“Brayden,” he rasps.
“Okay, Brayden. How old are you?”
“Nine. Caleb, too. Zoe’s eight.” He blinks rapidly, but his eyes won’t focus. “Is Zoe okay?”
“None of you are okay right now,” I answer honestly, my hands curling around the foot of the bed. “You’re getting help, though, and right now that’s what’s important.”
“They sounded scared.”
“She had a seizure.” The nurse looks startled, and opens her mouth like she’s about to cut me off, but subsides. “They gave her something to calm the seizure, and they’re going to run tests so they know how else to help her.”
“But she’s gonna be okay?”
“I don’t know, Brayden, but the doctors are doing their absolute best, I promise.”
“Mom and Dad didn’t get out of the house,” he tells me. “They were still sleeping. She had Zoe, and she pushed us out of the house, and it exploded. She said it was the way it needed to be.”
“Did she say why?”
“She said you were going to keep us safe.”
“Brayden, do you remember anything about the lady?”
“She was an angel.” He frowns, draining the rest of his cup. “She looked like an angel, maybe. Maybe? I don’t see too good. But she looked all white. Like the moon.”
“Did she give you anything?” I ask, already knowing the answer but curious how he’ll answer it.
“Bears,” he replies promptly. “White bears, and parts of them were noisy.”
“Noisy like what?”
“Like . . . like . . . like Bubble Wrap blankets,” he decides after some thought. “Like a tissue paper present.”
“Were you in a car, Brayden?”
With the nurse watching his vitals and giving him just a little bit of water each time he empties the cup, I ask Brayden all the questions I can think of until a doctor comes in, and then I move down to the next curtain. I don’t swap out the gloves this time, because I didn’t touch Brayden. Caleb, however, is in no condition to be answering questions. He doesn’t seem to hear what the nurses and doctor are asking him. Beneath the oxygen mask, he keeps up a steady stream of half-formed words, and occasionally cocks his swaying head as if he’s listening to something, but what he’s saying doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what the rest of us can hear.
So I peek back behind Zoe’s curtain. They’ve got her hooked up to a heart monitor now, and it’s going a little crazy, so I don’t try to go in. Instead, I walk back to the nurses’ station. Eddison is there, but Holmes isn’t.
“She went outside to meet Simpkins,” he answers before I can ask the question.
“Mierda.”
“She specifically wanted you here, and it calmed the girl.”
“Yeah, calmed her right into a seizure.”
He flicks the center of my forehead, more irritating than painful. “One has nothing to do with the other. Stop.”
“Extrapolating from what Brayden said”—I sigh, peeling off the UM tee so I can lean against the counter without worrying about castoff meth from Zoe—“our killer prepared the explosion before she woke up the kids. She woke up Zoe first, and kept hands on her so the boys wouldn’t risk fighting, if they were even in any condition to do so. Parents were still sleeping in their room, she pushed the boys outside, did something, then carried Zoe out and got all three kids a safe distance away before the explosion. Brayden said he felt the heat, but they weren’t in danger of burning. She got them in the car—a big car, he said—keeping Zoe in the front seat, and gave them the bears. Brayden tried to open the door, but the child lock must have been engaged. He doesn’t know how long they drove for. She stopped in sight of the fire station to let them out, and gave them the instructions and my name. He looked back when they were at the station door, but he couldn’t see well enough to know if she was still there. One of the firefighters ran out and looked but didn’t see any cars out of place, so she must have gone.”
Being in the halter top has me anxious, especially knowing Simpkins is right outside, but I’d really prefer not to wear the meth-rubbed shirt any longer than I absolutely have to.
“He’s seizing!” calls a voice from Caleb’s curtain. A moment later a similar cry rises from Zoe’s partition.
Eddison grabs my arm before I can race back to Brayden’s bed. “Doctor is in with him,” he says softly. “I know you want to comfort him, but right now you’ll be in the way, especially with the other two in such unstable condition.”
