The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(64)

“Mercedes.”

I turn to look at her more fully. “I think I’ve been in the Bureau too long; hearing my first name from adults makes me start to worry.”

“Mignone and I have been partners for five years; I’m still not convinced he knows my first name,” she agrees. “What you said to Noah, earlier, about why? It was a good answer.”

“I keep struggling toward a why,” I murmur. “I think that’s part of it. It’s my part of it. I don’t think it’s all of it.”

“We’ll find out the rest, with any luck. But for now it was the right answer.”

We let Cass know we’re heading out, and once outside, Eddison starts rooting for his keys. Sterling slips her hand into his pocket, yanks out the ring, and shoves them deep in her purse. “Uh-uh,” she tells him flatly. “You’re not driving.”

“I always drive.”

“You’re not driving.”

“But I always drive.”

“And yet, you’re not driving.”

I bite my lip against a laugh. It’s like counting on the tides.

Spreading out in the bullpen’s conference room, we gradually settle into a system. Eddison and I pore over all of our team’s old cases, skimming over details and notes from the digital files, and whenever a reference to someone—a family member; a neighbor; a hospital worker; a lawyer; a victim, really anyone that makes us look twice—strikes us as interesting, we call out the name for Sterling to research, to find out where they are now.

It is very quickly a depressing venture.

Being a victim isn’t something that disappears as soon as you’re rescued. It doesn’t vanish the moment the people who hurt you are taken into custody. That sense of it, that awareness of being not just victimized but a victim, it sticks to your bones for years, even decades. That sense of the thing can cause as much damage as the original trauma, as life goes on.

Being a victim has its own nasty form of recidivism.

In the days following the destruction of the Garden, as girls either succumbed to grievous wounds or began to improve, thirteen Butterflies survived, Inara, Victoria-Bliss, and Ravenna among them. Six months later, there were only nine. Now there are seven, though, to be fair, Marenka died in a car accident. All the rest were lost to suicide as they struggled to live in a world that was supposed to be better, where they should have been able to leave their trauma behind them. As calm as I tried to be, I understand Inara’s worry about Ravenna.

Suicide, whether of the original victims or their friends and family, is a common thread through our research. So is drug and alcohol abuse. So is prison. So is continued victimization through domestic violence.

“Have you ever given out a bear with wings?” Eddison asks when we stop for a break.

By which I mean I slammed the laptop shut because I needed five fucking minutes without a depressing-as-shit statistic, and he decided that meant time for breakfast.

Which actually meant splitting a giant bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

“No,” I sigh, forehead against the cool surface of the table. “I buy our bears by the gross. They come in a variety of colors but there are no accessories.”

“So the angel means something to her specifically.”

“The kids have mostly described her as looking like an angel,” Sterling notes. “It could just be something that she took on for herself, especially if someone in her family or fosters were religious.”

“Or a reflection of her name. Angel. Angelica. Angelique. Or if she had a brother named Angel. Angelo.”

“I’d say this is a bad time for Yvonne to be on maternity leave but she’d only yell at us for being this vague,” I mumble.

“Why the blonde wig, though?” he continues, ignoring me. “Even in classical art, angels had hair colors in the full range. They’re not all blonde, whatever Precious Moments would have you believe.”

Sterling shrugs and very kindly doesn’t comment on his familiarity with Precious Moments. “Don’t look at me; Jewish angels are properly terrifying. Have you ever read those descriptions? There is nothing blonde or pretty about them.”

“And Jesus wasn’t white, but who wants to admit that?”

With a deep groan, I open the laptop again. “Okay, try Heather Grant,” I tell Sterling, along with the date of birth and social security number. “She went missing in Utah and was found a month later in a field; said angels had taken her.”

“And those angels turned out to be?”

“An older couple who desperately wanted kids but hadn’t been able to have or adopt any of their own. He had a heart attack, she left to get help, and Heather wandered away. She was only calm for interviews if she was in my lap where she could play with my crucifix.”

“Let’s see, she is now . . . fifteen. Doing okay, still lives on the family ranch. Her mother died a few years ago, but her grandmother came out to live on the ranch so she wouldn’t be the only female. No red flags.”

“Sara Murphy,” Eddison reads off his screen. “She’d be twenty-four now. The man who kidnapped and kept her for his ‘heaven wife’ had dozens of sets of wings hanging from the ceiling of his cabin, made out of all kinds of found things. She wouldn’t sleep unless Mercedes was in the room.”