The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(17)

“Yes. I don’t want to be around people not working the case today.”

“You do remember that it’s Saturday, right?”

“That just means they won’t be in until ten or so, mostly.”

He concedes the point with a sigh, and we gather our things and head up to the conference room to get to work as Eddison and Sterling.

Yvonne, the team’s dedicated technical analyst, comes in around six-thirty with a box of donuts and a haunted expression. She has her own office off the bullpen, keeping the super-powered computers a bit more secure than the ones we have out in the cubbies, but today she walks straight up to the conference room and dumps her things on the table. “Can I work in here today?”

“Sure,” I say slowly, pushing my laptop back enough to fold my arms on the table. “Do you need the whole space, or . . .”

“No, I meant with you. Today is a day I need actual human interaction.”

“Okay?”

She closes her eyes, taking a deep breath. “She’s only a year older than my daughter.”

Fuck. Right.

“After the second refill, we steal Vic’s Keurig,” I inform her, with a pointed glance at her yellow travel mug.

She huffs a laugh in spite of herself and pulls a few things out of the enormous tote bag masquerading as her purse. “I need to grab some stuff from the office. I’ll be right back.”

Eddison trails after her in order to help carry. About fifteen minutes later, they return with two monitors and a laptop bag that bulges with cables and cords. I help her get them sorted and set up into a comfortable workspace at the end of the table closer to the door. Eddison shifts our things down the side a little to make room. I’m the only one on the team allowed to help her with anything technical, because, as she says, I’m the only one who’s not useless with anything more advanced than a smartphone.

Sometimes Eddison is tired enough, or desperate enough, to ask her something genuinely stupid. Her step-by-step instructions are patronizing, insulting, and absolutely gorgeous.

With the last cord in place, she turns everything on. While it’s booting up, she digs through the box of donuts and puts two of them on a napkin, handing them to me. “Maple and bacon. Should still be”—she blinks at me—“warm.”

I try for a smile, but given that I’ve got most of a donut shoved in my mouth, it probably doesn’t come off too well.

“Chew, Sterling. We chew our food.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I mumble.

“We also don’t talk with our mouths full. He’s a bad influence on you.”

Eddison looks up from his perusal of the other donuts in the box. “Hey!”

I snicker and make the effort to swallow. “Thank you for the donuts.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Settling back into my chair, I lick the maple icing off my fingers. It’s just a little salty and greasy from the bacon, and I’m in a very good place with that. This is one of the rare occasions in which my love of pork bacon gives me zero guilt.

Giving us both a stink-eye, Eddison plops two chocolate-glazed donuts on a napkin and sits back down.

“Where do you want to start?” Yvonne asks.

“Is there a report from the night-shift captain about last night’s work?” he replies.

She glances at her screen before answering. “No, but night shift is still on for another few minutes. I’d guess we get a report in an hour or so, unless Watts patches us through on a verbal report.”

“Then we need to sort through the offender registry responses, double-check that the school didn’t miss anything in its background checks, and look into Franklin Mercer’s parents. I’d like to take the Mercers.”

“I’ll take the registry,” I offer.

“So I’ve got the school.” Yvonne shakes her head, thick locs sliding against her peach silk blouse. “Okay. Why did we choose this job again?”

“So we can help.” I lean over Eddison and tap Yvonne’s phone, the screen lighting up to show her wallpaper with all four kids grinning, faces smushed together to get them all in frame. “So we can make the world safer.”

“Remind me of that a few times a day, will you?”

“Sure thing.”

She sets music to play out of one of the monitors, soft enough not to interfere with conversation or phone calls but loud enough to fill the space and the silence that comes of burying your head in your work. A few agents wander into the bullpen to take care of paperwork or do some research. Weekends aren’t always a real thing in the Bureau, especially in CAC, so more will come in as the day progresses.

Yvonne separated the Richmond-local pingbacks on the sex offender registry and sorted them by crime. Now it’s my turn to sift through the data and put it into context. When a child goes missing, there’s no such thing as privacy. Not really. And not just for the parents either. The investigation ripples out through the neighborhood and then beyond, digging into the smallest details of people’s lives in the attempt to find the child, hopefully safe and sound.

There were no pings on Brooklyn’s street, but there are three within her neighborhood. They’re too close to the school for any of them to have child-victim convictions; I dig through them anyway. One man, during a particularly nasty acid flashback, stripped and ran naked laps through the senior assisted living facility where he worked, finally hiding under the bed of an eighty-seven-year-old woman and sobbing about alien ants dissecting him from the inside out. Some of the residents and staff were certainly flustered, but the police interviews make it clear that several of the residents had never been so entertained. Neither had the police officers. Despite the attempts to keep their reports professional, it’s obvious they were laughing their asses off the entire time.