The Summer Children (The Collector Series Book 3) Read online

  ALSO BY DOT HUTCHISON

  A Wounded Name

  The Butterfly Garden

  The Roses of May

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Dot Hutchison

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542049887

  ISBN-10: 1542049881

  Cover design by Damon Freeman

  To C. V. Wyk—

  Look at us! We did it!

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

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  8

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was scared of the dark.

  Which was silly, even she knew that. There was nothing in the dark to hurt you that wasn’t also in the light. You just couldn’t see it coming.

  So maybe that was what she hated, that blindness and helplessness.

  Always helpless.

  But things did get worse in the dark, didn’t they? People are always more honest when no one can see them.

  In the light, her mama would only sigh and sniffle her sadness, blinking away tears, but in the darkness her sobs would become living things, fleeing her bedroom to tuck away in the drafty corners of the house and wail so everyone could hear them. Sometimes screams would stalk after them, but even in the dark her mama was rarely brave enough for that.

  And her daddy . . .

  In the light, her daddy was always sorry, always apologizing to her and her mama.

  I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean that.

  I’m sorry, baby, I just lost my temper.

  Look what you made me do, baby, I’m sorry.

  I’m sorry, baby, but this is for your own good.

  Every pinch and punch, every slap and slam, every curse and insult, he was always sorry. But sorry was only for in the light.

  In the dark, he was Daddy, entirely and honestly himself.

  So maybe she wasn’t silly after all, because wasn’t it a lot smarter to be afraid of true things? If you were afraid of something in the light, wasn’t it just good sense to be more afraid of it in the dark?

  1

  The roads around DC are rarely quiet at any time of day, but a little after midnight on a hot summer Thursday, I-66 is sparsely populated, especially once you pass Chantilly. Beside me, Siobhan babbles contentedly about the jazz club we just left, the singer we went especially to see and how wonderful she’d been, and I nod and hum in the pauses. Jazz isn’t really my thing—I tend to prefer more structure—but Siobhan loves it, and I planned the evening as a bit of an apology for having to work through a handful of date nights recently. The mothers—my last set of foster parents—always told me relationships took conscious effort. Back then, I didn’t realize how much effort they meant.

  My job doesn’t lend itself to standard date nights, but I do try. Siobhan is also an FBI agent and should theoretically understand the up-and-go constraints, but she works translations in Counterterrorism Monday through Friday, eight to four-thirty, and doesn’t always remember that my job in Crimes Against Children is nothing like that. We’ve been on rocky ground the past six months or so, but I can sit through an evening of music I don’t care for if it will make her happy.

  Her steady stream of chatter shifts to work, and my hums get a little more absentminded. We talk about her work all the time—not the details of what she’s translating, but her coworkers, deadlines, the sort of thing that doesn’t bring Internal Affairs around asking about security leaks—but we never talk about mine. Siobhan doesn’t want to hear about the horrible things people do to children, or the horrible people that do them. I can talk about my teammates, our unit chief and his family, but it even unnerves her to hear about the pranks we pull on each other at the office when our desks bear folders full of horrors.

  I’m used to this disparity in our relationship after three years, but I’m always aware of it.

  “Mercedes!”

  My hands clench on the wheel at the sudden spike in volume, eyes flicking to the dark road around us, but I’m too well trained to let my flinch make the car swerve. “What? What is it?”

  “Were you even listening?” she asks wryly, back to her normal volume.

  That would be no, but I’m not about to admit that. “Your bosses are ignorant assholes who wouldn’t know Pashto from Farsi if their lives depended on it, and they need to get off your ass or learn to do it themselves.”

  “I complain about them far too much if that’s your safe guess.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean you were listening.”

  “Sorry,” I sigh. “It’s been a long day, and waking up early is going to suck.”

  “Why are we waking up early?”

  “I have that seminar in the morning.”

  “Oh. You and Eddison being you and Eddison.”

  That’s one way of putting it. Mostly accurate too.

  Because apparently it’s inappropriate, when your partner/team leader asks after a specific report, to tell him not to get his nuts in a vise. And it’s definitely inappropriate for said partner/team leader’s automatic response to be “Calm your tits, hermana.” And it’s especially inappropriate if the section chief happens to be walking through the bullpen and hears the exchange.

  I’m honestly not sure who laughed harder over it later: Sterling, our junior partner, who witnessed everything and got to duck down behind the safety of a cubicle partition to hide her giggles, or Vic, our former partner/leader and now unit chief, standing beside the section chief and lying his ass off to assure him that this was a one-off occurrence.

  Not sure if the sec-chief believed him or not, but both Eddison and I were assigned to the next quarterly sexual harassment seminar. Again. I mean, we’re not Agent Anderson, who has his name on the back of a chair and a first-name relationship with the roster of instructors, but the two of us are there far too often.

