The Girl and the Unlucky 13 (Emma Griffin™ FBI Mystery) A.J. Rivers (historical books to read TXT) 📖

“Who else is she going to tell? You? She probably thought you would slip a note back that just said ‘yay’,” he says.

I roll my eyes at him. “Alright, I think that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Things aren’t that bad between us. I just need her to…”

“What?” Dean cuts me off. “Act like you never would have when you were her age?”

“By the time I was her age, I had already been an agent for a couple of years and taken down murderers and organized crime rings,” I fire back.

“Because you didn’t let anybody tell you who you were allowed to be or what you were capable of doing,” he points out. “Because you took it upon yourself to disobey direct orders from your superior officers if you needed to.”

“I haven’t told her either of those things,” I protest. “I’ve just told her to not interfere.”

“And if someone had said that to you?” he asks. “If at the beginning of your career someone had tried to put you in a corner that way?”

“They did. Countless times,” I say.

“And what did you do? You just sat there and took it?”

“We’re not talking about me, Dean. We’re talking about Ava.”

“What are we talking about Ava about?”

I look up to see Ava standing at the door, gazing in at me.

Xavier leans slightly toward me to whisper. “Maybe we could talk about her grammar. That might be more constructive.”

“The door wasn’t all the way closed,” Ava says, gesturing at it as she steps inside. “I heard everybody talking, so I thought I’d come in.”

“What were you doing this morning?” I ask.

She smiles, clearly pleased with herself. “I went to talk to Ashley.”

“You did what?”

“Oh, shit,” Dean mutters.

Ava’s smile drops from her face and she looks surprised at our reaction.

“You’d said Misty didn’t want Ashley to go to the house and I thought…”

“You thought what? That you could convince her to change her mind? That you could go behind my back and interject yourself, and that would spontaneously make her agree to it?” I ask angrily.

“No,” she says. “That’s not what I meant. I just thought maybe there was another way that would accomplish all the goals.”

“What goals?” I ask.

“Misty feeling that her daughter is safe and secure, but us getting the information we need to move the investigation forward,” she explains.

“No,” I say. “There is only one goal. And that’s to find who did this to Ashley so we can get them out of society. ‘We’ don’t need anything. I need Ashley to show us the house.”

“I found out how to get there. That’s why I went. I thought if she could describe to me how she got to the school and we were able to trace it back, we could find the house. She even drew a diagram of the house and as much of a map as she could,” Ava says.

“If I’d wanted her to do that, I would have asked her to do it,” I say through a stiff jaw and tightly held teeth. “The point was for her to retrace her steps and come to the house with me.”

“Why?” Ava asks. “Why does she need to be there?”

“So we can see it through her eyes,” Xavier says. “Emma needs to see what Ashley saw. And how she reacts to the surroundings. That would have told her more than a description and a piece of paper could.”

“Xavier,” Dean pipes up, backing up toward the door, “let’s go downstairs and get some breakfast.”

“We already had breakfast,” Xavier says.

“Brunch.”

“It’s not late enough.”

“Second breakfast,” Dean says.

“Oooh, Hobbit style,” Xavier says, moving toward the door. As he passes Ava, he pauses and looks at her. “The shovel, Ava. That’s all I said. The shovel. Not the whole sandbox.”

She watches him leave, stuck in those familiar few seconds of wonder before turning her attention back to me.

“I’m sorry, Emma,” she says. “I was just trying to help.”

“You were trying to get your point across and take over part of the investigation because you didn’t like the way I want it handled,” I say.

“I thought there could be a better way,” she says. “I didn’t think it was necessary for a traumatized victim to return to the place she was held and probably tortured for five years, especially when the perpetrator is still unidentified and at large.”

She’s forcing her voice to sound strong as she holds her ground, but I’m not impressed.

“She wasn’t held there for five years,” I say. “She was probably only there for a few days at the most.”

“I thought she said that was where she was. Where she woke up and where she escaped from,” Ava says.

“She said she woke up in a house. And yes, she escaped from that particular house,” I say. “But that wasn’t the house where she was kept for five years.”

“How do you know that?” Ava asks. “She knew how to get out and get into town, but that could be as simple as sometimes they took her to the store. You know as well as I do there are kidnap victims who aren’t always locked down. They get taken out and driven around.”

“Because there’s no electricity there,” I say.

Ava looks slightly taken aback. “What?”

“No electricity. The area she described when she was first telling the story of how she escaped narrowed down the possible area of where the house could be located. Based on her description, it was clearly a farmhouse set on a good piece of land. The man who gave her a ride to the vigil the day she reappeared gave a clear account of where exactly he picked her up and what she said.

“Those details combine to roughly outline a general area where she realistically could have been. And in that area are several farms. Most of them are well-maintained and functional to this day. Three other houses in the general vicinity match her explanation of going across the field and out into the woods.