Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

on this case to make Amanda’s family happy, but I thought you were starting to trust me.” Fingernails of doubt scraped inside her.

“That’s not fair, Elle. When you’re in your element, you are one of the most natural investigators I’ve ever seen. But this is different. This case does something to you, clouds your instincts.”

Elle threw her hands up. “Okay, then, what’s your grand theory? Who do you think took Amanda? Some neighbor that none of the kids recognized, somehow? Because it’s been three days, which means if I’m right, he’s going to start poisoning her, and if I’m wrong, statistically, she’s dead already.”

“Even if she hasn’t been killed yet, that doesn’t mean it was TCK.” Ayaan’s voice did not rise to match hers, which just made Elle feel worse. “Leads have been coming in since they aired that little girl’s sketch on the news last night. We might not have a slam dunk yet, but we will find her.”

Elle shook her head, looking at the papers on her desk. “I can’t get him out of my head.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“No, you don’t understand. I haven’t had a feeling like this, ever. It’s like . . . it’s like he’s taunting me with this, showing me he’s back, reminding me what he can do.”

“That’s not entirely true.”

“What?”

Ayaan sat back against her desk and folded her arms. “You’ve done this before. You’ve felt this before.”

Elle’s mouth went dry. She looked away, but Ayaan kept talking.

“Five and a half years ago. Maddie Black’s case, before you quit CPS? You were sure of it then.”

Elle stared at the notes and pictures, pulse hammering. “That was different. That was a long time ago.”

“You were convinced it was TCK. I even believed you for a while—you almost cost that girl her life.”

Clenching her hands into fists, Elle whispered, “I did not.”

Ayaan shook her head. “Why do you think it took me so long to get back to you about Jair Brown two years ago, Elle? I had to get clearance from the chief himself to be allowed to work with you. Even after your help, he was still hesitant to let you on another case. Maybe he was right.”

“I made one mistake.”

“You tried to convince us to ignore the witnesses who came forward about her father.”

“Stop.”

“We only just made it in time. She would have died.”

“I wasn’t as sure then as I am now.” Even as she said it, Elle wasn’t convinced that was true.

“I’m calling Martín to come get you,” Ayaan said. “You can’t drive like this.” She pushed away from the desk and stood between Elle and the pictures and notes until Elle met her gaze. Ayaan’s eyes were kind, but determined. “I’m not sure this is a good idea anymore.”

When Elle got in his car, Martín asked only one question: “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

They rode home in silence.

She had never been very good at talking about what was bothering her. She should be, after years of therapy, but historically, things hadn’t gone well for her when she spilled her guts. Her parents could never accept what had happened to Elle when she was a child. After a while, she started to believe them—that it wasn’t as bad as she had built up in her head, that the things she remembered weren’t true. By the time she became a teenager, she had pushed all the memories of that incident down so far that it would take more than a decade for them to resurface.

Then she met Martín.

Elle glanced at him; his eyes were trained on the road, and he leaned slightly forward as if he was watching for something to jump out at him. Martín hated driving in Minnesota winters, even though he should have gotten used to them by now. He was born in Mexico, but he’d lived in the land of ten thousand lakes for seventeen years, since he moved here at eighteen to go to college. Still, he had never gotten used to all the snow and ice.

The Castillos were the opposite of Elle’s family in every possible way. He had four siblings, each of them married, and eleven nieces and nephews. Every other year, Elle and Martín rented a big van, picked up Angelica’s family in Wisconsin, and drove down to meet up with their brothers at his parents’ place in Mexico. There was not a moment’s silence for two weeks. Crying babies and screams of laughter and dishes of food passed around and around until you felt like you would burst. Elle absorbed their potent energy and unguarded love like parched soil in the rain. His mother had taught her to cook—a skill she’d never learned from her own mom, who worked every day of her life and relied on food that came from a box. In some ways, that was one of the things Elle respected most about her mom: she refused to give up hours every day to put food on the table just because her husband wouldn’t.

It had been more than a decade since Elle cut her parents out of her life, but sometimes she imagined her mom the way she must look now: a bit grayer, the hollows of her cheeks more pronounced, still standing over the stove with a box of Hamburger Helper in one hand and a glass of Cabernet in the other. Maybe now that she was retired, she’d learned to cook for real. Elle doubted it.

At a stoplight, Martín turned the dial on the car stereo until his favorite talk radio show came on. He wasn’t a music guy, not while he was driving, anyway. Comedic drive-time kept him alert. He met her gaze for a minute, offering a small smile. Too exhausted to force a smile of her own, she looked back out the passenger window. Soon the light turned green again, and he moved forward.

The Maddie Black case Ayaan had referred to was a complex sort of salvation. On the one hand, Elle wouldn’t have been