“Why do you think he isn’t as bad as them?”
“We don’t know that he isn’t, just that he isn’t seizing yet.”
“Ramirez, what the hell are you wearing?” snaps Simpkins, stalking inside with Holmes at her heels. The two Smiths, who have been on her team about as long as she’s willing to keep anyone, follow, giving us small nods of acknowledgment.
I stand up straight and point to the bundle of fabric on the counter. “It has meth castoff from calming the girl,” I answer calmly. “It wasn’t safe to wear, and we didn’t have time to change before we came.”
“You shouldn’t have come here at all.”
“It was my call,” Holmes reminds her in an aggrieved tone.
“Clearly the children don’t need you now,” Simpkins continues, ignoring the interruption. “Leave.”
“No,” retorts Holmes. “I called her in.”
“You chose to partner with the FBI—”
“Partnered, yes, I did not give up the case to you, and I need her checking in on these kids.”
The two women stare each other down, and honestly I’m very glad I get to stand off to one side for this particular pissing match. Surprisingly, Simpkins is the one to look away. “Who can give me a status report?” she yells, stomping toward the curtains, and two nurses and a doctor glare at her.
The taller Smith shrugs out of his windbreaker and holds it out to me, while the stouter Smith pulls a plastic sack from the bag at his side. I drop the shirt into the sack, following it with the gloves, and then gratefully accept the jacket. It’s cold, true—hospitals are nearly always cold—but I feel more exposed than I’d like, in a way that doesn’t really have anything to do with clothing or skin. The jacket helps anyway.
“We’ll be in the waiting room,” Eddison tells Holmes and the Smiths. “They don’t need more people in those cubbies right now.”
“We’ll send someone,” the taller Smith promises. They’ve been partnered up for thirteen years, six of them on Simpkins’s team, but I have never heard the Smiths referred to as anything but a cohesive unit. I honestly do not even know their first names, because they are always, always the Smiths.
The waiting room is nearly empty. In one corner, a sobbing woman rocks back and forth in an uncomfortable chair, her fingers moving along her rosary. In her other hand, she clutches a passport and a work visa. Eddison drops into the chair beside me, taking my hand to lace our fingers together, and I lean against his shoulder.
“Have you updated Vic and Sterling?” I mumble.
“Yeah. I’ll send another in a minute.”
My eyes are burning, and I want to say it’s just from castoff somehow, but it’s exhaustion and rage and fear, and the twisting claw in my gut from wondering if we’re actually going to catch this person, and what kind of reaction the community will have if it happens. In the same breath that people abhor those who break the law, they also love vigilantes with an appealing cause.
Rescuing children from abuse? The public will eat that up when it all comes out. So far the papers have been quiet about the details. The murders have happened in different parts of town or even outside of it but still in-county, so no one’s drawn big blinking lights around them to connect them. And, too, the editor down at the main paper is usually good about squashing stories that exploit kids as victims.
I want to go home.
I’m not sure home is home anymore.
20
Zoe Jones dies at 2:1
3 in the morning, when a series of hyperthermic seizures causes a massive stroke.
Caleb Jones dies three hours later of rapid organ failure, including his heart.
Brayden’s doctor tells us the boy is physically stable for now, though they’ll be monitoring him closely as he starts into withdrawal symptoms. Emotionally? Brayden isn’t talking to anyone. Not to me, not to Simpkins or Holmes, not to any of the doctors or nurses. He cries when they tell him about Zoe, but when they have to come back and tell him about his twin, he just shuts down.
Tate, the social worker who’d been with Mason on Wednesday, shows up around six, and listens gravely as we fill him in. “It took me longer to get here because I stopped to get their case file,” he explains, holding up the folder. “A home inspection was done four months ago based on an anonymous complaint, likely from one of their previous neighbors, but they had just moved into the house. Everything was still clean. When we interviewed the children, Zoe and Caleb said they played outside most of the time. Brayden stayed inside the house more. Presumably, he was the one who would go into the kitchen to get supplies if they ran out of food. They had a mini-fridge in the boys’ room, tubs of food under the bed they said were snacks. I think if they ran out, Brayden was the only one to go into the kitchen.”
