Knowing others is
intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is
strength; mastering yourself is true power.
—Lao Tzu
22
A million possibilities flew through my
mind as I searched the area around my mother’s abandoned car—none
of them good. Her car was exactly where she’d parked it, but she
was nowhere to be seen. She could have wandered off somewhere and
gotten lost. She could have tried to follow me on foot and collapse
somewhere.
She could have been attacked by the
killer, who liked brunettes in their midthirties. Mom was in her
forties; and her hair was black but at a distance she could pass
for thirty-five–ish. Had I led her right into the path of a serial
killer?
My stomach did a flip-flop, and I bent
at the waist, wrapping my arm around myself, squeezing my eyes shut
and willing the nausea to ease up so I could keep looking. Now was
not the time to get all queasy.
“Are you okay?” JT was behind
me.
I turned to face him. “Mom’s not here.
I don’t know where she’s gone.”
JT glanced at the car, then at my face,
which was probably as white as a nearby delivery van. “Maybe she
had to go to the bathroom.”
“Oh. God. I hope you’re right.” Able to
breathe a little better, I dashed down to our borrowed house. There
were still several police officers standing outside the garage. I
described my mother to one of them, asking if he’d seen her. He
hadn’t. I raced inside, making a beeline for the half bath on the
main floor. The door was hanging open. “Mom?” I called out. “Are
you here? Mom?”
No answer.
I headed into the kitchen, thinking
maybe she got thirsty and came in for a glass of
water.
No Mom.
“Mom!” I shouted, unable to keep the
panic from my voice. “Are you here? Please answer.” I ran from room
to room, growing more desperate with every second that passed. She
wasn’t on the first floor. I stomped up the stairs, clinging to the
railing, breathless, dizzy. “Mom!” I checked my bedroom, the spare,
the master bath, the main bathroom.
No Mom.
“Sloan,” JT called from
downstairs.
Hoping he’d found my mother, I flew
down the steps. I met him in the foyer. “Did you find her?” I asked
between heavy gasps.
“Not yet.”
“We have to find her. What if the unsub
has her?”
“It’s a little too soon to be jumping
to those kinds of conclusions, Sloan. She could have just gone for
a walk. Or ... something.” He gave me a you-know-what-I-mean
look.
I knew exactly what he meant. “JT, we
have to find her.”
“We will. It shouldn’t be too
difficult. She’s probably somewhere nearby... .” He gave my
shoulder a rub. It was a well-meant gesture, but for some reason,
it irritated me. “Tell me what you want me to do. You can’t file a
missing persons report until after she’s been gone twenty-four
hours.”
“I know.” I stared at the door, wishing
she’d come wandering through. “But there’s a killer out there
somewhere, and even if she’s just meandering around the
neighborhood, chasing pink monkeys or elephants or rhinoceroses,
she could be in danger.”
“We can search faster by car.” JT
steered me toward the front door. “I’ll drive.”
We cruised up and down the
subdivision’s streets. I practically hung out the window, trying to
peer between houses, behind fences, and around shrubs and trees.
When we didn’t find her, JT turned out onto the main road,
following the route I’d jogged. Just as I was about to give up, I
caught sight of some movement at the rear of the
school.
“Stop!” I shouted.
JT turned into the school’s parking lot
and threw the car into park. We clambered out. “Where?” he
asked.
“This way.” I sprinted along the west
side of the school, my feet pounding on the paved drive, which
circled the building. By the time I reached the rear of the
building, I was in dire need of oxygen. I stopped, my gaze sweeping
back and forth across the playground. Blue-and red play structure.
Steel swing sets. Trees. No Mom. No people. “I swear I saw
someone.”
JT, who wasn’t breathing hard at all,
wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “She’s not here. Let’s go back
to the car. I want you to sit down before you pass out. And I think
you need some water. You’ve run close to seven miles by
now.”
My knees felt a little Jell-O–ish, but
I wasn’t going to let that stop me from looking for Mom. That was
what I always did. I took care of her—no matter what. She didn’t
have anyone else. “I’m okay.” I stepped out of his hold, heading
toward the closest door, painted cherry red. Identical doors lined
the face of the building at regular intervals, entries to each
classroom, I guessed. “Maybe she went inside the
building.”
“I’m sure the doors are all
locked.”
“But suppose one wasn’t? I think it’s
wise to check, just in case.” The first one was locked. I cussed
silently and headed for the second one, vaguely aware of JT tailing
me. That one was locked too, but that didn’t stop me from trying
door number three.