  “Is there still a pool on whether or not you two are dating?” Siobhan asks.

  “Several,” I snicker, “and at least one to guess the date our latent sexual tension finally overwhelms us.”

  “So one of these days I should expect a text apologizing for jumping him?”

  “I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.”

  She laughs and reaches up to pull the clips from her hair, her wild red curls spilling around her. “If you’re going to be up and about earlier than usual, do you need
to take me back to Fairfax tonight?”

  “How would you get to work? I drove us straight from the office.”

  “Oh, right. But the question stands.”

  “I’d like you to stay over,” I tell her, taking a hand off the wheel so I can tug one of her curls, “as long as you don’t mind sleeping.”

  “I like sleeping,” she replies dryly. “I try to do it every night, if I can.”

  I respond with dignity and maturity: I stick out my tongue. She laughs again and bats my hand away.

  I live in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Manassas, Virginia, about an hour southwest of DC, and almost as soon as we pull off the interstate, we become the only car on the road for minutes at a time. Siobhan sits up straighter when we pass Vic’s neighborhood. “Did I tell you Marlene offered to make me a raspberry trifle for my birthday?”

  “I was there when she made the offer.”

  “Marlene Hanoverian’s raspberry trifle,” she says dreamily. “I’d marry her if she swung that way.”

  “And if she didn’t have fifty-plus years on you?”

  “Those fifty-plus years have taught her to make the best goddamn pistachio cannoli ever. I am all sorts of good with those extra decades.”

  I pull onto my street, most of the houses dark at this time of night. We have a mix of young professionals in starter houses and empty nesters and retirees who’ve downsized. The houses are more cottage than anything, only one or two rooms, set like single blooms in decently sized lawns. I can’t keep a plant alive to save my life—I’m not allowed to touch the numerous plants in Siobhan’s apartment—but my next-door neighbor, Jason, tends my lawn and the shared garden that stretches between our houses in exchange for helping him with his laundry and mending. He’s a nice older man, still active and a little lonely since his wife died, and I think we both enjoy the trade.

  The driveway is on the left side of the house, extending a full car’s length beyond the back wall, and as I cut the engine, I automatically check that the back porch with its sliding glass door looks undisturbed. There’s a certain amount of personal paranoia that comes with the job, and on the good days, when we’ve saved kids and gotten them safely home, it feels like an okay cost.

  Nothing seems out of place, so I open the car door. Siobhan grabs our messenger bags from the backseat and skips ahead of me on the curving walk to the front porch. “Do you think Vic will bring in something from his mother tomorrow?”

  “Today? Chances are good.”

  “Mmm, I could really go for some Danish. Or, ooh! Those berry-and-cream-cheese pinwheel puffs.”

  “She’s offered to teach you how to bake, you know.”

  “But Marlene is so much better at it.” She passes the motion sensor, and the porch light flickers on as she grins over her shoulder at me. “Besides, it would never survive to the baking part if I tried to do it, I’d eat—Oh my God!”

  I drop my purse, gun in hand with my finger stretched along the side of the trigger guard before I can put thought to it. In the bright glare of the porch light, a shadow sits on the bench swing. I inch forward past Siobhan, gun aimed down, until I can see more clearly through the rails. When my eyes finally adjust, I damn near drop the gun.

  Madre de Dios, there is a child sitting on my porch, and it is covered in blood.

  Instinct says, Race for the child, take him or her in my arms and shield them from the world, check them over for hurts. Training says, Wait, ask the questions, don’t disturb the evidence that will help find whatever asshole did this to them. Sometimes being a good agent feels a lot like being a heartless person, and it’s hard to convince yourself otherwise.

  Training wins, though. It usually does.

  “Are you hurt?” I ask, still inching forward. “Are you alone?”

  The child lifts its head, face a horrific mask streaked in blood, tears, and crusting snot. It sniffles, thin shoulders shaking. “Are you Mercedes?”

  He knows my name. He’s on my porch, and he knows my name. How?

  “Are you hurt?” I ask again, to give myself time to process.

  The kid just looks back at me, eyes huge and haunted. He—fairly sure it’s a he, though it’s hard to tell from here—is in pajamas, a giant blue T-shirt and striped cotton pants, all spattered thickly with blood, and he hunches around something, clutching it. He sits up more as I get closer, up the three steps of the porch, and I can make it out: a teddy bear, white where blood hasn’t rubbed, rust and red, into its fur, with a heart-shaped nose and crinkly gold wings and a halo.

  Jesus.

  The spray patterns on his shirt are alarming—somehow even more than the rest of this—because they’re thick stripes, far too reminiscent of arterial spray. It can’t be his, which is almost comforting, but it’s still someone’s. He’s the kind of fine-boned small that suggests he’s probably older than he looks; my guess is ten or eleven. Beneath the blood and the shocky pallor, he looks bruised.

