The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(33)

“All right, I’ll go talk to her inside then, if that’s okay. Figure she’ll be calmer there?”

“Where she can’t see the blood streaks? Yes.”

“Does the sleepover mean you two worked it out?” Eddison asks after Holmes enters the house.

“No. And given what came after . . .”

Sterling bumps our knees together.

It doesn’t feel like a grand fight rearing up, the desperate stand to save a relationship. She’s going to leave and I think . . . I think I’m okay with that. Three years and this is how a relationship dies, but can anyone really fault that? She can’t handle this and I can’t keep pretending, and we’ll probably both be better off.

The hurt will come later, the cuts too sharp for the pain to register straight off.

Siobhan exits the house between Vic and Holmes, her face red and patchy from crying; a plastic grocery bag hangs from two fingers, carrying anything she’d left here. She glances at me once, flinches, and looks resolutely at her car. Sterling slides off the rail and takes the keys from Siobhan’s other hand, gently urging her down the steps and toward her car. Vic nods at us and aims for his own car. He’ll follow them to Fairfax and give Sterling a ride back, just to make sure Siobhan arrives safely. I hope, when the shock wears off, that she’s grateful for it.

Happy Independence Day.

“We’re not any closer,” admits Holmes, leaning against the wall and looking exhausted. “Six people dead, and we really don’t have a clue.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a link in the third CPS file.”

“Do you think we’d be able to partner with the FBI on this going forward?”

“Probably, given that there’s really no reason to expect she’ll stop,” Eddison answers. “It’ll have to be with a different team.”

“Conflict of interest.”

He nods.

The silence resumes, and I find myself looking at the splotches of rusty brown where blood has dried on the porch. By the end of this I’ll probably have to repaint, and what a stupid thing to be thinking of, but we just washed it Sunday.

Sunday. “Less time between kills, this round,” I note. “Nine days between the first two, only five between the next.”

“How do we know if that’s significant?”

“If there’s less time before the next,” Eddison replies, not intending to be a dick but kind of coming off that way.

Holmes’s face pinches, but she doesn’t retort. Instead, she pulls her notebook back out and flips to a fresh page. “All right, Ramirez. Start with the morning. Was today a normal day?”

With Eddison leaning into my side, a warm press of support, I start. We used to have to role-play this stuff at the academy, practicing interview techniques on other trainees, and I think almost all of us hated it. You have to be detailed without being irrelevant, you have to be approachable without being cold or sentimental, you have to, you have to, you have to.

I fire up my laptop so we can sift through the security-camera footage leading up to Emilia knocking on my door. I recognize the car of one of the quiet college students sharing a house on the curve of the cul-de-sac, then the young parents three doors down, followed by the departure of their regular babysitter. Just a few minutes before the knock, an unfamiliar car drives slowly by, pausing near the end of my driveway, and continues on. A minute later, it’s heading out.

Not long after that, the porch camera picks up Emilia stumbling across the lawn.

“Midsize SUV,” Holmes mutters.

Even with the streetlights, it’s impossible to discern the color beyond “dark.” Black, maybe, or navy or forest, maybe a dark grey. Burgundy has a kind of gleam even in poor light, so that’s discounted, and purple does the same thing, as rare as that is in cars.

“No plates,” sighs Eddison. “She must have taken them off. There’s not enough for an APB.”

In the first frames, I can see Emilia slumped in a daze against the back passenger window. The driver is harder to make out, beyond the light hitting white clothing in a way that makes it seem to glow. In the opposite direction, there’s a decent shot of the disturbing, featureless white mask, spattered with blood, surrounded by . . . huh. I zoom in to be sure.

“She’s either got multiple wigs or one really good wig,” I point out. “It’s curled. Sarah said the angel’s hair was straight.”

“What about Ronnie?”

“Braid. Synthetic wigs usually don’t restyle all that well. Human hair wigs can be pretty pricy.”

“Are you sure it’s a wig, then? Could it just be her hair?”

“See how the bangs start below that bulge of hair?” I point to the screen, sweeping my finger under the spot in question. “These masks are usually made of porcelain, sometimes plaster. They’re thick. The bulge is from pulling the front of the wig over the edge of the mask. It’s definitely a wig.”

“Email me that footage,” Holmes says. “I’ll get the techs started on identifying the make and model of the car. We’ll keep the shot of her to pass around.”

“Or him,” Eddison points out. “We haven’t actually ruled that out.”

Holmes glares at him, but nods. It makes sense—behind the wig and the mask, it could be a man—but no detective relishes having the suspect pool expanded. “You two are free to go.”