A quiet tapping woke Ilse, and she blearily lifted her head from the lumpy hotel pillow. She winced, blinking against the light streaming through the window which she'd left cracked. Something about completely closed windows, especially in unfamiliar places, made it difficult to fall asleep.
The small doll rested at the foot of the bed where it appeared like she'd thrown it sometime in the night. The tapping sound returned, increasing in frequency, followed by a quickly muttered voice from out in the hall. Slowly, Ilse lifted her head from the pillow, throwing her bare feet over the edge of the mattress.
The tapping grew even louder, more urgent. She frowned, reaching quickly for her shirt, which she'd left draped over the bedside lamp. Her pants were on the other side of the room, neatly folded in front of the mirror.
Pulling on her shirt, she got slowly to her feet.
The knocking now echoed through the room. “Open up!” a voice said, urgently. Ilse hesitated, glancing towards her discarded sweatpants. Her bare legs were chilly, and a faint breeze drifted through the open window. Was something wrong?
She took a half step towards her sweatpants, but, as the urgency of the knocking increased, still half-conscious, she re-routed towards the door, unlocked it, and eased it open, peering through the crack out into the hall.
Agent Sawyer was standing there, his green eyes—the same color as hers, though a bit darker, more like deep forest foliage than foaming seas—peered down at her.
“Can I come in?” he said, quickly.
Ilse hesitated, shifting so her half-naked form was hidden behind the door.
“I've been up all night,” he said, an eager note to his tone. “And I think I have something.”
Then, seemingly ignorant of her reluctance, he pushed open the door with his shoulder, waving his phone about which he clasped in both hands like some prized possession.
“Hang on,” Ilse tried to protest, but the door opened enough that Sawyer froze in the threshold, swallowing once as he realized she was standing in her underwear.
“I—I,” he stammered, staring at her.
“Just give me a second,” she said, wincing in embarrassment. She began to turn, hurrying over towards her discarded sweatpants. She quickly slipped them on and turned back to find Sawyer staring at the wall, his cheeks the color of a fire hydrant.
She watched him for a moment as he stammered a quick apology towards the petunia wallpaper, both his hands held up as if in surrender. She waited, one hand on her hip, studying his profile; he wasn't wearing a baseball cap now, and his sandy hair jutted every which way. He wore the same buttoned flannel shirt and jeans he'd had on the day before, like some sort of farmhand. When he'd first entered, he'd smelled like cheap hotel coffee and sawdust.
“I'm decent,” she said as if lifting some sort of spell.
He cleared his throat, glancing sidelong with a quick tilt of his eyes first, as if checking the coast was clear, before turning. “I-I didn't see anything,” he said, stammering. “I mean, well, not much. I mean, not that I'm saying what I saw wasn't much. But, well—no, hang on. It was. But I didn't see it. I mean—you were. I'm...”
Ilse coughed, hiding a smile of her own. Her own sense of modesty—proven by her preference for turtlenecks and sweatpants faded in the sheer, overwhelming sense of embarrassment flooding from Agent Sawyer.
“You said you found something?” she replied, quietly, sitting on the edge of her bed now.
Sawyer finally dared to look her in the eyes, no longer stammering at least. Then, he glanced at the phone he still held in his upraised hand and began to nod rapidly. Some of the flush in his face receded again, and his eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep, widened a bit. “Yes!” he declared. “Yes—yes. I was thinking about what you'd said. How we'd focused on male students... But Mr. Capriso's abuse was primarily directed at young girls... Well, I started double-checking the female students on both victims' rosters.”
“And?” Ilse said, raising an eyebrow.
“I found one,” he replied, nodding up and down and pointing a finger at her. “I found a name. Emily Winters. She was a student of Mr. Capriso's nearly ten years ago. And also a student of Mr. Hubbard more recently. She graduated a couple of years ago...”
“Where is she now? Still local?”
“Local... In a way.” Sawyer coughed, glancing at his phone again. He cleared his throat, reading off the name, “The Anderson Sisters' mental hospital.”
Ilse's ears perked and she frowned. “A mental hospital?” she asked, her own mind spinning, darting back to the Black Forest, back to Katarina and their stilted conversation. She felt her stomach sink, and part of her wanted to lay back down on the bed and pull the covers over her face.
But Sawyer replied, “Yes. By the looks of things, she's been in and out of mental institutions and halfway houses for nearly three years now. The kicker: Docs have traced her trauma back to her stepfather who sexually abused her as a child.” He gave her a significant look. At this last part, though, something else flashed in Sawyer's eyes. Something... something that almost scared Ilse. There was a fury, a rage she hadn't seen before. She saw it in the way his cheeks tensed, his jaw clenched. The faintest way his fingers curled over his palms and his stance became rigid. The words “abused...” and “child...” seemed to have been particularly evocative of this response.
Ilse spent so much time with the survivors of predators and monsters that she didn't think much about the perpetrators. Most of her thoughts went to the victims. When she heard of abuse, or pain of any kind, especially involving children, her heart would go out to the victims. She would find a burgeoning sympathy in her chest. And while she could sense a similar empathy from Sawyer, she also sensed something else...
While she considered the victims, he seemed to have the predators in mind. Like some sort of hunter with a scoped rifle, peering down towards a pack of lions. Sawyer stood poised in the doorway, his phone clenched in his hand, his teeth grit.
“Are you alright?” she said, carefully, studying his features.
He blinked a couple of times, shaking his head once and looking off. “Fine,” he replied. “Mhmm. Just fine.” He glanced at the phone again, then stiffened. “Wait, hang on. I was wrong,” he said. “Emily isn't at the hospital anymore. She was moved to a halfway house nearly a week ago.”
