The Summer Children (The Collector Series Book 3)

by Dot Hutchison

  My mind was definitely engaged with the freckles.

  “Why are you dressed?”

  “Because I went out into the living room.”

  “Why did you get dressed to move around your own house?”

  “Because I always do?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” Continuing the bedtime ritual, I kneel down to check that the gun safe under the bed is secure. I pull out all three guns—two personal, one Bureau issued—and make sure they’re unloaded. My service weapon is still in hand when there’s a knock on the door. Well, not a knock so much as pounding.

  “Hello! Please be there! Help!”

  “Get dressed but stay here,” I snap at Siobhan, loading the gun and yanking my phones back off the cords.

  “Mercedes!”

  “Just do it!” Closing the bedroom door behind me, I head to the front door, with its locks and chain and peephole. There’s a girl out there, face bloodied and panicked, but I can’t see any sign of a car or another person. “My name is Mercedes,” I call through the door, and I can hear the girl take in a shuddering gasp. “I’m going to open the door, okay? But I need you to stay where you are. Can you do that?”

  “I can . . . I can do that. I can do that.”

  “Okay. You’ll hear the locks disengage, okay? I’m not leaving.” I shove the phones into the band of my leggings and throw the locks one-handed. When the door opens, she lurches forward, then restrains herself, wringing her hands in front of her.

  She’s early teens, not much older than Sarah, I think, with glasses sitting crookedly on her nose. There’s blood on her face and both arms, and running down the front of her long tank top, which is the only thing she has on over underwear. She’s got bruises, too, down her arms and across the visible parts of her chest. There’s what looks to be a fresh cigarette burn on her collarbone.

  There are no cars besides mine and Siobhan’s in the drive or parked at the curb, no sign of one idling or driving away, no trace of another person around the house. “Sweetheart, how did you get here?”

  “A lady,” she says with a gulp.

  “Is she still here?”

  “N-n-no. We turned around and she told me to get out and walk back here from down the street. I heard her drive away.”

  Cógeme. Wait. The camera on the mailbox should have gotten something. Please let it have gotten something. “Okay, sweetheart. That’s okay.” I engage the safety and gingerly tuck the gun into the back of my leggings, and I will never understand people who think that’s a great place to keep a firearm. Reaching out slowly, making sure she can see the movement, I touch her hand. “Why don’t you sit down, mija? What’s your name?”

  “Emilia,” she sniffles. “Emilia Anders.”

  “Emilia, are you hurt?”

  She nods slowly. “My head.”

  “Can I look?”

  Her nod comes even more reluctantly this time, but it comes. I help her onto the porch swing, where the light is best, and carefully, so gently, follow the blood trail up her face to her temple. Just past her hairline, a gash bleeds sluggishly over a swelling, purpling goose egg. “How old are you, Emilia?” I ask to keep her talking.

  “Almost fourteen.”

  “Almost? When is your birthday?”

  “Not until September,” she admits, her hands curling into fists on her thighs. “But it sounds better than thirteen.”

  “I remember those days. I’m going to straighten your glasses, okay? And bring them down your nose a little so I can see your eyes better.”

  “Okay.”

  The earpieces are still a little crooked after I do my best—probably the screws need adjusting by a professional—but it’s a little better, and clear enough to see her pupils are wide but not blown. Hit hard enough to daze and partially subdue, but probably not hard enough to cause a concussion. “Emilia, what happened, sweetheart?”

  She tells a story that’s already achingly familiar, but unlike the others—Ronnie, broken and submissive, and Sarah, protecting her siblings—Emilia fought the woman who woke her up and dragged her to her parents’ room. “She called me ungrateful,” she whispers, watching me text the information to Holmes and Eddison. I angle the phone so she can see the screen. Holmes responds while I’m typing Eddison, telling me she’s on her way with an ambulance, and to keep talking to Emilia rather than call 911.

  I can do that.

  “Why did she think that?”

