The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(23)
He dropped them into her pillowcase. “Really.”
She threw her arms around him in a hug, and a moment later he had all four of them crowding him, laughing into his ears as they tried not to hit each other with shells and tiaras and fake weapons.
In the archway, Stanzi’s mamá grinned and took a picture.
Faith sighed happily and snuggled into her brother’s neck, her tiara tangling in his dark curls. “This is the best Halloween ever,” she murmured.
“Just wait until next year,” he told her. “Maybe it will be even better.”
The girls looked at each other. “I’ve got an idea for costumes!” Faith crowed, and they all burst back into giggles.
9
Yvonne runs out the door at five forty-three, phone pressed between ear and shoulder as she apologizes profusely to her husband and swears she’s on her way to their son’s T-ball game. Gala sticks around until seven, at which point she has to return to her mildly drugged-up fiancé to let his friend get to work. Eddison and I use that as a prompt to eat dinner—bless delivery and delicious Thai food—but then he heads out at nine-thirty when Mercedes calls and explains that she somehow managed to leave her keys in Watts’s car and could he please come let Mercedes and Cass into the cottage?
“Are you coming?” he asks, shrugging into his coat.
I shake my head. “I’ll head out soon. I’ve just got a couple more things I want to do before I leave.”
“You promise soon?”
I smile up at him. “I’ve got my shortlist of probably similar ViCAP cases, and I just want to tag and pull the full files so I can dive into them in the morning.”
“But soon.”
“Soon.”
Bran gives me a quick kiss and leaves the office. A few minutes later, I have an almost identical conversation with Mercedes via text.
I pull up my messages with Cass, see the bubble that says she’s typing, and tap out a quick order not to even start. I get back a wink.
The floor is quiet, still. Unnerving, if I’m being honest. Every time I’m here after standard hours, I’m with my team. I feed my iPod into the speakerphone contraption on the desk and turn on an a cappella playlist. The familiar Hebrew brings me back to my Birthright trip with my best friend, Shira, both of us soaking up music and the food our parents hardly ever made. There are prayers in there, and pop music, and translated covers, a bizarre and eclectic mix that suited us perfectly at nineteen and suits me still. These days, Shira’s lucky to listen to anything that doesn’t involve counting, the alphabet, or the wheels on the bus.
The research we’ve been doing all day is valuable, but it also has a glaring problem: we’re trying to construct a pattern off of what’s essentially a single point of data. Brooklyn’s disappearance didn’t happen in the midst of a rash of abductions. Her disappearance didn’t match known criteria of a case we were already working. Working blind, without any idea if this is a one-off or part of a series, it means we have to treat it as both, without enough information for either, really.
ViCAP is an invaluable resource at this point. It collects specific data from violent crimes, both solved and unsolved, detailing the signatures of cases. It helps link serials from across the country, which was next to impossible before it was up and running.
And it means that I can look for abductions/murders of girls ages seven to ten, and then sort the Caucasian blonde girls onto a separate list. If Brooklyn’s abduction was preferential, if this is because of an abductor’s particular tastes, then how the child looks is nearly everything. If Brooklyn is blonde, then other victims, if there are any, would likely be as well, and preferential offenders tend to have fairly narrow age windows.
There are so many missing or murdered little blonde girls.
There are so, so many.
Some of it can be connected to fetish, some to profit margins in trafficking, but the number is staggering. And here’s the real kicker: white blonde girls aren’t necessarily more vulnerable than any other demographics. More vulnerable than some, significantly less so than others. It’s simply an ever-present threat.
Once when I was home from college for spring break, my dad and I caught a movie. It was dark when we came out, and the movie theater had a large parking lot that wasn’t especially well lit. It was the first time he’d ever noticed how I carried my keys threaded through my fingers to make a punch as painful as possible if anyone tried to grab me. Aba asked me about it over milkshakes and fries, the diner’s fluorescent lights headache-inducing and bright, and I walked him through the many, many things a girl or woman out on her own does.
He was baffled.
It wasn’t that he didn’t believe me; it was just that he had absolutely no frame of reference for that kind of caution being a routine. Couldn’t understand that it didn’t really have anything to do with where you were or what kind of area it was, that this was just good sense if you were a woman walking alone.
When a child gets kidnapped, people wail and point to safe neighborhoods as if that should be protection against opportunity. As if money is the only thing needed to make a child safe.
A lot of the girls on this list lived in safe neighborhoods.
Brooklyn Mercer lives in a safe neighborhood.
I start sorting the list further, separating the blonde files into three groups: solved, found, and missing. Anything that’s been solved within the past year can be dismissed out of hand because the perpetrators are either in prison or pre-trial custody. Whatever happened to those girls, whether they were found alive or dead, I’m not reading it. Not now. The people who hurt them have been identified and arrested, and there’s only so much I’m willing to torture myself with in the name of compassion.