sarge both nodded.
“We also know that Heather was the one who licked those envelopes. Except for Melita’s prints, the only other ones were Heather’s, the same as the ones in the storage unit. In fact, the envelopes and printer match envelopes and the printer from the storage unit.”
“So Heather was Darling Black’s source,” Pickett said, nodding. She had figured as much, but good to have evidence now prove it.
“Any idea why?” Sarge asked.
“The information in the Darling Black columns came directly from the letters,” Robin said, “with very little changes at all. Melita didn’t change much, not even the writing, especially toward the end as she clearly got more interested in getting ready for college. And the columns after Melita left for college were written completely by Heather.”
“So in a way Heather really was Darling Black, filtered once,” Sarge said. “Cinda was right about that.”
Robin nodded, then went on. “Best the computers can figure when putting the information from the files with the letters is that the code indicates a time and a fairly exact place.”
“For what reason?” Pickett asked.
“That is the big question,” Robin said. “We ran all the times and places against all known crimes or other events. Nothing.”
Sarge just shook his head, clearly discouraged.
Pickett felt the same way.
“Let me see if I can get this straight,” Pickett said, doing her best to grasp all the real information they had so far. “Heather gives a young columnist information to feed into her column.”
“Yes,” Robin said simply.
“The column must have been used to publicly pinpoint something at a time and place,” Pickett said.
Robin nodded.
“Heather got paid large sums of money for the information she was putting through the column,” Pickett said. “So we are missing the front of this puzzle and the back of this puzzle.”
“How’s that?” Sarge asked.
“We don’t know where or how Heather got whatever information she was passing on,” Pickett said. “And we don’t know what was done with the information on the other side to make it worth so much money and so many lives twenty-five years later.”
Sarge and Robin both nodded.
“We have the center, you are right,” Robin said.
“So what kind of places were pinpointed by the articles?” Sarge asked.
“Addresses that were vacant lots at the time, parking garages, a few old casino parking lots, and so on,” Robin said. “The times were from the middle of the morning to late evening.”
Suddenly Pickett had an idea. This was all about money, but far larger sums of money than the forty million that had been in that safe at one point.
Pickett looked at Sarge and smiled, then at Robin. “This all started fairly quickly after she and her fake family moved to town. Right?”
Robin and Sarge both nodded.
“So we didn’t ask a few questions we needed to know,” Pickett said. “First off, did anyone else from Heather’s former town move here ahead of Heather’s fake family?”
“Tough to find, but possible,” Robin said. “What are you thinking?”
“Drops,” Pickett said. “This town constantly has vast sums of money in transit. And without some of the modern technology we have now, back in 1990 it was much harder to track all that money.”
Sarge nodded. “Had my share of armored car robberies back when I was starting off. Someone almost always ended up dead.”
Robin and Pickett both nodded.
“If an exact location is known through a code in the paper to both an inside person and a pickup person, a drop from a money car would have a lot less likelihood of being tracked.”
Sarge suddenly sat back in his chair. “If Heather’s notes were right and she had over forty million in that safe when she pulled the plug, how much money are we talking about overall?”
“More than I want to think about,” Pickett said. She turned to Robin. “Any total of how many dates and places there were in those notes?”
“Over the length of the column there were over a thousand,” Robin said.
“Heather had the fake cars she was selling making her from three grand to six grand,” Pickett said.
“That’s forty million easy,” Sarge said. “Just for Heather’s cut, which more than likely was small.”
“Wow,” Pickett said as Robin picked up her phone.