“Hospital?” Sterling asks, throwing back the blanket to reach for the light.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
The smack upside the head, gentle as it is, still takes me by surprise. “Mercedes Ramirez, don’t you dare apologize for any of this,” she says severely. “It is not your fault.”
I know that, I do, but I still don’t really have a response for that right now. “We should grab our bags for work. I doubt we’ll be getting back before the office.”
The ER isn’t anywhere near as frantic as two days ago. Jesucristo. Dos días. A nurse at the station recognizes me and points me to one of the closed curtains. Sterling stays at the counter to talk to the nurse as I walk over, stepping a little too hard on purpose so the sound can announce my approach. “It’s Ramirez,” I say.
Holmes pulls the curtain back, revealing a pair of calm nurses and a boy sitting on the bed, tear-stained and confused and splashed with blood. He’s in an undershirt and boxers, showing a lean, muscled body that’s unusual for a boy his age. Holmes was right, though, he’s got a lot of bruising, and one of the nurses is bent over a red, swollen ankle.
“My name is Mercedes Ramirez,” I tell him, and he jerks his head up to look at me. “Someone gave you my name?”
He nods slowly. “She killed my mom,” he says. His voice sounds slurred, not mushy so much as drugged, maybe?
“She hit him pretty good on the back of the head when he fought her,” Holmes explains, “and he’s been having problems with allergies the past few days, so his mother gave him some Benadryl to help him sleep. They’ll do a scan for concussion but they don’t want to give him anything for the headache until the Benadryl wears off a bit more.”
It’s a little scary that Holmes and I have now spent enough time with each other for her to interpret my expressions that well. I lean against the foot of the bed, curling my hands around the plastic frame so he can see them. “Noah? Can you tell us what happened?”
“I was sleeping.” He shakes his head, his eyes going momentarily out of focus. “Mom sent me to bed early because it’s an early morning. We’re driving to Williamsburg tomorrow, to Busch Gardens. For my birthday.”
¡Por amor de Dios, tenga compasión!
“What woke you up?” Holmes asks. She must have already questioned him a bit, before she called and on the way over, but you’d never know it from her face or body language.
“I thought it was a nightmare. One of those creepy mannequins. A hand shook my shoulder, I opened my eyes, and there it was. The hand covered my mouth when I tried to scream.” He mumbles the last bit, a blush creeping up his neck, and there’s something perversely reassuring about the self-conscious pride of preteen boys. “She said I had to be quiet.”
“She?”
“Sounded like a she. I mean, I guess it didn’t have to be, like a drag queen or something, maybe, but um . . .” He blushes a scalding pink. “I wasn’t walking too straight. She put an arm around me, like to steer me? And she was, uh, soft. You know? Like . . .” Blushing even more fiercely, he cups a hand against his chest and squeezes.
One of the nurses ducks his head to his shoulder to hide his smile.
The story is heart-achingly familiar. She took him to his mother’s room and forced him to stand beside the bed while she stabbed his mother to death. He fought her, but she pistol-whipped the back of his skull hard enough to make him groggy, and she finished the job, took him to the van—or an SUV, he isn’t sure, but it was bigger than his mom’s sedan—gave him the bear, and dropped him off one street over from the police station.
After, of course, giving him my name.
“She kept saying she was saving me,” he says, his voice small and pained. “Saving me from what, though? She said my mom had to pay. That she couldn’t keep doing this to me. Doing what?”
Holmes and I trade a look, and she nods for me to take it. “Noah, this person has been going after parents who hurt or endanger their children.”
“My mom never hurt me!” he retorts, straightening so fast he visibly fights off a bout of nausea. “She never hurt me.”
“Noah—”
“No. We watch those crime shows, I know a lot of kids say that even though they’re being abused, but I’m not!”
“When you were at a friend’s house a couple of weeks ago, someone called Child Protective Services to lodge a concern,” Holmes tells him. “They said you were badly bruised and limping when you arrived.”
“My dad was an Olympic gymnast.” His eyes are bright but determined, so rather than derail what seems to be a non sequitur, we stay silent. “He won bronze medals for the Netherlands. When he and Mom got married, they moved here and he started training gymnasts. He died when I was little. All I’ve ever wanted is to go to the Olympics like my dad, but our gym closed two years ago. I wasn’t good enough yet to get into one of the competitive gyms. Last year, I was on the wait list. No spots opened up. They said if I kept practicing, I could audition again next month.”
“You practice at home.”
