The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(67)

“Riley Young.”

It’s amazing how much faster you can find specific information when you have a name and a social security number. It takes less than twenty minutes to definitively place Mark Davies as living in the neighborhood each time one of these girls was abducted.

“That’s more than enough for a warrant,” Vic announces. “We can absolutely arrest him on this.”

“Wait, go back for a moment. Sterling”—Watts looks at me—“explain the two years to me. What is he doing with these girls while he has them?”

“At a guess? They’re Lisa. The minute he’s able to separate them from their typical surroundings, they lose the identity he knew them by, and they become Lisa.”

“But why only the two years? He lost Lisa, but then he gets a new one.”

“But losing Lisa was so overwhelmingly traumatic that it’s shaped his entire life since then. Losing Lisa is inescapable. Two years of leukemia treatments? In . . . what, the midseventies? He would have watched his daughter go through absolute hell in the hopes of a cure, and then he lost her anyway. He wants that hope of a new beginning. He wants that long and happy life with a healthy daughter, but the trauma might as well be written in his bones. He cannot avoid it.”

“But the girls are healthy. You can’t give someone leukemia.”

“No, but you can give someone symptoms. You can make someone sick.” I reach out for Bran. He puts my hand on his leg and lays his hand over it, too scared of hurting me again to take it in his. “He makes them sick, and over the course of those two years, they get worse and worse.”

“And then they die from it,” Mercedes whispers. “Ah, las pobrecitas.”

“Erin was alive,” Bran says, his voice strangled. “For almost two years, Erin was alive a stone’s throw from my house, and no one . . .”

“No one knew she was there,” Ian finishes grimly. He’s wearing sunglasses this morning, and I worry all this stress may be too much for him.

“Bran . . .” I hesitate, which makes him look over at me. “Did you talk to your parents yesterday?”

He shakes his head, lips pressing together so hard they’re turning white.

“You should warn them. This is going to break and break hard.”

Vic puts a hand on Bran’s shoulder, solid and familiar. “You can use my office. When you’re ready. Take as much time as you need. Let’s get the warrant paperwork prepped.”

“How much can we ask for?” Mercedes touches the thin silver crucifix at her throat. It’s as much a reassuring gesture for her as it is for me to rub my fingers against the Magen David.

“Brooklyn is probably in the house,” I point out. “He wouldn’t have been able to get away to look in on her anywhere else without attracting attention, especially as he works from home. But we should probably get permission to search the yard, as well.”

“The yard?”

“Kendall,” I say quietly. “If he left the girls in the houses after they died, an outcry would have arisen at one of the other properties. He would have been caught by now. Maybe he takes them somewhere else, but the yard of the property he rents is the first sensible place to search.” Bran looks a little sick, but the rest of them nod. We don’t mean to be insensitive; it just kind of happens when you’re trained to work through the horror now and deal with the emotional fallout later. “We also need to prep warrant requests for each of his prior residences. It doesn’t make sense to file them until we find out what he’s been doing with . . . with the bodies, but we should have them ready.”

“Sterling, I want you with us when we pick him up.”

“Eh?” I glance at Watts.

“I want that flinch. I want him to open the door and see you and be unsettled.”

I look at the board, with its parade of missing girls. A picture of eight-year-old me could be slipped in between any of them, and no one would so much as blink. “He has seen me before,” I feel obliged to mention. “He might not flinch a second time.”

“True. But Brooklyn looks like her mother; that could be comforting until we can get her mother to her.”

Suddenly the thing that hampered the investigation could help us now.

Bran’s hand presses against mine, and I can feel his full-body tremble. He stares down at a picture of his sister playing with her friends, Mark Davies’s sad eyes watching from the background.





22

The conference room and bullpen become a carefully contained flurry of activity, everyone jumping to a task. Each address Mark Davies has lived at needs a separate warrant, all of which need approval from a judge, and it’ll go a lot faster if we can get one federal judge to sign off on all of them. We also can’t tell Richmond PD yet, because sometimes, even with the best of intentions, the local officers can entirely fuck up a Bureau operation by moving in without us. If they did that, they’d get Davies, and maybe they’d rescue Brooklyn, but they wouldn’t have the full chain in mind when questioning him, and their arrest warrant wouldn’t have all the information.

“Sterling!”

I jump and spin around to see Watts back in the doorway of the conference room. “Yes?”

“Do you have a curling iron in your go bag?”