The next morning, after tossing and turning most of the night, I woke to find a face hovering three inches above my own. I jerked
backward in bed, and Sloane blinked at me.
“Hypothetically speaking,” she said, as if it were perfectly normal to bend over a bed and stare at someone until they woke up, “would constructing a model of the crime scene we saw on the video yesterday qualify as intruding on Dean’s space?”
I opened my mouth to tell Sloane that she was intruding on my space, but then processed her question. “Hypothetically speaking,” I said, stifling a yawn and sitting up in bed, “have you already reconstructed the crime scene in question?”
“That is a definite possibility.” Her hair was tousled and sticking up at odd angles. There were dark circles under her eyes.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked her.
“I was trying to figure out how the killer managed to pose the girl’s body without being seen,” Sloane said, which both was and wasn’t an answer to my question. When Sloane got absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist. “I have a theory.”
She tugged on the ends of her white-blond hair. I could practically see her waiting for me to snap at her, to tell her that she was handling the situation with Dean wrong. She knew she was different from other people,
and I was realizing, bit by bit, that somewhere along the line, someone—or maybe multiple someones—had conditioned her to believe that different, her kind of different, was wrong.
“Let me get dressed,” I told her. “Then you can tell me your theory.” When Dean was upset, he went to the garage. When Sloane was upset,
she went to the basement. I wasn’t sure she had another way of coping.
And besides, I thought as I pulled on a T-shirt, I’m clearly the last person who should be lecturing anyone about giving Dean space.
The basement ran the length of our Victorian-style house and extended out underneath the front and back yards. Walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling divided the space into distinct sets, each missing a fourth wall.
“I had to make some modifications to the car specs,” Sloane said, pulling her hair into a tight ponytail as she stopped in front of a battered car parked on the lawn of a set designed to look like a park. “Briggs had a two-door brought down a couple of weeks ago for a simulation I was running. The hood was two inches too long, and the slope wasn’t quite steep enough, but it was nothing a carefully wielded sledgehammer couldn’t fix.”
Sloane had a willowy build and relatively little regard for recommended safety measures. The idea of her wielding a sledgehammer of any kind was terrifying.
“Cassie, focus,” Sloane ordered. “We were somewhat limited on outdoor sets, so I went with the neighborhood park scene. The grass is one and one- quarter inch tall, slightly less uniform than the crime scene lawn. We had a nice arrangement of crash dummies to choose from, so I was able to match the victim’s height within two centimeters. The rope is the wrong color, but it’s nylon, and the thickness should be a match.”
It was easy to forget sometimes that Sloane’s gift went far beyond the index of statistics stored in her brain. The video we’d seen of the crime scene had been taken from a distance and lasted less than forty-five seconds, but she’d encoded every last numerical detail: the length and width of the rope tied around the victim’s neck; the exact positioning of the body; the height of the grass; the make, model, and specs of the car.
As a result, I was looking at a nearly exact replica of what we’d seen on the film. A faceless, naked dummy was draped across the hood of the car.
The dummy’s lower extremities dangled over the front; a rope was knotted around its neck. The body was tilted slightly to one side. On the video, we’d only viewed it from the front, but now, I could actually walk around and take in the three-sixty view. The hands were bound at the wrists, unevenly, twisting the upper body slightly to the left. I closed my eyes and pictured the girl.
You fought, didn’t you? Fought so hard that the bindings cut into your arms.
“One end of the rope was tied around her neck. The other ran up to the sunroof, down, and was anchored to something inside the car.” Sloane’s voice brought me back to the present. I stared at the car.
“The UNSUB didn’t do all that on the front lawn of the university president’s house,” I said.
“Correct!” Sloane beamed at me. “Which means that he strung her up and then placed the car there. I looked up the topography of the streets surrounding the house. There’s a road directly west that curves, but if you don’t take the curve, you go off-road and down a forested slope.”
“A forest could have provided cover,” I said, nibbling at my bottom lip as I tried to picture the UNSUB moving, quickly and quietly, still shrouded in the partial darkness of very early morning. “Assuming he killed her in the car, he could have strung her up in the forest…”
Sloane picked up where I left off. “…pushed her to the edge of the woods, and the slope of the hill would have done the rest. The only question is how he kept the body from bouncing around on the way down.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but someone else beat me to it. “It was weighted.”
