“I can’t imagine that going well.”
“I started screaming. Told him I couldn’t go home, couldn’t go back to my papá hurting me again. I promised to be good, begged, anything so my papá couldn’t touch me again. And his face did this . . . I honestly don’t know if you’ve seen Vic when he’s about to rain down fire and destruction.”
She shakes her head against my shoulder. “I’ve seen him pissed, but not like that. Saw a hint of it with Archer’s fuckup three years ago, but he left that to Finney.”
“When the hospital had done all its scans and wrapped and treated everything, he came back in with a social worker and another police officer, and they asked me about my father. My room at the house was still the same; my father couldn’t change it because it would look to the rest of the family like he was giving up on my safe return. All the rest of the family thought I’d been kidnapped, even my mother. He was the only one who knew differently. So the police went and they saw the lock, and the dress-up clothes with the blood and semen on them, and the diary I had duct-taped to the back of the headboard. My father was arrested, and the men from the woods admitted I’d been given to them to settle a gambling debt. The family denied knowing anything about him molesting me. Family.”
She nods.
“They were furious when the court sent me to foster care. I was supposed to come home. Oh, but they were pissed at me, too, because I should have just said thank you for rescuing me from the woods. Should have come home and kept my mouth shut, because family. I kept getting moved to different foster homes because my relatives would show up and start harassing the adults. My tía Soledad tried to kidnap me from school a couple of times. After three years, my social worker got permission to move me to a different city. I’ve seen one of my cousins a couple times since then, but that was it. But they won’t . . .”
“They won’t give up on you, even though they gave you up years ago.”
“Yes. Yes, exactly. My father has been in prison ever since, and all going as it should, he’ll die there. Sooner than expected, maybe, with the cancer.”
“That why they’re trying to talk to you again?”
“They’ve never really stopped. It’s why I change my number so often. But yes, it’s why my mother came out. Esperanza told them I work for the FBI at Quantico, that I’m an agent. Their little girl, look how far she’s come. I’m the victim and I’m an agent, and surely if I ask for him to be released so he can spend the rest of his days at home, a judge would do it.”
“They’re really asking you for that?”
I nod, and can’t help but smile as she mutters what sounds like curses into my shirt.
“Did you request Vic’s team?” she asks once she’s subsided.
“No. Wouldn’t have, even if I could; seemed a bit weird, trying to prove myself as an adult agent to someone who’d pulled me naked out of a root cellar when I was ten. When I received the assignment, he took me out to lunch before I even got to meet Eddison, and we sat and talked, to see if we could both do this. He said there was no shame if the answer was no, he’d make sure I got assigned to another team, no stigma, no gossip. At the end of the day, though . . .” The bear is a comforting, familiar brush against my neck, twenty-two years of cuddling and nightmares and triumphs. We were in a car accident once, me and the bear, and I wouldn’t let the paramedics touch me until they’d stitched up the bear’s arm, even though my own arm was bleeding all over the place. I was twelve. “He was the reason I became an FBI agent. He pulled me out of absolute hell, and his kindness made me feel like maybe safe was a thing I could be someday. He rescued me, saved me. And it wasn’t about trying to repay him, but just . . . I wanted to do that for others. He gave me my life back.”
“And now someone is using your history against you,” she murmurs, lightly touching the bear’s bow tie with one fingertip.
“I don’t think they mean to. I think this is them trying to give that gift to others.” We sit in silence until I finally ask the question I try not to ask any agent. “Why are you in CAC, Eliza?”
“Because my best friend’s father was a serial killer,” she answers calmly. She actually smiles a little. “I told Priya that, three years ago. Archer was being an ass to her. My best friend’s father was a serial killer, and even though he murdered grown women, I saw what it did to the kids when the truth came out. I used to have sleepovers at her place all the time. He tucked us into bed. And he did all that. I wanted to understand it. I never have, of course, but it left me obsessively researching criminals and psychology and one day, when I was home from college for winter break, my dad asked me if I was going to make a career out of it.”
“You hadn’t even thought about it, had you?”
“No. I mean, I had a couple of psychology and criminology classes under my belt, but it was only my sophomore year. I’d only just finished up my gen eds, and was trying to decide on a major. But he got me to realize that I could put that motivation to work helping others. And I chose CAC because I’m still friends with Shira, and I remember how terrible it was when we found out about her father, and I wanted to help kids. CAC lets me do that.”
After a while, she gets to her feet and offers her hand to help me stand. We look around the mess of teddy bears on the floor. I don’t have any more garbage bags in the kitchen.
“Leave it,” she advises. “Come back to it later, decide then. You’ve been collecting them for years, and this is a really bad time to make important decisions.”
“Tossing teddy bears is a big decision?”
“It is when they remind you of why you’re here.”
“You’re a wise soul, Eliza Sterling.”
“I think we take turns with it. Given everything else, it would irresponsible of me to get you drunk, so hopefully this will be enough.”
My phone rings. I pull it out of my pocket, but I can’t bring myself to answer it. Not if it means another child dead.
Sterling takes it from my hand, checks the display, and thumbs the call to speak. “Kearney, you’ve got Mercedes and Sterling here.”
