“Just because Mavis—”
“Where do you think she’d be, given how she was, where she was, her age, if he hadn’t given her a place?”
“I think she’d have been scooped up, the cops and CPS would’ve interviewed and examined her, would’ve tossed her worthless, bat-shit mother in a padded cage, and put Mavis in foster care.”
“That’s possible,” he said as he drove. “As it’s possible someone prone to taking young girls would have raped her at the least, sold her, killed her. Many possibles, but the fact is she wouldn’t be who she is, you wouldn’t be more than sisters if not for Sebastian. Change something by a hair, darling, change it all.”
“It’s not right, what he’s doing. I let it go because I needed her to get him to talk to me. And because—”
“You gave her your word you wouldn’t arrest him.”
“It’s different now.”
“You don’t think he killed those girls.”
Damn it, no, she didn’t—and hoped to hell she wasn’t being conned. “Thinking isn’t proof, and he’s connected. Liar, thief, con man.”
“Are you speaking of him or me?”
She slumped down in her seat with a fresh scowl. “Stop it.”
“Well now, I didn’t run a gang of girls, but I ran with a gang. I lied, I stole, and certainly ran the occasional scam. You’ve learned to live with that, but it niggles now and then.”
“You gave it up.”
“Some for myself before I met you. The rest for you. For what I wanted for us. I had Summerset, or else the old man would’ve beat me bloody time and again until he did me in. You know, better than most, that the system does fail, however much those in it try. And that not all who take children in, within that system, do so with open hearts. You have your lines, Lieutenant, and I’ve my own. I don’t think we’re too far apart in this case. More a bit of a lean in two directions, but not far. Not with Mavis in the middle of it.”
He reached over, rubbed her thigh. “Where’s her mother? You’d have looked into that.”
“In a facility for the bat-shit who carve an equally bat-shit up with a butcher knife. She’s been in for about eight years now—before that she moved around, joined a cult, left it, did some time for trading sex for Zeus. Got out, got on the funk. She was wasted on it when she sliced up the woman she ran with—and was sleeping with by that point. Mavis was right. She just fried her own brain over time. She’s mostly sedated.”
“You haven’t told her.”
“I will if and when she needs to know. If and when she ever wants to know. She’s pushed it all out, or had until tonight. Really pushed it out. She had some moments tying herself up in knots that she wouldn’t be a good mother, but she figured out how to set it away, and be happy. Telling her just throws it back at her.”
Eve leaned her head back. “And she was right. If her mother wasn’t shit-house crazy, she’d never recognize the kid she knocked around in Mavis Freestone, music star and fashion . . . wonder. I often wonder about her fashion.”
“That’s part of the point, isn’t it? Forced to wear dull clothes, having her hair whacked off. It’s not just shoving it out, it’s beating it with sticks and setting it on fire.”
The image surprised a laugh out of Eve. “Yeah, it is. I wonder if she knows it.”
“I suspect she did when she started experimenting with hair color, eye color, the clothes. Now? It’s who she is.”
He turned in the gates, toward the big, handsome house. “She didn’t recognize Iris from The Club?”
“I didn’t have an ID photo to show her. No Missing Persons ever filed on Iris Kirkwood, no alerts, not here, not where the mother died. She slipped through the cracks. Yes, the system fails sometimes, some of the worst times, but teaching adolescent girls how to run Take the Candy isn’t the solution.”
“I’ve never heard of that con.”
“I made it up. I want some candy.”
He parked in front of the entrance, smiled at her. “Let’s go get some.”
She went in with him, tossed her coat over the newel post.
“What do you intend to do with the addresses Sebastian gave you?”
“Send out some uniforms to canvass and dig up residents and merchants who were around when the girls went missing, show them photos. Poke, prod, pry. It only takes one person,” she continued as they went upstairs, “just one to have seen one or more of the vics with someone. They’ll have been friendly with him, trusted him. She had a secret,” Eve murmured. “Iris.”