“No way,” she breathed.
She ran upstairs to get her phone. Neither Noah nor Trout woke or even stirred. She left them there. Downstairs, she pulled up the photos she had taken of Amber’s childhood diary. Swiping to the page with the numbers on it, she found what she was looking for. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was a start.
There would be no sleeping tonight.
Forty
By nine a.m. when she stood in front of the team in the great room at the stationhouse, Chief Chitwood included, Josie was still buzzing with adrenaline. She’d come into work before Noah woke up, leaving him a note asking him to come in as soon as he woke. She needed his help putting this all together, especially after all the research he had done concerning the real estate listings. While he organized stacks of paper on their desks, the ancient printer in the corner of the room was still whirring, but she had what she needed.
“Come on, Quinn,” said Chitwood. “The suspense is killing me.”
She handed out a sheet of paper with the numbers from Amber’s diary printed on it. She had highlighted the twelve-digit numbers. Chitwood said, “You figured these out?”
“I did,” Josie said.
Mettner looked up from the sheet. “You’re kidding me. How?”
“Insomnia, by the looks of it,” Gretchen mumbled.
“Well, yeah,” Josie agreed.
“What are we looking at here, Quinn?” asked Chitwood.
“That is a list of parcel ID numbers,” Josie announced.
“I don’t know what those are,” Mettner said tiredly.
Noah said, “The parcel identification number is the number that the county tax office assigns to a parcel of land. That’s how they keep track of whether or not property taxes have been paid. But each county is responsible for collecting its own property taxes, and each county does it differently.”
“Which means that each county in Pennsylvania has a different number format for their parcel identification numbers,” Josie added. “Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and started doing some research into Thatcher Toland. On his driver’s license, his home address is in Montgomery County. When I looked it up on the property search site, I noticed the parcel ID number was similar to some of the numbers on the list Amber wrote down.”
Noah said, “I had researched a few of the property listings that Amber and Eden both looked up on their devices which were located in Montgomery County, but I didn’t really take notice of the parcel ID numbers.”
“No one notices them, I’m sure,” said Josie. “I saw those listings as well when Noah brought them up but I didn’t notice the parcel ID numbers either. But since then, I’ve been going over these damn numbers again and again and again, I’ve practically got them memorized.”
“Does that mean the highlighted ones correspond to properties in Montgomery County?”
“Yes,” Josie said excitedly. “But that’s not all. It took some digging through the records that Noah had gotten from the various county records offices, but I’ve matched up not only those numbers but almost all of the other ones. Here.”
She began handing out one of the packets. “What you’ve got in your hands is an agreement of sale and some estate documents.”
“A house in Dauphin County,” said Gretchen, skimming the pages. “An expensive house. The parcel number is on the list Amber made. Purchased several years ago by a Lemuel Purdue. That’s one of Lydia Norris’s husbands. I looked him up.”
“I don’t get it,” Mettner said.
Gretchen said, “She was married to a Lemuel Purdue for eighteen months.”
“I still don’t get it,” said Mettner.
Noah said, “Look at the section that lists the buyer’s realtor.”
Chief Chitwood gave a low whistle. “Nadine Fiore was his realtor.”
“Yes!” Josie said. “Nadine Fiore was his real estate agent when he bought the house.”
“Wait a minute,” said Gretchen, pulling her notebook across her desk and flipping some pages. “The dates. These dates. Nadine Fiore sold Mr. Purdue this house six months before he married Lydia Norris.”
“Yes,” said Josie. She pointed to a stack of papers on her desk. “We’ve got everything here. Nadine Fiore sold houses to each and every one of Lydia Norris’s husbands within a year of Lydia marrying them.”
“All the husbands were rich, weren’t they?” asked Mettner.
Gretchen flipped another page in her notebook. “Not only were they rich but they were very old when Lydia married them. The five husbands that Hugo mentioned? Chasko, Purdue, Kleymann, Vawser, and Norris? They’re all dead. In fact, they were elderly when Lydia married them, and when I say elderly, I mean not one of them was younger than eighty years old.”
Mettner’s face filled with disgust. “Wasn’t Lydia…”
“In some cases a full forty years younger than these guys, yes,” Gretchen supplied.
“Also, they were all childless, so Lydia inherited everything. I thought that was going to be the most shocking revelation of the morning. Looks like you’re the better internet stalker after all, boss.”
“It was a scam,” said Noah, reaching over to the stack on Josie’s desk and pulling off another set of documents to hand out. “As the realtor, Nadine Fiore would have been privy to her client’s financial information. Assets, debts, Everything.”
“And she also would have known which clients were elderly, childless, and unmarried,” Chitwood added.
Mettner said, “Nadine finds the men when she sells them a house. She puts Lydia on to them. Lydia seduces and marries them. Not long after, he dies. She inherits everything.”
“Now look at the estate documents for Lemuel Purdue that Noah just gave you,” said Josie. She was so exhilarated, she was bouncing on the balls of her feet.
Everyone began sifting through the new document. “This cannot be right,” Mettner said. Josie could tell by his pale expression that he was having the same reaction she had had earlier that morning. Some of the pieces were now falling into place, and the picture was startling.
Chitwood said, “Hugo Watts was the attorney who handled the estate?”
“Yes. In fact, he was the attorney and the executor not just for this estate but for all of Lydia’s dead husbands’ estates. Because he was both attorney and executor, he practically doubled his fees. Not only that, but Lydia didn’t hold onto any of her husbands’ million-dollar and sometimes multimillion-dollar homes. She sold them.” Noah said.
“And her agent was probably Nadine Fiore,” said Chitwood.
“No,” said Josie. “This is where it gets really interesting.”
They all looked up at her in surprise. Mettner said, “More interesting than this insanity?”
“Yes,” Josie said. She reached for a new stack of documents and quickly handed them out. “Another agreement of sale. We’re still using the Purdue marriage as the example. This is after Mr. Purdue died and Lydia sold the home to someone else.”