Hiccuping sobs reached my ears. At first, nothing happened beyond the sniffling. It sounded like a child crying—someone in deep emotional distress. The parent in me wanted to move forward and comfort, but the cop kept me rooted where I stood.
The ankle disappeared under the bed. A tiny oval face, with big blue eyes drenched with tears, a straight nose, and trembling lips, peeked out. A child. This was a fucking child.
A small, waiflike figure crawled out from under the bed. He had a thumb in his mouth and a hand outstretched, making grabby gestures toward me. His skinny arms, like an underfed child’s, poked out from a tight green shirt.
What the actual fuck?
“Mine,” he said around the thumb in his mouth.
How old was he? He could be fourteen or twenty. It was hard to pinpoint, but one thing was certain. He was too old to be acting like a little baby. The thumb sucking, the crying, and… oh my god, he was wearing a onesie over a diaper.
The air in the room became stifled. I fumbled with the lock behind me, flung the door open, and shoved my way out, but I didn’t close it soon enough. The heart-wrenching wail that followed me left a foreign ache inside my chest.
“Well?” Knight raised an eyebrow. “You see our dilemma. We’ve found our killer. He was driving Webb’s car, and he had the gun in his possession. Ballistics is working on it now, but we’re pretty sure it will match the weapon we’ve been searching for.”
“But it’s not him,” I said, my voice hoarse. I cleared my throat. “It can’t be him, Knight. Don’t tell me you actually think he can be our killer. Just look at him.”
The boy had crawled out from under the bed fully and was crying hard now, staring at the glass. I had to quell the urge to go back into the room and give him his doll.
“It’s quite a performance.”
“No, you don’t understand.” I placed a hand on the glass. “I recognize the signs. He’s in little space.”
“He’s what now?”
“How old do you think he is?”
“We haven’t a clue. We fingerprinted him, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been. We had to hold him down to get it done. His prints didn’t come back with any match. We can’t find any records of him, but Gutiérrez is looking deeper.”
“Even if we consider he’s younger than he looks, he’s still not acting his age. I’m telling you, Knight. He’s in little space.”
“Whatever space he is in, he needs to snap out of it soon. We need to interrogate him. We need to know who he’s working with. He can’t have done this on his own. I have a meeting with the attorney general and our FBI liaison on this case. We’ll be advised on how to proceed from here on. For now, we hold him here, but eventually, we’ll have to take him to the official BOP facility pending further investigation.”
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Listen to me, Knight. That—what you’re seeing in there—is severe age regression. I know because my son is into age play and has two littles. And while there are good Doms out there who see to the well-being of their littles, that’s not always the case. One of my son’s littles was rescued from a pretty unpleasant situation, and she found refuge in being in little space. Sometimes she would go away inside her head for almost a week. How you handle this can make or break whatever information he gives us. I don’t know if he’s involved, but chances are he knows something, and whatever it is, we should try to get it out of him.”
“I don’t give a shit what he’s pretending to be. We have a case to solve, and his ass will land so fast in jail he’ll be a meal there unless he tells us what we want to know. He’s our only lead, and he’s not going anywhere until he cooperates.”
“You can’t honestly look at him and think he’s behind this, Knight. He doesn’t match the profile, and he’s too fucking young, given how long ago the crimes started. He would have had to be a sharpshooter when he was what? Ten fucking years old? Listen, nobody wants to nab the asshole responsible for this as much as I do, but if you go into this resigned that you have the killer, it’ll make you careless. Don’t you find it odd that for ten years, we haven’t been able to so much as stumble upon anything that got us close to him, and suddenly in the wake of a double murder that doesn’t fit the MO, our killer just drops into our lap? I don’t know about you, Knight, but I, for one, don’t buy it. A killer this experienced doesn’t just go joyriding in the car of one of his last victims and sure as hell not dressed like that.”
Knight fell silent beside me, watching the boy who’d curled up in the middle of the floor into a ball with his finger in his mouth. He looked to be fast asleep, and every so often his shoulders twitched as if he was still sobbing in his sleep.
“What do you propose we do, then? I’m listening.”
“I can’t tell you that. Talk to your superiors. All I can advise is to handle this with care. The last thing you want to do is traumatize him more into silence. Whatever he knows, we need to know too, and that should be our goal. We should do whatever it takes to make him open up.”
My gaze dropped to the doll I still clutched in my hand. I’d come here full of relief and energy about confronting my wife’s killer, and this was what I’d found instead.
I handed the doll to Knight. “When you know what your next step is, let me know.”