“Thanks,” I told my grandmother. My voice came out slightly hoarse. I tamped down on the grief rising up inside me. Sooner or later, it would catch up to me.
I had always been better at compartmentalizing than ridding myself of unwanted emotions altogether.
As I turned away from Nonna’s prying eyes and walked back to Judd and the car, I couldn’t banish the memory of my mom’s voice.
Dance it off.
Judd drove in silence. He left it to me to break it, if and when I was ready to do so.
“The police found a body.” It took me ten minutes to push those words past the edge of my lips. “They think it’s my mother’s.”
“I heard,” Judd said simply. “Briggs got a call.”
Special Agent Tanner Briggs was one of the Naturals program’s two FBI supervisors. He’d been the one to recruit me, and he’d used my mother’s case to do it.
Of course he’d gotten a call.
“I want to see the body,” I told Judd, staring out at the road in front of us. Later, I could process. Later, I could grieve. Answers, facts, that was what I needed now. “Pictures of the crime scene,” I continued, “anything Briggs can get from the locals, I want to see it.”
Judd waited a beat. “That all?”
No. That wasn’t all. I wanted, desperately, for the body the police had found not to be my mother. And I wanted it to be her. And it didn’t matter that those things were contradictory. It didn’t matter that I was setting myself up to lose, no matter what.
I bit down, my teeth digging into the inside of my cheek. After a moment, I answered Judd’s question out loud. “No, that’s not all. I also want to take down the person who did this to her.”
That, at least, was simple. That was clear. I’d joined the Naturals program to put killers behind bars. My mother deserved justice. I deserved justice, for everything I’d lost.
“I ought to tell you that hunting down the person who killed her won’t bring her back.” Judd switched lanes, seemingly paying more attention to the road than to me. I wasn’t fooled. Judd was a former marine sniper, always aware of his surroundings. “I ought to tell you,” he continued, “that obsessing over this case won’t make it hurt any less.”
“But you won’t,” I said.
You know what it’s like to have your world torn apart. You know what it’s like to wake up each day to the awareness that the monster who tore it apart is still out there, free to do it again.
Judd wouldn’t tell me I needed to let this go. He couldn’t.
“What would you do,” I said softly, “if it were Scarlett? If there were a lead, no matter how small, on her case?”
I’d never spoken Judd’s daughter’s name in his presence before. Until recently, I hadn’t even been aware she existed. I didn’t know much about her, other than the fact that she’d been the victim of a serial killer known as Nightshade.
The one thing I did know was how Judd would have felt if there were a development in that case.
“It was different for me,” Judd said finally, his eyes fixed out on the road. “There was a body. Don’t know if that makes it better or worse. Better, probably, because I didn’t have to wonder.” His teeth clamped together for a moment. “Worse,” he continued, “because that’s something no father should ever see.”
I tried to imagine what Judd must have gone through when he saw his daughter’s body and immediately wished that I could stop. Judd was a man with a high tolerance for pain and a face that hid nine-tenths of what he felt. But when he saw his daughter’s lifeless body, there would have been no hiding, no gritting his teeth through the pain—nothing but the roar in his ears and a devastation I knew all too well.
If it were Scarlett whose body had just been found, Scarlett whose necklace had just turned up, you wouldn’t sit idly by. You couldn’t—no matter the cost.
“You’ll tell Briggs and Sterling to get me the files?” I said. Judd wasn’t an FBI agent. His first and only priority was the well-being of the Bureau’s teenage assets. He was the final word on our involvement in any case.
Including my mother’s.
You understand, I thought, staring at him. Whether you want to or not—you do.
“You can look at the files,” Judd told me. He pulled the car into a private airstrip, then fixed me with a look. “But you’re not doing it alone.”
The private jet seated twelve, but when I stepped onto the plane, only five of those seats were filled. Agents Sterling and Briggs sat at the front of the plane, on opposite sides of the aisle. She was looking at a file. He was looking at his watch.
