The Summer Children (The Collector Series Book 3)

by Dot Hutchison

  As agents, we’re trained to recognize the elephant in the room, to approach it somehow, but tonight it is merrily ignored.

  I’m back at Eddison’s for the nights, though Sterling mentioned kidnapping me next week in some sort of bizarre joint-custody arrangement. While I get changed into T-shirt and boxers—and it’s even my “Female Body Inspector” running shirt, just to make him laugh—Eddison fiddles with his laptop and the cables until he’s got Skype up on his massive television, Inara and Priya sprawled across the screen.

  “Victoria-Bliss is at work,” Inara offers instead of hello.

  “Looks like you two are, as well,” I reply, accepting the bottle of beer Eddison hands me and sinking down onto the couch.

  They both shrug, but they also both look a little proud. “The literary agent I’m interning with has me reading queries and submissions,” Inara says. “She makes all the decisions, of course, but she wants to know my opinion on them, and then shares her process. It’s interesting.”

  Priya fans a stack of photos in such a way that we can only see corners, nothing of the subjects of the pictures. “Looking at layouts.”

  “School project or your personal project?” Eddison asks.

  “Personal.”

  “That we still don’t get to see?”

  “You’ll see it eventually.” Priya grins at him, sharp and familiar, and I can actually see Eddison debating whether or not he really wants to know. Inara sees it, too, and buries her face in the quilt to stifle her laughter. “So what’s up? There’s not a good game on, and just about anything else could be done through text or phone call. You guys okay?”

  “Wanted to update you guys on what’s happening down here,” Eddison says, and both girls nod, blink, and focus on me.

  Our team doesn’t adopt many kids the way we did these two and Victoria-Bliss, but I’m always glad we’ve got them. Almost always glad we’ve got them—being the sole focus of their considerable attention and powers of observation is a little like settling into the confessional at church.

  Despite it being mostly my story, Eddison is the one who tells them about the newest deliveries—that they happened, anyway, without sharing details—and about Siobhan. Inara nods along absently, but Priya’s eyes narrow when Eddison gets to the breakup. Then again, Priya never actually liked Siobhan. Didn’t care about her one way or the other as a human being, just didn’t like that we were dating. Once, and only once, she told me why: she didn’t like that I seemed only half myself with Siobhan. And in the beauty of hindsight, she was absolutely right.

  But she’s also the first one to ask, “Are you okay?”

  “For now,” I tell her. “I guess I’m still waiting for it all to weigh in.”

  “But you’re going to be okay?”

  “Yes.”

  She starts to say something, then shakes her head. “It’s okay if you’re not, you know. For a while.”

  Inara snorts along with Eddison, and it’s been a long time since either of them have looked horrified to agree with each other. How many times have we told Priya—and Inara, for that matter—that it’s okay not to be okay?

  “Speaking of not okay,” Inara starts with a frown, “have you heard from Ravenna since she visited you? She still isn’t answering her phone, and hasn’t responded to the email.”

  “She hasn’t called, no. Is there a specific reason you’re more worried than usual?”

  Inara blushes, honest-to-God blushes, and looks down at the quilt. Somehow, despite everything, she didn’t lose the ability to care for people, but she can still get embarrassed by someone pointing it out. Much like Eddison, in fact. “If you were going to rank the surviving Butterflies by most likely to snap and murder someone, Victoria-Bliss is, no contest, number one, and I’m a close second.”

  Eddison and Priya both nod.

  “Ravenna is an easy third.”

  I set my beer on the coffee table with a thunk. “Really? She said she’s been doing better, at least until that last fight.”

  “Yes and no. Separating Ravenna and Patrice-the-senator’s-daughter, or just figuring out how they exist together, isn’t going to happen around her mother or the constant publicity.”

  “Mum offered her the guest room,” Priya adds. “Paris might give her enough distance to start truly working through it, and she’d have a safe place to stay with people who care about her, and a steady link to Inara.”

