The Summer Children

by Dot Hutchison

  “Now you’re allowed to say the maternity leave is badly timed,” Eddison tells me.

  I throw a peanut butter cup and hit him just under his eye. “Put her on the short list.”

  She’s the fourth name on there, and we’re only a year and a half in.

  Vic comes in at seven with actual breakfast and drinks. “How’s it going?” He regards us all with grave, worried eyes as he hands out bowls of western scramble, like omelets but lazier.

  “We’ve got a few names for the analysts to dig into deeper,” I tell him around a yawn.

  Eddison pushes to his feet with a groan and walks around the table to Sterling, standing over her shoulder to pick all the mushrooms out of his bowl and put them into hers. “This is also going to take forever.” He moves on to picking the red peppers out of Sterling’s breakfast to put in his bowl.

  She watches his progress with a bemused, slightly horrified expression.

  Vic watches, too, but chooses not to comment. “Do you want to update the Dragonmother, or would you like me to do it?”

  “I’ll do it,” I sigh. “I could stand to move around a bit.”

  “Eat first.”

  And then he parks himself in one of the chairs to make sure we do.

  Once he’s satisfied we’re not trying to subsist purely on caffeine, he leaves us for his office. I take a moment to finish my coffee, trying to sort out words and reports so I don’t look like an idiot in front of Agent Dern. Eventually, I’m as prepared as I’m going to get and head out into the bullpen.

  I’m not quite to the elevators when a massive cheer goes out in Blakey’s corner of the floor, which is a hell of a lot more crowded than it usually is. I can recognize a handful of agents from the cybercrimes division, and there’s no division between CC and CAC as agents collapse into hugs on each other, some of them crying, a couple laughing giddily and jumping up and down.

  “Ramirez!” Blakey calls. “We got Slightly!”

  “Slightly,” I repeat blankly. “Oh, holy shit! Slightly! One of your Lost Boys!”

  She laughs and throws herself at me in a hug. “He’s going to be okay. We got him, he’s going to be okay, and the bastard who had him gave us leads on Nibs, Tootles, and Curly!”

  I hug her back, holding on just as tightly. They’ve been tracking these boys and several others for months, trying to break through a ring of pedophiles who use pop-up forums to arrange trades. They found one boy a few weeks ago, but the man holding him panicked and killed him when they closed in on the house. Slightly safe, and solid leads on three others? This is a very good day for Blakey’s team and their partners in cybercrimes.

  But it makes me think of Noah, trying to understand why his mother is gone when she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  I hit the call button, waiting for the elevator, and it opens to frame Siobhan and two of the language experts from the Southeast Asia desks in Counterterrorism. After a minute or two, I might even remember their names. But they give each other wide-eyed looks that gradually transfer from me to Siobhan and back again, and step out of the elevator. “We’ll just . . . hey, that looks like a party!” the younger one announces awkwardly, and drags her teammate out behind her.

  “What kind of horror stories have you been spreading?” I ask dryly, stepping in and hitting the button for Internal Affairs.

  “Don’t have to,” Siobhan retorts, voice as stiff as her posture. “You really think the whole building doesn’t know you’re getting deliveries?”

  “None at the house anymore.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I study her discreetly in the wavering reflection on the doors. She looks exhausted, worn in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with sleep. It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask how she’s been in the . . . cógeme, ten? Ten days, since I’ve seen her.

  It feels so much longer than ten.

  But I let the silence carry us down the floors. She walked away, and I let her. I’m not sure there’s really anything else to say. We hit her floor first, and the doors slide open with a ding. She walks past me, shoulders squared, and hesitates over the tracks. She turns her head, just barely, like she’s going to look back at me.

  But she doesn’t. Someone in the hall calls her name, and she flinches, then walks out without a word or a look. The doors slide shut and leave me alone in the car.

