The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(28)

My phone buzzes with a text.

It’s from Priya.

Sterling says you’re making fun of her apartment. You know I gave her some of that stuff, right?

And sometimes that change is good. Or leads to good, anyway.



11

Despite its beginning, the week continues fairly quiet. Sarah and I talk several times a day, and I get updates from both Holmes and Mignone. Sarah’s able to give some useful descriptors of the woman who killed her parents: a few inches taller than Sarah but not tall, slender but strong—she’d carried Sammy to and from the car so the girls would follow along. She wore a white jumpsuit that covered her from neck to wrist to ankles, and white gloves, and she had a bag over her shoulder with multiple sets of plastic covers for her white sneakers. The white mask, with its suggestion of features and its mirrored-over eyes, she’d described before, but the blonde hairline came down over the top of the mask in such a way that it had to be a wig, the hair long and straight.

And that’s where the discussions Eddison and I are having devolve into a long conversation about the distinction between useful and helpful, because none of these details are going to actually help us find the killer until we locate a person and happen to find those items on her. Mignone has already tried tracking purchases, but that’s another thing that will be easier to do after the fact.

The police have also heard from Social Services: the files for Ronnie Wilkins and Sarah Carter both went through the Manassas CPS office, but none of the names on them matched. The one complaint filed by Sarah’s school had been given to someone new to the office, whereas the same man had been handling Ronnie’s file for several years.

I swing down to the FBI archives on Wednesday to submit a request. All of our case files, complete with our handwritten notes made during and after investigations, are preserved for posterity or auditing, whichever comes first. (Auditing. Always auditing.) Given that I’ve been in the Bureau for ten years, I’ve worked a lot of cases. Most of them have been with the team or done as consults, but I’ve occasionally been loaned out to other teams. We all have, really, if another team is missing people or there’s a need for a particular specialty.

Agent Alceste, who works in the archives because it entails the least amount of human interaction, listens to the reasons for my request as she looks through the paperwork that is already filled out and waiting for her approval. Alceste doesn’t like me—she doesn’t actually like anyone—but she hates me less than most because I make sure if I absolutely have to bother her for something, I’m as prepared as possible.

Her husky voice still has a strong Quebecois inflection, probably because she doesn’t talk with people often enough for it to smooth out. She tells me it will take a few days to copy over that much information. She’s waiting for me to argue; most do.

I just thank her for the time and effort and leave her to the solitude of her office. I can access most of what I need from my computer, but getting all the files onto a drive will be a lot easier than searching for each case. Plus, this way I get to see Vic’s and Eddison’s case notes, not just mine. We work well as a team because we see different things; they may have noticed something on one of our cases that I didn’t, something that may be relevant here.

I hope I’m giving myself a ridiculous amount of work for nothing, but I can’t shake this niggling feeling that I might know why me. Why this killer gives the children my name and tells them they’re safe now. That I’ll keep them safe.

What if that’s because I once told him or her the same thing?

That’s what we tell them, the children we rescue. You’ll be okay. You’re safe now.

I think we’re all dancing around the thought, not wanting to admit the possibility—or even the likelihood—that this killer has his or her origins somewhere in our case files. We’re not ready to say it out loud yet, like the sound will give it too much meaning. It doesn’t mean we get to keep hiding from it, though.

Late Friday morning, as Sterling and I sit on Eddison’s desk to make him twitch while the three of us debate what to get for lunch, Vic comes through the bullpen, handing files and reports to various agents on his meandering way. “I’m supposed to tell you three to go home.”

“What?”

“Independence Day is tomorrow. This is your observed day off for the federal holiday. You’re not even supposed to be here.”

“A lot of other people are here.”

“Because they’re either on the Monday rotation or they’re as bad at the work-life separation as you three.”

Ouch. Also a little hypocritical, given . . . well, everything.

Vic shakes his head. He’s wearing a tie Priya, Inara, and Victoria-Bliss gave him last year for his birthday, stained-glass butterflies against a black background, and it is just as creepy as it sounds, but he wears it anyway because they gave it to him. “Go home. Do not take any paperwork with you. Relax. Do laundry. Catch a game.”

We continue to blink at him.

“You do have fairly regular days off,” he reminds us with a sigh. “You know how to survive them.”

Sterling tilts her head to one side.

“No,” he says sternly. “No sleepovers, no pub crawls. You each go to your own home, and you don’t come to mine, because Jenny and I have the house to ourselves in what must be the first time in thirty years.”