“Awesome.” Cass’s voice sounds tinny and distant, like maybe she’s using the speakerphone as well. “Burnside went through every single file access in the office the last few weeks and took special note of which ones were accessed without additional information being added, the ones most likely to be superfluous access.”
“Okay. Does that point to Gloria?”
“That’s where it gets a bit weird.”
“How do you mean?”
“For one thing, a lot of the access to our kids’ files, among others, was done on Gloria’s chemo days. File clerks don’t have remote access.”
“So someone else is using Gloria’s log in. Could it be Lee?”
“If it was, it wasn’t from his computer—it’s clean, and the clerks probably would have noticed if he’d been out there on Gloria’s computer. The really weird part is that there’s one search that comes up almost every day that isn’t in Manassas CPS jurisdiction. It’s over in Stafford, and there is no active CPS file for that address. Can you think why anyone would do a daily search on an address that’s not only out of their office’s jurisdiction, but also out of their hunting ground?”
“Stafford? Stafford, Stafford . . .” Listen to your gut, Mercedes, it’s telling you something. “Run that address against my old cases.”
“Let’s see . . .” In the silence of the house, I can hear the click of keys over the phone. “Holy shit, Mercedes. Nine years ago, a fourteen-year-old girl named Cara Ehret. Her father beat her, raped her, and prostituted her to his friends. Fuck. You stayed with her in the hospital.”
“A guardian angel,” I murmur, remembering. “She said she finally had a guardian angel. Her mother drove her car into a tree when Cara was nine or ten. Her father’s still in prison—the rest of his life, I seem to recall—so he’s not still living in that house. And I doubt Cara is either. We looked at her case this morning but couldn’t t
race her after high school; where is she now?”
“We’ll dig in and find out. I’ll call back when we’ve got it.”
“Cara Ehret,” Sterling repeats, tasting the name. “She was on our short list. But what’s her connection to Gloria? Or to whoever was using Gloria’s log in?”
I shake my head, the final threads still just out of reach. “She was blonde as a kid, but her father dyed her hair red when he started renting her to his friends,” I tell her, the details I read so recently crowding in on me. “What if we’re looking for Cara, but she—”
My phone rings again before I can finish the thought, but it isn’t Cass. It’s an unfamiliar number. “Ramirez.”
“Mercedes,” comes a hoarse whisper. “Mercedes, she’s here!”
“She’s here? Where’s here? Who is this?”
“It’s Emilia,” the girl on the other end of the call whispers. “The lady who killed my parents, she’s here at my Uncle Lincoln’s!”
26
“We’re on our way,” I promise immediately, and Sterling has her keys and phones in hand before we even get to the door. She tosses me her keys so she can get the phones ready. “Emilia, are you safe? Are you hiding?”
“No, I have to warn my uncle.”
“Emilia, you need to hide.” My hands are steady as I jam the keys in the ignition, training beating adrenaline. I can see Sterling texting Cass with one phone and looking up the number for the Chantilly police with the other.
“I can’t let him die like my mom did. He’s been taking real good care of me. He’s nice, and he doesn’t hurt me. I can’t just leave him.”
“Is she in the house?” I ask, pulling out of the driveway. Sterling grabs the phone from my shoulder and switches it to speaker, sliding it into a cradle sticking out of the cigarette lighter.
“No. She’s walking around it.”
“Is it just you and your uncle in the house?”
“No. His girlfriend’s here.”
“Okay, Emilia, run to their room if you can do it without being seen through a window. Wake them up. But be sneaky. If they’re loud, you could all get hurt. Keep the phone with you.”
I can hear her heavy breathing over the line. Mother of God, this girl is brave. Sterling cups her hand around her mouth and the mic on her phone to muffle her conversation with the dispatch officer in Chantilly. Driving like a bat out of hell, I tap her other phone and make a swirling motion with my finger, the closest I can get to lights.
She gets it, though, and starts punching in another text, this one to Holmes, to let her know we’re driving like LEOs in a personal vehicle without lights or sirens. She tells the dispatch officer, too, so hopefully we’ll be able to get to Chantilly without a well-meaning officer pulling us over for violating a dozen or two traffic laws.
Lincoln Anders’s groggy voice comes through the background. “Emilia? What is it, Emi?”
“The lady who killed my parents. She’s outside,” she tells him, and the phone is right up against her face.
“Did you have a nightmare, sweetheart?” asks a female voice, just as sleep muddled. God, it’s later than I thought.
“No, she’s here, she’s just outside. We have to hide.”
“Emilia, put the phone on speaker,” I tell her. “Let your uncle hear me.”
“Okay,” she pants, and I hear the change in the background.
“Mr. Anders, this is FBI Agent Mercedes Ramirez. Emilia called me. If she says the woman is outside, believe her. The Chantilly police are on their way to your address. Is there a cellar or basement where you can hide?”
“No,” he answers, suddenly sounding much more awake. “There’s a root cellar—”
I cringe.
“—but the entrance is outside. You can’t get there from here.”
“Do you have any weapons in the house?”
“N-no.”
“The address is outside city limits,” Sterling whispers. “Dispatch says two cars will be there in ten.”