All business, I thought. Then again, if it had really been all business between them, they wouldn’t have needed the space provided by the aisle.
Behind them, Dean sat with his back to the front of the plane. There was a table in front of him and a deck of cards on the table. Lia was sprawled across two seats, catty-corner from Dean. Sloane was perched, cross-legged, on the edge of the table, her white-blond hair pulled into a lopsided ponytail on top of her head. If she’d been anyone else, I would have been seriously concerned that she was about to topple over, but knowing Sloane, she’d probably already done the math on her current position and taken whatever steps necessary to ensure the laws of physics fell in her favor.
“Well,” Lia said, shooting me a lazy grin, “look who finally decided to grace us with her presence.”
They don’t know. The realization that Briggs hadn’t told the rest of the team about my mother—about the body—washed over me. If he had, Lia wouldn’t have been lazily poking at me; she would have been jabbing. Some people comforted. Lia prided herself on providing distractions—and not the kind you wanted to thank her for.
My assumption was confirmed when Dean turned to look at me. “Don’t mind Lia,” he said. “She’s in a mood because I beat her at Chutes and Ladders.” A small smile played around the edges of his lips.
Dean wasn’t crossing the plane. He wasn’t putting a calming hand on my shoulder or neck. And that meant that he definitely didn’t know.
In that moment, I didn’t want him to.
The smile on his face, the way he’s teasing Lia—Dean was healing. Each day we were together, the barriers came down a little. Each day, he inched out of the shadows and became a little more himself.
I wanted that for him.
I didn’t want him thinking about the fact that my mother was a victim. I didn’t want him thinking about the fact that his father was a killer.
I wanted to hold on to that smile.
“Chutes and Ladders?” I repeated.
Lia’s eyes glittered. “My version is much more interesting.”
“That is concerning on so many levels,” I said.
“Welcome back,” Agent Briggs told me. Across from him, Agent Sterling looked up from the file she was reading and met my eyes. Briggs’s ex-wife was a profiler. She was my mentor.
If Briggs knows, Sterling knows. Within a heartbeat, my eyes went to the file in her hand.
“Grab a seat,” she told me.
I took that to mean, We’ll talk later. Sterling was leaving it up to me to decide what I wanted to tell the others—and when. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep this a secret indefinitely. Lia’s specialty was deception detection. Lying was out of the question, and no matter how firmly I locked this away, it wouldn’t take Dean long to realize that something had happened.
I had to tell them. But I might be able to put it off for a couple of hours—especially since the one person who would have known immediately that something was wrong wasn’t on this plane.
“Where’s Michael?” I asked, sliding into the seat next to Dean.
“Fifteen miles southeast of Westchester, due north of Long Island Sound.” Sloane tilted her head to one side, like her slightly off-center ponytail was weighing it down.
“He went home for Christmas,” Dean translated. Underneath the table, his hand found its way to mine. Initiating physical cont
act wasn’t easy for Dean, but slowly, he’d begun to reach out more.
“Michael went home for Christmas?” I repeated. My eyes darted to Lia’s. She and Michael had been on-again, off-again long before I’d arrived on the scene. We both knew—everyone on this plane knew—that “home” wasn’t a place Michael should be.
“Michael wanted to go home for a visit.” Agent Briggs inserted himself into the middle of the conversation, coming to stand in the aisle just behind Sloane. “It was his request and his choice.”
Of course it was. My stomach twisted. Michael had told me once that if you couldn’t keep someone from hitting you, the best thing to do was make them hit you. When Michael was hurting, when there was even a chance he might be hurt, he sought out conflict.
He’d taken my choosing Dean like a backhanded slap.
“He wanted to see his mom,” Sloane chirped up innocently. “He said he hadn’t seen her in a really long time.”
The rest of us understood people. Sloane understood facts. Whatever Michael had told her, she would have believed.
“I gave him a list of conversation starters before he left,” Sloane told me seriously. “In case he and his mom need something to talk about.”