“I’ll go check the doors around the
other side!” JT called.
“Thanks!”
Doors five, six, and seven were also
locked. I circled around the north and then east sides of the
school, finally turning toward the front, searching the area for a
sign of people. Still, nothing. Not Mom. Not anyone. I followed the
curved sidewalk, which wrapped around the front of the school,
approaching the west side again.
No JT.
Where’d he go?
I jog-walked down the west side of the
building again; my gaze lurched from one red door to another as I
passed them. The last one, I noticed, was wedged open slightly.
Either it hadn’t been open earlier when we’d run this way, or I had
been too distracted to notice it. I pulled it open and peered
inside. Whiteboard. Little tables with chairs stacked on top.
Lights off. No voices, no people, no JT.
I gently eased the door shut behind me
and moved deeper into the classroom, senses alert, muscles tense.
My ears caught every tiny sound, the hum of a fly buzzing around
the room, the whirr of the air conditioner, the drip of a leaky
faucet.
The echo of footsteps.
Someone was coming.
I flattened myself against the wall,
hiding behind a file cabinet. The footsteps came closer. Closer.
The person was right on the other side of the steel cabinet. I held
my breath.
“Sloan?” the person
whispered.
“JT?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I checked the building.
There’s a janitor polishing the cafeteria floor. Nobody
else.”
“Okay.”
We headed back outside, squinting
against the glaring sunlight. The sun was hanging high overhead. I
guessed it was getting close to noon.
“Wow, where’d the morning go?” I
muttered.
“Are you hungry?”
“No. I’m too worried to be
hungry.”
JT gave me what I guessed was meant to
be a reassuring look. “We’ll find her.” We started back to the car.
Too desperate to give up, I kept looking, everywhere, at
everything, hoping I’d see some clue. Not far from the front
sidewalk, something caught my eye, a flash of metal in the grass.
“Where are you going?” JT asked as I dashed toward the
reflection.
“Checking something.” The grass hadn’t
been mown in a week or two; it was a little on the thick and tall
side. I combed my fingers through the blades, searching in the area
where I thought I’d seen the glittery thing. “Found it.” I plucked
the silver chain from the long grass. At the end dangled one of
those silver medical-alert badges. My mother wore one. I’d
purchased it for her years ago, after she almost died. An ER doctor
had given her a medication that interacted with her prescription
drugs after an accident, causing an almost fatal heart
arrhythmia.
What was the likelihood of this medical
alert being hers?
Letting it fall into my palm, I checked
the engraving. It wasn’t Mom’s. But the name was familiar. Deborah
Richardson. A series of letters with pluses and minuses follow. Her
blood type was very rare. I handed it to JT.
He read it, then met my gaze. “Damn,
you’re good!”
“It was a lucky find. What do you think
it means?”
“It means we need to call the Baltimore
PD so they can get a CSI team over here pronto and get this area
cordoned off. I think we’re standing in the middle of a crime
scene.” He patted his pockets. “Damn, I left my cell in the
car.”
“Me too.”
We ran back to the car and dove for our
phones. Mine was playing “The Entertainer,” indicating I’d just
received a message. Hoping it was from my mother, I dialed voice
mail to retrieve it. Meanwhile, JT called the Baltimore PD to tell
them what we’d found.
The message, I discovered, wasn’t from
Mom. It was from Gabe, and it sounded urgent. “Sloan, you need to
get down here to the hospital now. It’s about your
case.”
Our case. My case. Damn.
What to do? Keep looking for Mom? Or
head to the hospital?
If there was ever a test for an agent’s
commitment to her job, this was it. I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t
ready to give up looking for my mother yet.
This was an impossible
choice.
I tried calling Gabe back, hoping he’d
give me the information over the phone. No answer. JT ended his
call as I shoved my cell into my purse and muttered a few
expletives.
“Detectives are on the way.” JT took a
step closer. “What’s wrong?”
“Gabe left me a message. He’s at the
hospital. Said I need to get down there. It’s about the case...
.”
“But you’d rather stay here and keep
searching for your mother.”
I shoved my fingers through my hair,
practically yanking it out of what was probably the world’s
messiest ponytail by now. “What would you do?” I could feel my eyes
tearing up, a sob choking me. I inhaled slowly, then
exhaled.
“If your mother’s disappearance has
anything to do with the unsub, then you need to find
her.”
