The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(3)

“Actually,” I say, fighting against the seat belt so I can twist and better see all three of them, “it doesn’t look like there’s an AMBER at all. No suspect or vehicle description, so it doesn’t fit the criteria of the alert. Not enough information to reasonably assist the public in identification.”

“Have they called it into NCMEC?” Ramirez asks.

“And NCIC and VCIN, but not until this morning. Looks like the day-shift captain got in this morning and raised hell.”

From the corner of my eye, I can see Kearney open her mouth, glance at the driver’s seat, and bite down on whatever she wanted to say. If it’s anything like what’s running through my head at the moment, it’s about the likelihood of the Richmond PD getting heavily retrained on missing kid protocols. There’s no real reason for the family to know that you should always call the police before you start searching. The police would rather be irritated by a false alarm than have a kid be missing for hours before they’re notified, but most people operate on the instinct to not bother the police until they know for a fact something is wrong. That the Mercers called after an hour and a half is actually not terrible. At least it was only an hour and a half.

But there’s also not much reason for a family to know that your next call after the police should be to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. From the initial call, the police are the ones who should enter the information into the Virginia Criminal Information Network and the National Crime Information Center, but the family is supposed to call into NCMEC. The faster the child’s description and details can be spread through the networks, the better the chance of finding them.

Brooklyn was missing for over twelve hours before anyone thought to get her information beyond Richmond. The night shift screwed this up, and badly.

“Any sign that she did come home?” Kearney asks.

“No. Backpack is gone, a note from her mother is still on the counter, snack is still in the fridge. No signs of attempted entry around any of the doors or windows. Mail still in the box at the end of the driveway. Apparently she usually gets it on her way in.”

Eddison’s thumbs beat anxious tattoos against the wheel. “Any listed predators in the area?”

“Not sure yet. Yvonne’s got a note here that there are a fair number of dings on the registry, but it’s going to take her some time to sort it by crime.”

The sex offender registry covers a lot of ground, from the sick and violent to the drunk and stupid. People learn a neighbor is on the registry and immediately assume the worst, which can be problematic in a case like this. Any time we have to spend convincing a neighborhood that the man who drunkenly pissed in an alley, thereby exposing himself, is probably not the one who kidnapped a kid, is time we should be spending actually looking for the kid.

“Are her parents her biological parents?” asks Ramirez.

“Yes. No prior marriages for either of them, and they’re still married and living together.”

If Brooklyn was adopted or fostered, or if one of the parents was a step-parent and the other biological parent was still out there somewhere, it would give us specific people to research. There’s this mental checklist we all have, going down all the obvious questions so we can figure out what we know and what we don’t, what possibilities we can eliminate right off the bat.

Eddison lets go of the wheel long enough to adjust the air-conditioning. Stupidly or not, we’re all wearing our coats, which means the heat is a bad option. “Any links to other cases?”

“None obvious. The few other open missing kid cases in Richmond mostly happened a while ago. Suspected runaways, two parental abductions. Only two that have been labeled probable stranger abductions, both several months old. A fifteen-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy.”

“Ages don’t connect into a pattern,” notes Kearney.

“Neither does appearance. The boy is black; the girl is Latina. Different parts of town, different schools, different social circles. Neither had anything in common with the other. Yvonne is running both of them against the Mercers just in case.”

“What’s the neighborhood like?” Ramirez asks. She has her tablet open to a map of Richmond.

“Pretty solidly middle class, it looks like,” I reply. “Mostly families or empty nesters. Yards and driveways, individual mailboxes, maintained streetlights and well-lit roads. Up enough for a homeowners’ association, but mostly so they can limit the number of college kids renting out. Must be a hot-button issue, because it’s in the officer’s notes. A handful of stay-at-home moms, one stay-at-home dad, but otherwise dual-income households or single-earner/single-parent, plus two houses rented to groups of students.”

“Do the Mercers have any pets?”

“Two cats, both accounted for. We’ll check with the local pet shops and shelters, see if any recent adoptions stand out.”

Kearney taps a note into her version of the file. “Is Brooklyn the kind of kid who could be lured with a pet?”

“Don’t know; we’ll have to ask.”

The rest of the way to Richmond, we dissect the scant file, exchanging questions. Kearney writes down the ones we can’t answer, which are most of them. A few minutes from our destination, Watts calls my work cell rather than Eddison’s. If Eddison is in a car, Eddison is driving. There are very few, and very specific, exceptions to that, because he’s a terrible passenger. I flick the Bluetooth connection on.