  I don’t have an appointment with the Dragonmother, so I spend several minutes sitting outside her office while she volubly reminds another agent just how she earned her nickname. Her assistant looks torn between being mortified and proud. I suppose if you’re the guardian at the gates for a dragon, you can’t help but be pleased when she roars.

  “Inappropriate conduct with a witness,” he murmurs, tossing me an unwrapped pink Starburst. “Probably a lawsuit coming. She’s not happy.”

  No shit, and so not my business, Christ.

  A red-faced agent stomps out, sans badge and gun, and after another few minutes, the assistant pokes his head into the lair to announce me.

  “Would you like to feel sorry for Agent Simpkins?” Agent Dern says instead of hello when I walk in.

  “If I say I already do?”

  “She got served with divorce papers two weeks ago. Her ex-husband-to-be cited irreconcilable differences stemming from her consistently putting her job above their marriage and family.”

  “Why are you telling me this, ma’am?”

  “Because I know you won’t tell anyone outside your team, and you deserve to know that it wasn’t you, your team, or your case that sent her round the bend,” she says bluntly. “Sit, please.”

  I sit. She’s wearing lilac today, in some kind of fabric that drapes and shimmers becomingly, and I think this is who Sterling should grow up to be, someone who can wear the pastels and the feminine things without it taking a millimeter of authority away from her. Sterling just has to wait until she doesn’t look like jailbait.

  “I’m told you haven’t seen any of the counselors here.”

  “I’ve talked with my priest about everything. I felt like I could be more forthcoming.”

  “How goes your research through your old cases?”

  I run her through the parameters we’re using, not shying away from explaining the glacial pace. Because a lot of our search is based on instinct and impression, we can’t just turn it over to the technical analysts as is. We have to narrow it down first.

  She looks back over her page of notes, written in some ultraefficient shorthand possibly known only to her. “You’re still staying with your teammates?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If you would feel more comfortable at home—”

  “All due respect, ma’am,” I interrupt softly, “it’s not about feeling unsafe at my house. I just feel better with Eddison and Sterling. Less exposed.”

  She nods thoughtfully, her dark eyes very aware in ways I’m not entirely comfortable with. “Are you going to sell the house?”

  “I don’t know. I’m honestly not planning to think about it until all this is done.”

  “That’s understandable. Professional opinion, Agent Ramirez: When do you think this person is going to strike again?”

  I take a minute to run back through all the factors and variables that have been hammering at my skull for hours, days maybe. In the end, though, there’s really only one answer.

  “Two days, if we’re lucky. Very likely less.”

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was scared of breaking.

  Or breaking more. She was honest enough with herself to acknowledge she’d been broken for a very long time. Some of that she’d fixed; some she was still working on. Some, she knew, could never heal. Even if her body someday gave up the scars, her soul would still carry the wounds.

  It hurt, every time, to acknowledge that she’d never truly be whole.

  But she did acknowledge it, because some pain was necessary, even healthy.

  When she rammed against those brok
en places—when a nightmare was too vivid, when someone touched her in a way too rich with memory, when someone asked her why she hated being in photos—she reminded herself of all the ways she wasn’t that little girl anymore.

  She had a new name, one her daddy and his friends had never touched.

  She’d gone to college and graduated with honors.

  She had friends, though she’d left most of them behind when she graduated. But she kept some of them, even after she’d moved, and she was making new ones.

  She’d moved back to Virginia. She almost hadn’t, but it seemed silly to avoid an entire state just because she’d been so miserable for so many years. It was hardly the state’s fault. And because returning to Virginia was brave, she didn’t call herself cowardly for avoiding her old city. That much allowance she would give herself.

  She had a job she loved, and was so proud of it. She was helping people, helping children. Children who were like the little girl she used to be. There were a lot of things she still wasn’t strong enough to do or be, maybe never would be, but this she could do. She could help the children who so desperately needed it, and she didn’t have to push herself past the breaking point.

