The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(43)
“And me?” Bran asks quietly.
He already knows the answer, his dark eyes flinty and challenging.
The Dragonmother meets his gaze without flinching. “If you’d like to work with Rick and his junior analysts on Brooklyn’s case, you’re welcome to do so for now, but the moment we have proof that she is in any way connected to your sister, Agent Eddison, we have to pull you off the case entirely. And I would prefer, for your own well-being, that you be on paid leave rather than paperwork duty. Or—”
He shifts and resettles in his seat, waiting.
“Or you assist Detective Matson. Be his gofer, the point of contact between him and the teams.”
He still looks mutinous.
“Agent Eddison, I am not unsympathetic,” Dern says calmly, “but I am thinking of both you and the Bureau in this. As much as the inactivity chafes, as much as you want to be working on this, it will take very little for a defense attorney to claim, convincingly, that you were emotionally compromised through the course of the investigation. If your sister is connected to Brooklyn, if the same person kidnapped them, if I allow you to continue working on this case, then everything you’re feeling right now, everything you’re going through, will be for absolutely nothing when the court has to release the man who abducted Faith because your presence as a bereaved family member compromised the case.”
Bran goes very still, hardly breathing, and across the table, Vic winces.
The Dragonmother isn’t roaring or flaming, but she has sharp teeth and claws, and she’ll use them out of love even faster than out of fury.
Once it becomes clear Bran isn’t going to say anything, Dern turns to Watts. “Give your instructions to Rick, and steal whoever you need from the pool. No more than three. Have your team funnel information through Rick and the juniors. Agent Sterling, help Yvonne and Miss Andries?u set up their searches. Vic will establish the shift in jurisdiction and get you the full case files. Agent Eddison, I will ask you to be the one to contact Agent Karwan. The subject will be understandably painful; it will likely be best coming from you, as we reopen old wounds.”
“I’m going to impose a gag order on the departments I contact,” Vic tells us. “I don’t want this leaking. As soon as the media gets a whiff of what we’re thinking, it’s going to be a zoo, and our ability to investigate will drop significantly.”
“My team will have to be told, but they’ll be under strict orders not to speak about it where anyone else can hear them. Last thing we want is this getting to the Mercers.” Watts stands and shakes her head, her grey-streaked bob shifting around her face. “Eliza, you know what I’m going to say?”
I sigh and pick up my phone, programming alarms in every hour to keep me from disappearing down the rabbit hole.
“Atta girl.”
“Faith, we have to go,” Lissi urged. “We promised. Straight home.”
“I know, but—”
“I have my piano lesson. If I’m late, my teacher will tell my mamá.”
Faith looked down at the pair of books in her arms. She hadn’t meant to finish both of them already. She’d been closer than she realized to the end of the first one, and during assigned reading she finished and started the second one. And then during recess it was raining, so she read, and now . . . Now she wasn’t going to have anything to read while Lissi was doing her piano lesson, and she wasn’t allowed to watch TV with the sound on during the lesson, and she was going to be bored.
She’d already read all of Lissi’s books at home.
She hesitated, then looked back up at Lissi. “I won’t even be five minutes,” she said. “I promise! You start walking. I’ll switch these out at the library, and I’ll run to catch up!”
“You never spend less than five minutes in a library,” Lissi reminded her. “You never spend less than twenty!”
“But—”
“Faith, I have to go.”
“I’ll catch up,” she said again. “I will, Lissi, you know how fast I run. Like Brandon! I’ll catch up before your teacher ever sees us.”
“We’re not supposed to split up.”
“I won’t be long!” Faith called, already jogging for the library. She knew exactly which books she was going to check out. She’d catch up with Lissi before her best friend had even gotten into their neighborhood.
Only, the books she wanted weren’t there.
By the time she found new ones that sounded interesting, it had been a lot longer than she realized. Lissi might even be home by now. Faith shoved the books into her backpack and ran, waving at the crossing guards as she passed them. She got into the neighborhood, still running, but it was harder to breathe, and her side was stitching up.
Her brother made it look so easy to run and run forever. Was that something you figured out how to do as a teenager?
But no, Rafi was the same age as Brandon, and even though he was really fast, it was only for a short distance at a time, and then he’d huff and puff and turn funny colors if he tried to keep going.
She slowed down to a walk, holding her aching side. Lissi’s lesson had definitely already started. Maybe she could go sit on the back porch and read? And if the teacher said anything to Lissi’s mamá, well, maybe she and Lissi could say she’d been out back the whole time?