  “Sweetheart, can you tell me your name?”

  “Ronnie,” he mumbles. “Are you Mercedes? She said you’d come.”

  “She?”

  “She said Mercedes would come and I’ll be safe.”

  “Who is ‘she,’ Ronnie?”

  “The angel who killed my parents.”

  2

  A shrill whine suddenly reminds me that hi, yes, Siobhan is right behind me, Siobhan who doesn’t like to hear about what I do and can’t watch a help-us-feed-children-in-Africa commercial without bawling. “Siobhan? Can you get our phones out, please?”

  “Mercedes!”

  “Please? All three phones? And hand me my work phone?”

  She doesn’t hand it to me so much as throw it at me, and I fumble to catch it against my side with my left hand. I can’t put the gun away until I know the area is clear, and I can’t prowl around the house to check because it would leave Siobhan and Ronnie unprotected. Siobhan doesn’t carry a gun.

  “Thank you,” I say, using the Soothing Agent Voice and hoping she doesn’t punch me for it later. She thinks it’s manipulative; I think it’s better than letting someone freak out. “On my phone, can you pull up the notepad? Type Ronnie’s name in, and get ready for an address. Once you have that, call 911, give them both our names, tell them we’re FBI agents.”

  “I’m not a field agent.”

  “I know, they just need to know we’re law enforcement. Hang on, let me try to get the rest of what they’ll need.” I study Ronnie, who’s damn near hugging the stuffing out of the bear. He hasn’t moved from his spot on the bench swing, and there are no bloody footprints around him or on the steps. There’s blood dried on his bare feet, but no footprints. “Ronnie, do you know your address? Your parents’ names?”

  It takes a few minutes to get their names, Sandra and Daniel Wilkins, and enough of their address to be useful, and I can still hear Siobhan whimpering as she types it into my phone. “Call emergency,” I tell her.

  She nods shakily and walks quickly down the curve of the path with her phone to her ear, my personal cell lit up in her trembling hand so she can read out the information. She’s briefly out of sight where the path meets the drive, but then I can see her head down the driveway to stop at the curb, just within the cone of light from the streetlamp. Good enough, even if I’d rather she was closer. I can’t protect her from here.

  “Ronnie? Are you hurt?”

  He looks up at me, confused, but flickers away from eye contact half a second later. Oh, I know that body language.

  “Is any of that blood yours?” I clarify, because there are a lot of ways a child can be hurt.

  He shakes his head. “The angel made me watch. She said I’d be safe.”

  “Were you not safe before? Before the angel came?”

  He lifts one shoulder in a half shrug, eyes fixed on the floorboards.

  “Ronnie, I have to step away so I can call my partner at work, okay? He’s going to help me make sure you’re safe. I’ll stay right where you can see me,
all right?”

  “And I’m safe?”

  “Ronnie, I promise you, as long as you’re here, no one is going to touch you without your consent. No one.”

  I’m not sure he trusts it, or that he gets it—I don’t think consent is something his parents have ever taught him—but he nods, hunching back into himself over the teddy bear, and watches me through his sandy fringe of hair as I walk to the curve of the path, where I can see both him and Siobhan clearly. Keeping the gun pointed at the ground, I wake up the phone and tap “2” to dial Eddison.

  He picks up on the third ring. “I can’t get us out of the seminar; I already tried.”

  “There’s a bloody little boy on my porch. An angel made him watch her kill his parents, then brought him here to wait for me.”

  There’s a long silence, and in the background I can hear what sounds like a post–baseball game analysis on the television. “Wow,” he says finally. “You really don’t want to go to that seminar.”

  I bite my lip, not quite fast enough to hold in the strangled laugh. “Siobhan’s calling emergency.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “That’s a complicated kind of question.”

  “Our kind of complicated?”

  “Smart bet.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

  The call ends, and for lack of a pocket in my little black dress, I slide the phone under my right bra strap where I can grab it without letting go of the gun. I walk back to the porch, sitting down on the top step. After a moment, I angle my body so I can see both him and the end of the driveway, my back against the rail post. “Help will be here soon, Ronnie. Can you tell me about the angel?”

  He shakes his head again, and clutches the bear a little tighter. There’s something about the bear, something that . . . oh. The blood on the fur isn’t spray. It’s castoff, from his arms, from his face, probably the bear’s back is coated, but he wasn’t holding it when his parents were attacked.

  “Ronnie, did the angel give you that bear?”

  He glances up, meets my eyes for a heartbeat, and then fixes his gaze back on the floor, but after a moment, he nods.

  ¡Me lleva la chingada! Our team gives teddy bears to victims, or their friends and siblings, when we have to interview them, because it’s a bit of comfort, something to hold or squeeze—or in the case of one twelve-year-old, throw at Eddison’s head. But to give a bear to a kid after you’ve murdered his parents in front of him?