“Really? But his apartment is exactly the way I’d picture it.”
“If you were going to change it, to make it even more Eddison, what would you do?”
She ponders that while easing the pillows into the cases and fluffing them. “Take the pictures off the wall and change the table to something boring,” she says eventually. “Those aren’t his touches.”
“Priya.”
“I adore that girl.”
We don’t stay up to talk; it’s been a long couple of days, after all. As tired as I am, sleep takes some time in coming. I haven’t slept in my own bed in a couple of weeks now, and while the couch-bed is fairly comfortable as far as couch-beds go, it’s still a couch-bed.
But that’s not really what’s keeping me awake. We live half our lives on the road, on the beds of whatever hotel we happen to land in. We’ve slept on couches in precincts and even sometimes on conference room floors when there wasn’t time for more than a nap.
I keep thinking of Sarah, alone in her room at night, listening for footsteps down the hall, wondering if she’d be left alone for a night, or if her stepfather would enter. If he’d put a hand to her mouth and remind her in a whisper that she had to be quiet, she couldn’t let her sister or mother hear. Sitting in the kitchen in the morning, aching and sick, staring at her mother and wondering if it was really possible she hadn’t heard, that she didn’t know.
It isn’t impossible to heal from that, but it leaves scars. It changes the way you look at people, how far you can trust or let people in. It changes your habits, even your desires and dreams. It changes who you are, and no matter how much you struggle back toward that place, that person you started as, you never actually get there. Some change is irreversible.
My phone buzzes with a text.
It’s from Priya.
Sterling says you’re making fun of her apartment. You know I gave her some of that stuff, right?
And sometimes that change is good. Or leads to good, anyway.
11
Despite its beginning, the week continues fairly quiet. Sarah and I talk several times a day, and I get updates from both Holmes and Mignone. Sarah’s able to give some useful descriptors of the woman who killed her parents: a few inches taller than Sarah but not tall, slender but strong—she’d carried Sammy to and from the car so the girls would follow along. She wore a white jumpsuit that covered her from neck to wrist to ankles, and white gloves, and she had a bag over her shoulder with multiple sets of plastic covers for her white sneakers. The white mask, with its suggestion of features and its mirrored-over eyes, she’d described before, but the blonde hairline came down over the top of the mask in such a way that it had to be a wig, the hair long and straight.
And that’s where the discussions Eddison and I are having devolve into a long conversation about the distinction between useful and helpful, because none of these details are going to actually help us find the killer until we locate a person and happen to find those items on her. Mignone has already tried tracking purchases, but that’s another thing that will be easier to do after the fact.
The police have also heard from Social Services: the files for Ronnie Wilkins and Sarah Carter both went through the Manassas CPS office, but none of the names on them matched. The one complaint filed by Sarah’s school had been given to someone new to the office, whereas the same man had been handling Ronnie’s file for several years.
I swing down to the FBI archives on Wednesday to submit a request. All of our case files, complete with our handwritten notes made during and after investigations, are preserved for posterity or auditing, whichever comes first. (Auditing. Always auditing.) Given that I’ve been in the Bureau for ten years, I’ve worked a lot of cases. Most of them have been with the team or done as consults, but I’ve occasionally been loaned out to other teams. We all have, really, if another team is missing people or there’s a need for a particular specialty.
Agent Alceste, who works in the archives because it entails the least amount of human interaction, listens to the reasons for my request as she looks through the paperwork that is already filled out and waiting for her approval. Alceste doesn’t like me—she doesn’t actually like anyone—but she hates me less than most because I make sure if I absolutely have to bother her for something, I’m as prepared as possible.
Her husky voice still has a strong Quebecois inflection, probably because she doesn’t talk with people often enough for it to smooth out. She tells me it will take a few days to copy over that much information. She’s waiting for me to argue; most do.
I just thank her for the time and effort and leave her to the solitude of her office. I can access most of what I need from my computer, but getting all the files onto a drive will be a lot easier than searching for each case. Plus, this way I get to see Vic’s and Eddison’s case notes, not just mine. We work well as a team because we see different things; they may have noticed something on one of our cases that I didn’t, something that may be relevant here.
I hope I’m giving myself a ridiculous amount of work for nothing, but I can’t shake this niggling feeling that I might know why me. Why this killer gives the children my name and tells them they’re safe now. That I’ll keep them safe.
What if that’s because I once told him or her the same thing?
That’s what we tell them, the children we rescue. You’ll be okay. You’re safe now.
I think we’re all dancing around the thought, not wanting to admit the possibility—or even the likelihood—that this killer has his or her origins somewhere in our case files. We’re not ready to say it out loud yet, like the sound will give it too much meaning. It doesn’t mean we get to keep hiding from it, though.
Late Friday morning, as Sterling and I sit on Eddison’s desk to make him twitch while the three of us debate what to get for lunch, Vic comes through the bullpen, handing files and reports to various agents on his meandering way. “I’m supposed to tell you three to go home.”
“What?”
“Independence Day is tomorrow. This is your observed day off for the federal holiday. You’re not even supposed to be here.”
