Chapter 16
RAMPAGE
Irish sent the message at eleven at night.
Delling's phone pinged. Kansas City. Moving east. Contacted Denver field office. They're flagging it up the chain.
Rampage read it sitting at his desk, and the relief of having a direction was immediately overtaken by the calculation of what east meant. Kansas City was a midpoint. A handoff location. Which meant Delling wasn't running and he was delivering himself to the next level of the network.
Which meant they were running out of time to catch him before he disappeared into a structure too large for the club to touch on its own.
He pulled up his contacts. Scrolled to a number he hadn't used in eight months.
Dozer picked up on the second ring, which meant he'd been awake.
"Rampage."
"You still running operations out of the east?"
"Depends on who's asking and what kind of operations."
"I've got a trafficking network running a corridor. Colorado to the Midwest and east. Collector just moved through Kansas City. Federal contact in Denver is tracking it but they're going to lose him in the structure."
A pause. The specific silence of someone shifting from casual to operational.
"How many victims confirmed?"
"Four minimum. Believe it's higher."
"How long has the network been running?"
"Long enough to have refined the methodology. This isn't new."
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 was fine, 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.
He put his hand on her head. Slow. Deliberate. He began to massage her head.
She went very still.
He didn't say anything. Just let his hand work through her hair, while the room was quiet and the compound settled around them and outside a Colorado night went on about its business.
She didn't cry. Not quite. Her breathing changed as he ran his fingers through her hair, rubbed her head and she relaxed against his legs. She was facing away from him, he thought it might make it easier for her.
"I'm not usually—" she started.
"I know."
"I handle things."
"I know that too."
"This is—" Her voice was small. Not weak. Just honest. "This is a lot of things to handle."
"Yes," he said. "It is."
His thumb moved through her hair. “You don’t have to. That’s what I’m here for, baby.”
She exhaled.
They stayed like that for a long time. The clock on the wall ticked. Clover padded past the open door, assessed the situation, and continued down the hall with the diplomatic discretion of a very good dog.
"Daddy," she said eventually.
"Yeah."
"The scene in the book." She paused. "Is that…
Is that something you would…" She stopped.
He felt the tension of the question she wasn't finishing. He should feel annoyed that she didn’t know the answer to that question yet.
Of course. Of course, he would crawl into bed beside her and cuddle her. Anything she needed.
"Yes," he said. Before she'd completed it. Because he knew what she was asking and because she deserved an answer that didn't make her finish the hard part.
She was quiet.
"Okay," she said, very quietly. Just that.
He kept his hand where it was.
After a while, her breathing had fully steadied and her shoulders had dropped and she was leaning her temple against the arm of the chair, and he could feel the exact moment she started to drift.
"Go to bed," he said.
She made a sound that was not an agreement.
"Emily."
"Mm."
"Bed."
She straightened up. Slow. The way you moved when your body had released the tension it had been carrying all day and wasn't interested in rebuilding it. She got up and climbed back onto the bed and pulled the blanket, her blanket, the one from her apartment, up around her.
She looked at him from across the room. Eyes heavy.
"Thank you," she said. "For coming in."
"You didn't tell me to leave."
"I didn't want you to."
He stood.
"Daddy."
He stopped.
"The Delling thing," she said. "Something happened. I can tell." Her eyes were half-closed but her instincts were still running. "You were going to tell me tomorrow."
He looked at her.
"It's okay," she said. "Tell me tomorrow. Just — tell me."
"I will," he said. “Do you want me to crawl into bed with you?”
She didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and was asleep before he left the room.
He stood in the doorway for a moment. Then he pulled the door closed and went down the hall and stood in his own room in the dark and thought about the weight of his hand on her head and the specific, irreversible quality of simply rubbing her head and playing with her hair, the way she'd gone still, and then soft, and then gradually, completely quiet.
He'd been in harder situations than this one.
None of them had ever required this particular kind of discipline.