“This halfway house is in the area?”
He clicked something on his phone and then began to nod hurriedly. “Yes... City center, about a fifty-minute drive from here.” He looked Ilse dead in the eyes. “You were right, doc,” he said, nodding. “There's every chance I was approaching this from the wrong angle.” He rubbed at his bloodshot eyes, stifling a yawn, and glanced towards the laptop which was still on the square table. “You'd probably best just sit tight until I get back,” he said. “If you need anything, room service is a phone call away. Rudiger too—he gets lonely if someone doesn't call him every few hours.”
Sawyer began to move, slipping back through the door into the hall, but Ilse pushed off the bed, hurriedly, adjusting her shirt and brushing her bangs over her maimed ear. “Hang on,” she protested. “I'm not staying here.”
Sawyer frowned, looking towards her. “We made an exception with the Whites,” he said, “because they had no criminal record. But Emily is different.”
“How so?” Ilse insisted, scowling. “She's been taken care of for a mental disorder brought on by trauma. That doesn't mean she's dangerous.”
Sawyer frowned. “I didn't say that.”
“No, but you thought it,” Ilse said, patiently. “I have plenty of clients who've been through similar situations. People often treat them with kid gloves and more than a bit of caution and fear. And yet most of my clients wouldn't harm anyone.”
Sawyer rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Doc, it's my job to keep you safe.”
“No, it's your job to catch the murderer. And I'd like to help...” Plus, Ilse wanted nothing more than to leave that hotel room and leave the laptop behind her. At least for now. “You said it was my idea that gave this lead anyway.”
Sawyer gave her another longer look. He rubbed at his nose, peering at her with bloodshot eyes before sighing once and saying, “If you promise to wait in the car.”
“Fine,” she said, quickly, before he could take it back.
Sawyer muttered beneath his breath, but then waved a hand, gesturing she should follow him. “Well, come on then, doc. We can grab some coffee in the lobby.”
***
The halfway home in the center of the city took up a single lot, but the building itself seemed intent on expanding. An additional wing extended from the second floor over the garage. Instead of slanted, the roof bulged out, as if a new room had been built over the front foyer, complete with a small, porthole-sized window.
Whoever ran the place seemed indifferent to the peeling paint, and the old, worn steps. But the steps were sturdy. The garden mowed. The essentials, it seemed in Ilse's opinion, taken well care of. The rest—what others might simply refer to as incidentals, or décor, hadn't been so much neglected as avoided entirely.
She peered out from the back of the dark-tinted sedan, staring up towards the front of the house. The home didn't have a patio, nor steps leading to the front door. Rather, again, as if in an attempt to maintain further space, the front door sat directly against the cobblestone pathway leading from the sidewalk.
Agent Sawyer stalked forward, rubbing blearily at his eyes and taking a moment to yawn, take another long sip from his Styrofoam cup, and then crumple the thing in one hand. He muttered beneath his breath how much he hated coffee.
Like this, with a crumpled coffee cup gripped beneath his knuckles, Sawyer raised his hand and rapped on the door.
“One minute!” a voice called, projecting from a small speaker system next to the sturdy front door. The speaker itself looked to have four buzzers with masking tape name tags.
Ilse watched, waiting, and a few moments passed before the door opened. Ilse rolled down the window, slowly, leaning in to hear better. An older woman, with penciled-on eyebrows and a warm smile answered the door. “Hello?” the woman said, eyeing Agent Sawyer. She got one look at his bloodshot eyes and the crumpled cup in his hand, dripping coffee past his wrist, and she adjusted her posture. Her smile diminished somewhat, but a note of concern entered her tone. “The home for men is on the other side of town. I can give you an address if you like.” She spoke clearly, loudly enough that Ilse could hear through the open window of the parked car.
Sawyer's back stiffened a bit, but he gave a quick shake of his head. “I'm not here for the house. I'm here for Emily Winters. My name is Agent Sawyer.” He flashed his credentials.
And now, the woman in the door's smile faded completely. She crossed her arms, both her painted eyebrows lowering into something near a frown. “What do you want with Emily?”
Sawyer rubbed his eyes again. “Just a few questions. Is she here?”
“Yes. And she's been a model guest, I might add.” The woman was glaring at Sawyer outright now.
“Yeah? She here Thursday?”
The woman bobbed her head quickly. “I run this place, and yes, she was here. We had a three-hour group meeting then a showing of Mr. Bean re-runs. Do you know that show? I suppose you probably don't watch television, do you? Too busy locking up young women.”
Sawyer blinked, shifting a bit. Not quite taking a step back but adjusting his posture as if bracing against a sudden gale. “I'm not here to lock anyone up. She here?”
“Wait right there.” This last part didn't sound like a suggestion.
The old caretaker turned, facing up the stairs and called into the house. “Emi, there's an agent with the FBI here to see you, dear!”
The moment she called out, her voice projecting through the house, Ilse heard the sound of a banging window. She jolted, shifting in the front seat of the car, the seatbelt straining against her chest as she turned, glancing over the garage.
Sawyer frowned, this time stepping back suggesting he'd also heard the noise. Both of them looked up and over the garage, as a small form slipped out of a window, stepped onto the small outcropping of the garage roof, and, with a practiced shimmy, dropped over the side into the fenced-in yard on the other side.
“Emily Winters?” Sawyer called out, beginning to move towards the woman.
Olive-skinned features gave frame to an intense gaze from beneath an upraised hood. A young woman stared out at Sawyer for a moment, frozen in the yard.
“I need to speak with you,” Sawyer said, recognizing her, it seemed, from her picture.
Emily's dark gaze fixated on him for a moment longer. But then, she muttered something beneath her breath, spun on her heel, and bolted.