The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(30)

“When you were at the academy, Brandon, you told me about a friend in your cohort. When he was a kid, his little sister’s best friend went missing.”

“Sachin Karwan,” Bran whispers.

Sliding a second file to the center of the table, Ian opens it to show another little girl who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to both Faith and Brooklyn. “Her name was Erin Bailey. Eight years old, white, curly blonde hair, blue eyes, disappeared walking home from a tutor’s. She went missing in Chicago twenty-seven years ago tomorrow.”

Shifting the papers off my laptop to the counter behind me, I wake up the computer. I have to log back into the various systems, but a couple of minutes later there’s Erin’s face on my screen, already tagged to one of my lists.

Unsolved, never found.

Another file joins Faith and Erin in the center of the table. “Twenty-one years ago come November 3. Her name was Caitlyn Glau, from Atlanta.”

Her complexion is ruddier than the other girls’, patchy with pink and red, and her hair has a tighter, bushier curl, but not enough to pull her out of the line of photos. Vic picks up the printed picture by its edges, handling it carefully. He looks up at me.

Caitlyn’s name isn’t on my ViCAP list, but I run her name through NCMEC and she pops up, classified as a runaway. The last update to her profile is over a decade old.

“How did you find her name?” I ask.

“One of the officers on the initial search transferred to Tampa nine years ago. Around nine, I think. Manny keeps a photo of Faith on his desk at work, right next to his kids.”

“Rafi’s younger brother.” Rafi and Manuel—Manny, as he goes by now, when he can convince his family not to call him Manuelito still—were Bran’s best friends growing up. They’re still family.

“New guy noticed the picture,” Ian continues with a nod, “they got to talking. Neither of them seemed to think it was anything but coincidence, but Manny mentioned it to me not long after.” He pulls the next file out and opens it. “Fifteen years ago, Emma Coenen, Nashville.”

Emma is on my ViCAP list.

“There’s a nonprofit group in Nashville that haunts around old cases like this. A few years ago they worked with artists to recreate what the missing kids might look like now, ran them on television. Emma was eight years old, white, with curly blonde hair and blue eyes. She disappeared walking home from her aunt’s house on November 7.”

Unsolved, never found.

“Seven years ago”—Ian opens the last file—“Andrea Buchanan from Baltimore vanished walking home from her voice lesson. Ordinarily, your team might have been called in, but it was the same day Keely Rudolph was kidnapped from a mall in Sharpsburg.”

Vic looks suddenly exhausted, and the heel of his hand presses against the gunshot scar on his chest. Bran drops his face into his hands.

Expression a little frightened, Gala delicately clears her throat. “I’m sorry, I don’t . . . what’s the connection to Keely? Is she another blonde girl?”

Yvonne shakes her head. “Keely was twelve. She was kidnapped by a man whose family kept teenage girls prisoner in a garden complex on his estate. She was rescued, but the Garden . . .” She closes her eyes momentarily. “It was a mess of a case. A lot of girls died when the building exploded. That was before we learned how many had died over the years preceding it.”

“I remember the Garden case,” Gala whispers, hands hovering around her mouth like she wants to cover it but doesn’t want to risk muffling her words. “I was in high school, and after the news broke, they pulled all of us girls into a safety lecture. It was all anyone could talk about for weeks.”

“The explosion was on Halloween,” Yvonne says. “The next day was my first back at work after giving birth to my oldest daughter.”

“Keely and Andrea both went missing on the twenty-ninth of October.” Ian’s stubby fingers, square and thick with callus, poke the edges of Andrea’s picture to where we can all see it. “Andrea was never found.”

Andrea has a cheerleader’s smile, wide and toothy and fixed in place like she could hold it for hours at a time. Her hair, a slightly redder blonde than the other girls in the line, is up in two high pigtails and done in tight, sprayed-fast spirals bound with starched ribbon twists. Cheerleader pigtails. Around her face, though, the wispy curls are soft and loose.

“They all went missing in the same two-week span. All in the last week of October or the first week of November.” He sits back, gaze traveling around the table to study each of us. “Two might be a coincidence, but six? Six eight-year-old white, blonde, blue-eyed girls who all disappeared at the same time of year? I think they were taken by the same person or people. And I think there are probably others.”

I close my laptop again, leaning over it to flick through the printed pages in the files. Not to read them, exactly. Just to see what they are.

“They’re not full files,” notes Vic.

“No, just what I could pull from online, except for Faith’s. Corbero, the transfer from Atlanta, didn’t think they were connected. I couldn’t get a copy of Caitlyn’s file from him. The rest, I didn’t have someone with access.”

“Eliza,” Vic asks quietly, “what are you thinking?”

Interesting that he’s asking me. But then . . . well, I suppose it’s not fair to ask Bran. It’s a compelling story, certainly. That doesn’t mean they aren’t coincidences. We’ve seen stranger. Hell, we’ve solved cases by stranger coincidences. Still . . . I rub my finger against the date on the bottom of one of the printouts in Caitlyn’s file. Ian heard about her nine years ago, but he only put this folder together recently.