Emma: I’m glad to be able to help.
Pauclass="underline" What do you need to know about Eva?
Emma: You told the officers when she first went missing that she never spent time at home alone. Is that right?
Janet: Yes. Never. We always made sure one of us was home when she got out of school and staggered going into work so that we could see her off to the bus. During the summer, we alternated our days off as much as we could and involved her in as many programs as we could so she would never be at home by herself. That morning was the first time she was home without one of us. It was only supposed to be for fifteen minutes. Just fifteen minutes.
Pauclass="underline" She knew not to answer the door for anyone and not to let anyone inside. She wasn’t allowed to wait outside for the van. She was to stay inside with the door locked until she saw them drive up, then she could go.
Emma: And she was supposed to be going to a water park that day?
Janet: Yes. With her youth group from church. She was so excited. She’d been talking about it for days. We even went and bought her a brand new bathing suit with matching flip-flops, and sunglasses, and got her a new towel. She had to have packed and unpacked and repacked her bag three times the night before.
Emma: Can I see the bag?
Pauclass="underline" It’s gone. It wasn’t here when we got home after getting the call from the pastor that she wasn’t there when he came to get her. Wherever she is, she has it with her.
Janet: Do you really think you can find her?
Emma: Sam has a good team behind him, and we’re going to do everything we can.
Janet: I know you will. It’s so good to see the two of you leaning on each other again. I always thought you two were going to be together. No matter what else was going on, you two were going to make it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I turn off the recording, and we sit for a few seconds in silence, letting the worried voices of the families settle into us. Sam sits beside me, his pen poised over a blank page in a notebook. He’s been sitting that way since I started replaying the interviews. He hasn’t written down a single word.
“How do you deal with stuff like this every day?” he asks.
“What do you mean? This isn’t your first murder investigation,” I say.
“You’re right. It’s not. But it is the first time I have seen anything like this and been the one in charge of making it stop. The occasional murder or domestic violence killing is one thing. This is completely different. And I know you’ve seen it before. How do you deal with it?”
“Because I have to. Because someone has to. Pretending it doesn’t exist and not confronting it isn’t going to stop sick people from doing these things. It’s just going to make it easier for them. I decided a long time ago I was going to be one of the people to stand in their way. I might not always be able to stop lives from being taken, but I can make sure people answer for what they’ve done,” I tell him.
“Is that why you left?” he asks.
“I left to go into training and become an agent.”
“That’s why you left Sherwood. I meant, is that why you left me?”
“Sam, I can’t have this conversation right now.”
“Why not?” he asks. “We never had it before. You never gave me a chance. Why not have it now that we’re back in the same room together for the first time in seven years?”
“You knew from the time we met up again in college that I was planning on joining the Bureau. It wasn’t a surprise.”
“It was a surprise, Emma. That wasn’t anything like the girl I knew,” he says.
“The girl you knew hadn’t been through enough yet. She hadn’t waited for years for someone to figure out who killed her mother and why. She was murdered right there in our house, and no one was ever able to give me an explanation. Not what really happened to her, or who did it, or why. No one was ever made responsible for that or held accountable for the damage they did to me and to my father. I couldn’t just keep letting that happen. If no one else was going to stand up for my mother, I was going to. When my father disappeared, it just solidified what I was supposed to do with my life. It might not be what everyone expected, but that doesn’t matter.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you pushed me away. Why you never came home,” he says.
“I did what I had to do. There was no way I was going to be able to move forward in the life I had ahead of me if I kept myself in the past. I had to separate myself from the life I used to lead. This place, this house, even you. If I didn’t, I would never be able to be the agent I wanted to be.”
“Why not?” he asks.
I let out a sigh. “What did you imagine for us, Sam? What did you see in our future after we graduated from college? Did you see a woman with a gun on her hip hunting serial killers and breaking up drug rings? Or did you see one with a baby on her hip making dinner, always there when you got home?”
He stares at me without saying anything. I give a slight nod. “Exactly.”
“I never would have stopped you from doing something that you believed in because of some image I had.”
“I know you wouldn’t have. That’s the thing. You wouldn’t have had to. I watched my parents suffer for each other. I watched my mother stay strong even while she missed my father, and cry for him when she was worried about him. I watched my father grieve himself into almost nothing when my mother was murdered. That’s not something I ever could have put you through. If I let myself stay with you and keep going, I wouldn’t have been able to let you worry about me and think about the danger I was in every day. It would have stopped me from being able to give myself completely to what I needed to do. This place, this world, couldn’t be mine if I wanted to be in the Bureau and fight for what I believe in.”
His phone rings before Sam can say anything else, and I take a second to catch my breath.
“What?” he snaps into the phone, but a second later, his face drops and he looks over at me.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I’ll be right there,” he says and ends the call, shoving the phone into his pocket as he stands up from my couch.
“What’s going on?”
“We need to get to the station. Another child has gone missing.”
The ride to the station is tense with the weight of our conversation and the reality of another child gone sitting heavily on us. He’s barely put the car in park when Sam takes off his seatbelt and rushes toward the building. I follow him right past the waiting area and into the back to an interview room where the officer at the front desk tells us ‘she’ is. I don’t know who he was talking about, but as soon as we walk into the room, I see her.
A gorgeous dark-haired woman sits in a hard-plastic chair at the white table, her arms wrapped around herself as she rocks back and forth. Her lips move rapidly, and from the few whispered words I can catch and translate, it sounds like she is praying in Spanish.
“Bianca,” Sam says.
She looks up, and her almond eyes widen. In an instant, she’s out of the chair and across the room. I’m stunned when she throws herself into Sam’s arms and clings to him, one hand gripping the back of his uniform, and her face tucked into his shoulder as she sobs.
“She’s gone,” she finally gasps. “Gloria’s gone.”