Actually, just one. Ava.

I went straight to the office without going home. The best way to get back to my family was to get my report done in the quiet of the night, before the office started filling up.

The amount of administrative paperwork on something like this is staggering. The primary burden would fall to Valente, and also to Jacobs for the River Killer case. Each file would have to go through no fewer than seven levels of review at the department before it got its final sign-off. I’ve seen the process take upwards of six months. It’s a big part of what keeps me from trying to go any higher at MPD than I already am. At a certain level, you wind up spending all your time on paperwork and politics instead of in the field, where the real police work gets done.

By seven that morning, I’d written up a full account of the last twenty-four hours, and handed it off to Sergeant Huizenga when she came in for the day. She’d already been in touch with Valente, and her mood was as good as I’d seen it in weeks.

Just as well, since I had to give her my paperwork and ask for a few days off in the same breath.

“I know I just got back on,” I said, “but Ava’s been missing for three days now—”

Huizenga was blessedly cool about it. She waved me out of her office with the file I’d just handed her.

“Go, before I change my mind,” she said. “Find your girl, and get back here as soon as you can. And leave your phone on!”

There would be a dozen or more calls that day, with half a million questions about Creem and Bergman, but this at least gave me the space I needed to get my priorities back in order.

First stop—home.

CHAPTER

102

I LEFT HEADQUARTERS AND SWUNG THROUGH THE HOUSE LONG ENOUGH TO see the kids before school. Exhausted wasn’t really the word. At a certain point, it pushes past that and back into adrenaline. I’d figure out the whole sleep thing when I could.

“Who are you again?” Jannie asked, grinning over her eggs at me as I came down from a quick shower.

“I’m the Invisible Man,” I said. “You can call me Ralph E.”

“Hi, Ralphie!” Ali said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Not funny,” Nana said. “You’re going to burn yourself out, right down to the nub. And if you hadn’t noticed, we’ve still got a family emergency on our hands.”

“That’s what I’m doing home, Nana,” I said. I gave her a sideways hug at the stove and stole a piece of her amazingly flat bacon off the paper towel where it was draining. “I’ll drop the kids at school, and then I’m heading out to look for her again. All day if I have to.”

There was no talk of Elijah Creem or Josh Bergman. Bree already knew, and nobody else in the family needed to be worrying themselves about all that. We made sure to leave the TV off that morning, too.

“I want you to make an appointment with Dr. Finaly,” Nana told me, once the kids were in the hall, putting on their jackets. “You need to tend your own garden as well, mister.”

“Funny you should say that,” I told her. “I had the same thought.”

Adele Finaly is the shrink I see from time to time—sometimes more than others. She’s always there when I need a smart, objective opinion about my life, my work, my family—and most of all, about the habit those three things have of crashing into each other. First chance I got, I was going to put my figurative feet up on Adele’s couch. Just not today.

As soon as I dropped Ali and Jannie off for school, I circled back around to touch base with each of the street cops and Vice Unit detectives I’d been working with since Ava disappeared.

Mostly it was an exercise in frustration. There was no new word anywhere. Things were starting to look worse, and I knew it. I told everyone the same thing. If they so much as spotted someone who looked like Ava, they were to put the grab on her and call me immediately. I’d come and take it from there.

The toughest calls were the ones I’d started making on the Prostitution Unit and their outreach teams. Like it or not, there was one very nasty and unavoidable possibility in all of this. With a drug habit, no money, and Ava’s family history, she might very well have started turning tricks by now—for cash, or for the drugs themselves, if she was desperate enough.

It ground me down every time I thought about it. The girl was fourteen years old! Was that unheard of? Not at all. Nobody knows better than me that life on the streets of DC can get pretty damn bleak.

But this was Ava. Our Ava. And nothing I did seemed to get me any closer to finding her.

I was starting to wonder if anything would.

CHAPTER

103

IT WAS A FULL TWO DAYS MORE BEFORE WE FINALLY GOT WORD ON AVA.

I was home for a few hours that Wednesday, just grabbing some time with the family before I headed back out. I’d been alternating day and night, trawling the long list of streets where I thought Ava might turn up.

When the doorbell rang, I got up from the couch with the kids and went to answer. Every ring of the bell those days brought a combined sense of hope and dread—maybe this would be the one that gave us some kind of answer.

And in fact, it was.

When I opened the front door, Sampson was standing there on the stoop. It didn’t take long to read him. Between the fact that he hadn’t come in the back, as usual, and the tears in his eyes, I knew right away why he was there.

It felt like a crater opened up in my chest. My jaw went tight, and some part of me started trying to come up with a different conclusion. Maybe I was misreading Sampson, I thought—even though I knew it wasn’t the case.

He didn’t have to say a word. I stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind me.

“Jesus, John,” I said, choking up.

He pulled me in tight, with his hand on the back of my head.

“I’m so sorry, Alex. I’m so goddamn sorry.”

I’ve been here before. I’ve lost loved ones, and I’ve had to give other people the worst news they could possibly get. Nothing—but nothing—ever makes that easier.

Ava was gone. I knew it for sure now. But even so, it didn’t feel real.

I stood back from John on the stoop. “Where?” I said.

“An abandoned apartment building on the waterfront, across the river. Junkies flop there all the time. It was a…Jesus, Alex, it was a terrible scene. They took samples, but…”

The tears were streaming down my face, even as the anger started flooding in. Sampson was having a hard time getting through this himself.

“Just tell me everything,” I said. “What else do you know?”

John took a long, slow breath. “The body was burned. Beyond recognition. I don’t know why. Maybe she’d scored a hit and someone wanted it. Maybe someone killed her on accident and tried to cover up.”

“But it was her?” I said. “For sure?”

“It was a young woman. African American. Ava’s height and build. And Alex? They found this on the body.”

He opened an envelope and poured the blackened pieces of Nana’s locket into my hand. The two hinged halves had come apart from the chain, and the photos were either burned up, or missing. But it was most definitely the necklace that Nana Mama had given Ava on the day she’d moved out. I could just make out the engraved R. C. on the back—for Regina Cross.

Suddenly, the front door opened and Nana was there with Bree.

“What is going on out here?” Nana said. She stopped short the second I turned to look at her. It was the same way I’d seen the truth on John’s face.

As her eyes traveled down to the pieces of the locket in my hand, I reached over and pulled her close.

“No,” she said, stiffening up at first, but then buckling at the knees just as fast. “No, no, no. Not our Miss Ava. Oh, Lord. Please, no!”