“Exactly.”
“But maybe driving around isn’t the
best way to do that. Maybe going to the hospital will give you the
lead that’ll crack this case.”
“Good point.” Also, in my current
state, I trusted JT to be sharper and more capable than
me.
JT waved toward the road. “Go. Take my
car. Once I’m done here, I’ll go back to searching on
foot.”
“Okay. Thanks.” I thought about giving
him a hug, just because he was being such a good friend. But with
the thing going on between us, I figured that wasn’t the best
idea.
He handed me the keys. “I’ll keep you
posted.”
“Thanks.” I jumped into the car, made
some adjustments to the seat and mirror, cranked the engine over,
and bounced and sputtered away. During the herky-jerky drive, I
tried to guess what Gabe had found out about our case. He’d
followed the missing girl to the hospital. Had her disappearance
been linked to the murders, after all?
Fifteen minutes later, I pulled JT’s
car into a parking spot and cut off the engine. I snatched up my
laptop bag, double-checking to make sure I had my cell phone, and
headed inside.
Lucky me. The emergency room lobby was
in chaos. I tried to get the attention of a couple of security
officers, but they were both busy talking on radios. One snapped,
“If you’re not a patient, you must go to the waiting room”; then he
went back to his radio conversation.
This was one of those times where I
wished I had a badge. I tapped on his shoulder. “I’m an intern with
the FBI. I’m here about a case.”
“Do you have any ID?”
“Just my driver’s license. I’m an
intern. Not an agent.”
Wearing a totally believable security
guy’s stern face, he said, “Sorry, then, I can’t let you
back.”
“Okay.” I checked my cell. No bars. I
headed outside, waited for my phone to connect, and tried Gabe’s
phone again. No answer. “Damn it.”
“Sloan!” Gabe called out.
Relieved, I whirled around. “What’s
going on?”
“I’ve been waiting for you. Come on.”
He rushed me back inside.
Following him, I explained, “I tried to
get into the ER to look for you. Without a badge, I couldn’t get
past the security guards.”
“Yeah, I know. The hospital had to step
up the security. There was a problem with some drunk asshole
brought in by the police.” Gabe paused at the registration desk and
flashed a badge, pointing at me. “We’re with the FBI.”
The woman at the desk waved us
back.
“Where’d you get that
badge?”
“It’s the chief’s. She wanted to make
sure we’d be able to get back in.”
“What if they’d looked at the name on
the ID? Or the picture?”
“Good thing they didn’t.” Gabe pointed
at a long corridor, lined with empty gurneys. “This way. She’s been
isolated in an area where we can protect her.”
“Who?”
“Your witness.” He turned down a
narrower, quiet corridor, lined with doors. The man had long legs
and was using them to full advantage, which left me to jog to keep
up.
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Eden Eckert.” He stopped
at a door, which was guarded by a federal agent. “This is Sloan
Skye, the other intern SSA Peyton told you about.”
The agent nodded, and in we went. I
whispered, “Why the guard?” as we stepped through the
door.
“I’ll tell you later.”
Our little friend looked even smaller
lying in that big hospital bed, monitors blinking, tangled tubes
dangling over the side of the bed. But she looked a lot better than
she had in the garage. A woman, whom I hadn’t noticed right away,
was sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the bed. She stood
as Gabe and I moved closer.
Gabe motioned to me. “This is Sloan
Skye. She was the one who found your daughter this morning. Sloan,
this is Mrs. Eckert, Eden’s mother.”
“Thank you for finding my baby. I can’t
...” The woman sniffled. “I was so worried.”
“It wasn’t technically me who found
her, but I’m glad she was found, and I’m relieved to hear she’ll be
okay.” I glanced at the little girl, who was eagerly shoveling
vanilla ice cream into her mouth. “I see she’s hungry. That’s
always a good sign.”
Mrs. Eckert did a little half sob, half
laugh. “Yes, it is.”
Biting back a sarcastic comment, I
said, “If it’s okay, we need to ask Eden some questions.” We needed
the mother’s cooperation. Now was not the time to talk about any
suspicions of neglect.
Mrs. Eckert thumbed a tear from her
eye. “Sure. Anything that’ll help you catch the woman who did this.
If you don’t, I won’t be able to let her play outside without being
terrified she’ll vanish again.”
“The woman?” I echoed.
