The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(18)

The public nudity makes him a sex offender, and this unfortunate streaker lives closest to the Mercers, just two streets over. Sympathetic employers or not, he no longer works at that facility or directly with patients in any capacity. His latest information has him working for an insurance company processing medical claims.

The next street over from him is a woman who got busted for prostitution in one of the states that includes that in the registry, and it carried over when she moved to Virginia. The conviction is old, though, without any indication of recidivism. Sex workers are also far, far likelier to be the victims of sexual offenses rather than the perpetrators.

At what used to be the very back of the neighborhood, though, where the houses were a little more spread out before construction started on the expansion, lives a man who apparently spent most of college raping classmates until he was finally tried, found guilty, and expelled, in that order. He was convicted in two cases, tried in five others, and was a person of interest in fourteen others. After serving a partial sentence, he’s been arrested twice more in the years since. Once, the charges were dropped because the young woman’s employer put pressure on her to keep it out of the news, and once the case was dismissed because the physical evidence was badly handled and largely destroyed.

All of his victims and alleged victims, however, have been in their early twenties, even as he’s gotten older. It means he’s not a person of interest in Brooklyn’s disappearance. I’d still love to burn him to the fucking ground.

Of more relevant interest to the current circumstances, there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of child-based offenders to go through in the larger Richmond area. Partway through, I thump my forehead against the table, wishing it could knock loose something brilliant. Something that proves to be the key to the whole case, the string that leads us straight to Brooklyn.

“I think I read somewhere that that kind of thing isn’t healthy for you.”

I sigh and gently thump the table a few more times. “Good morning, Vic.”





8

“Head up, Eliza. It’s afternoon. Time for lunch.”

“Lunch? Really?” I reluctantly sit up, more because of the tantalizing smell of food than the instruction. Soup and sandwiches, it looks like, with a side of stern but gentle Look from Vic.

“Your focus is legendary, but try to maintain a little more situational awareness,” he says, passing me a thick paper bowl and a paper-wrapped something. “I checked in on you a few hours ago.”

“You did?”

“Eliza, I asked you questions and you answered them.”

“Huh.”

Yvonne snorts and rolls her chair along the oval table until she’s sitting next to me, her food a safe distance away from her equipment. “You were the girl who read through football games, weren’t you?”

“No, I was the girl playing the trumpet in the itchy band uniform.”

“You play trumpet?”

“Not anymore.” I unwrap the sandwich. Ooh, turkey and bacon. “Of course, if you ask my band instructor, I didn’t play it back then either.”

Eddison swallows a bite of his own sandwich, a bit of lettuce clinging to the corner of his mouth. “Don’t worry, Vic. She’s gotten snacks and proper hydration.”

“I have?”

Yvonne’s giggling and not trying all that hard to hide it. “All he has to do is put the cup or piece of food in your hand and you automatically put it in your mouth. It’s amazing.”

“And frightening.”

“Well, yes.”

Vic settles across from us with his own meal. It is absolutely unsurprising to see him here on a Saturday. “Anything promising?” he asks.

“Not yet,” I reply. “Most of the ones I’ve gone through so far can be dismissed, either because this kind of crime goes against their progression or they’ve got different victim preferences. I’ve got maybe a handful to look into more.”

“But?”

“I find it hard to believe that this is nothing more than a crime of opportunity.” I bite down into the sandwich, chewing more slowly than necessary to give myself time to think. “From all accounts, Brooklyn is a smart, careful kid. Being alone, she would have been even more careful.”

“So you think she knew whoever took her?”

“Well enough to recognize them, maybe even to stop and talk to them. Especially if she was helping someone.”

“Which would argue someone in the neighborhood.”

“Maybe. Or maybe someone she knew through the school. Or someone through Brownies. Or someone her parents work with who she might have met.”

“Or her grandparents,” mutters Eddison.

“Have we learned anything on that end?” I ask.

“Not without a warrant,” Vic says.

I choke on a bit of crust. “Wait, what?”

“Not quite a warrant. Her grandparents are just up in Delaware, so the Smiths skipped Richmond and drove straight there.”

The Smiths, two members of Watts’s team, have been partnered up for so long that they have ceased to be individual units. Most of the people in CAC could not tell you their first names with a gun pointed at their heads. On the rare occasions there’s a need to differentiate, they’re usually described by build.