  Inara’s blush, which had been fading, returns full force, as it always does when someone reminds her that she’s basically the Butterfly housemother, even still.

  “I’ll let you know if she contacts me,” I promise.

  We catch up for a bit, telling the stories that don’t translate well across texts. A little after midnight, my personal phone rings.

  I don’t recognize the number.

  At almost any other time, I’d let it go to voice mail, but this month has seen a rather spectacular set of circumstances, hasn’t it? Eddison goes very still beside me, and the girls follow suit, their faces blurred a bit by the crappy webcam and the giant screen.

  On the third ring, I accept the call. “Ramirez.”

  “Ramirez, this is Dru Simpkins.”

  Shit.

  I thumb it over to speakerphone. “Simpkins, I’ve got Eddison here with me. What’s up?”

  There’s no comment on Eddison and I being together at midnight. Half the Bureau thinks we’re fucking, the other half thinks we haven’t realized yet how much we should be fucking.

  “Just got a call from Detective Holmes,” the woman answers. “A seven-year-old boy named Mason Jeffers was dropped off outside the emergency room entrance of Prince William Hospital. He was covered in blood, none of it seems to be his. He hasn’t spoken, but he’s got a note safety pinned to his teddy bear that gives his name, age, and address, and says to ask for you.”

  “And his parents?”

  “Holmes wants you out at the boy’s house. I’ll allow it this time.”

  This time. Simpkins is already on a roll. “What’s the address?”

  Eddison scrambles for a pen, finds a Sharpie, and writes the address out on his forearm for lack of accessible paper. “We’ll be there in twenty,” he promises, and Simpkins acknowledges before hanging up.

  Inara and Priya watch us gravely as we lever up from the leather couch. “Be safe,” Priya charges us. “Let us know what you can.”

  “Do we need to cancel our trip down this weekend?” asks Inara.

  “Don’t cancel the trip,” Eddison says. “Marlene stocked the freezers. You are not allowed to leave us with that many pastries.”

  “Well . . . we board the train at six o’clock Thursday afternoon, so if things change, that’s the point of no return.”

  Eddison shakes his head, reaching for the laptop to shut it down. “Only you think six o’clock is afternoon.”

  “You think six o’clock is morning,” she retorts.

  “It is morning.”

  “Not if you haven’t gone to bed yet.”

  “Good night, girls.”

  “Good night, Charlie,” they chorus, and grin at his pained look. Just before the screen goes dark, I can see the worried looks they flash to me.

  “I’ll call Sterling while I’m changing,” I tell Eddison. “You’ll call Vic?”

  “Sí. Not that either of them can do anything, but we’ll keep them updated.”

  Sterling takes the news calmly, telling me to keep her informed through the morning, and she’ll take care of the first couple of coffee runs. Sterling is an angel. I come back out in jeans and a windbreaker, with a different T-shirt on underneath, because I just cannot make myself put on a suit after midnight. I have better clothes at the office if we don’t get to come back, and besides, I’m desk bound anyway. If I can’t use that excuse to bend the dress code, what’s the point?

  The Jeffers house is all the way on the west side of town, what should be a thirty-minute drive with cooperating traffic lights. The li
ghts are not cooperating, but neither is Eddison: we get there in eighteen minutes. After signing in with the uniform at the door, we head inside and nearly run into Agent Simpkins.

  Dru Simpkins is a well-respected agent in her midforties, with a mane of coarse, dark blonde hair that never looks quite tame. She guest lectures at the academy about the impact of psychology on children’s writing, specifically looking at how to pick up cues and subtext in diaries or writing assignments, and leads that portion of the CAC-specific training. The BAU wanted her pretty badly for one of their profiling teams, but she’s resolutely remained in Crimes Against Children. She was the one to correctly identify that I wrote the NAT’s survival guide. Apparently I have “a voice.”

  “Other three cases, it’s always been the father who got the worst of it, right?”

  She also doesn’t believe in small talk.