Gabe nodded. He looked at little Eden,
who had just polished off the last drop of ice cream in the bowl
and was licking her lips. “Okay, Eden. Now that you’ve had your
treat, can we talk about what happened?”
“Sure.” Eden beamed at
Gabe.
Gabe returned her smile. “Go ahead and
tell Ms. Skye what you told me and the other agents
today.”
“It was Mrs. Bishop,” the little girl
said.
“Who is Mrs. Bishop?” I
asked.
“Veronica’s mama. Remember? I told you
Veronica is my best friend. But she was gone away at camp. And I
missed her really, really bad. So I rode my bike to her house. I
wanted to ask her mommy when she’d be back. Julia came back early,
after her mommy died. I thought maybe Veronica would come back with
her. Mrs. Bishop asked if I wanted some ice cream.” She slid a
glance at her own mother and tipped her head down. “Mommy always
told me not to go into other people’s houses without telling her
first. I should’ve gone home and asked, but I didn’t. Because it
was Mrs. Bishop. Mommy knows Mrs. Bishop.”
“What happened next?” I
asked.
“I ate the ice cream. It tasted kinda
funny. Then I got real sleepy, even though it wasn’t nap time. Mrs.
Bishop told me I could sleep in Veronica’s room. So I went up and
took a nap. When I woke up, the door was locked, and Mrs. Bishop
wouldn’t let me out. The window was covered too. With boards. I
couldn’t get out. I was really scared. She came back later, to give
me something to eat and drink. She also brought in a baby toilet. I
told her I wanted to go home, but she said I couldn’t. I asked her
why not, and she said it was because she missed Veronica so much.
That I was helping her not feel so sad.”
This was a terrible story, but I still
didn’t see the connection to our case yet. I glanced at
Gabe.
He nodded to Eden. “Tell her what
happened later that night, Eden.”
The little girl’s expression changed.
She suddenly looked small and vulnerable and horribly frightened.
“Do I hafta?”
“I know it’s scary, but we need to
hear. We need to stop Mrs. Bishop from hurting you, and other
children. This is the only way we can stop her.”
The little girl didn’t speak for a full
minute. She just stared down at her hands, now clasped in her lap,
fingers tightly curled into fists. “It’s hard to say.”
“It’s okay.” Gabe took the child’s hand
into his. “There are a lot of people here to protect you. She won’t
get near you again.”
Eden eventually gave a little nod.
“Later I fell asleep. Something woke me up. It felt like someone
was dragging something hard and cold over my skin, like a knife.
And it smelled awful, like our garage in the summertime, when we
leave the garbage in there too long. I opened my eyes, and she was
standing there, looking at me, but it wasn’t her. She was
different. Her face. Her ... teeth. And then ...” Eden fingered her
neck. “And then she bit me.” Tears streamed down the little girl’s
face. “It hurt. So bad. She did it again. And again. And
again.”
Gabe and I exchanged a
glance.
An image flashed in my mind. A
shocking, horrifying one. Fangs flashing in the dim light. The
agony of the bite. Instantly I felt sick. Dizzy. My stomach surged
up my throat. I wrapped my fingers around the bed’s side rail. With
my other hand, I rubbed my neck, recalling all too clearly how
horrific the pain had been.
It had happened to me. Not just
recently. No, years ago. When I was this little girl’s age. How
many times had I cowered in the dark, feeling those icy fingers of
dread curl around my stomach, waiting for the beast to
return?
Sounds grew distant. The world narrowed
to a dark, oppressive tunnel.
“I need to step outside. For just a
minute.” My legs felt like half-cooked noodles, my feet heavy, as
if they were encased in concrete shoes. I tried to give Eden a
reassuring smile. “I’ll be right back.” Then, without looking at
Gabe, I turned and walked out the door. In the hallway, I leaned
back against the cool wall, closed my eyes, and tried to wish away
the awful feeling spreading through my body like a
cancer.
“Are you okay?” Gabe asked a few
moments later.
I inhaled. Exhaled. “Sorry about that.
Did I scare her worse? I hope not.”
“She’ll be okay. I’m more worried about
you. What’s wrong?”
“What she said brought back some
unpleasant memories. That’s all.” I fought a shudder that was
quaking up my spine.
“Oh, the attack. I didn’t
think—”
“No, it’s not that. I understand now
why my dad started researching vampires, risking his career, his
reputation, everything. I finally get it.” I swallowed the bile
surging up my throat. “I think a vampire was attacking me. My
father threw everything away to try to stop it.”