The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(39)

“Holmes wants you out at the boy’s house. I’ll allow it this time.”

This time. Simpkins is already on a roll. “What’s the address?”

Eddison scrambles for a pen, finds a Sharpie, and writes the address out on his forearm for lack of accessible paper. “We’ll be there in twenty,” he promises, and Simpkins acknowledges before hanging up.

Inara and Priya watch us gravely as we lever up from the leather couch. “Be safe,” Priya charges us. “Let us know what you can.”

“Do we need to cancel our trip down this weekend?” asks Inara.

“Don’t cancel the trip,” Eddison says. “Marlene stocked the freezers. You are not allowed to leave us with that many pastries.”

“Well . . . we board the train at six o’clock Thursday afternoon, so if things change, that’s the point of no return.”

Eddison shakes his head, reaching for the laptop to shut it down. “Only you think six o’clock is afternoon.”

“You think six o’clock is morning,” she retorts.

“It is morning.”

“Not if you haven’t gone to bed yet.”

“Good night, girls.”

“Good night, Charlie,” they chorus, and grin at his pained look. Just before the screen goes dark, I can see the worried looks they flash to me.

“I’ll call Sterling while I’m changing,” I tell Eddison. “You’ll call Vic?”

“Sí. Not that either of them can do anything, but we’ll keep them updated.”

Sterling takes the news calmly, telling me to keep her informed through the morning, and she’ll take care of the first couple of coffee runs. Sterling is an angel. I come back out in jeans and a windbreaker, with a different T-shirt on underneath, because I just cannot make myself put on a suit after midnight. I have better clothes at the office if we don’t get to come back, and besides, I’m desk bound anyway. If I can’t use that excuse to bend the dress code, what’s the point?

The Jeffers house is all the way on the west side of town, what should be a thirty-minute drive with cooperating traffic lights. The lights are not cooperating, but neither is Eddison: we get there in eighteen minutes. After signing in with the uniform at the door, we head inside and nearly run into Agent Simpkins.

Dru Simpkins is a well-respected agent in her midforties, with a mane of coarse, dark blonde hair that never looks quite tame. She guest lectures at the academy about the impact of psychology on children’s writing, specifically looking at how to pick up cues and subtext in diaries or writing assignments, and leads that portion of the CAC-specific training. The BAU wanted her pretty badly for one of their profiling teams, but she’s resolutely remained in Crimes Against Children. She was the one to correctly identify that I wrote the NAT’s survival guide. Apparently I have “a voice.”

“Other three cases, it’s always been the father who got the worst of it, right?”

She also doesn’t believe in small talk.

“Yes,” I reply. “Father was subdued with gunshots, mother was killed, father was finished off. Not the case here?”

“Doesn’t seem like it. Come take a look.”

We grab booties in the hallway and slip them on over our sneakers before following her down the hall to the master bedroom. The medical examiner gives us a two-fingered wave as she keeps the thermometer steady in Mr. Jeffers’s liver. He has several stab wounds across his torso, but not nearly to the extent of the other male victims.

Mrs. Jeffers, however, Jesucristo. Her face is destroyed, and the carnage continues downward. Her groin is a solid cluster of wounds, and the other stab wounds littering her stomach stretch up into slices at and around her breasts. Her husband’s death was pretty straightforward, but this woman suffered. And, judging from the negative space on her side of the bed, her son was forced to stand there and watch.

“You said Mason wasn’t speaking?” I ask.

Detective Mignone, standing by the father’s side of the bed, looks up and nods. “Neighbor says she doesn’t think he’s spoken in years.”

“So it’s not trauma based.”

“Or it’s not based on this trauma,” Simpkins notes. She pulls one of the framed pictures off the wall and holds it out to me, then realizes I don’t have gloves and keeps it steady so I can see it. There’s blood spattered on the glass. Not a lot, not at this distance, but some. It’s not enough to obscure the way the family is posed in the portrait, Mrs. Jeffers’s hand wrapped around her son’s arm as he tries to pull away toward his father.

“Sexual abuse by the female parent,” Eddison murmurs over my shoulder. “That’s uncommon.”

“Why do you assume the abuse was sexual?” asks Simpkins, who clearly already knows the answer but is asking it anyway.

That would be the teacher part of her personality.

“The way the wounds are clustered,” Eddison answers automatically, because we are both used to Vic, after all. “Groin, breasts, mouth. That’s very specific grouping.”

“Social Services?” I ask.

“We have a call in. Their social worker on call is already at Prince William on a different case, so she was going to put a call out for backup.”

“Seems like Mason might do better with a male social worker.”