He sits on the couch and reaches for his bag, but she shakes her head. “Wait for Mum. No sense in doing it twice.”
So they spend the next hour talking about Ramirez and the woman in Counterterrorism she isn’t calling a girlfriend yet, about Vic and his panic about his eldest daughter going off to college in the fall. They talk about spring training, making guesses about who might make the long slog all the way to the World Series, and that’s something he was able to give her, that love of baseball and numbers and crazy statistics.
Deshani comes home half past seven, dropping bags on the coffee table and grunting at them before trudging up the stairs.
He glances at Priya.
“She’ll be more human once she’s changed clothes,” she answers, plucking at her striped fleece pajama pants. “Once she gets home, she wants to be in real clothes.”
“You two are the only people I know who consider pajamas more real than suits.”
“Because you’d rather be in a tie than a Nationals shirt?”
He doesn’t have an answer for that. Or rather, he does, but it isn’t going to help him any.
Priya rolls to her hands and knees, then levers up to standing so she can get plates and silverware from the kitchen. She also comes back with a bowl, and shrugs at his curious look. “We only have two plates unpacked.”
“Heathens.”
“Quite literally.”
He snorts, but accepts one of the plates. By the time Deshani joins them wearing leggings and a long-sleeve Cambridge T-shirt, Priya’s got the food sorted out for all three of them. The routine is comfortable, familiar from those seven-odd months they lived just outside of D.C. Deshani regales them with tales of her misogynist assistant, who can’t manage to hide how disgusted he is to be reporting to a woman, and her own delight in offering him a demotion if he’d prefer a male boss. It’s sharp and funny, and Eddison gets the feeling that the only reason the idiot hasn’t been fired is because Deshani finds him entertaining.
It’s a little disturbing.
It’s only after the meal is cleared, and Priya’s fingers are crumbling the fortune cookie without actually eating any of it, that Deshani sighs and glances over at the battered black case. “All right. What’s the bad news?”
Christ.
He leans back into the couch, scrubbing at his face to pull his thoughts into some semblance of order. “When Aimée Browder was murdered in San Diego, we came to the conclusion that it must honestly be a terrible coincidence.”
Priya closes her eyes, too deliberately to be called a wince, but it still makes him feel like a heel. There’s probably a better way to start this conversation but damned if he knows what it is.
“You didn’t notice anything out of place, no one who looked familiar from Boston, and we couldn’t find any connections. As strange as it was for you to have ties with a second victim, there wasn’t anything to point to it being anything more than a freak chance.”
“You suspected, surely?” Deshani asks sharply.
“Yes, but there was nothing to back it up.”
“The flower deliveries would have changed that, though.”
He nods reluctantly. He doesn’t want to make Priya feel bad—worse—but her mother’s statement is an obvious one. “There wasn’t any reason for you to attach significance to them. Not without knowing the details of the other cases.”
“Why are the flowers significant?” Priya asks quietly. She leans against Deshani’s bent legs, her eyes still closed, and Deshani’s fingers run gently through the blue-streaked hair.
“Just like Chavi was found with chrysanthemums, each victim has been left with some kind of flower. The first girl had jonquils; the second had calla lilies.”
“And Aimée?”
“Amaranth.”
Priya lets out a soft huff. “Her mother grew amaranth. She had a garden on the roof of their front porch, and she grew amaranth to cook with. Aimée used to steal some every day to pin around her bun. Her mother could never keep a straight face when scolding her for it, and they’d always end up laughing together. You know another name for amaranth?”
He shakes his head.
“Love-Lies-Bleeding.”
Oh, hell.
“So whoever’s delivering the flowers is copying the order of the murders,” Deshani says. She frowns down at Priya’s hair, using her thumb to measure growth from roots to the base of the colored streaks. “We need to fix this.”
“I keep meaning to ask.”
Eddison clears his throat.
Deshani arches an eyebrow in response.
“There isn’t a way to know yet if this is our killer, or a local creep who figured out who you are and is getting off on terrorizing you. The presence of the flowers in San Diego, the similarity you remember in the cards, suggests the former, but we can’t back it up yet.”
“What would be proof?”
He freezes, and both women shift to look at him more clearly.
“Oh,” Priya whispers.
“Oh?” Deshani echoes, tugging lightly on a lock of her daughter’s hair. “Meaning what, precisely?”
Eddison nods. “Unless or until he tries to attack, or we catch him in the act of leaving the flowers, there’s no way to know. The flowers by themselves don’t mean enough.”
“Don’t mean enough?”
“Aren’t by themselves a threat,” Priya says. “Without evidence to the contrary, they’re both gift and warning.”
“Schr?dinger’s flowers,” snorts her mother. “Lovely.”
“What does that mean for FBI involvement?”
Why didn’t he ask Vic to come with him? Vic is so much better at all of this.
“Eddison?” Deshani’s eyebrows are in danger of disappearing into her hair. “Why do you look like we just called an executioner?”
“No matter who’s leaving the flowers, it’s still an FBI matter,” he tells them. “It crossed state lines, which makes it ours.”
“But?”
With a sigh, he gives them a carefully edited version of Vic and Finney’s history with Section Chief Martha Ward, and her very narrow view of case responsibility. They listen intently, with the kind of focus that can be intimidating if you don’t know them and downright terrifying when you do. When he’s finished, mother and daughter share a long, inscrutable look.
“Small picture,” Deshani says eventually. “How likely is she to prevent the agents coming down here?”
“If it stays intermittent, not very,” he admits. “Finney doesn’t like politics and he doesn’t want to leave the field, but if it comes down to it, he’s been in the Bureau almost as long as Vic; if he wants to take a swing at her, he can probably make it hurt. As long as the visits don’t take up much time, she likely won’t interfere.”
“Until they get more frequent?” Priya shakes her head, and there’s something shadowed in her eyes, something he’s not sure how to ask about. “When the lab reports on the bouquets start showing more time and expense than she’ll approve?”
“Priya . . .”
“Are we stuck in the middle of this?”
“Maybe.” He ignores Deshani’s muttered curses in favor of maintaining eye contact with Priya, trying to be as reassuring as possible. “Vic and Finney aren’t going to just roll over and take it. They’re going to fight for you. We just have to catch this guy before it comes to that.”
“But in the meantime, my daughter is left at the mercy of someone who knows where we live and may have killed her sister.”
He can’t help but cringe at that.
“So what’s being done right now?”
“Finney’s looking into Landon,” Eddison says. “The lack of a last name is making it difficult.”
“So you think he’s a possible suspect?”
“Person of interest, at this point. We’ll see where it goes.”
“Is it always waiting?” Priya asks quietly.
“It is, until it isn’t.” He gives her a lopsided smile. “But you already know that.”
“So we wait.”
“Why did you come all the way out here to tell us this?” Deshani’s head is cocked to one side, her thumbs tapping the top of her feet in a repetitive but indiscernible rhythm. “There’s nothing that couldn’t have been delivered over the phone.”