She answered it and flipped the audio to speaker. “Hey, Boy Wonder.”
On the other end of the line, Michael responded with all the dignity he could muster. “I appreciate a good Batman reference as much as the next person, but clearly, if I were a character in that particular fictional universe, I would be Batman, not Robin.” He didn’t give Lia the chance to gainsay him before continuing. “Hypothetically, on a scale from thrilled to ecstatic, how delighted would you be if ‘Batman’ commandeered a private plane, left a pleasantly worded note for the fine folks at Quantico, and made his Bat-way to the lovely town of Cape Roane to battle evildoers at your side?”
“Michael.” I beat Lia to a response, but didn’t get more than his name out before she cut in.
“Hypothetically speaking, have you already done and/or are you in the process of doing all of the above?”
“Absolutely not.”
Lia rolled her eyes. “Liar.” She turned toward me. “I’m going to need directions to the church.”
“Spiritual awakening?” Michael asked her.
“Impending vigil for our murder victim,” I corrected. It took all of three minutes for me to get Lia the directions and catch Michael up to speed on the case—all of it. Mackenzie, what she’d seen when she looked at Kelley’s body, the stakes for our newest Natural now.
Kelley.
Her parents.
“Let’s face it,” Lia cut in. “Grief turns everyone into liars. It doesn’t, however, make you a good liar—and our victim’s parents, her father in particular, were very, very good.” She paused. “If I were anyone else, I would have fully believed that he’d never so much as entertained the idea that his daughter had killed herself. And the wife?” Lia pressed her foot on the gas, reminding me for the umpteenth time why I really needed to stop letting her drive. “She totally didn’t buy that any tiffs Kelley had had with her classmates were because other girls were just so jealous.”
“Translation?” Michael asked.
“Far be it from me to act like a profiler,” Lia replied, “but—and I say this as someone who has deeply embraced the title of lovable bitch—I deeply suspect that Kelley Peterson played to win and played for keeps.”
“She was competitive,” I confirmed. “With herself and with other people. I don’t know that I would go so far as to call her a lovable bitch.”
“You say tomato,” Lia commented. “I say to-mah-to.”
You were in pain, Kelley. You hid it. Did you cut down others—deliberately, precisely—the way you cut yourself? Most people tended to turn aggression either inward or outward. There was bleed-over, but it was somewhat rare to find a person with equal proclivities for both. Power. Pain. Perfection.
I knew Kelley now better than I had before, but it still wasn’t enough.
“I sense a disturbance in the force,” Michael observed on the other end of the phone line. “Heavy silence of the emotionally laden variety.”
“Cassie’s composing a mental poem,” Lia told him. “‘Ode to a Profiler’s Angst.’”
“I’m trying to figure out if Kelley was the type of person who would have climbed the steeple on her own,” I corrected, “or if someone else led her up there.”
Power. Pain. Perfection. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Kelley making the climb. Because she could. Because, on some level, it might hurt. Did the killer take you by surprise? Or, I thought, picturing the aftermath of Kelley’s impact with the ground in my mind, was it his—or her—idea?
I could feel the shift coming. This wasn’t just about Kelley anymore. I was hovering around the edges of someone else’s subconscious. The UNSUB’s.
The Unknown Subject’s.
The killer’s.
“We’re about a minute out from the church,” Lia informed me—and Michael. “When do you land, Batboy?”
“Batman,” Michael loftily corrected. “And fifteen minutes, give or take. Might I suggest that until then, we handle this old-school?”
“Old-school as in sneaking out of the FBI Academy like an unruly teenager and opting to ask for forgiveness instead of permission?” Lia asked innocently. All things considered, that was probably a pretty accurate depiction of what Michael had done when he’d realized that the case we were working now had ties to one of our old ones.
Michael cleared his throat. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘old-school’ as in ‘making liberal use of video surveillance.’”
When we’d first started out, the only way we’d been given access to witnesses was through a video feed, courtesy of our FBI handlers.
“Call me sentimental,” Michael continued, “but it would hit me right in the feelings if my favorite deception detector could deal me in for old times’ sake while I’m in transit. Just think about it, Zhang. You, poking around the vigil, asking questions and listening for lies, me on the lookout for anyone who’s not grieving nearly as much as they’d like us to believe.…”
“Be still, my heart.” No one could deadpan like Lia. “I will surely be unable to control the animal attraction this nostalgia will provoke.”
I snorted, but all things considered, Michael’s suggestion wasn’t a bad one. It wasn’t unusual for killers to return to the scene of the crime, or to attend funerals, wakes, vigils, or other occasions marking the passing. And if you are there…
Triumph. Anger. Adrenaline. Guilt. The range of emotions Michael would be on the lookout for was wide—but I had every confidence he could spot it.
“And what is Cassie going to be doing while we take this trip down memory lane?” Lia threw the question out there, as much for my benefit as for Michael’s.
If we’d had the time, I might have joined them. But the clock was ticking. We needed every advantage we could get.
“I’m going to get a feel for the crime scene and start a profile on the killer,” I said.
And that was my cue to call Dean.
