Twelve

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  You didn’t push Kelley. You didn’t kill her. You feel guilty. I tried to make the situation compute, but it didn’t, because the UNSUB we were looking for might have mourned victims, might even have felt remorse at the way things had to be, but that wasn’t the dominant emotion in these kills. Neither was anger.

  Exaltation. Release.

  “You didn’t kill Kelley,” I said, trying a new tack. “You saved her. You didn’t push her; you set her free. And you feel guilty because you weren’t able to honor her passing, the way you did with the others.…”

  “No,” the psychologist snapped. “I feel guilty because when Mackenzie told me that Kelley was pushed, I didn’t believe her. I feel guilty that I left my most vulnerable patient—on a ledge that’s getting slicker by the second—for this.”

  You feel guilty, I thought reflexively, because if you’d kept your mouth shut when I was on the verge of talking Mackenzie down, she might not still be up there.

  That wasn’t me profiling the killer. That was me profiling the woman standing two steps above me—and that distinction was enough to send my heart pounding in my ears.

  As if from a great distance, I heard Lia confirm that every word that the psychologist had just spoken was true. Her guilt was centered on Mackenzie.

  You’re the reason she’s still in such a precarious position. A crack of thunder drowned out every other noise in the stairwell, but not the deafening roar of my own thoughts. But you’re not the only reason.

  Mackenzie’s psychologist wasn’t the only one who’d spoken up and whose words had kept Mackenzie out on that ledge. You weren’t the only person in that room with a background in psychology, motivation, mental illness, and the human mind.

  I had similar training—and I was willing to lay a lot of money on it that any crisis negotiator worth his salt had the same.

  You’re the one in control here, Quentin Nichols had told Mackenzie. It’s your decision.

  I’d assumed that he hadn’t realized how Mackenzie would take a man in a position of power giving her control, like it was his to dole out. But in Quentin Nichols’s line of work, he had to know what to say, how to manipulate a target, how to defuse a dangerous situation…

  Or how to blow it up.

  YOU

  The boards are off the windows. It’s just you and Mackenzie now, separated by feet.

  Soon to be inches.

  Clearing the room before the FBI agent returned was the right call. You promised Mackenzie’s mother that this would be over shortly.

  It will be.

  You wouldn’t have chosen Mackenzie. She’s younger than Cara was—younger than you were when Cara died—but she’s hurting. You can see that. You feel it. This child is hurting. She will always hurt.

  She needs you.

  You didn’t arrange for Mackenzie to be standing on that ledge. You didn’t befriend her, didn’t mentor her, didn’t lead her to this place. She’s not like the others, but she needs you all the same.

  Needs this.

  And after Kelley? Your heart ticks up a beat. You need this, too.

  I pushed past the psychologist and bolted up the stairs, aware that Michael and Lia were following on my heels, but focused only on Mackenzie. The ledge. It’s slick now. You’re shivering. What’s he saying to you?

  What is he nudging you to do?

  I reached the ninth-story landing to find Mrs. McBride and the fireman standing to one side. Celine was on the other side of them, fighting with the door to the lightroom. It was jammed.

  The ladder was up.

  “Mackenzie let us take the boards off the window,” Mrs. McBride told me, breathless, glowing, and fighting tears. “Quentin said she needed space—but she’s coming down.”

  They’d left her alone with him—and based on the trouble Celine was having with the door, he’d locked them out.

  “Nichols isn’t talking her down,” I told Celine, keeping my voice low. “We have to get in there. Now.”

  It took time for the fireman to cut through the door, time for Celine to pull down what was left of the ladder.

  Time we didn’t have.

  Per protocol, Agent Delacroix pulled herself up first. I followed a heartbeat later—screw protocol. On the far side of the room, Mackenzie stood ramrod still on the ledge, the window open, the remains of the barricade scattered on the floor.

  Quentin Nichols stood between her and us—close enough that he could have pulled Mackenzie in.

  If he’d wanted to.

