I have the feeling, though, that when the elite gyms he’s auditioning with learn his story, he’ll find a space and a host family to be his legal guardians. I hesitate to think of it as One Good Thing, but at least it’ll be something.
One of the uniformed officers stays with Noah when a doctor comes to take him for a CT. Holmes and I wander out to the waiting room to join Sterling and the newly arrived Cass.
“Agent Watts is on her way,” Cass immediately reports to Holmes. “She lives up in Norfolk.”
“Hell of a commute. That’s what, three hours each way to work?”
“Her husband is stationed on the base at Norfolk; she spends the weekends there, cases allowing, and stays with her brother-in-law and his wife on base at Quantico during the week.”
Holmes shakes her head. “That sounds exhausting.”
“She’ll be here as soon as she can, but she asked me to come ahead.”
“Let’s fill you in, then.”
22
“I’m just going to . . .” I hold up my phone, and Holmes nods, focused on the attentive Cass.
Sterling follows me to the waiting room, where I can actually make a call without getting scolded. “You believe him, then? That he wasn’t abused?”
“I do, and that’s going to be a problem.”
“That you believe him?”
“That he wasn’t abused.”
“You want to run that one by me again? We’re supposed to be happy when kids aren’t abused.”
“So far as we know, she hasn’t killed any innocent people,” I tell her quietly. The waiting room isn’t frenzied, but there are a few people there, and our professional clothing is already getting some looks. I take her by the elbow and lead her outside, a safe distance from the doors so we don’t get in anyone’s way. “Mason’s father, Paul Jeffers, maybe. We don’t know if he was aware of what his wife was doing. Probably not, but we’ll never know, and I don’t think our killer is capable of drawing a line between ignorant and complicit.”
“Okay . . .”
“Zoe and Caleb Jones died, and she’s going to take that as not saving them soon enough. She’s going to take that on herself, and it’s going to make her rage burn even faster, and even messier. And when word gets out that Noah wasn’t remotely abused, that she murdered a completely innocent woman who loved and supported her son?”
Sterling pales in the crappy outdoor lighting. “There have to be hundreds of at-risk kids in this county. We have no way to know who she’ll go after. There’s no way to warn anyone.” She touches the thin gold Star of David at her throat. “Mercedes . . .”
“I know. Watts needs to start really digging into the CPS employees. We also need a list of kids who fit this killer’s criteria. Anything that’s gone through the Manassas office. I know it’s probably a huge list, but we have to have something to work off of. We’re running out of time.”
I text Eddison and Vic to let them know, hoping they’ll sleep through the alerts. There’s nothing they can do right now anyway. Still, it’s not entirely surprising that not long after we head back inside, Eddison walks in with a drink carrier.
“It was a gas station,” he says gruffly, handing one to Sterling. “I didn’t want to trust the tea. It’s hot chocolate.”
He is absolutely not awake enough to safely drive, how the hell did he get here?
Then he throws away the empty cup in the fourth spot of the carrier and picks up a second cup of jet fuel for himself, so there’s that terrifying answer. He holds the last cup out to me, a mix of hot chocolate and coffee because they’re both shitty at gas stations but mixed together, they’re not half bad. Somehow.
“If we head to the office, we can keep working on your files,” he says after listening to the full update. “Maybe we can find her.”
“Check with Holmes. She might want me here for when Watts questions Noah.”
But Noah, when he gets out of CT with the good news of no concussion, is fast asleep and hard to wake, the trauma adding to the Benadryl to knock him out. They wheel him to a room in Pediatrics, and he doesn’t so much as stir when they shift him to a normal bed. At least they cleaned him up before the scan and changed his clothes. We stand in the doorway and look in.
Holmes smiles a little at the sight, something soft and maybe a little wistful. “How far is it to Quantico?”
“This time of day? About half an hour.”
“Then go ahead. Watts can call you back if she wants you here for questions.”
“All right. We’ll be at the office for the foreseeable future.”
“Mercedes.”
I turn to look at her more fully. “I think I’ve been in the Bureau too long; hearing my first name from adults makes me start to worry.”
“Mignone and I have been partners for five years; I’m still not convinced he knows my first name,” she agrees. “What you said to Noah, earlier, about why? It was a good answer.”
“I keep struggling toward a why,” I murmur. “I think that’s part of it. It’s my part of it. I don’t think it’s all of it.”
“We’ll find out the rest, with any luck. But for now it was the right answer.”
We let Cass know we’re heading out, and once outside, Eddison starts rooting for his keys. Sterling slips her hand into his pocket, yanks out the ring, and shoves them deep in her purse. “Uh-uh,” she tells him flatly. “You’re not driving.”
“I always drive.”
“You’re not driving.”
“But I always drive.”
“And yet, you’re not driving.”
I bite my lip against a laugh. It’s like counting on the tides.
Spreading out in the bullpen’s conference room, we gradually settle into a system. Eddison and I pore over all of our team’s old cases, skimming over details and notes from the digital files, and whenever a reference to someone—a family member; a neighbor; a hospital worker; a lawyer; a victim, really anyone that makes us look twice—strikes us as interesting, we call out the name for Sterling to research, to find out where they are now.
It is very quickly a depressing venture.
Being a victim isn’t something that disappears as soon as you’re rescued. It doesn’t vanish the moment the people who hurt you are taken into custody. That sense of it, that awareness of being not just victimized but a victim, it sticks to your bones for years, even decades. That sense of the thing can cause as much damage as the original trauma, as life goes on.
Being a victim has its own nasty form of recidivism.
In the days following the destruction of the Garden, as girls either succumbed to grievous wounds or began to improve, thirteen Butterflies survived, Inara, Victoria-Bliss, and Ravenna among them. Six months later, there were only nine. Now there are seven, though, to be fair, Marenka died in a car accident. All the rest were lost to suicide as they struggled to live in a world that was supposed to be better, where they should have been able to leave their trauma behind them. As calm as I tried to be, I understand Inara’s worry about Ravenna.
Suicide, whether of the original victims or their friends and family, is a common thread through our research. So is drug and alcohol abuse. So is prison. So is continued victimization through domestic violence.
“Have you ever given out a bear with wings?” Eddison asks when we stop for a break.
By which I mean I slammed the laptop shut because I needed five fucking minutes without a depressing-as-shit statistic, and he decided that meant time for breakfast.
Which actually meant splitting a giant bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
“No,” I sigh, forehead against the cool surface of the table. “I buy our bears by the gross. They come in a variety of colors but there are no accessories.”
“So the angel means something to her specifically.”
“The kids have mostly described her as looking like an angel,” Sterling notes. “It could just be something that she took on for herself, especially if someone in her family or fosters were religious.”
“Or a reflection of her name. Angel. Angelica. Angelique. Or if she had a brother named Angel. Angelo.”