  And whenever she started to doubt, whenever she felt like she was more scar tissue than real person, she remembered her angel, and drew strength from the memory. The teddy bear still sat on her bed, a gift and a kindness. It had seen so many tears from her over the years, but eventually it saw joy as well, and the kind of tears that came of laughing too hard.

  And she had the angel herself, in a way. She’d been shocked, at first, to see the angel while she was out running errands for her small apartment. She wasn’t entirely sure why. After all, even angels had to live somewhere. But it was such a big world. It was a sign, she decided, that she was exactly where she needed to be. She was here, helping children, and her angel was still helping children. She was still an angel.

  She was healing, and she wasn’t as afraid.

  23

  I’m pretty sure the only thing that keeps Sterling from slipping me sleeping pills is the very real possibility of us getting called in. She is, however, clearly out of all fucks for my fidgets, because she eventually rolls over in bed and knees me right in the ass. Once it hits two o’clock, it’s like all the tension floods out of me. None of the calls have been that late. Early?

  Despite having set the alarm on my phone for six-thirty, I don’t wake up till a little after ten. Sterling, already showered and dressed and sitting at her table with the crossword puzzle, just shrugs at my glower. “You needed the sleep. Vic said not to come in until you woke up on your own.”

  There’s only so much I can mutter about that. I mean, I do, because it makes me feel perversely better to grumble about it like Muttley, but I’m well aware it doesn’t accomplish anything.

  It takes every trick I’ve ever learned with concealer to make the shadows under my eyes look vaguely human, and even then we’ll call it a partial success. When I come out, Sterling hands me a bowl of oatmeal, a glass of orange juice, and the front page of the paper.

  A picture of Noah’s mother fills a third of the space above the fold. Constantijn Hakken (and it’s spelled differently each of the three times it’s written, which, come on, paper) is mentioned, with his Olympic history and his unexpected death from an aneurysm when Noah was three. If he’d lived, his son probably would have been in intensive training from a young age rather than trying to play catch up from a hobby gym. Maartje Hakken managed a local credit union and volunteered at her son’s school one day a week, as well as assisting with a number of PTA events. As a legacy, loving your son and working hard is pretty decent.

  Below the fold, however, the article mentions the rash of similar murders. It doesn’t connect the explosion at the Jones house—the methodology was too different—but it lists the Wilkinses, the Wongs, the Anderses, and the Jefferses, and asks in bold letters if Manassas has our own serial killer.

  “Comerse el mundo,” I sigh.

  “I’m going to assume that whatever you said doesn’t require an answer.”

  “It’s not anything new enough to need one.”

  I check in with Watts, just in case she isn’t at the office when we get there, and send her pictures of the more relevant paragraphs of the article. She texts back that the kids in the hospital have been moved to a corner block of rooms with a pair of guards at all times, and an agent has been dispatched to Ronnie Wilkins’s grandmother to fill her in and make sure she isn’t besieged by the curious or prurient.

  As soon as we get to the office, Cass pounces and drags me into the conference room, which is still in our setup from yesterday. “We’ve got the list from CPS, file-by-file access. They’re working on identifying the kids in similar circumstances, but it’s going to take more time than we have, I think. They’ll forward them in bunches to the Smiths.”

  Eddison grunts from the other side of the table and slides me a chipotle hot chocolate.

  For the most part, the list is exactly what you’d expect it to be. The social workers and nurses are logged as they follow up on different aspects of each case, and the clerks are the ones who add in paperwork from external sources as it comes to their office. And it makes sense that the clerks occasionally log in to the files to make sure that all forms are accounted for.

  “Is Gloria Hess a supervisor?” I ask, spreading the pages out in front of me. “She’s the only name on every file until this week, when Nancy, Tate, and Derrick Lee went through.”

  “She’s the senior clerk,” answers Cass. “It’s not technically a supervisory position, though.”

  “So she might train others, but she’s not the one who should be going back through to make sure it’s done correctly?”