Sloane and I turned in unison. Agent Sterling came striding toward us, her long legs making quick work of the space. She’d traded the gray suit for a black one and the pink shirt for a light, silvery gray, a near-perfect match for her eyes. Her hair was in a French braid, and her face was taut, like she’d fixed the braid in place so firmly it pulled her skin tight across her skull.
She stopped, a few feet away from the scene Sloane had rigged up. “That’s an impressive likeness,” she said, her clipped words making it
clear that the statement wasn’t a compliment. “What source material were you using?”
Sloane, completely oblivious to the steely tone in Agent Sterling’s voice, replied with a smile. “There was a cell phone video leaked online.”
Agent Sterling closed her eyes, bowed her head slightly, and inhaled. I could practically hear her counting silently to ten. When she opened her eyes, they zeroed in on me. “And what was your involvement in all of this, Cassandra?”
I could have told her that Sloane had built the replica completely on her own, but I wasn’t about to throw my own roommate to the wolves. Stepping in between Sloane and Sterling, I drew the agent’s ire to me.
“My involvement?” I repeated, channeling Lia—or possibly Michael. “Let’s go with moral support.”
Sterling pursed her lips, then turned back to Sloane. “Was there a particular reason you wanted to rebuild this crime scene?” she asked, gentling her voice slightly.
I tried to catch Sloane’s eye, telegraphing that she should not, under any circumstances, tell her what Dean had told us about his father.
Sloane met my eyes and nodded. I relaxed slightly, then Sloane turned back to Agent Sterling. “Dean told us this case looks a lot like his father’s,” she said matter-of-factly.
Clearly, Sloane had misinterpreted my look to mean the exact opposite of what I’d been trying to communicate.
“So you rebuilt the scene to figure out if Dean was right about the similarities?” Agent Sterling asked.
“I rebuilt the scene so Cassie could look at it,” Sloane said helpfully. “She said that Dean needed space, so we’re giving him space.”
“You call this giving him space?” Agent Sterling asked, flicking a hand toward the car. “I could kill the kid who leaked that video. Seeing that—it was the very last thing Dean needed. But you know what the second-to-last thing he needs is? Someone re-creating that scene in his basement. Did you learn nothing this summer?”
That question was aimed directly at me. Agent Sterling’s tone wasn’t angry or accusatory. It was incredulous.
“When the director discovered what Briggs was doing with Dean, using him to solve cases, it almost got Briggs fired. It should have gotten him fired. But somehow, my father and Briggs reached a compromise. The Bureau would provide Dean with a home, a guardian, and training, and Dean would help them with cold cases. Not active cases. Your lives were never supposed to be on the line.” Agent Sterling paused, the look in her eye caught somewhere between anger and betrayal. “I looked the other way.
Until this summer.”
This summer—when we’d been authorized to work on an active case, because the killer had zeroed in on me.
Sloane jumped to my defense. “The killer contacted Cassie, not the other way around.”
Sterling’s expression softened when she looked at Sloane. “This isn’t about what happened this summer. This is about the fact that no one has authorized you to work on this case. I need your word the two of you will leave it alone. No modeling it, no profiling it, no hacking.”
“No hacking,” Sloane agreed. She held out her hand to shake on it, and before Agent Sterling could comment on her selective hearing, she added, “If the entire population of the town of Quantico shook hands with one another, there would be a total of 157,080 possible handshake combinations.”
Agent Sterling smiled slightly as she took Sloane’s proffered hand. “No hacking and no more simulations.”
Sloane took her hand back. The dark circles under her eyes made her look younger somehow, fragile—or maybe brittle. “I have to run simulations. It’s what I do.”
As a profiler, Agent Sterling should have been able to hear what Sloane wasn’t saying—that building this model was the only thing she could do for Dean. It was also her way of working through her own emotions. It was what she did.
“Not on this case,” Agent Sterling repeated. She turned from Sloane to me. “No exceptions. No excuses. This program only works if the rules are followed and enforced.” Agent Sterling had clearly cast herself in the role of enforcer. “You work on cold cases, and you do so only with the approval of myself and Agent Briggs. If you can’t follow these simple instructions, you’re not just a liability. This whole program is.” Agent Sterling met my eyes, and there was no question in my mind that she’d meant me to hear those words as a threat. “Am I clear?”
The only thing clearer was the fact that my earlier impressions of the woman had been right on target. This wasn’t just a job to her. This was personal.