  “It’s not your fault you’re different,” the crisis specialist was murmuring. “I’m betting that no one asked you, back then, if you wanted to be saved. If there was anything left worth saving.”

  Lightning flashed behind Mackenzie, sending an almost tactile shock through the room. But Mackenzie didn’t jolt. Her muscles held steady. As rain and wind beat at her, her eyes stayed focused.

  On the man in front of her.

  “You told yourself that you came up here for Kelley, but, Mackenzie? If this were just about Kelley, you wouldn’t still be out there.” Quentin Nichols sounded tender.

  He sounded sure.

  “There’s no shame,” he said, “in taking control and deciding for yourself what you need.”

  Control. Decide. His word choices were deliberate—and given the way Mackenzie’s mind worked, terrifying. He shifted his weight forward, so slightly that it might not have been visible to his target on the ledge.

  She would have felt it all the same.

  You know what she needs. I silently addressed Quentin. You know that left to her own devices, she might not do it.

  “He pushed Kelley.” I said the one thing guaranteed to draw the UNSUB’s attention my way—the one thing sure to break through to Mackenzie. “She wouldn’t jump, so he pushed her.”

  “I let her go,” Nichols corrected, his attention still focused on Mackenzie, his tone still gentle. “Kelley was hurting. Some pain gets better—but some doesn’t. What you’ve lived through, Mackenzie? The fight you fight every day? It’s not going away.”

  It felt like he was telling me that—not just her.

  “Part of you will always be in that shack,” he continued softly, the sudden cruelty of that statement jarring. “And as long as you’re there—the man responsible wins.”

  “No,” I said, my voice like a gunshot that ricocheted through the lightroom. “You win, Mackenzie, because you’re alive. Because you survived. Because that son of a bitch is in the ground, and Mackenzie McBride is still dancing.”

  “Step back from the window.” Celine had her weapon raised and aimed at Nichols. The crisis negotiator didn’t even seem to register it.

  Mercy is what matters. What you and only you can give Mackenzie—no one can take that away.

  “Your FBI friends think you’ll come in,” he told the girl on the ledge. “They think I’m the one keeping you out there. They think you’re that easily manipulated—that you’re helpless and weak, and if they tell you fairy tales, you’ll believe them. But I’ll tell you the truth.” He paused, his expression tender. “I had a sister like you. Bad things happened to her. Like you. I didn’t understand then, but I do now. Some wounds can’t heal. Some people can’t heal.” He took a step toward her this time—a full step. “But you don’t have to do this—you don’t have to end this—alone.”

  “He killed Kelley,” I repeated, close to shouting now to be heard over the storm, to make her hear me. “He wants you to jump.” No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t tell Mackenzie that everything he’d said was a lie, because it wasn’t. Even when wounds healed, the scars remained. She’d always feel them.

  But this was her body. Her choice. Her life.

  “Dance,” I told her. She was on a ledge. It was pouring rain. That was the last thing I should have advised, but in that four-by-four shack, when she was just a little girl, Mackenzie had danced—hours upon hours, again and again, because it was her body.

  Because no one was g
oing to take that away.

  “Don’t listen to him, Mackenzie. Dance.”

  Slowly, she raised her arms, rounding them in front of her, then allowing them to part. She shifted her weight to one foot, the other toe pointing.

  For the first time since we’d entered the room, Quentin Nichols turned to face Celine and me head-on.

  “Hands in the air!” Celine barked. “On the ground!”

  On some level, I was aware that Michael and Lia had joined us, that Celine had backup. But my attention was focused solely on the man in front of me.

  The man who was close enough to Mackenzie to reach out and touch her.

  “I didn’t plan this,” he told me.

  You didn’t search Mackenzie out. You didn’t groom her. You didn’t lead her slowly toward this, day by day.

  “You planned the others,” I countered. “You found them. You listened to them.” I swallowed. “You made them trust you.”

  “I volunteer,” Quentin said, closing his eyes for just a moment, the expression on his face eerily wistful. “I coach. I work with the youth group at the church.”

