The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(29)
“And how many seconds did it take them to call their lawyers?”
Vic chuckles. “Apparently one of the Smiths has a cell blocker. They were able to call from a landline at the satellite office.”
“So their lawyers had to drive.”
“They’re rather upset at the moment.”
“The senior Mercers, or their lawyers?”
“Yes,” Bran says decisively. He’s still Bran, somehow, despite the case update. “The Smiths are talking to them now. Or, one of them is talking while the other is in the room texting updates, mostly to make the senior Mercers paranoid.”
“You have them both in your phone as Smith, don’t you?” sighs Yvonne.
“Who doesn’t?”
Cass, who has them labeled Smith the Tall and Smith the Stout.
Ian removes five file folders from his bag and sets them on the table. One of them is thick, bulging with pages and paper clips, Post-its and scraps of paper, even ink-covered napkins sticking out at odd angles. The others are much thinner. He follows them with a battered composition book, the cover patched with electrical tape, thick and ruffled with things added between the pages.
He takes a slow, deep breath. “I know you don’t have time to waste on fools’ errands,” he begins carefully. It sounds rehearsed, and it isn’t hard to imagine he spent the plane ride from Tampa going over this again and again in his head. “Brooklyn Mercer is missing, and tangents can cause problems.”
“But you have a tangent?” asks Bran.
“I think you all know better than most that there are some cases you just don’t let go. You keep trying to solve them, to fix them, long after the department moves on.”
Vic stares warily at the thickest file, gaze flicking to Bran and back.
“You kept looking for Faith,” I say softly.
Bran flinches minutely, not from shock, I think, so much as reflex. He’s known for years, possibly decades, that Ian hasn’t given up. Xiomara, Bran’s mother, told me as much the first trip I met her.
Ian slides the thickest file out into the center of the table. “Almost every detective has that one case. Maybe more, but there’s always at least one they can’t let go of. Departments understand that. They look the other way when you copy notes or stay after hours in the archives. Used to pretend not to notice you using the station phones for long distance calls, back when that meant anything. As computers became more widespread, they didn’t mind us old-timers coming in for tutorials, running searches, and setting up alerts.”
“There are an awful lot of blonde girls who go missing, Ian,” I tell him. I’m not trying to be patronizing, and I hope it doesn’t come off that way. But it’s a fact, and I have a full night’s work to prove it.
“Yes.”
It’s the way he says it: utterly calm despite the tension around his eyes. This man, who knows damn well that every second counts in a child abduction, dropped everything to come here and tell us this.
“Okay. Walk us through it.”
Bran glances at me, his shoulders hunching. “Eliza.”
I touch his side, my hand hidden under the table. “We can go in Vic’s office if you’d rather not hear this. If you want to dig back into yesterday’s files.”
He shakes his head. “Ian, I don’t . . . you know I don’t . . .”
“I know you respect me, boy,” the detective replies with a small, tired smile. “Maybe I’m past the foul line on this; maybe it’s a solid hit. Let me lay it out.”
Bran glances at Vic, who nods gravely. “All right.”
Ian flips back the cover of the thickest file. Faith’s file. Her picture is on the top, an eight-by-ten glossy print with much of the gloss worn away. I’ve never actually seen this picture of her. Like most missing children, it’s her final school picture, because when police are plastering pictures of your missing kid everywhere, you want one that clearly shows their face. This one has a wavy purple background, her broad smile displaying the bottom middle teeth she’d lost by Halloween. Her hair is the same as the picture I’m used to, though, and a handful of other photos I’ve seen, the blonde pigtails curling down onto the shoulders of her Lisa Frank unicorn tee. Her head is cocked a little to one side, like the photographer said something she didn’t quite understand, but she knew she had to keep the smile. It’s adorably confused, and, oh, God, I’ve seen Bran with almost the exact same expression minus the smile. A thin chain drapes around her neck, leading to a pendant that rests just beside the unicorn’s horn. It’s the kind of glittery enamel pendant that kids love regardless of decade, the kind where you look at it and automatically wonder if it also glows in the dark—a pink, yellow, and blue rainbow that arcs into two white stars rather than clouds.
Bran gave her that their last Christmas together. She made him help her put it on that morning, and never took it off. Their mother told me that.
“Twenty-five years ago,” Ian says. “Almost exactly. Heard about Brooklyn on the national news last night. Eight-year-old girl, white, curly blonde hair, blue eyes, disappears walking home from school in the afternoon.”
Gala looks at the photo of Faith, at Bran, at the large picture of Brooklyn clipped to the whiteboard wall behind her, and loops around again. She swallows hard but doesn’t comment.