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Fifty-five

AN HOUR LATER , Detective Zane Carter, accompanied by two police officers, stood in the same spot they’d been in, looking at the same boxes. With gloves on, Carter went through the items, pausing at the tennis bracelet. “L.J....” he said. “I’m trying to rack my brain for missing women. It would have been about six years ago that we visited this awful place.”

“What happened back then?”

“When Claire Greaves escaped, she claimed she’d met Lance Winslow at a revival and had fallen for the guy.”

Greyson’s brows shot up. “She’d fallen for him?”

“Yeah. Said she’d fallen in love with the guy and moved in with him. Only she wasn’t the only woman.”

Riley’s jaw slackened. “Ewww.”

“She claimed, at the time, he wasn’t romantic with the other women. That he was ‘helping’ them in their suffering.”

“Suffering?” Riley asked.

“Yeah, he’d promised to help heal the women from whatever was plaguing them. Apparently all the women had health issues like hers.”

“A waitress at the Argo who knew Claire said she had a kidney disease.”

“Yeah, and the wacko said he’d heal her, and she believed him and went off her meds. I don’t recall the full story offhand, but I grabbed this on the way out of the office when you called.” He pulled a notepad out of his jacket pocket. “I’m old-fashioned,” the only-forty-years-old detective said. “I write everything down and date the books. Keep them in a box at the precinct. I looked up the case in the database and pulled the corresponding notebook.”

He quickly flipped the pages up and over the spiral rings. Finally, he stopped. “Here we go. Lance Winslow.” He scanned the page. “Right. Okay. Claire said she stopped her meds and felt good for a while until...” He scanned farther down. “Until her symptoms returned. That’s how she realized he was conning her and the other women. She managed to get away, but by then she was really sick. Poor girl died days later.”

“We heard that. It’s awful.”

“It gets worse,” Carter said.

“Worse?” Greyson blinked, the arid air sucking the moisture from his eyes.

“Claire had recently inherited a decent amount of money from a relative, but she gave it all to Winslow. For the ‘cause’ to heal the hurting.”

Riley covered her mouth to smother a cough. “Sorry. The room is—”

“Caked with dirt.” Carter scuffed at it with the sole of his shoe. “No windows. Little air. Except what seeped through the floorboards.”

Greyson studied the windowless room, the adobe walls, the door with the lock hanging from the handle they’d opened. “Looks like he kept some captive down here.” Please say they didn’t stay locked up in cells by choice.

“Claire didn’t know anything about the cellar when we asked her about it.”

“I imagine he kept it hidden.”

“Hey, Zane,” one of the officers said. “No missing women from Vegas with the initials L. J., but there’s a missing woman from seven years ago from Scottsdale. Sounds like Winslow traveled.”

The detective shook his head. “I’m afraid of what all we’re going to find before this is over.”