  “She said . . . she said she was helping me. She was going to make me safe. She told me to stop fighting but I didn’t. She hit me. She killed my parents, and I had to watch.” Her breaths are coming faster, short and choppy, her shoulders quivering. I scoot to one side and press gently against her back to have her bend forward.

  “Head between your knees, mija, or as close as you can get. Just breathe.” I keep a hand on her back, just there, not rubbing, because I can see more bruises disappearing under the edge of her shirt and don’t want to hurt her any more. “Just keep breathing.” I can feel her muscles quivering under my hand, dry heaves she swallows back with whimpers. “You’re safe here, Emilia, I promise.”

  I text Siobhan to tell her to stay inside. If she comes out, it will be to head straight to her car and leave, and ignoring whatever that will cost me personally, I really don’t want Holmes to have to track her down to interview her. That will be traumatic on a number of fronts.

  “I was safe at home,” Emilia retorts, voice still thready and thin.

  My pinky presses into the green-tinged edge of the bruise over her shoulder blade, and she winces.

  “Parents are allowed to discipline their child,” she recites in a mumble.

  “They’re not allowed to hurt them.”

  “So we just kill them? That’s okay?”

  “No. Emilia, no, that is not okay. We are going to catch this person.”

  “My mom . . .” She takes in a great, shuddering breath, and immediately loses half of it to an aching keen. “Mom told me not to fight, to do whatever I had to do to stay safe,” she weeps, and I wrap my arms around her in a secure hold to keep her from pitching off the swing. “The lady moved on to my dad, and I was just standing there, like an idiot, holding my mom’s hand as she died. My mom. I didn’t do anything.”

  “You couldn’t do anything,” I tell her softly. “Emilia, that woman had a gun, and she’d already hit you. If you’d fought any harder, she probably would have killed you.”

  “But she said she was saving me.”

  I bite my lip, trying to sort through what I could tell a shocked, grieving child. “Emilia, when someone has a mission like hers, something they need to do, someone disrupting that can be in grave danger. She needs to save you, but if you fight too hard, if you make her think she can’t save you . . . Sweetheart, we’ve seen that kind of thing before. She would have killed you, or at the very least hurt you very badly. You listened to your mom, and that probably saved your life. She must have loved you so much.”

  “She’s my mom. She’s my mom. She’s my mom.” Her words trail off into incoherent sobs and I just hold her, letting the motion of the swing rock her gently.

  It’s telling, though, even in her shock, that she hasn’t really mentioned her father.

  Eddison pulls up with Sterling in the passenger seat, followed by Holmes and the ambulance and the other police car. A few minutes later, Vic drives up as well, and the cul-de-sac is once again full of cars. As I introduce Emilia to Detective Holmes, I can feel Eddison’s hands at my hips.

  “Easy, hermana,” he murmurs, and pulls the gun from my waistband, gracias a Dios. He slides a hand along for my other phone, as well, as Sterling picks up the work cell from the board by my knee.

  “Siobhan is in the bedroom,” I tell Vic, and from the corner of my eye I can see Eddison’s eyebrows lift in surprise. I shake my head. Vic nods and heads into the house. He’s absolutely the best choice for it; there’s something about him that Siobhan’s a little in awe of, and if
there’s any chance of her not going through the fucking roof, it’s with Vic breaking the news.

  As soon as Emilia settles into Holmes’s questions and the attention of the paramedic, I ease away from her to the other end of the porch, perching on the railing. Eddison and Sterling follow.

  “We’ll make sure Siobhan gets home okay,” Sterling says, hopping up beside me.

  “Thanks.”

  We sit in silence as Holmes finishes with this round of questions and Emilia gets walked to the ambulance, wrapped in a shiny silver blanket.

  “No teddy bear,” Sterling notes.

  “She dropped it in the grass a few houses down,” Holmes says, joining our little knot. “Markey’s getting it bagged.”

  I twist around on the rail, and sure enough, one of the uniforms is picking up a familiar-looking white bear. I sigh and turn back. “Was she able to add anything?”