  “Yes,” I reply. “Father was subdued with gunshots, mother was killed, father was finished off. Not the case here?”

  “Doesn’t seem like it. Come take a look.”

  We grab booties in the hallway and slip them on over our sneakers before following her down the hall to the master bedroom. The medical examiner gives us a two-fingered wave as she keeps the thermometer steady in Mr. Jeffers’s liver. He has several stab wounds across his torso, but not nearly to the extent of the other male victims.

  Mrs. Jeffers, however, Jesucristo. Her face is destroyed, and the carnage continues downward. Her groin is a solid cluster of wounds, and the other stab wounds littering her stomach stretch up into slices at and around her breasts. Her husband’s death was pretty straightforward, but this woman suffered. And, judging from the negative space on her side of the bed, her son was forced to stand there and watch.

  “You said Mason wasn’t speaking?” I ask.

  Detective Mignone, standing by the father’s side of the bed, looks up and nods. “Neighbor says she doesn’t think he’s spoken in years.”

  “So it’s not trauma based.”

  “Or it’s not based on this trauma,” Simpkins notes. She pulls one of the framed pictures off the wall and holds it out to me, then realizes I don’t have gloves and keeps it steady so I can see it. There’s blood spattered on the glass. Not a lot, not at this distance, but some. It’s not enough to obscure the way the family is posed in the portrait, Mrs. Jeffers’s hand wrapped around her son’s arm as he tries to pull away toward his father.

  “Sexual abuse by the female parent,” Eddison murmurs over my shoulder. “That’s uncommon.”

  “Why do you assume the abuse was sexual?” asks Simpkins, who clearly already knows the answer but is asking it anyway.

  That would be the teacher part of her personality.

  “The way the wounds are clustered,” Eddison answers automatically, because we are both used to Vic, after all. “Groin, breasts, mouth. That’s very specific grouping.”

  “Social Services?” I ask.

  “We have a call in. Their social worker on call is already at Prince William on a different case, so she was going to put a call out for backup.”

  “Seems like Mason might do better with a male social worker.”

  “She’s going to do her best to get one in. They’re understaffed, at the moment.”

  All the public services in this county are.

  “The teddy bear? Was it the same?”

  Simpkins carefully replaces the frame on the wall. “White, gold wings and halo.”

  “And the note was pinned on the bear?”

  “Handwritten or typed?” adds Eddison.

  “Typed,” Simpkins answers. “We had a look at the computers, but the killer brought the note with them. The Jefferses don’t even have a printer.”

  “So the killer knew in advance that Mason probably couldn’t be coached to say anything. She came prepared.”

  “Why are you saying she?”

  Eddison and I trade a look, and Mignone drifts closer to join the conversation. “The description the children gave,” Eddison says finally. “They all called her a lady.”

  “But we don’t actually know that it is. Saying ‘she’ could blind us to avenues. I’m not implying the children lied or even that they were mistaken, but just because someone in a costume seems to present as female . . .”

  “It doesn’t mean they are,” Mignone finishes. “Could be a tactic to throw suspicion the wrong way.”

  “Precisely.”

  It’s perfectly reasonable and actually better practice to not block off avenues of investigation, but my gut says we’re looking for a woman. A man might dress as a female, given the appropriate impulses, but the phrasing would be different. This killer says the children are going to be safe now; a man would say he was rescuing them, or making them safe. Men are more likely to announce actions, women states of being.

  And judging from the way Simpkins is watching us, she’s already come to the same conclusion, she’s just putting us through the paces. Exhibit A as to why I always learn a hell of a lot from Simpkins, but I don’t actually like working with her.

  “Holmes is at the hospital with the boy,” Mignone says. “She wasn’t in the room during the examination, but he had a panic attack when the doctor needed to check beneath his underwear. They actually had to sedate him.”

  “Did they finish the examination?” Eddison asks with a frown.

  But Mignone shakes his head. “He didn’t seem obviously injured, and they want to try to build a measure of trust with him. They did some scans to assess for internal damage, to make sure they could wait, but otherwise they want him to be awake and allowing them.”

