The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(78)

“Cara!” I yell, wondering if she can hear me. “Cara, it’s Mercedes. Do you remember me?”

But the only thing I can hear is the pained groans of someone still alive. Tears running down bloodless cheeks, Sterling tells the dispatch officer to send ambulances.

Too many minutes later, we hear the officers arrive, calling into the house. “This one’s alive!” one shouts, and someone steps on Emilia’s phone before they say who it is.

I’m doing 110 in a 45, and I wasn’t anywhere near fast enough.

When we screech to a halt in front of the Anders house, lights are flashing everywhere, pressing in on wounds that are far more raw than usual. Two ambulances are in the drive, and as we run up to the front door, two paramedics rush out with a gurney.

There’s a man on it. Her dad’s cousin, Lincoln Anders.

“The little girl!” I snap.

One of them shakes his head, and they push past into the ambulance.

There’s an officer at the door, and he barely gives our credentials a glance. “The woman and the girl were dead before they hit the ground,” he tells us. “Woman was shot straight through the heart, the girl took one to the head, point-blank.”

“We were on the phone with her,” Sterling tells him, voice shaking. “She saw the intruder, called us, and went to wake up her uncle and his girlfriend. They were trying to leave the house.”

“Why did she call you? Why not the police?”

“Her parents were murdered on the third.” I scrub my hands against my cheeks. “She was delivered to my house, and I gave her my number if she needed anything. She saw the same woman outside here.”

“You’re that one?”

Sterling honest-to-God growls at him, and he flushes.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he says quickly. “Dispatch said the call came from the FBI and we didn’t know why, that’s all. We saw the story in the paper.”

“Agent Kathleen Watts is the lead agent on the case, and she’s partnered with Detectives Holmes and Mignone out of Manassas.”

“Chief got a call from Watts; she should be just behind you.”

“It’ll take her longer from—” Sterling stops, watching an SUV with flashing lights slam to a stop behind her car. “She was still in Manassas. Mercedes, she was still in Manassas.”

Which means she was still questioning Gloria.

Watts and Holmes run up the lawn. “Cara Ehret,” Watts calls before they even reach us. “She changed her name to Caroline Tillerman after she left foster care. She’s one of the file clerks. We’ve got officers on their way to her apartment and an APB out on her car.”

Caroline Tillerman. Cass and I spoke face-to-face with her at the CPS office.

I look at Holmes, who’s significantly more shaken. “We were on the phone with Emilia.”

She closes her eyes, hand rising automatically so she can kiss her thumbnail.

“We all looked at Lincoln Anders when he said he’d take Emilia in,” Sterling says. “CPS did their checks, but so did we. He was completely clean. The closest he’d come to trouble was a couple of speeding tickets. Why in the hell would she attack him?”

“CPS received an anonymous complaint this morning.”

“Anonymous.”

“This morning?”

Watts nods impatiently. “Caller said his girlfriend couldn’t be trusted with children, because she killed a boy.”

“What?” we both demand.

“When Stacia Yakova was a teenager, she was helping her father clean his guns at the kitchen table, and a neighbor called over to ask her father’s help with something heavy. So he told her to put down the gun she was working on and he’d be right back. Her brother came in, high off his ass, and thought she was an intruder. He attacked her with a knife. Got a few slashes and stabs in because she didn’t want to hurt him, but when he got the knife to her throat, she grabbed one of the guns they hadn’t worked on yet and shot him in the thigh.”

“Bled out?”

“No, she called an ambulance, they got him to the hospital, but when they gave him anesthesia for surgery—”

“He was a tweaker.”

“The father walked in on the end of the struggle. He was the one to pull his son off of her. It was clearly self-defense so she was never charged with anything.”

“If this anonymous complaint turns out to be one of her brother’s former friends or girlfriends . . .” I shake my head. “But Cara probably wasn’t in any fit state to research it. She heard Emilia’s name and decided then and there.”

My phone rings, and I swear to fucking God—

Sterling yanks it out of my hands. “It’s Cass,” she reports, and accepts the call to speaker. “Kearney, you’ve got Ramirez, Sterling, Watts, and Holmes.”

“Emilia?” she asks immediately.

“. . . No.”

“Damn.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath, both inhalation and exhalation clearly audible over the line. “Caroline Tillerman is not at her apartment. Officers found several masks, white jumpsuits, both bloodied and clean, blonde wigs, both bloodied and clean, a box of white angel teddy bears . . . everything in her kit except a knife and a gun, but there are boxes of ammunition.”