The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(65)

“In jail for assault,” Sterling reports after a minute. “She escorted a friend to an appointment at an abortion clinic with protestors. One of the protestors tried to hit her friend with a sign, Sara grabbed the sign and beat him with the two-by-four it was stapled to. She’s got another few months.”

“Huh. You hear ‘jail’ and you don’t expect to be proud by the end of it.”

“Cara Ehret,” I say. “She’d be twenty-three now, and really, what didn’t happen to her at home.”

“Moved around through a lot of foster homes, graduated high school at seventeen and falls off the grid. I . . . actually can’t find her past that. We’ll have to get one of the techs on it when they get in.”

“Now you’re allowed to say the maternity leave is badly timed,” Eddison tells me.

I throw a peanut butter cup and hit him just under his eye. “Put her on the short list.”

She’s the fourth name on there, and we’re only a year and a half in.

Vic comes in at seven with actual breakfast and drinks. “How’s it going?” He regards us all with grave, worried eyes as he hands out bowls of western scramble, like omelets but lazier.

“We’ve got a few names for the analysts to dig into deeper,” I tell him around a yawn.

Eddison pushes to his feet with a groan and walks around the table to Sterling, standing over her shoulder to pick all the mushrooms out of his bowl and put them into hers. “This is also going to take forever.” He moves on to picking the red peppers out of Sterling’s breakfast to put in his bowl.

She watches his progress with a bemused, slightly horrified expression.

Vic watches, too, but chooses not to comment. “Do you want to update the Dragonmother, or would you like me to do it?”

“I’ll do it,” I sigh. “I could stand to move around a bit.”

“Eat first.”

And then he parks himself in one of the chairs to make sure we do.

Once he’s satisfied we’re not trying to subsist purely on caffeine, he leaves us for his office. I take a moment to finish my coffee, trying to sort out words and reports so I don’t look like an idiot in front of Agent Dern. Eventually, I’m as prepared as I’m going to get and head out into the bullpen.

I’m not quite to the elevators when a massive cheer goes out in Blakey’s corner of the floor, which is a hell of a lot more crowded than it usually is. I can recognize a handful of agents from the cybercrimes division, and there’s no division between CC and CAC as agents collapse into hugs on each other, some of them crying, a couple laughing giddily and jumping up and down.

“Ramirez!” Blakey calls. “We got Slightly!”

“Slightly,” I repeat blankly. “Oh, holy shit! Slightly! One of your Lost Boys!”

She laughs and throws herself at me in a hug. “He’s going to be okay. We got him, he’s going to be okay, and the bastard who had him gave us leads on Nibs, Tootles, and Curly!”

I hug her back, holding on just as tightly. They’ve been tracking these boys and several others for months, trying to break through a ring of pedophiles who use pop-up forums to arrange trades. They found one boy a few weeks ago, but the man holding him panicked and killed him when they closed in on the house. Slightly safe, and solid leads on three others? This is a very good day for Blakey’s team and their partners in cybercrimes.

But it makes me think of Noah, trying to understand why his mother is gone when she hadn’t done anything wrong.

I hit the call button, waiting for the elevator, and it opens to frame Siobhan and two of the language experts from the Southeast Asia desks in Counterterrorism. After a minute or two, I might even remember their names. But they give each other wide-eyed looks that gradually transfer from me to Siobhan and back again, and step out of the elevator. “We’ll just . . . hey, that looks like a party!” the younger one announces awkwardly, and drags her teammate out behind her.

“What kind of horror stories have you been spreading?” I ask dryly, stepping in and hitting the button for Internal Affairs.

“Don’t have to,” Siobhan retorts, voice as stiff as her posture. “You really think the whole building doesn’t know you’re getting deliveries?”

“None at the house anymore.”

“Really?”

“Really.” I study her discreetly in the wavering reflection on the doors. She looks exhausted, worn in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with sleep. It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask how she’s been in the . . . cógeme, ten? Ten days, since I’ve seen her.

It feels so much longer than ten.

But I let the silence carry us down the floors. She walked away, and I let her. I’m not sure there’s really anything else to say. We hit her floor first, and the doors slide open with a ding. She walks past me, shoulders squared, and hesitates over the tracks. She turns her head, just barely, like she’s going to look back at me.

But she doesn’t. Someone in the hall calls her name, and she flinches, then walks out without a word or a look. The doors slide shut and leave me alone in the car.

I don’t have an appointment with the Dragonmother, so I spend several minutes sitting outside her office while she volubly reminds another agent just how she earned her nickname. Her assistant looks torn between being mortified and proud. I suppose if you’re the guardian at the gates for a dragon, you can’t help but be pleased when she roars.