Knowing Sloane, that probably meant she’d encouraged Michael to break the ice by informing his family that the last word in the dictionary was zyzzyva, a form of tropical weevil.
“Michael,” Briggs cut in, “will be fine.” Something about the way the agent’s jaw clenched told me that Briggs had made sure that Michael’s father knew his continued freedom depended on Michael’s continued well-being.
We’d all come to the Naturals program in different ways. Michael’s father—the one who’d taught him all about being hit—had traded Michael to the FBI for immunity on white-collar crimes.
“There, there,” Lia cut in flatly, “everyone’s fine, Kumbaya. If the comforting-Cassie portion of our daily ritual is over, can we get on with something a bit less tedious?”
One good thing about Lia: she didn’t let you indulge in worry or angst for long.
“Wheels up in five,” Briggs replied. “And Sloane?”
Our resident numbers expert bent her head back so she was staring up at Briggs. “There’s a high probability you’re going to tell me to get off the table,” she said.
Briggs almost smiled. “Get off the table.”
We’d been airborne for about twenty minutes when Briggs and Sterling started briefing us on where we were going—and why.
“We have a case.” Sterling’s voice was calm and cool. Not too long ago, she would have insisted that there was no we, that minors—no matter how skilled—had no place in an FBI investigation.
Not too long ago, the Naturals program had been restricted to cold cases.
A lot had changed.
“Three bodies in three days.” Briggs picked up where Sterling had left off. “Local police didn’t realize they were dealing with a single UNSUB until an initial autopsy was done on the third victim this morning. They immediately requested FBI assistance.”
Why? I let the question take hold. Why didn’t the police connect the first two victims? Why request FBI intervention so quickly after victim number three? The busier my brain was, the easier it would be to keep it from going back to the body the police had found.
Back to a thousand and one memories of my mother.
“Our victims seem to have very little in common,” Briggs continued, “aside from physical proximity and what appears to be our UNSUB’s calling card.”
Profilers used the term modus operandi—or MO—to refer to the aspects of a crime that were necessary and functional. But leaving a calling card? That wasn’t functional. It wasn’t necessary. And that made it a part of our Unknown Subject’s signature.
“What kind of calling card?” Dean asked. His voice was soft and had just enough of a hum in it to tell me that he was already shifting into profiling mode. It was the tiny details—what the calling card was, where the police had found it in each case, what, if anything, it said—that would let us understand the UNSUB. Was our killer signing his work, or delivering a message? Tagging his victims as a sign of ownership, or opening a line of communication with the police?
Agent Sterling held up a hand to stave off questions. “Let’s back up.” She glanced over at Briggs. “Start from the beginning.”
Briggs gave a curt nod, then flipped a switch. A flat screen near the front of the plane turned on. Briggs hit a button, and a crime scene photo appeared. In it, a woman with long, dark hair lay on the pavement. Her lips had a bluish tint. Her eyes were glassy. A sopping wet dress clung to her body.
“Alexandra Ruiz,” Agent Sterling narrated. “Twenty-two years old, college student majoring in pre-occupational therapy at the University of Arizona. She was found about twenty minutes after midnight on New Year’s Eve, floating facedown in the rooftop pool at the Apex Casino.”
“The Apex Casino.” Sloane blinked several times. “Las Vegas, Nevada.”
I waited for Sloane to tell us the square footage of the Apex, or the year it was founded. Nothing.
“Pricey.” Lia filled the void. “Assuming our victim was staying at the Apex.”
“She wasn’t.” Briggs brought up another photo, inset to one side of Alexandra’s, this one of a man in his early forties. He had dark hair with just a dusting of silver. The photo was a candid one. The man wasn’t looking at the camera, but I got the distinct feeling that he knew it was there.
“Thomas Wesley,” Briggs told us. “Former internet mogul, current world poker champion. He’s in town for an upcoming poker tournament and rented the penthouse suite at the Apex, with exclusive access to the rooftop pool.”
