I cross the room to stand between Watts and Nancy. “Ava, do you remember how you got to the hospital?”
She frowns at that, her fingers running anxiously along the crinkling gold halo of one of the bears. It’s strikingly similar to praying a rosary, and it’s everything I can do not to close my eyes against the sight, the memory of a string of metal and glass around my mother’s palm. “Not really,” she says eventually. “I fall asleep to the TV sometimes. My dad carries me to bed.”
“You were brought here by a stranger, Ava, someone who knew that your parents got you pregnant and was really angry about it. She brought you here so you’d be safe until you were found, but . . . Ava, I’m really sorry, but she killed your parents.”
There is no good way to tell a child that. I don’t know if there’s a good way to tell anyone that, if it comes to it, but certainly not a child.
She blinks, and stares at me blankly. “What?”
“Detective Mignone went out to your house to find your parents,” I remind her gently. “He found your parents dead. Someone had killed them. And because she brought you here, because we recognize the bears she gave you, we know it’s the same person who’s killed other kids’ parents recently.”
“No.” Her head shakes, increasingly frantic. “No, you’re lying. You’re lying!”
Nancy and the nurse both rush in to calm her as she breaks into hysterics. No tears yet—the shock is too fresh—but her screams are piercing and pained and the heart monitor is shrieking right along with her.
It’s one thing, common and even expected, for kids to deny they’ve been hurt. But this? To genuinely not even realize? Sympathy stirs for her pain, but I can’t bring myself to be sorry her parents are dead.
Her mother’s idea? Christ, this poor girl.
The shock triggers a panic attack, and by the time she’s finally calmer, she’s in an exhausted stupor with the oxygen mask covering the lower half of her face. The nurse strokes Ava’s hair, a physical comfort that has the girl drifting off to sleep, the teddy bears clutched to her chest. “I don’t think you’re going to get anything out of her for a while,” the woman says quietly.
Nancy and Cass stay in the room, pulling chairs away from the bed to give some space. The rest of us head into the hallway.
Holmes glances back through the small window in the door, then at me. “Why was she given two bears?”
“One for the baby.”
She chokes on that a little.
Watts blows out a frustrated breath that’s almost a raspberry. “She didn’t wake up enough to be told your name and she hasn’t read the note that was pinned to her; if you want to head back to the office, you probably can, Ramirez.”
“Do you think there’ll need to be a separate warrant for the list of who accessed Ava’s file?”
“No; ongoing cases usually garner a little bit of wiggle room. At least for this sort of information. I’m going to send the Smiths to CPS to talk to the clerks. They may be bringing Gloria Hess back with them to question. Ramirez . . .”
“I know. I can’t be there if you talk to her.”
Because talking to the kids is one thing, if it brings them comfort, and if it keeps them calm to answer questions. Because they’re given my name. Looking through my case files is research, not investigation. I am an asset to the investigation, but not an element of the investigation itself. Technicalities, as stupid as they can be, protect us. But if suspects are brought into a station or office in an official capacity, I can’t participate or even observe.
God damn it.
And I don’t actually have a way to get back to Quantico. We came in Watts’s car.
I should probably check on the other kids who are still here, but I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Maybe this is stepping away, acknowledging that I don’t have the strength to do this today.
I head out of the hospital, trying to decide if I remember where my car is. I can call a taxi if it’s at Eddison’s or Sterling’s. But there’s also the possibility that it’s in the garage at Quantico, and that’s a bit more than I want to pay for a ride.
My phone rings in my hand, and I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know, I don’t—why is Jenny Hanoverian calling me? “Jenny?”
“Mercedes,” she says warmly. “My husband tells me you might need a ride back to Quantico. The girls are showing Marlene Magic Mike, so I’m free as a bird.”
Watts, you clever fiend.
“I don’t want to inconvenience you—”
“I once had to drive to Atlanta because Holly forgot her running shoes for a track meet; beat that, and we’ll talk about being inconvenienced.”
Holly is her daughter, though, and I am suddenly very incapable of continuing with any kind of argument, because that is a weird and wonderful and terrifying thought.
She pulls up in her minivan, the front bumper still sporting the blue paint from when one of Brittany’s driving lessons ended in a destroyed toy box, and she takes a long look at my face as I buckle in. And then she spends the drive back chatting about her vegetable garden and the war she’s waging with the invading rabbits. It’s a gift, and there’s something about it . . .
It’s Siobhan, I realize. When Siobhan and I were together, she’d burble on about things because she didn’t want to know about my day or my cases. But Jenny is talking because I can’t, and it’s strange how something so similar can be so different.
We stop to pick up a late lunch for everyone, bacon grilled-cheese sandwiches and several different kinds of soup, and a quick glance around the office lobby is enough to reassure me that my mother isn’t there. Upstairs, Vic gives me a card with an address and a room number on it, a hotel here in Quantico, but doesn’t say a word.
I should probably figure out where my car is.
Jenny leaves after lunch, waving off my gratitude. She just kisses us all on the cheek, goes for Eddison’s other cheek after he blushes the first time, and walks off laughing.
“If she ever leaves you,” I tell Vic solemnly, “I’m marrying her.”
He chuckles and leaves us to our research. After all, all three of us have proposed to his mother at various times.
We spend the afternoon digging through my cases, occasionally sending names to Cass to have her analysts do more in-depth research in systems Sterling can’t access. Ava, she reports, is with an obstetrician to have an ultrasound. Her mother bought her vitamins, but they weren’t specifically prenatal, and she hadn’t had any appointments. Of course she hadn’t—every clinic in the country would have been required to report it.
“CPS keeps physical and digital files,” Sterling says suddenly.
Given that none of us have said anything in half an hour, the abrupt declaration makes me and Eddison blink stupidly. “Right,” I say after a minute. “We’ve got copies of several of the physical files.”
“So why are we assuming that the digital files are the only ones the killer is checking? There’s a whole file room.”
I don’t have a phone number for either of the Smiths, so I text Cass, who answers with a promise to have the Smiths poke at it.
And then, an hour later, she calls the conference room extension and demands to be on speaker. “Sterling, you’re a fucking genius,” she announces.
“Well, yes,” Sterling agrees, nonplussed. “Why this time?”
“Because there are files missing from the records room. The administrator has to go through drawer by drawer to match the files to their spreadsheets and what’s been checked out legitimately, but we’ve got three missing from what he’s checked so far.”
“Ava’s?”
“No, it’s there, but not quite in the right place. Someone took it out and then put it back wrong. All the kids we’ve met are accounted for.”
“Who reported the Levines to CPS?” I ask.
“A neighbor. The fence between the two houses is chain link and she saw Ava in the pool. Bathing suit.”
And a bathing suit was going to make that low belly very evident.
“How far along is she? Do they know yet?”