“How are you doing, son?”
Dean stares at the FBI agent. What are the chances that Agent Briggs isn’t thinking about how Dean is doing? What are the chances that he’s thinking about what Dean has done?
“Fine.” Fewer words are better. Dean learned that pretty quickly after his father’s arrest. Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am, yes, sir and no, sir, and not causing trouble.
Not that it helps.
“You’re fine,” Agent Briggs repeats, eyeing the bruise on Dean’s cheekbone.
“It doesn’t hurt.” Dean isn’t lying. The pain is there, but it can’t touch him. That’s part of being what he is, isn’t it? A lack of sensitivity to pain? To fear? To feeling?
Dean wonders, sometimes, if that’s how it started for his father. Every day, he remembers the feel of the knife in his hand. The smell of burning flesh.
“You did what you had to do, Dean. If you hadn’t played your father’s game, if you hadn’t convinced him you wanted to play, he would have killed Veronica.” Special Agent Tanner Briggs is awfully forgiving for someone whose wife’s flesh is now branded with Dean’s initials. “You hurt her so that he’d leave you alone with her.”
Don’t tell me I helped her escape. Don’t tell me I’m the reason she’s alive. Don’t tell me I’m the reason my father is behind bars. He’s a monster.
So am I.
“Is someone giving you a hard time?” Briggs tries again. “Because of your father?”
“I should go.” Dean is twelve. He’s not stupid. He knows that people want to say that they’ve done what they can for him.
He knows, even at twelve, that there’s nothing anyone can do.
“Wait.” Agent Briggs doesn’t touch him, but Dean has to push down the instinct to react like he has.
No one touches me. No one should touch me. If Dean doesn’t let people touch him, if he doesn’t touch back—he can’t hurt them.
He can’t become his father.
“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,” Agent Briggs says suddenly. “A case.”
<
br /> Suddenly, Dean can hear himself think again. “Like my father’s?”
“Not exactly.” Briggs pauses. “The UNSUB—unknown subject—that we’re currently tracking has killed at least three prostitutes in the last eight weeks.”
How? The question echoes in Dean’s mind, again and again until he has to ask it out loud.
“The women were beaten to death.”
“Beaten bare-fisted?” For Dean, the question is automatic. He’s already imagining the way the women would have fought back, the way that might have made the person beating them feel. “Or with a blunt object?”
“Neither.” Briggs pauses for just a moment. “Our killer beats women to death wearing gloves.”
Dean pictures it. Something gives inside of him, something visceral and hopeful and dark. Maybe he can make a difference. Maybe he can atone.
Maybe thinking like a killer is enough.
Dean didn’t answer when I called. I tailed Lia to the church’s front office, but once she’d been directed to the youth area, where Kelley’s friends—or possibly, her “friends”—were setting up for the vigil, I peeled off and stepped back outside.
In all likelihood, most of Kelley’s social group still believed that she had killed herself. I knew better. Standing with my feet on solid ground, I stared up at the steeple.
The sky was dark enough to send a shiver down my spine.
With or without Dean, there was no time to spare in stepping into the UNSUB’s mind. You know your way around this church—well enough to know how to get up to the steeple. Did you know Kelley, too?
Did she trust you?
As a profiler, my most important task was to separate the parts of a murder that were incidental from the parts that signified something specific about the killer. To the extent that a murder had been planned, the question morphed: Which parts of the plan were necessary?
Which parts were required only to fulfill your needs?
With what little I knew, I couldn’t begin to guess motive yet. Maybe the killer had hated Kelley—or been fixated on her—for some time. Maybe her recent actions had drawn attention. Based on the way Kelley’s parents had staunchly insisted that what happened to the Summers boy was not Kelley’s fault, it was also possible that some people had blamed her for her classmate’s suicide.
Maybe the suicides did nothing more than provide you convenient cover for Kelley’s death—or maybe, in your mind, they’re connected. As I addressed the killer, I couldn’t even rule out the possibility that Kelley’s death had been unplanned—that she’d climbed the steeple of her own volition, for her own reasons, and the killer had followed and acted on impulse.
There were too many variables. To sort through them—and I had to sort through them now, not later—I needed to concentrate on what I knew to be true. There were three elements to any murder: the victim, the location, and the method of killing.
I knew all three, and that was a start.
Victim: You chose Kelley. Why? That question could cycle too easily right back to motive, so I tried again. Why this girl? What was it about her that got your attention? Did you see the Kelley the world saw—homecoming court and Ivy League and standing dead-center in every picture? Or did you know the real Kelley? She was vulnerable. Most people didn’t see that.
Did you? I rolled that question over in my mind. Did she remind you of someone—or was this about her? Did she do something? Did you hate her?
Did she trust you?
That was too many questions and not enough answers, so I turned to the next element of the crime. Location: You killed her at a church. I found myself pacing around the base of the building, my face tilting toward the sky the way Mackenzie’s had, back at the lighthouse. Churches are holy. Sacred. You killed this girl on holy ground.
What did that say about our killer? For some, it might have been about sending a message, but not for an UNSUB who’d never intended for anyone to know that the victim had been murdered.
