“I never noticed any injuries on those kids to suggest abuse,” said Levi.
“Shephard could undo wounds, so he’d healed the children afterwards, leaving no evidence of what they’d been through,” said Milton. “From what the staff could tell, the abuse was isolated to that one dorm. The reason Harry and the others were placed together was that they were low on the power spectrum—the staff didn’t believe it would be fair to place them with children who they’d be unable to defend themselves against. I think that was probably also why the tutors chose that dorm—in terms of power, the kids were too weak to fight back.” Milton let out a sad sigh. “And now some of them have been victimized yet again. How were they killed?”
Knox gave him all the details, including Tanner’s belief that the mutilations reflected the See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil saying. “How many other kids were in that dorm? Because I’m thinking that one of them is holding the others to blame for whatever they went through, and they’re intent on making them pay for it.”
Milton pursed his lips. “Other than the boys I mentioned, there were three other children. Patrick Stephens, Royal Foreman, and Donnie Ramirez. I can tell you that Ramirez is dead—he turned rogue while at Ramsbrook; had to be taken down. I’m not sure what happened to the other two. Dale’s sister might also be a target.”
Tanner’s brows pinched together. “Why?”
“Well, she didn’t sleep in Dale’s dorm—the girls were kept separate—but she told one of the staff members that she snuck in there one night after she’d had a nightmare and the tutors came in and forced her to ‘take a vote.’”
Knox stilled. “Muriel told us that there was no way the victims were involved in anything together.”
Milton lifted a brow. “Then Muriel lied.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“She’s gone,” said Tanner, standing in the middle of Muriel’s living room a short while later.
Larkin perched her hands on her hips. “It doesn’t seem like any of her things are missing. Her wardrobe and drawers are full. Her door keys are in the bowl in the hallway. Her purse is near the sofa. The TV’s on.” Her nose wrinkled at the bowl of stale soup on the table. “Looks like she sat down to have lunch some time yesterday and then …”
“And then someone came and took her,” finished Knox. His nostrils flared. “Fuck.”
“I just skimmed through her phone,” said Levi. “She’s had a lot of missed calls. The last one she answered came yesterday morning at 10am. Her first missed call was at 2:30pm, so she was taken some time before then.”
“There’s no point ignoring the reality that she’s been taken by whoever killed her brother and the others. God knows where they’ll leave her body.” Knox sighed. “We need to get back to my office.”
Flames erupted around them and licked at Tanner’s skin as the Prime pyroported them back to his Underground office.
Planting his hands on his desk, Knox said, “Larkin, Keenan—I’m going to need you both to try to locate Royal Foreman and Patrick Stephens. One of them has to be the killer. It’s the only thing that makes sense of everything that’s happened.”
“Finding them might not be a fast process, especially with respect to the killer,” Larkin warned. “He’s probably taken precautions to hide his identity just in case anyone worked out what was happening and started to hunt him. He might have changed his name, moved away, switched lairs.”
“I’m not under the illusion that you’ll find the killer in time to save Muriel,” Knox assured her. “He’s had her in his grasp too long.”
“We’ll find Stephens and Foreman,” Keenan stated.
Knox sat on his leather chair. “What do we remember of Stephens?”
Levi pursed his lips. “He was a quiet kid. Kept his head down. Made no effort to draw attention to himself. He was also an illusionist. Could force people to believe they could hear, see, smell, taste, or touch something that didn’t exist. He didn’t have a good handle on his ability back then, though.”
“He had cold eyes,” Tanner recalled.
Larkin nodded. “Yeah. He could chill your bones with just a look, and he wasn’t even frowning or scowling. His face would always be blank.”
“Foreman was the opposite,” said Keenan. “Loud and brash. Always acting out. But then, ensnares are natural-born tricksters, aren’t they? I remember he used to create traps to amuse himself. Sometimes the traps were physical, like nets or tubes. Other times, he’d trap people’s minds inside their bodies, stopping the brain from communicating with the body—it meant they couldn’t move or speak.”
“His snares never stood up well to attacks, though,” Tanner remembered. “And they usually only lasted twenty seconds or so. But his ability would have strengthened with age.”
Levi folded his arms. “The question is … which one is most likely to be the killer?”
“I’d say Stephens purely because I found him creepy,” said Larkin. “But I don’t think we can really base our suspicion on how they acted as kids. People change.”
“Whoever it is, something must have happened recently in their life to spur them into suddenly going after the people they hold responsible for their pain,” said Tanner.
Knox nodded. “There must have been some sort of trigger.”
Tanner took a deep, pained breath that tightened his chest. “If one of the kids had just told us, just hinted at it …” He’d have obliterated the abusers in an instant.
“You can understand why they didn’t talk,” said Larkin, her mouth downturned. “But I sure wish they had.”
Yeah, Tanner could understand it, because shame was crawling through his system. He’d noticed the haunted expressions Harry and the others sometimes wore, but he’d never wondered at it. He’d always attributed their hurt to the other shit that went on there. Plus, everyone had a sad story of how they’d come to be at Ramsbrook—it hadn’t occurred to him that something else could be going on.
“Harry got them help, in his way,” said Levi. “It didn’t save him from whoever’s been hunting kids from his dorm, though.”
And that only made it worse. Tanner was glad the tutors were dead, but slit throats? They’d deserved a fuck of a lot worse than that. “Giles and Shephard died too easily, too quickly. They should have been the ones who fucking suffered, not Harry and the others—they were victims.”
“So is whoever killed them,” said Larkin. “That’s the worst thing. We’ll be killing someone who’s already been through enough.”
Exhaling heavily, Knox pushed to his feet. “I need to speak with Harper about something.”
Tanner suspected that his Prime didn’t have anything in particular to speak with her about. Suspected that Knox simply wanted to see her, wanted to touch the one thing that calmed him. Just the same, Tanner was itching to see the person who had the singular ability to still the chaos in his head. Devon.