"No, thank you, ma'am. We appreciate your taking the time to speak with us."
The house was beyond spotless and smelled of Pine-Sol and Pledge. Which suggested Mrs. Barten cleaned when she was stressed.
"I thought maybe we could talk in the living room?" she said.
"Please."
The room was done in keepsake and heirloom, with wallpaper that had flowers on it, and two couches that did not. As Mrs. Barten sat in an armchair, and everybody else took a sofa cushion, Veck got a good look at the woman. She was in her late forties, with a lot of blond hair that was pulled back and twisted around a scrunchie, and a long, thin body that had needed the weight she'd recently lost. No makeup, and she was still pretty. Stare was empty, however.
Shit, where did he start.
"Mrs. Barten," Reilly cut in, "can you tell us about your daughter. Things she liked to do or was good at. Memories?"
Glancing over at his new partner, he wanted to mouth a thank-you.
Especially as some of the tension left the woman's shoulders and the hint of a smile appeared. "Sissy was - is ..." She collected herself. "Please forgive me. This is hard."
Reilly moved closer to the armchair. "Take your time. I know this is a lot to ask of you."
"Actually, it helps to talk about her. It takes me out of where we all are now."
In a halting voice that gradually gained momentum, stories started to roll out, painting a picture of a highly intelligent, slightly shy good girl who would never have walked into trouble if she'd seen it coming.
Yup, Cecilia Barten had most definitely been murdered, Veck thought to himself. This was not one of those drug-related runaways, or an abusive-boyfriend-gone-haywire nightmare. Stable family. Happy young woman. Bright future. Until destiny's equivalent of a car crash had slammed into her life and wiped it out.
"Mind if I look at the pictures over there?" Veck said when thee was a pause in the narrative.
"Please."
He stood up and went across to the built-in bookcases on either side of the bowed windows that faced the street. Two kids. The other was a younger sister. And there were shots from graduations and birthday parties and track meets and field hockey games ... family reunions and weddings ... Christmases.
He was curiously in awe at the display. Man, this was the very best that "normal" had to offer, and for no particular reason, he thought of how, growing up, his house had had none of this stuff - the happy times or the photographs to show it off. The moments that he and his mom had had to share were nothing you wanted other people to see. Nothing you wanted to remember, either, for that matter.
He reached out and picked up one of the five-by-sevens. Cecilia was standing next to her father, her arm through his, her hand resting on the back of his.
She was mostly like her mom, only a little like her dad. But the lineage was clear.
"... called home?" Reilly said.
Veck retuned in to the conversation.
"That's right," Mrs. Barten said. "She left around nine. I'd just had my foot operated on - hammertoes... ." For a moment, the woman appeared to ruminate, and he was willing to bet that she was thinking about how much she wanted to go back to the time where all she had to do was worry about the way her shoes fit.
And maybe she was blaming herself, too.
She shook her head and refocused. "I was pretty immobile. I'd given her the shopping list and ... she called from the store. She didn't know whether I wanted green or red peppers. I wanted the red ones. I was making ..." The tears came and were blinked away sharply. "Anyway, that was the last time anyone heard from her."
Veck returned the photograph to the shelf. As he went to sit back down next to Heron, he frowned. The man was staring at the victim's mother with the intensity of a film camera, like he was reading and recording every twitch of her eye and purse of her mouth as she spoke.
As Veck's radar started pinging like crazy, it was unclear whether it was about the missing girl or her sad, lovely mother or this massive man who looked like he could start a fire with that hard, burning stare of his.
"If I can interject," Veck said, "did she have any boyfriends?"
From the corner of his eye, he saw Heron's hands tighten on his thighs, cranking down tight.
"No. She had friends that were boys, of course, and a prom date here and there ... nothing serious, though. At least, not that she told me - and she was generally open about her life."
Those hands released abruptly.
"Do you have anything you want to ask," Veck said to the agent.
There was a long stretch of silence. Just before it got truly awkward, the man said in a deep, low voice, "Mrs. Barten, I'm going to bring her home to you. One way or another, I will get her back for you."
Veck recoiled, thinking, Shit, don't go there, buddy. "Ah, what he means is - "
"It's all right." Mrs. Barten clasped the base of her throat. "I'm not fooling myself. I know that she's ... not with us anymore. A mother feels the cold in the heart. We just want to know what happened and ... have a chance to lay her to rest properly."
"You will have her back. I swear it."
Now Mrs. Barten choked up - and why wouldn't she. The guy was like a warrior with the vengeance routine, more avenger than agent.
"Thank you ... all of you."
Veck discreetly checked his watch. "If you'll excuse me and my partner, we're going to head over to the supermarket. The manager said he was leaving early today."
"Oh, yes, of course."
Agent Heron helped Mrs. Barten up by taking her hand. "Would you mind if I take a look at her bedroom?"
"Sure - I'll lead you right up." She turned to Veck and Reilly. "If you need to go now, you can always come back."
"Thank you," Reilly said. "We'll do that."
"And we'll see ourselves out the door," Veck murmured.
As Agent Heron and the victim's mother hit the stairs, Veck paused in the front hall and watched them ascend together. A window on the landing above cast illumination on them, the shaft of sunlight hitting them both square on the face and acting as a beacon for their -
Wait a minute.
Veck glanced over into the living room ... where the golden rays were pouring in from the west.
Impossible. You couldn't get that effect from opposite directions, front and rear of the house.
"What is it?" Reilly said softly.
Veck swung his eyes back to the staircase. Heron and Mrs. Barten were nowhere to be seen, and the light on the landing was gone now, too, the window showing nothing more than the budded branches of the maple tree behind the house and the clear blue sky above it.
"I'm going up there," he told his new partner. "Just for a minute."
Chapter 8
As Jim followed behind Sissy's mother, he was out-of-body overwhelmed. In a dim corner of his mind, he knew he had to keep tabs on Veck, but this opportunity was not going to smoothly present itself again anytime soon.
Turning the corner at the head of the stairs, the volume of the house was cranked up to Slipknot levels. Everything from the subtle creak of the carpeted floor beneath his boots to the soft talk down below in the foyer to his own breath in the back of his throat, it all seemed to scream in his ears.
Abruptly, Veck appeared behind them and made some kind of an I'm-only-here-for-a-minute comment. Jim nodded at the guy - and promptly forgot he was even there.
"Sissy's room is this way."
The three of them went to the right, and when Mrs. Barten hesitated at the closed door, Jim raised his hand to put it on her shoulder ... and then couldn't quite make the contact.
"Would you like us to go in alone?" he asked.
Mrs. Barten opened her mouth. But then just nodded. "I haven't been in there since ... that night. It's the way she left it."
At that moment, the phone rang, and there was visible relief in Sissy's mom's face. "I'll just go get that. Feel free to open the drawers and the closet, but if you have to take something, will you let me know what it is?"
"Absolutely," Veck answered.
As she hurried across the landing and disappeared into what he assumed was the master bedroom, Jim cracked the door.
Oh ... the scent.
Slipping inside, he closed his eyes and tried not to feel like a letch as he breathed in deep. Perfume. Body lotion. Dryer sheets.
It was ... extraordinary.
And he did not belong in this room. He was an adult male who had done things that shouldn't even be passing thoughts in a room like this - and the representations of those evil deeds were in the ink that covered his back. Plus he had weapons on him. And then there was that shit he'd pulled with the demon the night before.