The action figures in the toy box look barely touched, but the stuffed animals show a troubling bit of personality: they all have pants stapled onto them. Some of the pants are heavy construction paper, some look like doll clothes, but they’re stapled into the fabric of the animals in a very worrying, very telling way. Eddison grimaces when I show him, but nods.
“That can’t really be all,” he says.
“Maybe not.” Heading back to the bed, I ease my hand behind the head of the bed and feel the glove slip over something with a different texture. “Mignone?”
The detective lifts his camera and snaps photos of the bed, before and after we pull it from the corner. A plastic sheet protector, like a report cover, is taped to the back, filled with sheets of extrathick cardstock.
Mignone slowly lowers his camera. “Are those paper dolls?”
“Yes.” I pull the pages out of the protector and spread them across the floor. They were probably torn out of a book at some point. A family of paper dolls, but the father and both children have pants attached front and back, not with the folded tabs but with more staples.
The doll for the mother is colored over with black marker, drawn so firmly the marker soaked through and tore the thick paper in places.
“Shit,” mutters Eddison, and Mignone nods even as he lifts the camera again to snap pictures.
“I’m not top of the game for child psych, but that’s a pretty distinctive sign of sexual abuse, right?” asks the detective.
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
Eddison lightly kicks my ankle. “You think there’s a CPS file, don’t you?”
“It fits the pattern, and these markers—the pants on the toys and paper dolls, the mother being crossed out so vehemently—are so clear, someone had to have noticed and reported it.”
“What’s your theory, Ramirez?”
To give myself time to finish sorting the thought into words, I stack the paper dolls back together and slide them into the sheet protector, giving the whole thing to Mignone. “I think there was some sort of accident somewhere. Maybe at Sunday school, or a friend’s birthday party. Something. Maybe a bathroom accident, maybe just something spilling, but enough to need to change pants, and an adult offered to help.”
“A little boy freaks out to that degree about someone helping him change pants, questions are going to get asked,” Eddison agrees.
“Maybe it was even at school. Someone asked his parents—”
“Probably his mother,” adds Mignone. “Mrs. Jeffers isn’t employed.”
“—and of course his mother says he’s just body shy, and he’ll grow out of it.”
“But whoever asked the questions is still bothered by it, and eventually makes a report.”
“But how do you get from a report that vague to murder?”
“Until we hear back from Social Services, we don’t know if it was vague,” I remind Mignone. “They may have followed up, maybe even done an exam. If there isn’t penetration or bruising, the abuse isn’t going to be as obvious.”
“You know, I sort of assumed getting a new team member would break you and Eddison of that habit,” Simpkins drawls from the door. “Instead you’re indoctrinating others.”
“Groupthink is a useful tool, if it’s not overused,” I say mildly.
Simpkins doesn’t encourage that degree of interdependence among her agents. She and Vic used to argue about it sometimes, especially after she got stuck with us for a month while Vic was in the hospital.
“That isn’t your entire theory,” she says after a minute.
“I think you need to look at the social workers,” I admit. “When a parent is sexually abusing a child, the father is usually the safe assumption, but this person knew to go after the mother. This is someone with access to the accusations, at least, maybe even the files themselves. This is someone in the system.”
“Or someone attached to someone in the system.”
Eddison shifts uncomfortably. “That would be a pretty big indiscretion, Agent Simpkins. Someone who spills secrets like that would be fired pretty quickly.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps they only spill secrets to one individual.”
“Even if that’s the case, they’re still complicit,” I point out. “These murders have been hitting the news; the details may not be out there, but the names are. Even if the one in the system isn’t doing the killing, they have to realize that it isn’t a coincidence. If they’re actively part of it, if they’re just trying to protect a partner, they’re still helping a murderer.”
“We’ll see,” she says noncommittally. “Thank you for your assistance, agents. You can leave now.” She takes the paper dolls from Mignone’s hand and disappears back into the hallway.
Mignone stares after her, looking conflicted. “Is she always . . .”
“Yes,” we answer in unison. Eddison gives me a ghost of a grin and continues, “Whatever word you were reaching for, yes, the answer is always yes.”
“She plays things very close to the chest,” I add. “She doesn’t like assumptions, she doesn’t like what she perceives to be sloppy language, and she thinks verbal free-for-alls are undisciplined. For all that, she’s a very good agent with a solid track record.”
“Uh-huh.”
“After she meets Holmes and forms an opinion, she’ll assign one of her agents to be the main point of contact with MPD. She’s got good people under her.”
Mignone’s salt-and-pepper moustache twitches; it’s bushy enough that his exact expression is a little hard to read. “When honesty and loyalty collide, which wins?”
“Honesty.” At the repeated unison—unintentional this time—Eddison and I turn and stick our tongues out at each other, and Mignone barks a laugh.
“It’s a shame you two can’t work this. I get it,” he continues quickly, holding up one hand, though I’m not sure either of us was about to protest. “Just a shame.”
My skin crawls with the need to be working this case, to push everything else to the side and find out who’s doing this, who is this person who cares so much in such a twisted way.
That’s probably exactly why I’m not allowed to.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who was scared of angels.
Some of Daddy’s friends called her that, pretty angel or just Angel. Mama used to call her that, but she’d stopped even before she died. One of the men even had a little pewter pin of an angel he always wore on his shirts, between his collar and his shoulder. She stared at it whenever Daddy took his money. He said it was his guardian angel.
She tried to think of other things, like the fort back in the woods. It seemed so far away, and she’d dreamed of taking a blanket and a bag of clothes and running away to live there forever. The other kids in the neighborhood played there, but she’d never been welcome. Or maybe she could just walk, and walk and walk and walk, and end up someplace new every day, and Daddy couldn’t follow. But she couldn’t escape. No matter how hard she tried to think of other things.
One night, while she stared at that angel pin, there was a knock on the door upstairs. You could always hear everything in that house; it had no secrets. All the men froze. There was never a knock at night. Everyone was already there. There was a voice calling something, loud but indistinct over the music. The little girl kept her eyes on the angel.
But the noise continued, and before Daddy and his friends got to their feet, the basement door was kicked in with a blaze of light, forging halos behind the people who stood there. The man with the pin pulled away from her, and in the panic and babble, one of Daddy’s friends lifted a gun.
The little girl didn’t pay much attention to the gun; that was never the thing to hurt her.