“He built up a slight tolerance, so he didn’t overdose as badly last night,” I translate, and he nods. “But yesterday their parents broke pattern. They made dinner for their kids and sat down together to eat in the kitchen. The other two were exposed in greater quantity than they’re used to, and even Brayden was probably in there longer than usual.”
“We requested a drug test on the children following the inspection, but it was rejected because the house was clean.”
“What about a drug test on the parents?” Eddison asks.
“House was clean,” Tate repeats. “We don’t think the Joneses were purposeful users; our theory was that they rode the contact high from cooking it, and sold it for income. They didn’t demonstrate the more overt symptoms of tweakers. Their prior residence had already sold, so we were refused permission to test there.”
“And so the kids fell through the cracks because of technicalities.” I scrub at my face, which is itching like crazy from the combination of old makeup, chlorine, and hospital. “Do you happen to know if the warrant for who had access to each CPS file has been finalized?”
“I believe so. I know Lee has been working on things. He and Gloria had their heads together.”
That . . . does not fill me with confidence.
Vic and Sterling come in not much later, laden down with coffees and tinfoil-wrapped plates of baked goods, courtesy of Marlene staying up all night worrying about us. Sterling pads up behind Eddison, but rather than trying to spook him like she normally does, she lays a hand against the back of his neck and holds up a large travel mug of coffee. He still flinches at the unexpected touch, but it’s smaller, more contained, and he leans into her side, mumbling a thank-you.
Vic carefully lowers himself into a chair across from us, leaning forward so he can keep his volume low. “Simpkins called Section Chief Gordon to bitch about your being here,” he tells us. “He checked in with Detective Holmes before calling me, and we’re going to pretend I’m not sharing this, but you should have the heads up.”
“Así que esto va bien entonces,” Eddison mutters.
“Her team will still be working the case, but she won’t be. He’s pulling her up on administrative review.”
We both blink at him, then look at Sterling, who settles in next to Vic and shrugs. We look back at Vic.
“Did Cass tell you anything about their case a couple weeks ago in Idaho?”
I shake my head. “She said it was a clusterfuck, but we didn’t get the chance to get drinks for the stitch-n-bitch before this came up. At lunch on Wednesday we were talking about this case.”
“Simpkins rode the local law enforcement officials so hard they withdrew their request for aid before the case had been solved.”
“In Idaho?” Sterling squeaks. “It’s hard enough to get invited in there.”
“It should have gone to me as unit chief, but Simpkins took it over my head to the section chief. IA was reviewing the situation when the request from Holmes came in, but they hadn’t reached a conclusion and Gordon wanted the lead agent to have at least twenty years. It brings a weight to it that can go far in protecting the targeted agent.”
“I’ve heard rumors that she put herself forward for your job,” Eddison notes.
I look down at my hands. I’m not going to throw Cass under the bus by confirming it.
Vic grimaces. “We don’t know yet if that’s connected,” he cautions. “She hasn’t been notified, so mouths shut. It’ll be later today, once Gordon can get everything together.”
“The Smiths have the most seniority,” I note, “but neither of them is suited to leading a team. Cass is a great agent but she doesn’t have the leadership experience, not for a case like this, and Johnson is still transitioning back from medical leave, so he’s desk bound. That leaves . . . who—Watts and Burnside?”
“He’s asking Watts. Burnside is the best on the team at tracking through digital trails, so they want him focused on the CPS office.”
“Watts is good,” Eddison says, more to me than to the others. “She’s steady.”
“Simpkins was, too.”
Sterling brings her legs up onto the chair, sitting cross-legged with a napkin across her lap to catch the crumbs from the croissant she’s picking apart. She’s frowning a little; this is her deep-in-thought frown, one of the distinctive ones, marked by her mouth twisting into a sideways moue. I watch her for several minutes, the frown shifting minutely as she works her way through the set of thoughts.