“Mom converted the basement for me. We’re not rich, though. That’s why I was wait-listed, because I have to have a scholarship slot. Our mats are old, and the padding isn’t great, so I get bruised. I twisted my ankle trying a new beam dismount. And . . .” He blushes again. “I’ve been trying to get it down for the audition, so I haven’t let it heal. You have to believe me, my mom has never hurt me. All my friends know how hard I practice.”
“Noah, do you know if someone from CPS came to your home?”
“Yes, a lady named Martha. We showed her the gym in the basement, and she watched a couple of my practice routines and some of the videos. She said she believed us, and she’d get it taken care of.” He blinks rapidly, trying to keep back tears. “Is that why this lady killed my mom? Because she didn’t believe us?”
“Noah . . .” Moving around the end of the bed, I sit near enough to offer a hand. He takes it immediately, squeezing punishingly hard. I don’t tell him to ease up. “This person, whoever’s doing this . . . she’s so caught up in the need to do it that she’s rushing, and she isn’t getting all the information. I know that can’t be easy to hear, and I’m sorry. I am so sorry for what happened to you and your mom.”
“Why you?”
For the first time, I finally feel like I have an answer that’s almost good enough. “Because whoever she is, she knows I care. She feels like other people aren’t paying enough attention to kids being hurt and my whole job is to find and arrest people who hurt kids. She gave you my name because she knew I would drop everything to be here for you.”
The tears trickle down his face, smearing the dried blood that hasn’t been wiped away. “My mom.”
“Loved you. Beyond words, beyond reason, beyond death. She loved you, and loves you still. Don’t ever forget that, Noah.”
He nods gravely.
Holmes glances down at the notebook in her hand. “Noah, what was your dad’s name?”
“Constantijn Hakken,” he sniffs. “With a j.”
Halfway through writing it, Holmes blinks. “Where does the j go?” she asks helplessly.
The smiling nurse chokes a little.
Turns out the j comes after the i, and there’s an alphabet joke in there somewhere if I’m brave enough to make it (I’m not). His mother’s name is Maartje, and when we ask about his grandparents, he shifts uncomfortably on the bed. His father’s parents, he explains, didn’t think gymnastics was good enough for their son, and they haven’t had contact since his father was a teenager. His mother grew up as a ward of the state, and never knew her parents.
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.”
“I’d say this is a bad time for Yvonne to be on maternity leave but she’d only yell at us for being this vague,” I mumble.
“Why the blonde wig, though?” he continues, ignoring me. “Even in classical art, angels had hair colors in t
he full range. They’re not all blonde, whatever Precious Moments would have you believe.”
Sterling shrugs and very kindly doesn’t comment on his familiarity with Precious Moments. “Don’t look at me; Jewish angels are properly terrifying. Have you ever read those descriptions? There is nothing blonde or pretty about them.”
“And Jesus wasn’t white, but who wants to admit that?”
With a deep groan, I open the laptop again. “Okay, try Heather Grant,” I tell Sterling, along with the date of birth and social security number. “She went missing in Utah and was found a month later in a field; said angels had taken her.”
“And those angels turned out to be?”
“An older couple who desperately wanted kids but hadn’t been able to have or adopt any of their own. He had a heart attack, she left to get help, and Heather wandered away. She was only calm for interviews if she was in my lap where she could play with my crucifix.”
“Let’s see, she is now . . . fifteen. Doing okay, still lives on the family ranch. Her mother died a few years ago, but her grandmother came out to live on the ranch so she wouldn’t be the only female. No red flags.”
“Sara Murphy,” Eddison reads off his screen. “She’d be twenty-four now. The man who kidnapped and kept her for his ‘heaven wife’ had dozens of sets of wings hanging from the ceiling of his cabin, made out of all kinds of found things. She wouldn’t sleep unless Mercedes was in the room.”
“In jail for assault,” Sterling reports after a minute. “She escorted a friend to an appointment at an abortion clinic with protestors. One of the protestors tried to hit her friend with a sign, Sara grabbed the sign and beat him with the two-by-four it was stapled to. She’s got another few months.”
“Huh. You hear ‘jail’ and you don’t expect to be proud by the end of it.”
“Cara Ehret,” I say. “She’d be twenty-three now, and really, what didn’t happen to her at home.”
“Moved around through a lot of foster homes, graduated high school at seventeen and falls off the grid. I . . . actually can’t find her past that. We’ll have to get one of the techs on it when they get in.”
The Summer Children Page 19
