It wasn’t a theory yet, just a hunch and a lot of ideas that didn’t quite make sense of everything that had happened. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. He had all the pieces. He just needed to get the outline, and the rest would fall into place.
“I’m giving Lawrence the chance to show her chops,” he said. Next to him, Lawrence flinched at the challenge and straightened up attentively in her chair. Even Quick glanced up from the computer to give Took a reproachful look for that one. He wasn’t wrong. Took ignored it and pushed on. “Appleberg?”
“I’d forgotten what a dick you could be,” Quick muttered as he hunched back down to work. This time it took a bit longer. “If we include the Arons, eight of the families either lived in the area, attended the church at some time, or their children attended the Proverbial summer camp that is located just outside of town. Although that closed a few years ago.”
“Why?”
“No reason listed,” Quick said with a shrug. “Bad touches probably.”
The Arons had worked at the summer camp, Took remembered, during the years they didn’t go away on missions. Annabelle Franklin had gone there. The photo of her in the salmon-pink camp T-shirt flicked into his mind. Even a month in the outdoors hadn’t given her any color in her cheeks.
“Do you have a picture of the Aron children?” Took asked. He swiveled around in his chair and pointed to the screen mounted on the wall. Quick snorted at the change in subject, but after a moment, the pictures of two boys and a girl appeared on the screen. Before her years in the ground, Nora Aron had been a brown-haired little girl with see-through gray eyes and pallid skin. Her brothers were just as pale, with blond hair and brown respectively, but the same strange, almost translucent, eyes. “What about Annabelle Franklin?”
Keys clicked and then Annabelle joined the grid, a few years older and a little more faded but with the same eyes.
“Son of a bitch,” Lawrence murmured. “All of them?”
“We’ll see,” Took said. He turned to look at Quick. “I want to see pictures of the kids from every single family that went on one of the Aron’s missions. Start with the ones that have ties to Appleberg.”
Quick hadn’t caught on yet. He glanced curiously from the screen to Took and Lawrence but finally shrugged. “It’ll take me a minute,” he said. “They aren’t in our files, so I’ll need to trawl social media.”
It turned out that Quick was wrong, at least partially. Most of the Mission children he pulled off their parents’ Facebook pages or from sheets of posed selfies, children with curly hair and tans at the beach or in profile at their birthday parties. The others he didn’t need to trawl social media for. They popped up from the missing persons database. Nine missing children from Appleberg, the three missing Aron kids—two Aron kids now, Took supposed—and six they hadn’t even known about.
The children on the missing reports had all disappeared in the same three-month period, after Waring had gone to jail, and they all had the same pallor, and the same washed-out, almost colorless eyes behind glasses they probably didn’t need.
Took stared at Nora’s picture. If she woke up her eyes would be gray, the same as Madoc’s. He wondered what color Madoc’s had been back when he was still alive—maybe the same gray as Annabelle Franklin’s or the sepia brown of Brian Larkin.
There had been no reason for anyone to see it before. Dhampir children in the US were too rare for anyone to just jump to the conclusion that a pallid child was one of them. Especially when it was a pallid child from a staunch Proverbial clan. Besides, none of the Anakim had any reason to fear their children going missing then. They had all disappeared before Waring’s murders started, before the Aron family died. Once you saw them all together, though, the effect was amplified, unmistakable, until even Quick couldn’t miss it.
“Holy fucking hell,” he muttered. His hands were still for once as they settled on the keys. “They are all dhampirs. Shit is about to hit the fan.”
THAT TURNEDout to be an understatement.
The Director of VINE, a harder, more polished version of her daughter, was in front of a computer monitor in Philly. Her clipped questions were aimed at how VINE had missed something like this right under their nose. The fact that her daughter was involved didn’t seem to make her want to cut them any slack.
“Not for the first time in connection to this case, I am disappointed,” she said icily. Took, relegated to the back of the room after he’d given his testimony, gave a reluctantly sympathetic glance to Lawrence. She looked like she hadn’t heard it. “Not only did you miss the connection to the Arons, you apparently justoverlookeda dozen other missing children since we arrested Waring. We already had a shit show to navigate with the public after you discovered the kidnapped dhampir might be alive after all. Now this. Should I just expect mistakes and dhampir children every time you turn over a rock now?”
West cleared his throat. “The Biters’ lack of overview has always been a problem—”
He never could read a room, Took thought wryly as Lawrence turned her cold glare onto him. This wasn’t the sort of disaster that could be used to score political points. Not yet, at least.
“Apparently one that you should be well versed in, SSA Crane,” Lawrence said pointedly. “Since a child-trafficking ring has apparently been run out of your city for the entire duration of your time in charge there.”
While West tried to splutter his way out of responsibility for that on the two other screens, Charleston’s Anakim and human representatives in the Senate bickered over each other as to what the priority was next.
“If Waring is innocent,” Isaac Garcia, still human and breathing at sixty-four, said as he leaned in to peer through the screen, “we need to issue a statement that clears his name, and an apology, as soon as possible. As it is, this could completely alter the balance of power in the district. Liam Waring could become a real threat, not just a pain in our—”
“Ridiculous,” Robin Dale, his Anakim counterpart, snapped as he jabbed his finger at the web camera. “This whole problem with the Proverbials and their dhampirs might have no connection to the Waring case. For all we know, Waring still murdered those families and kidnapped their children.”
“But we don’t know that,” Garcia fired back. “He never confessed, remember? The conviction was carried on a wave of outrage and grief for those children. Or, for all we know, those dead families were somehow involved in this too. The murders only started after the Aron family was killed.”
West, visibly sweating despite his best efforts to be calm, raised his hands. “Obviously what we all agree on is that we don’t know enough. That’s why we haven’t decided what we’re going to do yet,” he said. “If we—”
He was shouted down by the mayor, who wanted assurances that the Proverbial churches and their missionaries would be “left out” of any statements. “It would be irresponsible to publicize their involvement and demonize whole congregations who had no idea.”
The district attorney countered with an indignant plea for justice. “If they ignored the evidence of what went on, then they’re just as guilty.”
Only Chief of Police Graven had held his tongue so far. He stood at the end of the table with his arms crossed across his chest and watched Madoc through hooded eyes.
