“Because I know you won’t tell anyone outside your team, and you deserve to know that it wasn’t you, your team, or your case that sent her round the bend,” she says bluntly. “Sit, please.”
I sit. She’s wearing lilac today, in some kind of fabric that drapes and shimmers becomingly, and I think this is who Sterling should grow up to be, someone who can wear the pastels and the feminine things without it taking a millimeter of authority away from her. Sterling just has to wait until she doesn’t look like jailbait.
“I’m told you haven’t seen any of the counselors here.”
“I’ve talked with my priest about everything. I felt like I could be more forthcoming.”
“How goes your research through your old cases?”
I run her through the parameters we’re using, not shying away from explaining the glacial pace. Because a lot of our search is based on instinct and impression, we can’t just turn it over to the technical analysts as is. We have to narrow it down first.
She looks back over her page of notes, written in some ultraefficient shorthand possibly known only to her. “You’re still staying with your teammates?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“If you would feel more comfortable at home—”
“All due respect, ma’am,” I interrupt softly, “it’s not about feeling unsafe at my house. I just feel better with Eddison and Sterling. Less exposed.”
She nods thoughtfully, her dark eyes very aware in ways I’m not entirely comfortable with. “Are you going to sell the house?”
“I don’t know. I’m honestly not planning to think about it until all this is done.”
“That’s understandable. Professional opinion, Agent Ramirez: When do you think this person is going to strike again?”
I take a minute to run back through all the factors and variables that have been hammering at my skull for hours, days maybe. In the end, though, there’s really only one answer.
“Two days, if we’re lucky. Very likely less.”
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was scared of breaking.
Or breaking more. She was honest enough with herself to acknowledge she’d been broken for a very long time. Some of that she’d fixed; some she was still working on. Some, she knew, could never heal. Even if her body someday gave up the scars, her soul would still carry the wounds.
It hurt, every time, to acknowledge that she’d never truly be whole.
But she did acknowledge it, because some pain was necessary, even healthy.
When she rammed against those broken places—when a nightmare was too vivid, when someone touched her in a way too rich with memory, when someone asked her why she hated being in photos—she reminded herself of all the ways she wasn’t that little girl anymore.
She had a new name, one her daddy and his friends had never touched.
She’d gone to college and graduated with honors.
She had friends, though she’d left most of them behind when she graduated. But she kept some of them, even after she’d moved, and she was making new ones.
She’d moved back to Virginia. She almost hadn’t, but it seemed silly to avoid an entire state just because she’d been so miserable for so many years. It was hardly the state’s fault. And because returning to Virginia was brave, she didn’t call herself cowardly for avoiding her old city. That much allowance she would give herself.
She had a job she loved, and was so proud of it. She was helping people, helping children. Children who were like the little girl she used to be. There were a lot of things she still wasn’t strong enough to do or be, maybe never would be, but this she could do. She could help the children who so desperately needed it, and she didn’t have to push herself past the breaking point.
And whenever she started to doubt, whenever she felt like she was more scar tissue than real person, she remembered her angel, and drew strength from the memory. The teddy bear still sat on her bed, a gift and a kindness. It had seen so many tears from her over the years, but eventually it saw joy as well, and the kind of tears that came of laughing too hard.
And she had the angel herself, in a way. She’d been shocked, at first, to see the angel while she was out running errands for her small apartment. She wasn’t entirely sure why. After all, even angels had to live somewhere. But it was such a big world. It was a sign, she decided, that she was exactly where she needed to be. She was here, helping children, and her angel was still helping children. She was still an angel.
She was healing, and she wasn’t as afraid.
23
I’m pretty sure the only thing that keeps Sterling from slipping me sleeping pills is the very real possibility of us getting called in. She is, however, clearly out of all fucks for my fidgets, because she eventually rolls over in bed and knees me right in the ass. Once it hits two o’clock, it’s like all the tension floods out of me. None of the calls have been that late. Early?
Despite having set the alarm on my phone for six-thirty, I don’t wake up till a little after ten. Sterling, already showered and dressed and sitting at her table with the crossword puzzle, just shrugs at my glower. “You needed the sleep. Vic said not to come in until you woke up on your own.”
There’s only so much I can mutter about that. I mean, I do, because it makes me feel perversely better to grumble about it like Muttley, but I’m well aware it doesn’t accomplish anything.
It takes every trick I’ve ever learned with concealer to make the shadows under my eyes look vaguely human, and even then we’ll call it a partial success. When I come out, Sterling hands me a bowl of oatmeal, a glass of orange juice, and the front page of the paper.
A picture of Noah’s mother fills a third of the space above the fold. Constantijn Hakken (and it’s spelled differently each of the three times it’s written, which, come on, paper) is mentioned, with his Olympic history and his unexpected death from an aneurysm when Noah was three. If he’d lived, his son probably would have been in intensive training from a young age rather than trying to play catch up from a hobby gym. Maartje Hakken managed a local credit union and volunteered at her son’s school one day a week, as well as assisting with a number of PTA events. As a legacy, loving your son and working hard is pretty decent.
Below the fold, however, the article mentions the rash of similar murders. It doesn’t connect the explosion at the Jones house—the methodology was too different—but it lists the Wilkinses, the Wongs, the Anderses, and the Jefferses, and asks in bold letters if Manassas has our own serial killer.
“Comerse el mundo,” I sigh.
“I’m going to assume that whatever you said doesn’t require an answer.”
“It’s not anything new enough to need one.”
I check in with Watts, just in case she isn’t at the office when we get there, and send her pictures of the more relevant paragraphs of the article. She texts back that the kids in the hospital have been moved to a corner block of rooms with a pair of guards at all times, and an agent has been dispatched to Ronnie Wilkins’s grandmother to fill her in and make sure she isn’t besieged by the curious or prurient.
As soon as we get to the office, Cass pounces and drags me into the conference room, which is still in our setup from yesterday. “We’ve got the list from CPS, file-by-file access. They’re working on identifying the kids in similar circumstances, but it’s going to take more time than we have, I think. They’ll forward them in bunches to the Smiths.”
Eddison grunts from the other side of the table and slides me a chipotle hot chocolate.
For the most part, the list is exactly what you’d expect it to be. The social workers and nurses are logged as they follow up on different aspects of each case, and the clerks are the ones who add in paperwork from external sources as it comes to their office. And it makes sense that the clerks occasionally log in to the files to make sure that all forms are accounted for.