  “Right. Every file?”

  “Every one, and it goes back weeks. A lot of log ins, come to think of it, especially for someone too ill to work full-time anymore.”

  Cass leans over the table to grab a folder from the stack at Eddison’s elbow. He’s too absorbed in what’s on his tablet screen to even snap at her. “Our analysts dug into Gloria.”

  The picture on file, copied from the DMV, is precancer if the hair is any indication, ashy blonde and thick, bound into a long braid over one shoulder. Her face is fuller, her color better, and all in all she looks . . . happier. Less hollowed. “Her husband died a few weeks after her diagnosis,” I announce, trailing my finger under the words. “Dropped dead of a massive heart attack, absolutely no warning signs or obvious risk.”

  “Who did she piss off upstairs?” Cass shakes her head, her chin digging into my shoulder so she can see rather than pull the file closer. “Advanced cancer, her husband dies, her sister and brother-in-law go to prison for abuse, she gets rejected for the care of their kids, her cancer isn’t responding to treatment . . . It’s like some wicked angel put their thumb down and started to squish.”

  “But would she be healthy enough to manhandle the kids this way? Ronnie Wilkins was carried to and from the car. She had to half-carry Emilia Anders. She carried Mason. She half-carried Noah.”

  “Not the others?”

  “No. She used Sammy to keep Sarah and Ashley compliant, and Zoe for Caleb and Brayden. They weren’t going to fight her when she could hurt the youngest.”

  “I feel like there’s something really important no one’s brought up yet, and I’m not sure there’s a good way to do it.”

  “Why are the kids white?” Sterling offers, not looking away from her laptop.

  “Okay, so it has been brought up.”

  “Not really. It’s just the obvious question. All of the families, with the partial exception of the Wongs, have been white. Generally argues that the killer is white, as well.”

  “This type of mission as a whole argues a white killer,” I remind her. “And you’re forgetting the racism inherent in the system.”

  Sterling nods, but Cass looks between us in confusion. “Applying how?”

  “Min
ority kids are significantly more likely to be taken from their families on less documented cause, and less likely to be given back to their families without more oversight on the parents. They take minority kids ‘for the good of the kids,’ but leave the white ones ‘for the good of the family.’ Minority kids are more likely to get treated poorly in foster homes but this killer is going after the parents, thus far, not the fosters, so they’re going after the white parents who get their kids back against evidence.” At the silence from my shoulder, I tilt my head to see Cass frowning. “What?”

  “You didn’t even have to think about that one.”

  “It’s well documented. We get taken faster and it’s harder to get us back.”

  “Were any of the kids’ files accessed by Gloria the day of the murders?”

  I lift Gloria’s file to check the papers below. “All of them.”

  Cass pushes back from the table, phone already in her hand. “Burnside,” she says on her way out the door. “This is Kearney; I need to know what files Gloria Hess has accessed most recently. Check Derrick Lee as well, just in case.”

  I wonder if there’s a way to borrow an administrator from a CPS office in another county to oversee a more detailed audit. After all, if Lee is in charge of the clerks, he might know their log ins. As much as we’re all thinking she, Lee hasn’t been eliminated as a possible suspect.

  My cell goes off, but it’s a number on the Bureau exchange so the ringing doesn’t cause the same frisson of fear it’s come to impart recently. “Agent Ramirez.”

  “Agent, this is the front desk; you have a visitor down here.”

  “A visitor?”

  Sterling and Eddison both look up, but I shrug.

  “Her ID says Margarita Ramirez.”

  “Cógeme.”

  My phone buzzes with another call, and I pull away from the screen to see Holmes’s name. “I’ve got a call about a case coming in; tell her I’ll be down soon, have her sit tight.” Without waiting for an answer, I switch over. “Ramirez.”

  “A pharmacist at Prince William took a smoke break and found twelve-year-old Ava Levine asleep on a bench. She had two angel bears.”