  “A little. She said when she was fighting, the killer got upset and started sounding more Southern.”

  We digest that for a minute before Sterling clears her throat. “Any particular kind of Southern?”

  “No. But she said it was only when the woman got upset. Other than that she sounded like she didn’t come from anywhere.” Putting away her notebook, Holmes looks up and does a full double take. “Jesus, Ramirez, who’d you piss off?”

  I lift one hand to trace the scars down my cheek, bare of makeup. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Looks too wide for a knife.”

  “Broken bottle.”

  “Jesus,” she says again. She rubs at her eyes, bits of dried blood from when she’d touched Emilia’s hands flaking off. “Mignone just got to the house. He says even at a glance, her story holds up. Signs of struggle in the hallways, and in both rooms.”

  “There’ve been complaints about her dad?”

  “Did she say that?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “You said Agent Ryan is inside?”

  “Yes. We heard the knock on the door and Emilia’s cry for help, and I told her to stay put while I came out here.”

  “All right, I’ll go talk to her inside then, if that’s okay. Figure she’ll be calmer there?”

  “Where she can’t see the blood streaks? Yes.”

  “Does the sleepover mean you two worked it out?” Eddison asks after Holmes enters the house.

  “No. And given what came after . . .”

  Sterling bumps our knees together.

  It doesn’t feel like a grand fight rearing up, the desperate stand to save a relationship. She’s going to leave and I think . . . I think I’m okay with that. Three years and this is how a relationship dies, but can anyone really fault that? She can’t handle this and I can’t keep pretending, and we’ll probably both be better off.

  The hurt will come later, the cuts too sharp for the pain to register straight off.

  Siobhan exits the house between Vic and Holmes, her face red and patchy from crying; a plastic grocery bag hangs from two fingers, carrying anything she’d left here. She glances at me once, flinches, and looks resolutely at her car. Sterling slides off the rail and takes the keys from Siobhan’s other hand, gently urging her down the steps and toward her car. Vic nods at us and aims for his own car. He’ll follow them to Fairfax and give Sterling a ride back, just to make sure Siobhan arrives safely. I hope, when the shock wears off, that she’s grateful for it.

  Happy Independence Day.

  “We’re not any closer,” admits Holmes, leaning against the wall and looking exhausted. “Six people dead, and we really don’t have a clue.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a link in the third CPS file.”

  “Do you think we’d be able to partner with the FBI on this going forward?”

  “Probably, given that there’s really no reason to expect she’ll stop,” Eddison answers. “It’ll have to be with a different team.”

  “Conflict of interest.”

  He nods.

  The silence resumes, and I find myself looking at the splotches of rusty brown where blood has dried on the porch. By the end of this I’ll probably have to repaint, and what a stupid thing to be thinking of, but we just washed it Sunday.

  Sunday. “Less time between kills, this round,” I note. “Nine days between the first two, only five between the next.”

  “How do we know if that’s significant?”

  “If there’s less time before the next,” Eddison replies, not intending to be a dick but kind of coming off that way.

  Holmes’s face pinches, but she doesn’t retort. Instead, she pulls her notebook back out and flips to a fresh page. “All right, Ramirez. Start with the morning. Was today a normal day?”

  With Eddison leaning into my side, a warm press of support, I start. We used to have to role-play this stuff at the academy, practicing interview techniques on other trainees, and I think almost all of us hated it. You have to be detailed without being irrelevant, you have to be approachable without being cold or sentimental, you have to, you have to, you have to.

  I fire up my laptop so we can sift through the security-camera footage leading up to Emilia knocking on my door. I recognize the car of one of the quiet college students sharing a house on the curve of the cul-de-sac, then the young parents three doors down, followed by the departure of their regular babysitter. Just a few minutes before the knock, an unfamiliar car drives slowly by, pausing near the end of my driveway, and continues on. A minute later, it’s heading out.

  Not long after that, the porch camera picks up Emilia stumbling across the lawn.

  “Midsize SUV,” Holmes mutters.