Ten minutes. Jesus fucking Christ.
“Can you get out of the house?” I demand. “Can you get to a neighbor?”
“Come on, Stacia, get up. We’ll just—” He cuts himself off, and Emilia whimpers. “She’s inside the house,” he hisses.
“Get out. Get out now!”
Sterling holds her phone near the microphone, the recording function lit up, and gives me a wide-eyed look.
A gunshot cracks through the silence, followed by a grunt and two screams.
“Emilia, RUN,” I yell through the gunshots that follow. Emilia is the only one screaming now. I don’t even know if she heard me.
“Stop,” a muffled voice commands on the other end. “Stop, you’re safe now.”
Emilia is sobbing now, and then there’s a startled grunt.
“Stop fighting me,” the voice snaps. “You’re safe now. You’re going to be okay.”
“Emilia!”
More grunts, and Emilia’s screaming again, feral, broken things that must be shredding her throat, and then—
Another gunshot, and a heavy thump.
“No, no, no,” whines the voice. “No, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. No. NO. You’re supposed to be SAFE! I’m making you SAFE!” She screams, and it tangles off into a choking rasp. I can barely hear footsteps. The time between treads says she’s running, and shit, the police aren’t there yet, they can’t get there in time to stop her!
“Cara!” I yell, wondering if she can hear me. “Cara, it’s Mercedes. Do you remember me?”
But the only thing I can hear is the pained groans of someone still alive. Tears running down bloodless cheeks, Sterling tells the dispatch officer to send ambulances.
Too many minutes later, we hear the officers arrive, calling into the house. “This one’s alive!” one shouts, and someone steps on Emilia’s phone before they say who it is.
I’m doing 110 in a 45, and I wasn’t anywhere near fast enough.
When we screech to a halt in front of the Anders house, lights are flashing everywhere, pressing in on wounds that are far more raw than usual. Two ambulances are in the drive, and as we run up to the front door, two paramedics rush out with a gurney.
There’s a man on it. Her dad’s cousin, Lincoln Anders.
“The little girl!” I snap.
One of them shakes his head, and they push past into the ambulance.
There’s an officer at the door, and he barely gives our credentials a glance. “The woman and the girl were dead before they hit the ground,” he tells us. “Woman was shot straight through the heart, the girl took one to the head, point-blank.”
“We were on the phone with her,” Sterling tells him, voice shaking. “She saw the intruder, called us, and went to wake up her uncle and his girlfriend. They were trying to leave the house.”
“Why did she call you? Why not the police?”
“Her parents were murdered on the third.” I scrub my hands against my cheeks. “She was delivered to my house, and I gave her my number if she needed anything. She saw the same woman outside here.”
“You’re that one?”
Sterling honest-to-God growls at him, and he flushes.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he says quickly. “Dispatch said the call came from the FBI and we didn’t know why, that’s all. We saw the story in the paper.”
“Agent Kathleen Watts is the lead agent on the case, and she’s partnered with Detectives Holmes and Mignone out of Manassas.”
“Chief got a call from Watts; she should be just behind you.”
“It’ll take her longer from—” Sterling stops, watching an SUV with flashing lights slam to a stop behind her car. “She was still in Manassas. Mercedes, she was still in Manassas.”
Which means she was still questioning Gloria.
Watts and Holmes run up the lawn. “Cara Ehret,” Watts calls before they even reach us. “She changed her name to Caroline Tillerman after she left foster care. She’s one o
f the file clerks. We’ve got officers on their way to her apartment and an APB out on her car.”
Caroline Tillerman. Cass and I spoke face-to-face with her at the CPS office.
I look at Holmes, who’s significantly more shaken. “We were on the phone with Emilia.”
She closes her eyes, hand rising automatically so she can kiss her thumbnail.
“We all looked at Lincoln Anders when he said he’d take Emilia in,” Sterling says. “CPS did their checks, but so did we. He was completely clean. The closest he’d come to trouble was a couple of speeding tickets. Why in the hell would she attack him?”
“CPS received an anonymous complaint this morning.”
“Anonymous.”
“This morning?”
Watts nods impatiently. “Caller said his girlfriend couldn’t be trusted with children, because she killed a boy.”
“What?” we both demand.
“When Stacia Yakova was a teenager, she was helping her father clean his guns at the kitchen table, and a neighbor called over to ask her father’s help with something heavy. So he told her to put down the gun she was working on and he’d be right back. Her brother came in, high off his ass, and thought she was an intruder. He attacked her with a knife. Got a few slashes and stabs in because she didn’t want to hurt him, but when he got the knife to her throat, she grabbed one of the guns they hadn’t worked on yet and shot him in the thigh.”
“Bled out?”
“No, she called an ambulance, they got him to the hospital, but when they gave him anesthesia for surgery—”
“He was a tweaker.”
“The father walked in on the end of the struggle. He was the one to pull his son off of her. It was clearly self-defense so she was never charged with anything.”
“If this anonymous complaint turns out to be one of her brother’s former friends or girlfriends . . .” I shake my head. “But Cara probably wasn’t in any fit state to research it. She heard Emilia’s name and decided then and there.”
The Summer Children Page 23