Hunger wasn’t an emotion. It was a need. A deep-seated, biological, primitive need. I didn’t want to even think about what might make a grown man look at a teenage girl that way, why Thatcher Townsend might be personally insulted that someone had dared to abduct the daughter of a family
friend.
“Gloves.” Agent Sterling held a pair out to each of us. She and Agent Briggs hadn’t responded to Michael’s text. Instead, Agent Starmans had eventually been the one to tell us that we’d been cleared to visit the crime scene.
You chose to come home over spring break. As I put on the gloves, I tried to slip back into Celine’s perspective. You had to at least suspect your parents wouldn’t be here. I stood at the threshold to Celine’s studio. Crime-scene tape had it blocked off. From the looks of it, the studio had been a cabana or single-room guesthouse at some point. It was detached from the main house, overlooking the pool.
Even from the doorway, the smell of kerosene was overwhelming. “Signs of forced entry.” Sloane came to stand beside me, scanning the
door. “Light scratches around the lock. There’s a ninety-six percent probability that further analysis would reveal dents on the pins inside the lock.”
“Translation?” Lia asked. Beside her, Michael closed his eyes, an elongated blink that made me wish that I were half as good at reading his emotions as he was at reading mine.
“The lock was engaged. Someone picked it.” Sloane ducked under the crime-scene tape, her blue eyes taking everything in as she methodically scanned the room.
You locked the door. I stood in the doorway a moment longer, trying to picture Celine inside. You came out here to paint, and you locked the door. I wondered if that had been force of habit—or if she’d had a reason to turn the lock. Taking my time, I entered the studio, careful to avoid the evidence markers on the floor.
Shattered glass. A broken easel. My mind superimposed the images from
the crime scene photos onto the markers on the floor. A second table was overturned near the far wall. A curtain had been pulled down, torn. There were drops of blood on the floor, a hand-shaped smear on the inside of the door frame.
You fought.
No, I thought, my heart thrumming in my chest. Using the word you kept me at a distance. That wasn’t what I wanted. That wasn’t what Celine needed.
I fought. I pictured myself standing in the middle of the studio, painting. Without meaning to, my body assumed the position we’d seen Celine in right before the security footage had cut out. My right arm was elevated, a pretend brush held in my hand. My torso twisted slightly to one side. My chin rose, my eyes on a phantom painting.
“The door was locked,” I said. “Maybe I heard someone outside. Maybe I heard the light sound of scratching. Maybe the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.”
Or maybe I was so consumed by painting that I didn’t hear a thing. Maybe I didn’t see the doorknob turn. Maybe I didn’t hear it open.
“I was quiet.” Dean stood at the door, staring at me. My first instinct had been to get inside Celine’s head. His first instinct was always to profile the UNSUB. “There will be a time for noise, a time for screams. But first I have to get what I came for.”
I saw the logic in what Dean was saying: the UNSUB had come here for Celine. She hadn’t been a random target. A killer choosing his victims randomly wouldn’t have chosen a girl protected by a state-of-the-art security system. Only someone who’d been watching her would have known she was here alone.
“You thought you could slip in and take me,” I said, my eyes on Dean. “You thought that if you were quiet enough and quick enough, you could subdue me before I’d put up much of a fight.”
You thought wrong.
Dean ducked under the tape and crossed the room. Standing behind me, he placed a hand over my mouth and pulled my body back against his. The motion was careful, slow, but I let myself feel it the way Celine would have. On instinct—and moving just as slowly as Dean had—I bent forward, thrusting my elbows back into his stomach. The brush, I thought, in my hand. I moved as if to stab him in the leg, and at the same time, I bit the hand that held me. Lightly. Gently.
Celine would have bit her captor hard. Dean pulled back, and I escaped his grasp.
“I’m screaming by this point,” I said. “As loud as I can. I rush for the door, but—”
Dean came up behind me again. As he mocked grabbing me, I went for
the edge of the closest table. If I hold on tight enough, you can’t—
“Not that way,” Sloane said suddenly, breaking into my thoughts. “Based on the pattern of the debris we saw in the crime scene photos, the contents of the table would have been knocked off the table from this side.” She came around to the far side of the table and mimicked the motion it would have taken, sweeping her arms over the table lengthwise.
I frowned. That side of the table?
“Maybe it wasn’t me,” I told Dean after a moment. “If I was terrified and fighting for my life, the first chance I got, I would go for the door.”
Unless I was looking for a weapon. Unless I had reason to believe that I could fight and win.
Dean’s hands clenched themselves slowly into fists. “I could have done it.” He swept his hands over the table, a vein in his neck jumping out against his suntanned skin. “To scare you. To punish you.”
I pictured glass flying everywhere. This studio is mine. My space. My haven. What Dean was saying made sense only if the UNSUB knew that— and only if he’d known, on some level, that Celine would stay and fight.
That she wouldn’t run.
I took in the rest of the room and integrated it with what I’d seen in the initial crime scene photos. The overturned table. The curtain, torn down from the rod. The broken easel. The remains of Celine’s painting, broken and dying on the floor.
“What about the kerosene?” Lia had been remarkably quiet while we’d been profiling, but she’d reached the limit on biting her tongue.
Her question jarred me out of Celine’s perspective and into the UNSUB’s.
If you’d planned to abduct her, you wouldn’t have brought the kerosene with you. And if you’d planned to burn her alive here, you would have torched the place.
“Maybe I couldn’t do it,” Dean said softly. “Maybe, going in, I didn’t realize what it would be like.” He paused. “How much I would like it.”
How much you would like the fight. How much you would like her fury, her terror. How much you would want to make this one last.
“The good news,” I said, my voice horrible and bitter and low, “is that if this is the work of one of the Masters, she’s definitely his first.”