Then Eddison throws a blueberry at her from his muffin, and she looks up with wide, startled eyes. “Share with the class, Thumper,” he says.
“What if it isn’t anything nice?” she retorts automatically.
“Two kids died this morning, and a family of five became a family of one very broken little boy,” I say softly. “I don’t think there’s any nice right now.”
She takes a deep breath and lets Vic pull the mangled pastry from her hands. “The killer was too late to save the kids,” she says in a rush. “It’s even possible that the stress of the so-called rescue exacerbated the effects of the drugs on their systems. So. She didn’t save the kids. Add that to the fact that she’s already accelerating the kills, and what happens next?”
“She needs to save these kids.” Eddison scowls down at what’s left of his muffin. “Whatever’s driving her, whatever personal trauma is nipping her heels, doing this is a need. Failure will either drive that violence inward, or—”
“Or outward, exploding in a frenzy,” I finish.
“She’s not even trying your house anymore,” Vic notes. “Sterling checked your cameras. Only two cars came through that didn’t belong to residents, and they went to homes and stayed there all night. Are still there, in fact.”
“But she’s still giving them my name. Why?”
“How far did you get into your cases yesterday?”
“Thursday? Not far. Assessing and running every name takes time.”
“Can you make a rubric to narrow them down, so we can help you sort through? You can dismiss the cases where the victims were boys—”
“We can’t, actually,” Sterling interrupts with a wince. “He could have had a sister, a cousin, a neighbor, a friend, some girl who was influenced by Mercedes helping with the rescue. We give bears to all the kids, not just the immediate victims.”
“And we haven’t eliminated the possibility of the killer being male,” adds Eddison. “Plenty of men have higher-pitched voices, or can fake it. Given popular depictions of angels, the wig may not even be out of place. We don’t know gender. It’s just easier to say ‘she’ because that’s what the kids assume.”
Despite our instincts screaming other
wise, he’s right. “And we can’t rely on cases where I felt a particular connection with someone, because they’re not always mutual. I could have had a drastic impact on someone’s life and have absolutely no idea.”
“Shit,” sighs Vic, and we all flinch. He so rarely swears; I think we’ve all grown to think of him cursing as a sign that things are really fucked.
Cass clears her throat from the hallway, getting our attention before she joins us. “I thought you’d want to know, CPS contacted both sets of Brayden’s grandparents. Paternals live in Alabama, maternals in Washington State, and both have indicated they want custody. They also really don’t like each other. It could get nasty.”
I sigh. “Cass, one of these days, you’re going to remember the difference between want to know and need to know.”
She gives me a tired smile. “The warrant went through. Mr. Lee should be getting me the list of file access by end of business Monday. Burnside got approved for access to their system to examine digital footprints.”
“Word to the wise, Gloria Hess is helping Lee put the list together.”
“Fuck.” She glances at Vic and turns bright red, but doesn’t apologize.
His lips twitch in a reluctant smile.
“Brayden isn’t talking to Tate,” Cass continues after a moment. “He isn’t talking to anyone. But he doesn’t seem to mind Tate staying with him.”
“Tate seems like very good people.”
“I got that impression too.” She straightens out a wrinkle in her shirt, then frowns down at it. “I can’t tell if this is inside out or backward.”
“Backward,” Sterling answers. “I can see the lines of the tag.”
“Huh. Anyway, Brayden probably isn’t going to communicate for a while. Tate said, and Holmes agrees, you should probably head on home and get some rest. You know, if you want.”
I eye the last splashes of my coffee and wonder if I can fall asleep before the caffeine kicks in.
“Thank you, Cass,” Vic says for all of us. “You’ll keep us updated?”
“Yes, sir.”
Eddison and I both snort, followed by Cass’s blush deepening. Sterling just gives her a commiserating look.
The Summer Children Page 17