“You’re that one?”
Sterling honest-to-God growls at him, and he flushes.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he says quickly. “Dispatch said the call came from the FBI and we didn’t know why, that’s all. We saw the story in the paper.”
“Agent Kathleen Watts is the lead agent on the case, and she’s partnered with Detectives Holmes and Mignone out of Manassas.”
“Chief got a call from Watts; she should be just behind you.”
“It’ll take her longer from—” Sterling stops, watching an SUV with flashing lights slam to a stop behind her car. “She was still in Manassas. Mercedes, she was still in Manassas.”
Which means she was still questioning Gloria.
Watts and Holmes run up the lawn. “Cara Ehret,” Watts calls before they even reach us. “She changed her name to Caroline Tillerman after she left foster care. She’s one of the file clerks. We’ve got officers on their way to her apartment and an APB out on her car.”
Caroline Tillerman. Cass and I spoke face-to-face with her at the CPS office.
I look at Holmes, who’s significantly more shaken. “We were on the phone with Emilia.”
She closes her eyes, hand rising automatically so she can kiss her thumbnail.
“We all looked at Lincoln Anders when he said he’d take Emilia in,” Sterling says. “CPS did their checks, but so did we. He was completely clean. The closest he’d come to trouble was a couple of speeding tickets. Why in the hell would she attack him?”
“CPS received an anonymous complaint this morning.”
“Anonymous.”
“This morning?”
Watts nods impatiently. “Caller said his girlfriend couldn’t be trusted with children, because she killed a boy.”
“What?” we both demand.
“When Stacia Yakova was a teenager, she was helping her father clean his guns at the kitchen table, and a neighbor called over to ask her father’s help with something heavy. So he told her to put down the gun she was working on and he’d be right back. Her brother came in, high off his ass, and thought she was an intruder. He attacked her with a knife. Got a few slashes and stabs in because she didn’t want to hurt him, but when he got the knife to her throat, she grabbed one of the guns they hadn’t worked on yet and shot him in the thigh.”
“Bled out?”
“No, she called an ambulance, they got him to the hospital, but when they gave him anesthesia for surgery—”
“He was a tweaker.”
“The father walked in on the end of the struggle. He was the one to pull his son off of her. It was clearly self-defense so she was never charged with anything.”
“If this anonymous complaint turns out to be one of her brother’s former friends or girlfriends . . .” I shake my head. “But Cara probably wasn’t in any fit state to research it. She heard Emilia’s name and decided then and there.”
My phone rings, and I swear to fucking God—
Sterling yanks it out of my hands. “It’s Cass,” she reports, and accepts the call to speaker. “Kearney, you’ve got Ramirez, Sterling, Watts, and Holmes.”
“Emilia?” she asks immediately.
“. . . No.”
“Damn.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath, both inhalation and exhalation clearly audible over the line. “Caroline Tillerman is not at her apartment. Officers found several masks, white jumpsuits, both bloodied and clean, blonde wigs, both bloodied and clean, a box of white angel teddy bears . . . everything in her kit except a knife and a gun, but there are boxes of ammunition.”
“Do we know what she’s driving?”
“It’s a 2004 dark blue Honda CR-V. We found all eight of the files missing from CPS, and have agents and officers on the way to those houses to secure the families.”
“What about the address in Stafford?”
“The house is owned by Navy Lieutenant Commander DeShawm Douglass. He lives there with his wife, Octavia, and their nine-year-old daughter, Nichelle. There are no complaints or suspicions of abuse in the household, either in Stafford County or their previous residences.”
“Call SPD, get officers out there.”
“What are you thinking?” asks Watts.
“Cara just point-blank murdered a kid she was trying to save. She is freaking the fuck out, and if she tries to go to her apartment, she’ll see the police. Where do you go when there’s nowhere else to go?”
“I go home,” Holmes says slowly. “To my husband and daughter.”
“Pretend you’re twenty-three and single.”
“To my parents, then.”
“But her mother is dead and her father is in prison. That leaves the house in Stafford, where her father put her through absolute hell. The house where a man is living with his little girl, and she has checked every day to make sure there are no complaints.”
“There still isn’t a complaint,” Sterling points out.
“Do you think that matters anymore to the woman we heard on the phone?”
She shakes her head.
“Burnside is calling Stafford,” Cass reports. “He’ll give a courtesy call to NCIS after, given that the homeowner is a lieutenant commander. We think we may have identified Cara’s initial trigger.”
“What’s that?”
“A few months ago, her father hired a private investigator to find her. When that was successful, he sent her a letter, asking her to come see him. The letter’s still in her apartment, so we called the prison.”
“Did she go?”
“Yes. This, though: her father got remarried, and his wife is expecting a baby. She’s having a little girl in August.”
“You want to tell me how the hell a man in prison for whoring out his daughter gets conjugal visits?” Watts snarls.
“He doesn’t, but when there’s a friendly prison guard to smuggle out a sperm sample, new wife can go to a fertility clinic for implantation. Guard was fired but it was a done deed.”
“And the father who sold her again and again to his friends gets another little girl. I remember interviewing him after the arrest; he probably tracked her down and told her in person just to torture her. Bastard probably got off on getting to hurt her again. You’re right, that has to be our trigger.”
“We borrowed Blakey, Cuomo, and Kang’s teams so we’d have enough. Hanoverian signed off on it.”
“Her endgame is Stafford.” My heart beats a rapid tattoo. “She can’t help it.”
“How sure are you?”
“What do you do when you’re lost in the woods?” I ask softly.
Sterling takes a step closer to me, leaning into my side.
“You run home,” I remind her. “Everything is on fire and overwhelming, and she’s running home, but when she gets there, she’s going to remember all the ways she was hurt, she’s going to see that little girl, and she’s going to see herself.”
“Kearney, send the address to Eddison.”
“He’s still here at the office,” Cass says.
“He’s what?” Sterling and I ask together.
There’s a shuffle and a beep, and then we can hear Eddison’s tired grumble. “Where are we going?”
“Fill him in on the way, just get there,” Watts orders. “Ramirez, Sterling, go.”
“The regulations?” Sterling asks hesitantly.
“Screw them. You’re the best chance of talking her down, just make sure Kearney makes the arrest. Give me your keys, take mine; I’ve got the lights.” She holds out her hand. Sterling takes the keys from me and drops them in Watts’s hand, scooping up the ring for the SUV.
Sterling had a reputation at the Denver field office for making seasoned agents cry when she drove. Never caused an accident, never incurred damage, but you spend the entire trip praying. Sounds like just what we need. As she peels rubber getting us down the street, I brace myself by my legs, much as I envision sailors must during hurricanes.
“Please let us get there,” I whisper. “Por favor.”
27
The Douglasses’ house is painted with flashing red and blue lights when we squeal in. Eddison, standing at the front door with a uniform, checks his watch and shudders.
“She got here first, probably came straight from Chantilly,” he tells us. “Mother is inside. Father’s on his way to the hospital, but the mother refuses to leave until her daughter’s safe.”