“A lot of other people are here.”
“Because they’re either on the Monday rotation or they’re as bad at the work-life separation as you three.”
Ouch. Also a little hypocritical, given . . . well, everything.
Vic shakes his head. He’s wearing a tie Priya, Inara, and Victoria-Bliss gave him last year for his birthday, stained-glass butterflies against a black background, and it is just as creepy as it sounds, but he wears it anyway because they gave it to him. “Go home. Do not take any paperwork with you. Relax. Do laundry. Catch a game.”
We continue to blink at him.
“You do have fairly regular days off,” he reminds us with a sigh. “You know how to survive them.”
Sterling tilts her head to one side.
“No,” he says sternly. “No sleepovers, no pub crawls. You each go to your own home, and you don’t come to mine, because Jenny and I have the house to ourselves in what must be the first time in thirty years.”
“Where’s Marlene going to be?”
“My sister picked her up yesterday, and they’re spending the weekend at the beach with the kids for the Fourth.”
That’s actually a little hard to imagine. Marlene is so active and healthy, but she always wears slacks and sweater sets with a single strand of pearls and her hair perfectly done. It just doesn’t seem to fit with the beach.
“Now, all three of you, go home.”
“We still haven’t figured out lunch,” Sterling notes as Vic walks away.
His voice floats back over his shoulder. “That’s because you’re all going home separately.”
It’s a weirdly normal afternoon. I go home and change out of my suit, clean the fridge of anything that’s spoiled in the week and a half since I was last home to do it, hit the grocery store, pick up a box of cute cupcakes for Jason as thanks for the yar
d work because he loves the damn things but can’t bring himself to order them on his own, and still have more day ahead of me than I’m used to. So I do laundry, and dust, and clean the bathroom, and when I put the second load of laundry in, I seriously consider following Sterling’s example of sorting through my closet to pull things that don’t fit or that I don’t wear anymore.
I end up on the couch with a beer and a book of logic puzzles instead. I mostly enjoy shopping for clothes, but I loathe purposefully looking for things that don’t fit.
It’s evening, though still light outside, when my stomach reminds me that I never bothered to eat lunch. I head to the kitchen to poke around my groceries. I got eight million kinds of fresh vegetables because even I know our eating habits are atrocious (one of the many reasons Marlene and Jenny are so eager to feed us, I think), and cooking them up with teriyaki and chicken sounds downright delightful. Squash, zucchini, mushrooms, onion, broccoli, three colors of pepper, throw it all together with a little bit of oil, sesame, salt, and pepper on the small hibachi grill Eddison teased me for installing in the counter.
He teases still, but he will also eat anything and everything we make on it, so I think I win.
The chicken is more or less cubed and soaking in a bowl of marinade, and I’m just about through chopping the veggies, when there’s a knock on the door. Before I fully register the sound, the knife spins in my hand to a position better suited for fights than food. It’s an uncomfortable reflex to have in my own home. One by one, I force my fingers to open so I can put the knife down on the board. “One second,” I call, reaching for the sink.
It’s full daylight still; no one is going to drop off anything nefarious in broad daylight.
Drying my hands on the sides of my jeans, I head to the door and peer through the peephole, which is mostly obscured by vibrant red curls. “Siobhan?” I quickly unlock the door and open it. “You have keys.”
She gives me a hesitant smile. “You throw the chain when you’re home. And I wasn’t sure . . .”
“Come in.”
She looks uncertain in my home, in a way she hasn’t done in a while. Not since the rocky bit last year, after I didn’t want to move in together. “You’re in the middle of something.”
“Just making dinner. Have you eaten? I was planning on leftovers for the weekend, so I’m making a ton.” I head back to the kitchen and the cutting board, letting her decide how comfortable she wants to get. She looks around like maybe it’s changed since she was last inside (it hasn’t) or maybe like she’s looking for some visible sign that I’ve changed (I haven’t).
The mothers told me a while ago that I needed to stop pretending. I’m starting to regret that I didn’t listen to them sooner.
“The peppers are big, so you’ll be able to pick them out,” I tell her, ignoring the fact that she didn’t actually answer me.
“Thanks.” She puts her purse on the spindly table by the door and dithers a minute or two before perching on a padded stool on the other side of the counter. “No new children at your door?”
“Pretty sure Heather would have been wiggling with excitement at your desk if there had been.”
“Probably, but you would have told me, right?”
“No. I told you first contact would be yours.” I check the temperature of the grill and throw everything on, savoring the hiss and billow of rising steam.
“And you wouldn’t break that to tell me that another child had been delivered to you.”
“Well, the deliveries don’t require signature confirmation, you see.”
She sighs and folds her arms on the counter, a safe distance from the grill and anything that might spit out. “Are there any leads?”
“No.”
“So they could just keep showing up.”
“Yes.”
“Mercedes.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” I shrug, poking at the veggies with the metal spatula. “There aren’t any leads, they could keep showing up, what else do you want me to say?”
“Can’t they, I don’t know, stake out your house or something?”
