The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(26)

“The grandparents?”

“Legal gave the go-ahead for the Smiths to bring them in for questioning. They’ll take the senior Mercers to one of the satellite offices. An agent from the Baltimore Field Office is driving up just in case the lawyers try to get pissy about particulars.”

“Okay, but we’re the FBI. We are, by definition, federal. Why do they think federal agents from Virginia are going to have less jurisdiction than one from Maryland who’s not even working the case?”

“I think their lawyers are going to attack everything they possibly can, even knowing they’ll fail, and it’s best just to be prepared.”

They give me updates through the rest of the quick meal, things too long to consign to text and that I assume they’ve already told Bran. There’s not really a lot to share, and not much new I can tell them either. What do you do when your wheels are spinning but you’re not gaining any ground?

If you’re this team, it keeps going until you’re ordered to stop.

And maybe slightly beyond that.

“I’m going to go change,” Cass announces around a jaw-cracking yawn.

“Good idea.” Mercedes stands, and it’s weird that it’s taken me this long to realize she’s in full makeup but wearing her navy-and-yellow “Female Body Inspector” running shirt.

I might need to take a nap.

“Eliza?”

“Vic?”

“When you’ve shown Eddison where your searches stopped last night so he can take them over, you’re going to go into my office and get some sleep. This is nonnegotiable.”

“Okay.”

“It’s important that you—what?”

“I said okay.” I yawn so widely my face hurts, and shake myself out like a dog. “I’m tired. There’s not much I can do in the way of research if my eyes start crossing every time I look at a screen.”

“All right then.”

He looks a little flummoxed, though.

“Would it make you feel better if I protested so you could use all the arguments you clearly mustered?”

“Hush.”

Walking into the conference room, Watts hands a hot chocolate to me, followed by a cup of jet fuel to Bran and a hazelnut latte to Vic, who tries really hard to pretend that he prefers his coffee black. “Eliza Sterling.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Eliza Sterling.”

“I really didn’t! I opened a file while the list was compiling and just . . . sort of . . . got sucked in?”

“Eliza Sterling.”

“I’m sorry!”

Vic glances over at Bran. “That was impressive. Does Eliza do that for you?”

Watts tuts. “It is not even nine on a Sunday morning; we are not going to discuss what Eliza does for Eddison, not on the Lord’s day.”

I cackle as Vic flushes bright red. Bran’s blush is a little deeper, with his darker complexion, but every bit as strong.

Watts waggles her eyebrows at me. For someone in her midfifties, she can be surprisingly impish. “Eddison, you going to tuck her in for her nap?”

“Madre de Dios,” he mutters, face buried in his hands.





10

Once Watts’s team rolls out with Ramirez and Kearney in tow and Vic heads back to his office to make sure there’s a clean blanket, I walk Eddison through the results from my accidental overnighter. Afterward, he takes my hand and walks me to Vic’s office, our fingers tangled together between us to keep them from the view of others. Vic opens the door, points at me, points at his couch, and then starts whistling as he walks past us with his laptop and a giant stack of case files. He leaves the door to the conference room open, so we can hear the whistling even after he’s out of sight.

Bran closes the office door behind us and slumps back against it, his hands sliding over my hips to bring me in close. His expression shifts, dropping the professional mask. He looks wretched. I don’t say anything, simply lean into him and bury my face in the side of his neck.

“Vic got a call this morning from Agent Dern,” he murmurs into my hair.

“The Dragonmother?”

“That’s the one. She said given the type of case and victim and the time of year, IA and HR are considering pulling me off to desk duty for a few weeks.”

“But you’re already out of the field.”

“They mean off the case.”

“What do you think?”

He’s silent for a long moment, but his arms tighten around me. “I can see the sense in it,” he says finally. “I don’t like it. As much as this case . . . even with the way this case . . .”

“Better to work this case with its emotional cost than not work it and obsess over both Brooklyn and Faith?”

He flinches at his sister’s name. We’re so good about not bringing her up, about letting him decide if he wants to talk about her or not. Usually. Sometimes it’s simply necessary. After a minute, though, he nods.

“What’s going to be the deciding factor?”

“Time. Halloween.”

“Halloween, or the end of the month?”

“They’re the same thing.”

“With completely different contexts.”