If you chose the church, you didn’t choose it to send a message. You chose it for you—either for your convenience or your satisfaction. Are you religious? Or would any structure this tall do?
There was something about heights. Even standing with my feet on the ground, looking up at the way the steeple stretched into the sky, I felt it.
The higher you go, the farther away the rest of the world feels. It was just you and Kelley up there. Just Kelley and you.
On the brink of something but unable to push through, I tried Dean a second time, and this time, he answered.
“Cassie.” Hearing him say my name sent a wave of something like relief—with a side of anticipation—through my body.
“Strangling someone is intimate,” I said, well aware that was not the way that normal girls started conversations with their boyfriends. “Shooting someone is not. But pushing them off a building…”
Pushing involves physical contact. You touched her. Did you want to? Either way, given the lack of defensive wounds, it had been quick.
“Cassie.” Dean said my name again, and this time, I heard something different in his tone. The two of us were used to profiling in tandem. I profiled in second person. He profiled killers in first.
He wasn’t profiling anyone or anything now.
“Briggs sent Sloane some files,” I said, taking a step back. I’d assumed that Sloane had shared them, that Dean would have started sorting through them as surely as Michael, whose emotion-reading ability was of the most use in person, had taken off.
“I’ve seen the files,” Dean told me. “All three of them.”
That gave me pause. “All three?”
Sloane’s conclusion had been clear: the first two victims had jumped. That was why we were focusing on Kelley—and the church.
“I’m sorry I missed your call,” Dean continued. “I was getting ready to return it. I just wanted to be sure first.”
“Sure?” I asked, wishing he were here, that I could see him, touch him, get a preview of some kind as to what he was thinking.
“Look at the first file,” Dean said. “The photos of the victim taken at the scene.”
I set my phone to speaker and went back to the original email from Briggs, pulling up the file.
The pictures.
The body.
At first, all I saw was blood and bone, a body mangled on the rocks. I knew from Mackenzie that the first two teens had jumped from a cliff, but that wasn’t visible in the picture.
“Do you see it?” The moment the question exited Dean’s mouth, I did. Beside the body, a foot or two removed and even with the victim’s neck, was a plant of some kind, caught between two rocks. At first glance, it looked like it was growing there, but something about the positioning made me question that conclusion.
“I see it. Have you asked Sloane—”
“To ID the plant?” Dean finished. “She says it’s from the genus hedera. Ivy. She’s in the process of identifying the exact species, but she gave it a ninety-eight point seven percent chance that it doesn’t grow naturally nearby.”
The fingers on my right hand tightened around the phone. If the plant didn’t grow nearby, that meant that it had been left there, tucked between two rocks.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Dean murmured. Something in his tone made me think that the first time I’d called, he’d been buried too deep in the UNSUB’s mind to hear the phone ring. He wanted to know if he’d gone too deep, if I saw it, too.
“The first two victims weren’t murdered,” I said. “Sloane said they jumped.”
And yet…
Without being prompted to, I downloaded a photograph of the second suicide victim. Scanning the surroundings didn’t reveal any plants—flowered or otherwise—among the rocks, but there was a small collection of stones.
Four of them, clustered a foot or two to the right of the victim’s neck.
“Mourning,” I said, parsing through it out loud. “Or marking.” I paused, then went ahead and to
ok that logic one step further. “Someone found the bodies before the police did and marked the sites.”
Were you the one who found them? Did you know them? Mourn for them?
“What are the chances of the same person finding both suicide victims?” I asked. The markers might have been different, but the positioning was the same.
Dean’s response was a long time in coming. “The chances are good,” he said finally, his voice reverberating in my bones, “if I watched.”
YOU
There have been so many over the years. Kelley was different. Kelley was not your best work. You failed her.
You won’t fail again.
“How could our UNSUB have known in advance that there would be something to watch?” I asked.
Once was a coincidence. Twice was a pattern. In our line of work, patterns had meaning. Sometimes, they told us about a suspect’s routine. Where they lived. How they spent their time. The radius in which they traveled.
But sometimes?
A pattern told us about the killer’s need.
“I need to watch,” Dean said, his words echoing my thoughts almost exactly. “The last moments…the decisions…”
“How do you know?” I asked again, the question catching my throat. “How did you know those teens were going to jump? Why were you there?”
To watch. The answer to the second question drowned out all possible responses to the first. To mourn.
Typically, any indicators of mourning—flowers, dressing the victim, covering the face—were signs that an UNSUB felt some degree of remorse. The posthumous honoring of a victim was an expression of complex emotion, one that allowed a killer to simultaneously make amends and retell the story of the death in their own head.
“You didn’t kill the first two,” I said, feeling Dean’s presence on the other end of the phone line, as surely as if he’d been there in person. “They killed themselves. They jumped.”
“Kelley didn’t,” Dean said, his voice throaty and low. “She didn’t jump.”
“You didn’t mark her body.” Those two facts were enough of a divergence from the voyeur’s MO that I should have wondered if we were talking about two different people.
Twelve Page 6