“It has to cross a threshold before the department can justify the expense.”
“Since when has Vic been unwilling—”
“It’s not an FBI case,” I remind her.
“The police, then.”
“The street is too quiet and open for a discreet stakeout, and they can’t afford to take officers away from normal tasks for something with no routine or predictability.”
“There’s such a thing as simple answers, you know.”
“You literally just scolded me for giving simple answers.”
She drops her chin to her arms and doesn’t respond.
I add some seasoning to the chicken and veggies, then open the fridge. “Something to drink?”
“Wine?”
“Sure.” I pour us each a glass and go back to poking. I add the sauce to the veggies at almost the last minute, giving them enough time to cook through without getting soggy, and serve it up in equal parts between two plates and three plastic containers. Handing her a fork, I pull out one of my sets of chopsticks, the nice lacquered ones that Inara and Victoria-Bliss gave me for Christmas, and put them with my plate to one side so I can clean the grill while it’s still hot.
We eat in silence, me leaning against the kitchen side of the counter, her seated opposite, and it might just be the loneliest meal of my adult life. When we’re done, I rinse the plates and fork and put them in the dishwasher, then handwash the chopsticks and leave them on a small towel to dry. For some reason that makes me think of Sterling’s coordinated kitchen, even though my dish towels are thin and ratty and pulled at random from the dollar bin at Target.
“I miss you,” Siobhan whispers to my back.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
The sound I make should be a laugh, but it really isn’t. “Hand to God, Siobhan, I have no earthly idea. I’d love to think you’re here because you want us to figure this out, but if I assume that, you’ll tell me you still need space, so I’m not going to assume anything.” I still have most of my glass of wine, but hers is empty, so I pour her another. “Have you decided what you want?”
She’s silent for a long time. I don’t try to prompt. I lean against the counter, sipping my wine, and let the silence settle between us. It’s familiar, that silence, has always been there just under her steady stream of chatter. It’s where substance is supposed to be. Finally she responds, her voice small and scared. “No.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I miss you!” she cries.
“And we what, have a grand reunion and fall into bed, and everything’s magically fixed? Because I thought we agreed, Hollywood is full of shit.”
“How can someone so romantic be so utterly unromantic?”
“Situational response.”
She flips me off, then looks at her middle finger and sighs. “I learn bad habits from watching you and Eddison together.”
“That’s okay, Sterling does, too.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“That does seem to be our life right now.” As long as we’re not having a conversation, I go ahead and finish wiping down the kitchen, washing the cutting board and knife and setting them next to the chopsticks to dry.
“For one night, just . . . just one night, can we please keep . . .”
“Pretending?” I shake my head. “You don’t really think that will help, do you?”
“But what could it hurt?”
So much. It could hurt so very, very much, but when she comes into the kitchen and kisses me urgently, the edge of the counter biting into my hip, I don’t push her away. I’ve made worse mistakes before.
12
I’m pulled out of a half doze by the feeling of Siobhan’s fingers tracing the words on my ribs, T. S. Eliot floating against a brightly colored neb
ula, do i dare disturb the universe? It hurt like a bitch to work over the bone like that, but when I got it, I didn’t ever want to have to worry about it showing in the field. I love Eliot, in that slightly embarrassed and embarrassing high school kind of way, not for whole poems but for solitary lines and images, the way one line will jump out and cling to your thoughts even as stanzas and movements continue on. This line is more personal than that, the reminder that disturbing the universe can be a good thing; it’s my skin, my blood that mixed with the ink to form the only scar I chose.
Her lips brush over the question mark, and I open my eyes to find the clock nestled between the teddy bear’s legs on my nightstand. Eleven forty-five p.m. It’s better than I’ve slept in a while.
“Your nose is twitching,” Siobhan murmurs sleepily.
“My face itches.”
She gives a soft laugh and pushes at my back. “Then go wash it.”
I use the toilet and scrub my face clean of the makeup I left on longer than intended, pulling my hair back into a ponytail because sex hair doesn’t do curls any favors. It’s like hundreds of other nights; when I get back into the bedroom, Siobhan will be starfished across the bed, with only about a fifteen percent chance of her head being anywhere near the headboard, probably already asleep because she can drift off at will. But tonight isn’t the same as all those other nights. I’m not good enough at pretending to convince myself that it is.
Groaning, I grab leggings and a camisole from the dresser, then head out into the living room to grab my phones. A few text messages have come in—Eddison, Sterling, Priya, and Inara—but nothing that needed an urgent response.
“Are you coming back?”
“Yes, just getting my phones.”
She makes an indistinct sound at that, and when I head back into the bedroom to plug the phones into their chargers, she props herself up on her elbows to scowl. She’s got one leg over the sheet, so it wraps over her other leg and half her ass and leaves the rest of her bare, her hair falling wild over pale skin. In better light, I’d be able to see the freckles that track over almost all of her. I love those freckles, love tracing constellations onto her skin with my mouth. “I think you’re glued to those things,” she mutters, and it takes me a second to realize she’s talking about the phones.
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