The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)
Dot Hutchison
1
“Eliza, help me out here.”
I glance at Cass. “With?”
“What is it with Mercedes and sunflowers?”
Our third teammate stops fluffing the arrangement of sunflowers in the vase on the filing cabinet and turns to face my desk, where Cass and I are sitting. “Cass, you’ve known me for how long now, and you’ve never asked?”
Cass shrugs, but as with most of her gestures, she does it with her whole body. Even the chair our feet are resting on moves with the full-body ripple. “I guess it never seemed important enough to ask.”
“And it is now?”
“No, but now I’m bored and you have a fresh delivery of them.”
I tune them out—they’ve been doing this a lot longer than I’ve known them—and check the time on my phone, then look to the empty desk set just a bit apart from ours. Bran is late.
Bran is never late. He is, in fact, compulsively early for everything.
“I like sunflowers because they reach for the sun, always.”
“Oh, God, you and your metaphors.”
Okay, so there’s a larger-than-average possibility that I’m looking for Bran less out of concern and more out of a wish that his sudden appearance will derail the friendly bickering. Cassondra Kearney and Mercedes Ramirez met at the FBI Academy some thirteen years ago, and both went into the Crimes Against Children division. Until recently, they were on different teams, but not quite a year ago there was a division-wide restructuring to account for the greater workload all the teams were facing, and our unit chief, Vic Hanoverian, decided we’d benefit from a fourth member. He gave us Cass, who’d been loaned to us on a particularly hellish and personal case two years before. Of the various Quantico-based CAC folks, she was the most temperamentally suited to our team, he informed us.
He was clearly trying not to laugh during that little speech. We are, without question, Vic’s favorite team, largely because Bran and Mercedes were his partners until his promotion, but loving us doesn’t mean he doesn’t also enjoy poking us with sticks. Or rather, poking Bran with a stick.
Bran was already outnumbered with just me and Mercedes. Cass makes it a pretty hopeless situation.
“Eliza? Eliza!”
Cass’s elbow in my side makes me flinch. “What?”
“What do you think?”
“What do I think? What do I think . . . about . . . the thing I was obviously not paying attention to?”
Both of them snicker, though Mercedes shakes her head. “Situational awareness, Sterling. Try to practice some.”
“So what do I think about what?” I ask rather than dignify that with an actual response.
“Is Mercedes a sunflower?” Cass repeats.
“You know, this is exactly the kind of conversation that gives him nightmares.”
They look over at Bran’s desk and burst into laughter. They don’t even have to ask who “him” is. It’s comforting, this team dynamic, even if it is still a little terrifying at times. When I graduated the academy, I was sent back to Colorado, to the Denver Field Office. My mother was relieved—if I absolutely had to go into such a dangerous, unladylike career, at least it was where she could nag me face-to-face about it—but I was a little disappointed. I’d wanted to go to new places for more than just the seventeen weeks of the academy. Then, four years ago or so, I was offered a transfer to this team. It took a little while for all of us to adjust.
“His bag is here,” Mercedes notes. “Look, you can see it poking out from the well of the desk.”
Huh. So it is. “In with Vic?”
“Or Yvonne, if something’s breaking and she’s still pulling all the data down. Is she in her office?”
Cass and I both strain to see Yvonne’s office, but the door is closed and the windowless space doesn’t give us any hint if the team’s technical analyst is in yet or not.
“So Eliza, have you put The Dress up on Craigslist yet?” Cass asks.
“If I give you a fork, will you go play with an electrical socket?”
She grins at me, unrepentant.
Before either of them can offer more suggestions regarding my never-been-used wedding dress, the door to Vic’s office—up at the top of a slight ramp that turns toward a conference room a half floor up—opens and Vic steps out to lean against the rail. “Good morning, ladies.”
“Good morning, Charlie,” all three of us chorus.
Normally he smiles and tells us to save it for Eddison.
Today . . . “You’ve got a case, local. Richmond.”
We share looks between us, then turn back to him. Mercedes says what we’re all probably thinking. “Okay?”
“Eddison will join you at the car. Watts’s team is taking lead on this one, but you’ll be working with them.”
Eddison’s—Bran’s—absence suddenly strikes me in a new, worrying light. “It’s a kidnapping, isn’t it?” I ask. “A little girl?”
“Yvonne will send you the files in a minute. She’s just tagging the last few things sent over.”
Which means yes, but he doesn’t want anyone else in the bullpen gossiping about it.
I slide off my desk—Cass hops, because she’s a little too short to manage the slide with accuracy—and the three of us gather what we need in under thirty seconds. Local, so we don’t need our go bags. We do need our coats—hello, late October. None of us like carrying our purses out in the field if we can avoid it, but leaving them in the cars is equally uncomfortable, so what can’t hang on our belts gets shifted to the pockets in our pants and coats until they bulge like chipmunk cheeks.