  He didn’t just have one point of access, one set of hunting grounds. He’d cultivated several.

  “There have been others,” I stated, reading into that. “Over the years.”

  “I’m there for them. I help when I can. And when I can’t…” He bowed his head, the motion bordering on ceremonial. “I offer release.”

  Behind him, Mackenzie stopped dancing. Her eyes meeting mine, she sank slowly to a sitting position.

  She’s coming in.

  I tried not to show even a hint of relief.

  “What I do is a duty,” Nichols was saying, “not a pleasure.”

  “It’s mercy,” I said. I had to keep his attention on me. I couldn’t let him turn around.

  For a moment, I thought it was working, and then, without warning, he whirled. He saw Mackenzie. She froze. Her legs were dangling into the room. She was almost safe.

  You will save her. He moved.

  I lunged forward, knowing even as I did that I couldn’t get to him before he reached her. A gunshot went off. My ears ringing, I hit the ground. The impact knocked the breath from my chest. I looked up, forcing my eyes to the ledge.

  Mackenzie was sitting there.

  Nichols was down.

  Celine approached him, her freshly fired gun still in her hands. Taking use of the cover she provided, Michael knelt to feel for a pulse. I forced my eyes from the two of them, pulled myself up off the ground, and stumbled toward Mackenzie.

  She slid off the ledge, into my arms. Beside us, Michael looked at Celine and shook his head.

  Nichols was gone.

  I wrapped my arms around Mackenzie, blocking the dead body from view, but she fought my hold and stepped aside. She wanted to see it.

  To see him.

  “For the record…” Lia managed to pull Mackenzie’s attention away from the killer’s corpse. “When he said that what he tried to do to you—what he did to the others—wasn’t a pleasure?” Lia spat in the dead’s man direction. “He lied.”

  The girl sits down, and her mother brushes her hair. Long, even strokes. “You’re lucky, you know.” The brush stills, then the woman wielding it corrects herself. “Blessed.”

  Blessed because the leader has chosen her.

  Blessed because she’s favored by God.

  What a joke.

  “Sadie.” Her mother says the name she was given at birth, the one he knows. “This is a blessing.”

  It would have been easier if she couldn’t hear, plain as day, that Mama believes that.

  Believes in him.

  The girl turns. She needs, just this once, for her mother to see the truth—to see her.

  “I don’t have visions.” Truths get more potent the longer you keep them from your tongue. There’s years of power in this one. “I never have. He doesn’t have them, either. He’s a liar. I’m a better one, and I will literally rip his eyes out of their sockets the next time he comes to my bed.”

  She was nine the first time. With the right lies—the right truths—she put him off. Until she was twelve.

  “This isn’t you.” Her mother backs away, frightened, but the girl called Sadie—the girl who used to be Sadie—knows the truth.

  After all, her mother was the one who told her, all those years ago—Pretend it’s not you. Whatever happens, pretend that it isn’t happening to you.

  Sadie is good at pretending. Lia is better. After all, she’s pretended to be Sadie all these years.

  “I love you, Mama.” Lia can make that sound and feel true without having to worry about whether or not it still is. “Even though you’re planning on telling him everything I tell you, even though you’ll stand back and let him put me in a hole in the ground, even though you’ll watch me starving and dying of thirst and look straight through me until he gives me permission to exist again—I love you.”

  Her mother is wearing a bracelet made of thorns—penance. She removes it, tries to force it around her daughter’s wrist.

  Lia lets her. As the thorns bite into her flesh, she lets her eyelashes flutter. Her face visibly softens. She dons the Sadie mask. “You did well, Mama.” The words are gentle, and they sound true-true-true. Lia is leaving tonight. She knows now that no one will be coming with her. She can feel the last bit of Sadie flickering inside of her like a candle, ready to die.

  She lets Sadie caress the side of her mother’s face, one last time.

  “Your faith is pure.” Lia knows how to sell a lie, and nine-tenths of it is telling people exactly what they want to hear.

