The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(2)

In the elevator, our tablets ding with the incoming file. I flip mine open. “Brooklyn Mercer,” I read aloud. “Caucasian, eight years old, blonde hair, blue eyes. Disappeared . . . yesterday.”

Cass yelps. “Yesterday? And they’re just calling us in now?”

“Disappeared while—shit—walking home from school in the afternoon.”

“Mierda.”

I reach out and jab the stop button on the console, and the elevator shudders to a halt.

“It’s always elevators,” Mercedes muses.

“Sterling?”

“Just . . . give me a minute.” I smooth a hand over the crown of my head, checking that my hair is still back in its tightly braided, somewhat severe bun.

November 5, just a week and a half away, will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day eight-year-old Faith Eddison, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, disappeared while walking home from school and was never seen again. Bran will look at the pictures of Brooklyn Mercer and part of him will, inescapably, see his sister. This time of year, this kind of case, I can’t help but wonder how long it took him to stop seeing Faith when he looked at me.

And whether or not it was still happening after we started dating three years ago.

I release the stop and the elevator lurches back into motion. “I guess we know why Watts has lead,” I sigh. “Eddison and I will both be banished to fringe work. I look too close and he is too close.”

Mercedes nudges my foot with hers. “Vic wouldn’t give this to us unless he and Eddison were both sure he could handle it. He’s got us to back him up.”

Cass nods. “We’ve got him, and Watts isn’t going to let him push himself too far.”

We’ll see, I suppose. Sometimes we only recognize our limits once we’ve passed them.





2

True to Vic’s word, Eddison waits for us at the car. He’s Bran off-duty, when he’s my boyfriend. But right now, just as Cass and Mercedes become Kearney and Ramirez once we have a case, he’s Eddison, the Charlie to our angels, and rather pissed about the entire fucking world, if it’s all the same.

Which isn’t entirely uncommon for him. He’s careful with his anger, works very hard not to lash out except in appropriate or useful directions, but he’s had that rage curling under his skin far longer than any of us have known him. Twenty-five years, from what his mother says, and it’s not hard to connect those dots back to Faith.

He’s already in the driver’s seat of the SUV, hands clenched white-knuckled around the wheel. The radio is off instead of turned low. I climb into the front passenger seat, Kearney and Ramirez taking the back. Kearney is the only one who can comfortably sit behind Eddison; she’s the only one short enough.

Halfway up the parking level, Watts’s team splits into two black SUVs identical to ours. They’re actually Cass’s old team; this is the first case we’ve worked with them since Cass came to us. Eddison lets them pull out first, leading the way down the levels of the garage, and he takes up the rear, our own little cavalcade Richmond-bound. For several minutes, uncomfortable silence grips the car.

I wake up my tablet screen again and clear my throat. “Brooklyn Mercer. She and her neighbor usually walk home from school in the company of her neighbor’s older brother.”

Eddison’s hand is so tight around the steering wheel one of his knuckles cracks with the strain.

After a moment, I continue. “The brother, Daniel, had a field trip yesterday, not expected to get back to his school until evening. His sister, Rebecca, went home sick before lunch. Arrangements were made to pick up Brooklyn, but they fell through for some reason. We’ll have to ask what happened there.”

“Her parents?” Eddison asks, his voice tight.

“Both work. Brooklyn usually either stays with Rebecca until one of her parents gets home or locks her house up tight. There are chain locks on the insides of the doors, so no one else can just walk in when she’s home alone.”

“When did they notice she was missing?” Kearney asks from the back.

“Eight o’clock. Her parents got home late and realized neither of them had picked up Brooklyn. They checked with the neighbors in case she went there, but she hadn’t.”

“When did they call the police?”

“Nine-thirty. They did a search first, walking between the house and school to see if she’d fallen or maybe just stayed at the school.” I squint at the screen, zooming in on the scan of an officer’s scrawled notes. “They called the school’s emergency number and got connected to the principal. He and the school’s resource officer walk the buildings and grounds together before leaving each day. That was around six, and they didn’t see her there.”

“Siblings?”

“Only child. Police came out en masse, started a grid search, and joined the family in knocking on doors through the neighborhood and the next ones over. They got Brooklyn’s picture out to hospitals, fire stations, malls, and news stations.”

Ramirez taps out a note on her screen. “Richmond’s only an hour and a half away; why didn’t any of us get the AMBER Alert push on our phones?”

“Uuuuuummmm . . .” I swipe through the scant handful of pages in the file.

“They don’t always do the push alert to the broader area if they don’t have reason to think it went beyond local territory,” Eddison answers.