The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(49)

“I’ll pass that along.”

I press the call button for the elevator. “One of your filing clerks, Gloria,” I say casually, aware of Cass stiffening beside me. “Is she always that grumpy?”

But far from suspecting anything, Nancy gives a soft, sad laugh. “Oh, dear. Gloria. She’s . . . well, she’s having a time of it, I’m afraid.”

“She’s ill.”

“Yes. Breast cancer, but it’s spread into her lungs and down into her abdomen. She insists on working, though, any day she feels strong enough. I think having something to do helps her a bit emotionally. And, well . . . this may be something that makes the CPS gossip rounds more than the national news, but did you hear anything about the CPS office in Gwinnett County? Down in Georgia?”

Cass and I both shake our heads.

“She grew up just outside of Atlanta, and her sister and brother-in-law both work in that office. She’s a nurse, and he’s a social worker. There was a big scandal there recently, and an investigation uncovered that several of the employees were purposefully concealing some abuse cases, or declining to investigate fully, and they were all cases involving employee kids or the kids of friends.”

“Her sister and brother-in-law?”

Nancy nods reluctantly. “So they’re off to prison, but the court wouldn’t let Gloria take her nieces and nephews because of the cancer. They said she’s not healthy enough to take care of five kids. And, truthfully, she’s not, but the kids got split up between different family members, and then with her husband’s sudden death, she’s just really had a bad few months. If she offended you—”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. She was snippy, but clearly she has reason to be. I was just wondering if we’d caught her on a bad day, or if she was just generally a grump. Every office has one, you know.”

“Lord, yes. Tell you what, though, give her a name and she can find the file in under ten minutes without even having to look it up. She knows the name of every kid who comes through our office, and last year she got the entire records room reorganized so it actually makes sense now, and got all the digital files tagged and cross-indexed.”

“How’s her prognosis?”

“Not very good, I’m afraid. She found it late.”

“We’ll pray for her,” I say, and Nancy beams. “Just . . . maybe don’t tell her that.”

“God bless you both. Off to see Ronnie next?”

“He’s with his grandmother, right?”

“Yes, she’s up in Reston. Let me get her number for you.”

We wait to call until we’re out of the hospital. Cass’s phone has been buzzing intermittently for the last hour, and every voice mail and almost every text is from Simpkins. Those that aren’t are from her teammates. Warning her, I assume. I can’t make out the words of the second voice mail, but the tone is pissed.

“Try not to get written up for my sake,” I tell her, tapping in the number for Ronnie’s grandmother.

“What if I get written up for the kids’ sakes?” she asks. “It did them good to see you.”

“Voice mail. Do I leave a message?”

“Sure. You haven’t been told otherwise yet.”

It drove our instructors nuts at the academy. As much as I’m willing to split hairs to achieve something, Cass takes it to the subatomic levels.

I clear my throat just before the beep. “This message is for Mrs. Flory Taylor. Ma’am, this is Agent Mercedes Ramirez, with the FBI, and I was hoping to check in on Ronnie, see how he’s doing with everything that’s happened. I’d be grateful if you could please call me back when it’s convenient for you.” I leave my number, then Cass’s name and number for good measure, and hang up. “All right. Anything else we need to do in Manassas before we face the music?”

“Holmes and Mignone won’t be on duty yet, will they?”

“Not for several hours yet.”

“Then I can’t think of anything else. Lunch?”

“I’ll bet twenty Simpkins complains to Vic that his team is a bad influence on her agents.”

“I’ll take that bet. No way she bitches at the unit chief like that, not out-and-out.”



18

You won twenty bucks yesterday, you’re buying the coffee today, Eddison informs me via text while I’m brushing my teeth at his kitchen sink.

The fact that he felt the need to send that text from the bathroom is . . . disturbing? He could have just yelled it.

It’s also a harbinger of how entirely shitty the rest of the day is going to be, because Simpkins spends a good two hours raking us over the coals for “interfering in her investigation.” Vic eventually has to step in, and that’s when it gets nasty. Vic rarely yells—he doesn’t like giving anyone the satisfaction—but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him that close to it. Whatever Simpkins’s ambitions, though, Vic quite simply outranks her, both in actual position and in tenure; he’s been an agent with the Bureau for thirty-eight years.

He started in the Bureau two months before Eddison was born.

Weirdly enough, it’s Eddison who’s the more bothered by that particular fact.

Once we’re out of Dodge, I get to spend the rest of the morning digging into the hard drive freshly delivered from Archives. It’s dropped off by one of the baby agents, and before she even gets to my desk, I know where she works; the baby agents assigned to the archives are all immune to the Eddison catnip because they’re all so terrified of Agent Alceste at first. By the time they realize they don’t have to be afraid of Alceste as long as they leave her alone, they’ve outgrown the catnip vulnerability, for the most part.