The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(49)

“Check anyway,” Bran says roughly. “Just in case.”

“I don’t need a warrant for DMV,” Yvonne says, adjusting one of her monitors. “I can see if anyone in the neighborhood has registered a car from out of state. It’s a start, anyway.”

Vic and Agent Dern join us around eight, closely followed by Ramirez, Kearney, and all of Watts’s team. We’ve spread out too much for there to be anywhere near enough room to manage it comfortably, but everybody squeezes in enough to close the door, and the temperature in the room feels like it jumps ten degrees.

Ramirez stands behind me, her hands on my shoulders, looking at Faith’s picture on the board.

One of seventeen pictures on the board.

“Madre de Dios,” she whispers.

“Did you get anywhere with the grandparents?” Vic asks the Smiths.

For what may be the first time since I met them, the Smiths look genuinely angry. Smith the Taller sputters something, cuts himself off, and gestures sharply at his partner.

Smith the Stouter doesn’t look any less pissed, but he’s more collected. “If you weren’t sure how deeply contemptuous they are of their son’s life choices, it can be summed up in one sentence: they named their damn dog Brooklyn.”

There’s complete silence in the room except for the whirr of computer fans.

“I’m sorry?” Agent Dern asks finally.

“They didn’t like what Frank and Alice named their daughter, so they got a pure-bred blonde Afghan hound puppy and named her Brooklyn. That’s who the third plane ticket was for. They bought an extra ticket so they could put their dog under the middle seat and still have their own space. They gave their goddamn dog the same name as their granddaughter.”

Vic groans. “And of course Frank and Alice weren’t going to think about that when their daughter is missing and they know the seniors want to take her away from them.”

“Are there any actual grounds for the grandparents gaining custody?” I ask. “I mean, it’s not like she’s abused or neglected; it’s not like her parents are scraping by on pennies and going hungry or dressing in rags. She’s a healthy, mostly happy kid whose greatest stresses in life seem to be her bullying classmate and her bullying grandparents.”

“Frank and Alice’s lawyer seems confident there are no grounds, and I certainly can’t see any,” admits Watts.

Burnside, a laid-back and dry-humored man who has refused four separate attempts to promote him to his own team, reads over the whiteboard. “What is all this?”

“Let’s find out,” Agent Dern invites. She gestures to Gala. “If you please, Miss Andries?u?”

Gala flashes me a terrified look.

Then she takes a deep breath, gets to her feet, and walks over next to the pictures. “This is what we’ve learned so far,” she begins, and the briefing that follows may be a little shaky at points, a little rushed and breathless in others, but it’s a solid first effort. As soon as Gala drops back into her seat, Yvonne hooks her ankle through the base of the younger woman’s chair and rolls it closer so she can give her a hug and a few whispered words. Praise, I expect, and damn but she’s earned it.

Ramirez and Kearney are less astonished than Watts’s team, but then they had to suspect something. Ian’s presence in the middle of a case is an unmissable signal that something is going on.

“So what do we do?” asks the last member of Watts’s team. Johnson is a little more high-strung than the rest of the team, but her energy also provides a good balance. She loops an elbow around Burnside’s neck to stabilize herself as she stands on tiptoe to stare at the pictures.

“We keep looking for Brooklyn,” Watts says firmly. “She is our priority. This is a lot of information to winnow through, but it’s going to help us find Brooklyn.”

Burnside strains around Johnson’s arm to see Yvonne’s screen. “I’ve got a DMV filter program I can send you,” he offers. “If you get a likely VIN, you can plug it into the program to see every place it’s been registered. Little faster than tracking them manually.”

“Why are you not a technical analyst?”

“Because I like fresh air.”

She spins in her chair and jabs his hip with a finger, then turns back to her work. Burnside prefers fieldwork, but he’s undeniably the best with computers on Watts’s team.

“We’re still waiting for files on a couple of them.” I pull up my feet so I can resettle cross-legged in the chair. As a conference room, it’s really only meant to hold a team at a time. Two teams plus a few is making me feel a little claustrophobic. “But we’ve been looking for common names across reports and files, and we’ll go from there.”

“Do not share this,” Vic orders sternly. “This is absolutely hush-hush. We do not want to spark hysteria.”

“When do you tell the other families?” asks Smith the Taller.

“When there’s something definitive to tell them,” Bran snaps. Frustration flares across his face, and he immediately nods an apology.

Smith glances at Faith’s picture, immediately linkable to the framed photo on Eddison’s desk, and nods in return.

“Go home, get rested up,” Watts tells her team. “Right now, this is a lull. Until we have a name, we keep on as we have. But understand that as soon as we have something, we’re going to be all-out sprinting to find all the girls.”