The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(20)
“It will still be a narrower list than the entire registry. Write out your criteria, Eliza, and we’ll give that over to Gala. You take ViCAP.”
Eddison looks up from his phone. “The Smiths are parked outside the senior Mercers’ gate. Right in front of it, too, so if the grandparents are expecting any visitors or deliveries, their guests are going to be told why the FBI agents have to move their car to let them in and out.”
“That’s legal?” Yvonne asks.
“As long as they don’t actually refuse entrance or egress, sure. They’re conducting open surveillance on persons of interest in a possible child abduction.”
“You people and your loopholes.”
“Loopholes are the soul of laws,” Eddison manages to say with a straight face.
She gives him the same look she gives her twin boys and gets a sheepish smile in response.
“They have their laptops and a hotspot, so they’ve offered to take over running background on the senior Mercers.”
“Freeing you to do . . . ,” prompts Vic.
“Obituaries and death certificates,” I suggest.
Eddison ponders that for a moment, then nods. “Not all preferences are sexual. If she fits a mold, it could be someone who’s lost a kid.”
“All right. I’ll update Watts and check in on you in a bit.” Vic stands, gathers all of our trash, and heads out of the conference room toward his office.
Yvonne turns to look at us. “He does realize he’s not actually working this case, right?”
Eddison just smirks. As unit chief, Vic works any case he feels is important enough for it. He simply ignores the whole not-in-the-field-anymore thing, and anything else that could be considered prohibitive. We’re his people; these are his cases. He just takes a less-passively supervisory role in some of them.
Gala, when she comes in, turns out to be a twenty-two-year-old with bright green-and-blue dyed hair, rhinestone-tipped cat-eye glasses, and a thick Georgia drawl that the name Andries?u did not at all prepare me for. “I’d say pleasure to meet y’all . . . ,” she starts, and shrugs rather than finishes.
“No worries; that’s standard for this division.”
As she shakes Eddison’s hand, she looks me in the eye and winks.
Yvonne and I both turn away to keep from snickering. Oh, I like Gala already.
There’s something about Eddison that makes the female baby agents go weak in the knees. Even I don’t know what it is, because while he’s my personal catnip, he became that gradually over a year of working with him and after two years of hearing our mutual friend, Priya, share stories about him. He’s handsome in a roughed-up sort of way, and he’s both authoritative and competent, but there are others in the division who can be described that same way. And yet, it is Eddison and only Eddison who makes the brand new agents swoon. Mercedes thinks it’s because he projects an air of broody and wounded. Marlene, Vic’s mother, pinches Bran’s cheek and says it’s because he’s so respectful of the women in his life.
Maybe it’s because she has a fiancé—though that hasn’t stopped others—but I like that Gala’s immune to the whatever-it-is.
Yvonne helps Gala set up another multi-monitor computer and walks her through the parameters I wrote out on several pages from Yvonne’s favorite yellow legal pads. I listen in with half an ear as they review them, in case anything needs to be clarified.
Beside me, Eddison stretches, his vertebrae cracking with a pop that makes him flinch.
Scrubbing at my eyes, I push my chair back from the table. “I’ll be back,” I tell the others. “I just need to walk a bit.”
“It’s about damn time,” Yvonne says pertly, and ignores Gala’s half-worried, half-appreciative look.
Eddison briefly blurs into Bran and takes my hand to press it against his cheek for a moment.
Everything aches from sitting too long, and even as some of my muscles sigh and relax with the movement, I can feel others tightening in protest. We’ve been trying to convince Bran he should put a hot tub in at The House, but so far he’s been too twitchy to do anything to it. After all, how many changes can you make to a house that doesn’t feel like yours?
I walk slowly down the two-wall ramp to the bullpen, sort of lunging into each step to stretch out as much as I can. If it looks half as absurd as it feels, the handful of folks here are getting quite a show. I keep up the weird stretch-lunge-walk thing through the desk-and-quarter-wall cubbies. But just for a few minutes. The case clock in the back of my mind is relentless, punishing. It’s easy to feel like every moment you take for yourself is a moment you’re taking from that missing child’s life. There are a lot of reasons people in this job burn out, and however much anyone else in the Bureau chooses to judge them, they’ll never get that from CAC. We understand the job too well to feel anything but sympathy and understanding when people finally have to walk away from it.
Eventually the walk lands me at Eddison’s desk. I’m more than a little anal-retentive when it comes to being organized, but his desk unsettles even me on a regular basis. Every file is neatly sorted and stacked, alternating orientation between portrait and landscape to create tidy towers on the back edge of his desk where it meets the row of squat filing cabinets he added when he inherited the space that used to be Vic’s. In some ways, it actually makes the workload more intimidating than if it were messy or cluttered.