Another pause. "You have documentation?"
"Federal agent collected statements three days ago. Full file."
"Send me what you can." He paused. "And Rampage, what's your personal interest here?"
He looked at the wall between his room and Emily's.
"One of the targeted women is mine," he said.
Dozer was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that communicated understanding of everything that sentence contained.
"I'll make some calls," Dozer said. "Give me forty-eight hours."
He hung up. Rampage forwarded the file Irish had compiled and sat back in his chair.
Forty-eight hours.
He thought about telling Emily. About the Kansas City ping, about Dozer, about the net drawing incrementally tighter around a man who had spent two months watching her neighborhood Facebook posts and calculating her value to a network that had made four women disappear.
He thought about her on the common room floor today with her coloring book, the afternoon light on her hair, looking up at him when he came in with that direct, clear-eyed look that had started to feel like something he came home to.
He'd tell her in the morning. Let her sleep tonight.
He opened the door and stepped into the hallway.
Her light was still on. He stopped. Raised his hand to knock and then heard the sound from inside.
Not crying exactly. The specific controlled quality of someone trying not to cry, which was in some ways worse. Deep short breaths.
He knocked once. Quiet.
Silence. Then: "Yeah."
He opened the door.
She was sitting on the bed with the coloring book closed on her lap and her kindle face-down beside her, and her eyes were wet but her jaw was set, and she looked at him with the expression of a woman who'd been caught doing something private and was deciding how to handle it.
"I'm fine," she said.
He crossed the room and sat in the chair by the window. Said nothing.
She looked at him. "You're not going to ask?"
"You'll tell me or you won't."
She exhaled. Pressed her lips together. Looked at the coloring book on her lap. "I was reading.” She stopped. "There's a scene. Where the—" She stopped again. Started differently. "The little in the book gets scared in the night. And her Daddy comes in and he sits with her and he just — holds her. And she cries and he doesn't try to fix it, he just lets her cry and he's there." Her voice was steady but only just. "And I've been… I've been fine, all day, and I did the interview and I went for the run and I colored and I wasfine,and then I read that scene and I couldn't?—"
She stopped.
Rampage looked at her. At the wet eyes and the set jaw and the coloring book held in both hands. He mulled over his choices. He could get in bed with her and hold her in his arms.But, that didn’t feel like the right way to go at this moment. Remembering how she relaxed while he washed her hair, he went in another direction.
"Come here," he said.
She looked at him.
"Emily." Quiet. Certain. "Come here."
She got up from the bed and crossed the room and sat on the floor beside the chair, which he hadn't specified but understood immediately, not beside him, not in his lap, not with any of the weight of what that would mean.
