The Reckoning by Jana DeLeon Page A

began a search of the land records. By the time he’d finished his first cup of coffee, he had his answer. The name on the deed was Mathilde Tregre. He let himself into the storage room, pulled the boxes from the old kidnappings and carted them back to his office. The interview with the woman was in the first box.
    The woman wasn’t listed as Mathilde or Tregre. She’d claimed her name was t’Mat. That made sense, given the old custom of naming a daughter after her mother and using the t in front of the name or shortened name to mean “little.” In this case, “Little Mathilde.” Holt poured himself another cup of coffee and settled into his chair to read over the interview.
    Mathilde had been clear from the start that she hadn’t seen the girls on the island or anywhere else, despite personal items belonging to the girls that were found on her property. She also claimed that this visit to the sheriff’s department was the first time in over a year that she’d been off the island. Based on the question marks drawn in pencil around the typewritten transcript, it was clear that the old sheriff hadn’t believed her, but he didn’t have any good reason to hold her.
    So he’d let her go.
    According to his mother, the people in Vodoun had made their displeasure more than apparent. She said the anxiety level in the town was unlike anything she’d ever seen. She’d been a teen herself at the time and remembered not being allowed to go outside unless her mother was with her. The shops in town were almost empty, the streets vacant. Some people even kept their kids out of school and church.
    As the weeks passed, and no more children went missing, the town slowly returned to its normal routine. And the case went cold.
    Had Mathilde Tregre taken those girls? And if she had, why wait thirty-six years before claiming another victim? Everything in him screamed that this was wrong—that they’d missed something then and he was missing something now. But he had no idea what.
    He closed the folder and sat back, frustrated with all the information that only created more questions. The facts of the cases were simple: thirty-six years ago, three girls had disappeared from Vodoun, and now Erika. There was no reason, save the doll and the past presumption that Mathilde was somehow involved, to assume the two were related. But if one did assume they were related, then the logical explanation was that the same person had committed both crimes.
    If he assumed that the same person had committed both crimes, and that person wasn’t Mathilde Tregre, then that meant the perpetrator had either moved away and just returned or had been in prison and was recently released. If they’d been living somewhere else for thirty-six years, Holt had no doubt that similar cases would crop up in the national database.
    He accessed the national database for missing children and put in the case information for Erika and the girls from thirty-six years before. Then he ran a query on all inmates that had been released from prison that year that had been in for crimes involving children. The national database would take a while to process, but his prisoner query was back in minutes, listing two men recently paroled after serving on pedophilia charges. Both were listed at New Orleans addresses. A quick query returned the name of the parole officer that both men shared.
    Holt checked his watch. Only seven a.m., but there was still a chance the PO would answer a call. On the fifth ring, he was about to give up, when a sleepy voice answered. Holt explained to the man who he was and why he was calling and the sleepiness left his voice almost immediately.
    “Give me a minute to get to my computer,” the man said.
    Holt heard the sound of doors opening and an office chair squeaking. A couple of minutes later, the parole officer was back on the line. “Both men clocked into their construction jobs every morning this week at
eight a.m. and didn’t leave until