least and followed Gillian and Harper into the kitchen. Pushing through the doors, she felt like she’d passed through a time machine into the seventies—old linoleum floors and ancient avocado appliances in need of replacing. On the counter, a battalion of pill bottles.
“I’ve talked to a lot of cops,” Gillian was saying. She sat on a green swivel chair, leaning on a Knoll-style glass-top tulip table. “And I’ve never met one who didn’t have a theory on the cases still keeping them up nights.”
“Not this one,” he said. “And don’t misunderstand. It’s the kids, what happened to you all, that still bothers me. Not Kreskey.”
He turned to face them both, Gillian and Rain now seated at the kitchen table. “I know it’s not very PC or whatever. These days the liberals run the show, it’s all about prisoners’ rights and what makes us tick. Rehabilitation. Education. Job training. But there’s something that cops, soldiers, some doctors know that other people don’t seem to get—or don’t want to get.”
“And what’s that?” asked Rain, inching Gillian’s recording phone closer.
There was a coldness to Detective Harper that she’d seen in him before.
“That some people are better off dead.”
TWENTY-SIX
“It’s there,” she says. “I swear it is.”
“I believe you.”
I do. I do believe her. Or, anyway, I believe that she believes it. But my search of the property revealed nothing. Just the house, where I’ve never seen anyone come or go. There was no other structure. I was out there late looking, and I’m exhausted having barely clocked three hours of sleep. She doesn’t know any of that, of course.
This girl, she’s so thin and so tense, I just want to cover her with a blanket. Her foster mother, Jen, younger than most, loving and concerned, sits out in the waiting area. This is an emergency session because Angel has been having nightmares—night terrors really, where she wakes screaming and inconsolable.
Angel claims that her former foster family abused her, and that other children in their care were also abused. Her new foster mother reported Angel’s claims to the police a while back, and no one’s done a thing. There was a cursory scan of the property, an investigation into the family that housed her before the couple she’s with now. But no evidence has been unearthed to corroborate her story.
“There was still someone else there when I ran away. A boy.”
“What was his name?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. He was younger than me, I think. He didn’t talk much. He had a birthmark on his shoulder that looked just like a heart. So, I called him Val, short for Valentine.”
She’s very creative. That’s what makes her a good liar.
“He’s in my dreams—alone and scared, Dr. Reams,” she says. “Someone has to save him.”
She leans forward, her eyes wide and desperate. There’s an off note; I just can’t place it. It might be that she’s used to being disbelieved, discounted. It might be that she’s lying, making up stories for attention. I have an open mind.
“I’ll make some calls,” I say. “I’ll push for a closer look.”
“What if it’s too late?”
We both know how it feels when help shows up too late, don’t we, Lara?
“All we can do is try.”
She leans back, pulls her legs up onto the couch and hugs herself into a ball. She stares out the window and I’m aware that the fall color show has faded, leaves brown and falling. Soon the trees will be bare. Winter. The Winter girl, isn’t that what they kept calling you in the media?
“We’re not just throwaways, you know,” says Angel, suddenly angry. “Because our parents didn’t want us, or they were too fucked up to raise us. We’re people.”
“Yes,” I say gently. “Of course.”
“But, like, you see that, right? How people just don’t care. If no one finds him, and a year from now someone stumbles on his bones—there’ll be tears and flowers and all of that. But no one cares enough right now to look for him.”
“People do care—I do. Your foster mother, Jen, she said they’ve started the proceedings for your permanent adoption. She cares about you. I think you know that. It’s the institutional processes that can make the system seem inhumane. But, trust me, plenty of people care.”
She shakes her head, eyes going hard. I didn’t love the blank look of anger on her face. She’s too young to be so jaded, so worn down.
“Do you think she’s telling the truth?” her foster mother, Jen, asks me, after Angel