  Eddison’s shoulders relax.

  “Do you mind if I go to Mason’s room?” I ask. “I won’t touch anything, I promise.”

  For an answer, Simpkins offers us pairs of gloves.

  Okay, so maybe I will touch things.

  Eddison trails after me, along with Mignone.

  Mason’s room belongs in a magazine. Being officially on the case, the detective can be our crime scene chaperone, as it were, able to swear, if a problem comes up later, that no evidence was planted, taken, or altered. The walls are painted in halves, the top a dusky blue, the bottom a deeper, royal blue, separated by a white-paper border covered with colorful figures in a number of different professions. I can see cowboys represented, astronauts and doctors, different branches of the military among others. His bed is plastic and low to the ground, shaped like a cartoon rocket, and except for the indentations where he lay and one corner folded back from when he got up, the blue sheets and comforter are perfectly made. Everything in the room is picture-perfect, designed for appearance rather than function.

  Nothing in here actually says little boy.

  Eddison opens the drawers of the dresser, his gloved hands easing between layers of perfectly folded and color-coordinated clothing. The closet is as pristine as the room, clear storage bins on the top shelf eliminating any chance of Mason using them to hide anything.

  Children like the idea of secrets; they don’t actually like keeping them, usually. Children want to tell people things.

  The action figures in the toy box look barely touched, but the stuffed animals show a troubling bit of personality: they all have pants stapled onto them. Some of the pants are heavy construction paper, some look like doll clothes, but they’re stapled into the fabric of the animals in a very worrying, very telling way. Eddison grimaces when I show him, but nods.

  “That can’t really be all,” he says.

  “Maybe not.” Heading back to the bed, I ease my hand behind the head of the bed and feel the glove slip over something with a different texture. “Mignone?”

  The detective lifts his camera and snaps photos of the bed, before and after we pull it from the corner. A plastic sheet protector, like a report cover, is taped to the back, filled with sheets of extrathick cardstock.

  Mignone slowly lowers his camera. “Are those paper dolls?”

  “Yes.” I pull the pages out of th
e protector and spread them across the floor. They were probably torn out of a book at some point. A family of paper dolls, but the father and both children have pants attached front and back, not with the folded tabs but with more staples.

  The doll for the mother is colored over with black marker, drawn so firmly the marker soaked through and tore the thick paper in places.

  “Shit,” mutters Eddison, and Mignone nods even as he lifts the camera again to snap pictures.

  “I’m not top of the game for child psych, but that’s a pretty distinctive sign of sexual abuse, right?” asks the detective.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  Eddison lightly kicks my ankle. “You think there’s a CPS file, don’t you?”

  “It fits the pattern, and these markers—the pants on the toys and paper dolls, the mother being crossed out so vehemently—are so clear, someone had to have noticed and reported it.”

  “What’s your theory, Ramirez?”

  To give myself time to finish sorting the thought into words, I stack the paper dolls back together and slide them into the sheet protector, giving the whole thing to Mignone. “I think there was some sort of accident somewhere. Maybe at Sunday school, or a friend’s birthday party. Something. Maybe a bathroom accident, maybe just something spilling, but enough to need to change pants, and an adult offered to help.”

  “A little boy freaks out to that degree about someone helping him change pants, questions are going to get asked,” Eddison agrees.

  “Maybe it was even at school. Someone asked his parents—”

  “Probably his mother,” adds Mignone. “Mrs. Jeffers isn’t employed.”

  “—and of course his mother says he’s just body shy, and he’ll grow out of it.”

  “But whoever asked the questions is still bothered by it, and eventually makes a report.”

  “But how do you get from a report that vague to murder?”

  “Until we hear back from Social Services, we don’t know if it was vague,” I remind Mignone. “They may have followed up, maybe even done an exam. If there isn’t penetration or bruising, the abuse isn’t going to be as obvious.”