The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(68)

“No?”

She grimaces, then sticks her head back out to the bullpen. “Anyone have a curling iron we can use on Sterling?”

Someone answers in the affirmative.

“Watts?”

“All the girls have had curly hair,” she says at a normal volume, “including Lisa. If we’re going to yank the ground out from under him, let’s do it properly. Soft and sweet, Sterling. With curly hair.”

“Roger that.”

Bran is in Vic’s office with the door closed. Ian is in there with him. I don’t know if he’s psyching himself up to talk to his parents, talking to his parents, or recovering from talking to his parents. Or perhaps he hasn’t gotten there yet, and he’s still talking to Ian. Unless and until he opens that door, I’m not asking.

“Priya’s on her way,” Mercedes tells me as I grab the go bag from under my desk. “She’s got a blouse and sweater for you to go with that whole softer thing.”

“I do still need to look like an agent.”

“You will; she’s modeling it off Agent Dern.” She hands me a curling iron from God only knows who.

I tug at the strap on my shoulder, adjusting the weight of the bag, and tuck the tool into one of the side pockets. “When did she even meet the Dragonmother?”

“At my reinstatement party three years ago.”

“Right. Did she say what color the top was?”

“Gala has managed to find three pictures of Lisa, and she’s wearing pink in two of them.”

Well, I’ve definitely got makeup that goes with pink. Once in the bathroom, I dump the bag on the counter and root through for my spare brush and clips as well as the cosmetics bag. It feels strange to completely scrub down my face and immediately reapply, but soft and sweet is an entirely different kind of face than serious professional. To try to hit both of those marks is challenging.

The curls, thankfully, don’t have to be perfect. They just have to look natural. They don’t have to be even, or tidy, or carefully shaken out. It is the fastest I have ever curled my hair in my life. When I get back to the bullpen, Priya is there with an FBI visitor’s badge clipped to her collar, watching all the activity with wide eyes.

“They’re your own things,” she tells me, handing me a large Sephora bag. “I wasn’t sure exactly what you needed, so I grabbed anything I thought might fit the bill.”

I rifle through the shirts. “This is perfect. Thank you.”

“Good luck.” She glances up at Vic’s window—someone must have told her Bran was there—and then heads off the floor.

I pull out one of the blouses, a deep berry that still leans more toward pink than purple, and a three-quarter-sleeved cardigan in a soft carnation. The sleeves of the shirt are longer than those of the sweater, but I roll them back in a way that both hides that and looks kind of trendy, despite the presence of the bandage. I leave the curling iron sitting on my desk for whoever owns it to reclaim it.

Ian’s sitting at Eddison’s desk now, silently watching everything around him. He’s less wide-eyed than Priya. He’s seen full-scale operations before, albeit in uniforms rather than suits.

I walk over and lean against the edge of the desk. “Are you okay?”

“Of all the questions to ask me right now, Eliza, you’ve picked the one I can’t begin to answer.”

“That’s fair.”

He looks at the edge of the bandage under my sleeve and sighs. “How’s your arm?”

“It’s doing better.”

“It’s been a very long time since I saw the boy that distressed.”

“What did you do back then?”

“Took him to the stadium and made him run up and down the stairs for a couple hours.”

I grin in spite of myself. Explains where he got his love of running stadiums, then. “What did you do yesterday?”

“I was going to make him find me a stadium, but apparently he’s not allowed to do that anymore.”

“No, his doctor wasn’t too thrilled with him when he tried to keep doing it. There’s some lingering damage around his knee from the bullet three years ago.”

“So I made him run laps along the battlefield paths.”

Wow. I’ve run the paths on some of the old Civil War sites with Bran and Mercedes. Once through is already a lot of running. Laps?

“Don’t let him off easy, Eliza. We both know he didn’t mean it. You can forgive the act, but don’t try to absolve the consequences.”

“I really will try, Ian. I promise.”

“Good.”

“First warrants got approved!” Watts calls across the pen. Everyone immediately hushes to listen except for one person on the phone with the Central District Medical Examiner’s office; she holds up her arms in apology, a sheepish expression on her face. “Ramirez, Kearney, Sterling, let’s go.”

Vic gives her a sideways look. He’s supposed to be in the field, too, on this one anyway. He even asked permission beforehand.

“Sorry, Vic,” Watts tells him, not looking sorry at all, “but as soon as we find Kendall, or Davies indicates the girls are buried elsewhere, we’re going to be flying on those other warrants and wrangling the local field offices to get out there and find them, and somehow keep it all reasonably secret. You’ve got the authority and experience to do that.”