“What?”
I slump into her, digging my chin into her shoulder. “I’m trying to remember the last time you sparred with a man and it didn’t end with him getting slammed repeatedly into the mats. You always kick their asses. It’s why Eddison won’t spar with you. When they can beat you sparring, then they can give you shit about the pink and frills.”
She laughs and pushes me away. “Let me go change and I’ll help you get the couch set up.”
I change in the living room, into a T-shirt and boxers freshly liberated from Eddison’s dresser because my other ones really need to be washed, and discover that the drawer of one of the end tables is actually a tiny gun safe. “Oh-two-one-four-two-nine,” she announces when she comes back out and sees me looking at it. “I know it’s stupid but I wanted something I didn’t have to think about.”
“Oh-two-one-four, that’s what, Valentine’s Day? Two-nine?”
“Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, 1929.”
I digest that for a moment, looking around at all the ruffles and pastels and perfectly coordinated decorations. “You are a complicated person, Eliza Sterling.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Oh, hell yes.”
With her coffee table moved up against the entertainment center, there’s enough room for the couch to pull out into a bed, which we finish off with a complete bedding set she grabs from the linen closet. She just rolls her eyes at my intermittent snickering.
“I can’t help it,” I insist. “It’s just . . . you’re so severe at work, you only wear black and white, you always have your hair back, you’re so damn careful with your makeup, and then here it’s this absolute fairy tale. I love it.”
“You do?”
“Absolutely! It’s just going to take my brain some time to reconcile the two. Anyway, you should have seen how long it took me to stop laughing the first time I saw Eddison’s apartment.”
“Really? But his apartment is exactly the way I’d picture it.”
“If you were going to change it, to make it even more Eddison, what would you do?”
She ponders that while easing the pillows into the cases and fluffing them. “Take the pictures off the wall and change the table to something boring,” she says eventually. “Those aren’t his touches.”
“Priya.”
“I adore that girl.”
We don’t stay up to talk; it’s been a long couple of days, after all. As tired as I am, sleep takes some time in coming. I haven’t slept in my own bed in a couple of weeks now, and while the couch-bed is fairly comfortable as far as couch-beds go, it’s still a couch-bed.
But that’s not really what’s keeping me awake. We live half our lives on the road, on the beds of whatever hotel we happen to land in. We’ve slept on couches in precincts and even sometimes on conference room floors when there wasn’t time for more than a nap.
I keep thinking of Sarah, alone in her room at night, listening for footsteps down the hall, wondering if she’d be left alone for a night, or if her stepfather would enter. If he’d put a hand to her mouth and remind her in a whisper that she had to be quiet, she couldn’t let her sister or mother hear. Sitting in the kitchen in the morning, aching and sick, staring at her mother and wondering if it was really possible she hadn’t heard, that she didn’t know.
It isn’t impossible to heal from that, but it leaves scars. It changes the way you look at people, how far you can trust or let people in. It changes your habits, even your desires and dreams. It changes who you are, and no matter how much you struggle back toward that place, that person you started as, you never actually get there. Some change is irreversible.
My phone buzzes with a text.
It’s from Priya.
Sterling says you’re making fun of her apartment. You know I gave her some of that stuff, right?
And sometimes that change is good. Or leads to good, anyway.
11
Despite its beginning, the week continues fairly quiet. Sarah and I talk several times a day, and I get updates from both Holmes and Mignone. Sarah’s able to give some useful descriptors of the woman who killed her parents: a few inches taller than Sarah but not tall, slender but strong—she’d carried Sammy to and from the car so the girls would follow along. She wore a white jumpsuit that covered her from neck to wrist to ankles, and white gloves, and she had a bag over her shoulder with multiple sets of plastic covers for her white sneakers. The white mask, with its suggestion of features and its mirrored-over eyes, she’d described before, but the blonde hairline came down over the top of the mask in such a way that it had to be a wig, the hair long and straight.
And that’s where the discussions Eddison and I are having devolve into a long conversation about the distinction between useful and helpful, because none of these details are going to actually help us find the killer until we locate a person and happen to find those items on her. Mignone has already tried tracking purchases, but that’s another thing that will be easier to do after the fact.
The police have also heard from Social Services: the files for Ronnie Wilkins and Sarah Carter both went through the Manassas CPS office, but none of the names on them matched. The one complaint filed by Sarah’s school had been given to someone new to the office, whereas the same man had been handling Ronnie’s file for several years.
I swing down to the FBI archives on Wednesday to submit a request. All of our case files, complete with our handwritten notes made during and after investigations, are preserved for posterity or auditing, whichever comes first. (Auditing. Always auditing.) Given that I’ve been in the Bureau for ten years, I’ve worked a lot of cases. Most of them have been with the team or done as consults, but I’ve occasionally been loaned out to other teams. We all have, really, if another team is missing people or there’s a need for a particular specialty.
Agent Alceste, who works in the archives because it entails the least amount of human interaction, listens to the reasons for my request as she looks through the paperwork that is already filled out and waiting for her approval. Alceste doesn’t like me—she doesn’t actually like anyone—but she hates me less than most because I make sure if I absolutely have to bother her for something, I’m as prepared as possible.
Her husky voice still has a strong Quebecois inflection, probably because she doesn’t talk with people often enough for it to smooth out. She tells me it will take a few days to copy over that much information. She’s waiting for me to argue; most do.
I just thank her for the time and effort and leave her to the solitude of her office. I can access most of what I need from my computer, but getting all the files onto a drive will be a lot easier than searching for each case. Plus, this way I get to see Vic’s and Eddison’s case notes, not just mine. We work well as a team because we see different things; they may have noticed something on one of our cases that I didn’t, something that may be relevant here.
I hope I’m giving myself a ridiculous amount of work for nothing, but I can’t shake this niggling feeling that I might know why me. Why this killer gives the children my name and tells them they’re safe now. That I’ll keep them safe.
What if that’s because I once told him or her the same thing?
That’s what we tell them, the children we rescue. You’ll be okay. You’re safe now.
I think we’re all dancing around the thought, not wanting to admit the possibility—or even the likelihood—that this killer has his or her origins somewhere in our case files. We’re not ready to say it out loud yet, like the sound will give it too much meaning. It doesn’t mean we get to keep hiding from it, though.
Late Friday morning, as Sterling and I sit on Eddison’s desk to make him twitch while the three of us debate what to get for lunch, Vic comes through the bullpen, handing files and reports to various agents on his meandering way. “I’m supposed to tell you three to go home.”