  “This was a test?” Her mother is breathless. Questions can’t be lies, but Lia hears the hesitation, the uncertainty. Some part of Mama has always known what the leader does to those, like Sadie, whom he calls blessed.

  But the others? They aren’t like Sadie, aren’t like Lia. They don’t know when someone is lying, when the leader is spitting falsehoods. They can’t lie nearly so convincingly themselves.

  This is the truth: there is blood on Sadie’s hands, on Lia’s. One lie—the right lie—can doom a man. She wishes a lie could save her mother.

  He’s going to kill you someday. All of you.

  Lia won’t be here to die. “It was a test,” she confirms gently. She leans forward, touches her forehead to her mother’s. “Tell me you love me.”

  It’s Lia who turns, not Sadie. It’s Lia whose hair her mother is brushing. She’ll always be Lia now.

  “I love you, Sadie.”

  It would be easier, for Lia, if that were a lie.

  “Worst thing about this case.” Dean sat at the end of my bed. It had taken three days—and Briggs calling in a favor—for my boyfriend to get twenty-four hours of leave from Quantico. Given that Briggs had also had to grease the wheels to excuse Michael’s better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission trip to Maine, I was starting to suspect that someone at the FBI Academy was going to be read in on the Naturals program fairly soon.

  “The worst thing about this case…” I took my time to feel the weight of the words. “The worst thing is knowing that Mackenzie could have died because I got it wrong.”

  I’d left a vulnerable twelve-year-old alone with a killer whose specialty was exploiting vulnerabilities. I knew better than to make assumptions. I knew how easily one wrong mental turn could lead even the strongest profiler astray.

  And yet…

  Dean took my hand in his and turned it over so that he could trace his thumb along the lines of my palm. “Are you sure that the worst part wasn’t why you got it wrong?”

  Being a Natural didn’t make a person infallible. I knew that, but I’d started working with the Bureau young enough that I also had a healthy amount of experience under my belt. Normally, when I made mistakes, they were smaller.

  Normally, I self-corrected.

  I didn’t need to turn too much of my profiler’s eye inward to know why it had been far too easy fo
r me to see a psychologist as the enemy. I’d thought from the beginning that the woman didn’t—and couldn’t—understand what Mackenzie had been through.

  Just like the Bureau psychologist I’d been assigned when I was a teenager had never understood me.

  “You think I should see someone.” I let my fingers curl slowly into a fist, and Dean cupped his hand around mine.

  “I think it might help.” His lips brushed, white-hot, over my knuckles.

  As much as I’d fought to ignore my own scars, I’d never tried to make Dean forget his. I had never—and would never—pretend that the worst moments of his life didn’t matter. I knew and accepted that Behavior, Personality, Environment wasn’t a one-time calculation, that everything we did and experienced became a part of us.

  I knew that the things that happened when we were young had the longest to burrow in.

  Without our particular childhoods, none of us would have been Naturals. Lia wouldn’t have been Lia without growing up in the cult. Sloane had always had an affinity for numbers, but isolation had turned them into a coping mechanism. Michael’s sensitivity to emotions developed as a survival skill, and Dean understood killers because he’d been raised to be one. I’d long since accepted the role that my own childhood had played in making me a Natural profiler.

  Why was it so much harder to accept that there were other traumas whose effects had formed me just as much?

  “Quentin Nichols had a sister.” I leaned back against the headboard, my fingers intertwining themselves with Dean’s. It was easier—always—to talk about someone other than myself. “She killed herself when she was eighteen. Quentin was four years younger.”

  “He was there.” Dean didn’t make that a question.

  “His family blamed him for not being able to stop it.” That was what I’d been able to piece together, after the fact. “According to people who knew him, Nichols always said that was why he went into crisis negotiation—to save lives. But in reality…” I closed my eyes, just for a moment, knowing that Dean deserved more than me talking about the case because it was easier than addressing the elephant in the room.