“I’m guessing our boy Wesley likes to party?” Lia asked. “Especially on New Year’s Eve?”
I stopped examining Thomas Wesley’s picture as my eyes were drawn upward toward Alexandra’s. You and some friends thought it would be a blast to spend New Year’s Eve in Vegas. You got invited to a party. Maybe even the party. Her dress was turquoise. Her shoes were black, high-heeled. One heel had been snapped off. How did you break your heel?
Were you running? Did you struggle?
“Did she have any bruises?” I asked. “Any sign that she’d been held under the water?”
Any sign that she fought back?
Agent Sterling shook her head. “There were no signs of a struggle. Her blood alcohol level was high enough that police assumed it was an accident. Tragic, but not criminal.”
That would explain why the police hadn’t connected their first two victims. They hadn’t even realized Alexandra was a victim.
“How do we know it wasn’t an accident?” Lia swung her legs over the side of her seat, letting them dangle off.
“The calling card.” Dean and I answered at the exact same time.
I turned my mind from Alexandra to the UNSUB. You made it look like an accident, but left something to tell the police that it wasn’t. If they were smart enough, if they connected the pieces of the puzzle, they’d see. See what you were doing. See the elegance in it.
See how clever you are.
“What was it?” I voiced the question Dean had asked earlier. “What did the UNSUB leave?”
Another click from Briggs, another picture on the screen, this one a close-up of a wrist. Alexandra’s. Her arm lay palm-up on the pavement. I could see the veins beneath her skin, and just above them, on the outside edge of her wrist, were four numbers, inked into her skin in fancy script: 3213. The ink was dark brown, with a slight orange tint to it.
“Henna,” Sloane offered, playing with the edge of her sleeve, judiciously avoiding eye contact with the rest of us. “A dye derived from the flowering plant Lawsonia inermis. Henna tattoos are temporary and, at any given time, less common than permanent tattoos by a factor of about twenty to one.”
I could feel Dean beside me, processing this information. His gaze was locked onto the picture, as if he could will it
to tell him the full story. “The tattoo on her wrist,” he said. “That’s the calling card?”
You’re not just leaving messages. You’re leaving them inked onto the bodies of your victims.
“Is there any way to get a time stamp on the tattoo?” I asked. “Did he mark her, then drown her, or drown her, then mark her?”
Briggs and Sterling exchanged a look. “Neither.” Sterling was the one who answered the question. “According to her friends, she got the tattoo herself.”
As we processed that information, Briggs cleared the screen and brought up a new photo. I tried to look away, but couldn’t. The corpse on the screen was covered in blisters and burns. I couldn’t tell if the victim was male or female. There was only one patch of unmarred skin.
The right wrist.
Briggs gave us a close-up.
“4-5-5-8.” Sloane read out loud. “3-2-1-3. 4-5-5-8.” She stopped talking, but her lips kept moving as she went over and over the numbers.
Meanwhile, Dean and I were staring at the photograph.
“Not henna this time,” he said. “This time I had the numbers burned into my target’s skin.”
My preferred pronoun for profiling was you. I talked to the killer, to the victims. But when Dean slipped into an UNSUB’s head, he imagined being the killer. Doing the killing.
Given who and what his father was—and the way Dean couldn’t shake the fear that he’d inherited some trace of monstrousness—that didn’t surprise me. Every time he profiled, he faced that fear head-on.
“I suppose you’re going to tell us victim number two burned the numbers into his own arm?” Lia asked Briggs. She did a good job of sounding unaffected by the gruesomeness of what we were seeing, but I knew better. Lia was an expert at masking her true reactions, showing only what she wanted the world to see.
“In a manner of speaking.” Briggs brought up another picture, side by side with the wrist. It looked like some kind of wristband. Set back into the thick material it was made of were four metal numbers: 4558, but flipped—a mirror image of the numbers on the victim’s skin.