  Even with the streetlights, it’s impossible to discern the color beyond “dark.” Black, maybe, or navy or forest, maybe a dark grey. Burgundy has a kind of gleam even in poor light, so that’s discounted, and purple does the same thing, as rare as that is in cars.

  “No plates,” sighs Eddison. “She must have taken them off. There’s not enough for an APB.”

  In the first frames, I can see Emilia slumped in a daze against the back passenger window. The driver is harder to make out, beyond the light hitting white clothing in a way that makes it seem to glow. In the opposite direction, there’s a decent shot of the disturbing, featureless white mask, spattered with blood, surrounded by . . . huh. I zoom in to be sure.

  “She’s either got multiple wigs or one really good wig,” I point out. “It’s curled. Sarah said the angel’s hair was straight.”

  “What about Ronnie?”

  “Braid. Synthetic wigs usually don’t restyle all that well. Human hair wigs can be pretty pricy.”

  “Are you sure it’s a wig, then? Could it just be her hair?”

  “See how the bangs start below that bulge of hair?” I point to the screen, sweeping my finger under the spot in question. “These masks are usually made of porcelain, sometimes plaster. They’re thick. The bulge is from pulling the front of the wig over the edge of the mask. It’s definitely a wig.”

  “Email me that footage,” Holmes says. “I’ll get the techs started on identifying the make and model of the car. We’ll keep the shot of her to pass around.”

  “Or him,” Eddison points out. “We haven’t actually ruled that out.”

  Holmes glares at him, but nods. It makes sense—behind the wig and the mask, it could be a man—but no detective relishes having the suspect pool expanded. “You two are free to go.”

  I pack a fresh bag while Eddison loads the leftovers and most of my brand new groceries into a cooler, because there’s no sense in leaving them to rot, and we head out in his car. Holmes and one of the uniformed officers remain there to tape off my house yet again. I’m so fucking tired, and my home feels less like home every time I’m in it, and I just . . .

  What happened to this woman? Where did our paths cross, and why is she so fixated on me?

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was scared of the color red.

  There was just so much of it.
r />   She remembered the blood on her mama’s car windows, how dark it looked in the moonlight but how brilliant a red it was in the officers’ flashlights. Her mama escaped that night, got away from Daddy forever, and didn’t even try to take her little girl with her.

  She knew the red on her body, blood from bites, and the pink from slaps, and the darker red of places that would become bruises. She knew the red of torn skin. It hurt for days after to pee.

  Then there was a new red there, thicker, heavier, and Daddy laughed and laughed when he saw it. You’re a woman now, baby girl. My beautiful woman.

  One of his friends was a doctor, the special lady kind, Daddy said, and took her to his office for an exam. The doctor nearly cried when he got to touch her there for the first time. Daddy never let his friends touch her. After that, there was a pill every day. One of Daddy’s friends laughed at the hair that started growing between her legs, said all the hungriest bitches should be redheads.

  Daddy looked thoughtful at that.

  She hated when Daddy looked thoughtful.

  It wasn’t long before he came home with two boxes of hair dye. They weren’t even the same color; one was a fire engine kind of red, the other more orange, and he didn’t mix them together right and he missed spots, but he laughed and called her beautiful anyway, and he took away the hair between her legs and under her arms.

  That night, when his friends came to the basement for their party, Daddy showed off the dye job. Gentlemen, he said, if the price is right . . .

  Amidst all the clamor, one of them had nearly $300 in his wallet, and he gave it all to her Daddy. Daddy readied his favorite camera.

  They’d never been allowed to even touch her before.

  They did love a redhead.

  13

  We’re over hours for the pay cycle and that, as Vic likes to remind us, is a thing the Bureau cares about when you’re working a desk. None of us are allowed to go in on Monday, which we spend sprawled over each other on Eddison’s couch in front of the TV. I don’t hear from Siobhan at all, and when I get into the office Tuesday morning, there’s a box on my desk with the handful of things I kept at her apartment. Eddison peers over my shoulder and winces.