There was a difference between knowing that Michael’s father was abusive and seeing it.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Michael said, pulling himself to his feet and wiping blood from his lip with the back of his hand, “but I thought that went well.”
The casual tone in Michael’s voice nearly undid me. I knew that he wouldn’t want my pity. He wouldn’t want my rage. And whatever I felt, he would see it.
“Well?” Dean repeated. “You thought that went well?”
Michael shrugged. “In particular, the fact that I introduced you to my father as my good friend Barf is a memory that I will treasure forever.”
It doesn’t matter unless you let it matter. I ached for Michael, for the boy he’d been, growing up in this house.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked Sloane.
She was standing beside me, very still, her breathing shallow and her skin pale. Thinking about Aaron. Thinking about what just happened to Michael. Thinking about your father. Thinking about his.
Sloane took three tiny, hesitant steps, then threw herself at Michael, latching her arms around his neck so tightly that I wasn’t sure she would ever let go.
My phone rang. Once I saw Michael’s arms curve around Sloane, I answered it.
“That did not go well.” Agent Sterling’s greeting reminded me that we were wired with video and audio feeds. “I won’t ask if Michael’s okay, and I won’t say I told you so. I will, however, let you know that Briggs is looking forward to seeing Thatcher Townsend booked for assault.”
I set the phone to speaker. “You have the entire group,” I told Sterling.
For a moment, I thought she might repeat her statement about Michael’s father, but she must have decided that Michael wouldn’t thank her for it. “What did we learn?” she asked instead.
“When Thatcher said Michael was wrong, he wasn’t lying.” Lia leaned back against a grand piano, crossing one leg in front of the other. “But
whether he meant that Michael was wrong about part of it or all of it, I couldn’t say.”
I replayed Michael’s accusation in my head: I think you were screwing her. I think you paid a visit to her the day she disappeared. I think you threatened her. I tried to sink into Thatcher’s perspective, but instead, found myself adopting Michael’s. You accused him of sleeping with her. You accused him of threatening her. You didn’t say that you thought he took her. You didn’t accuse him of breaking into her studio or trashing it in a rage.
“Anything else?” Agent Sterling’s voice broke into my thoughts, but as Lia reported on the only other relevant lie she’d caught—Thatcher’s reference to Remy as one of his closest friends—my brain cycled right back to profiling Michael.
You didn’t come in swinging. You didn’t lose your temper. You said that this went well. I followed those facts to their logical conclusion: Michael didn’t believe his father had physically harmed Celine in any way. If you had, you would have swung back.
I studied Michael—the bruise forming on his face, the way he was standing, the way he kept his body angled away from Lia’s.
When Lia pressed you for answers in Celine’s room, you said something guaranteed to make her run. And when I opened my mouth to continue the conversation…
Michael had done his best to push us away. He’d wanted to be in Celine’s room alone. And something he’d seen there had led him to come have a drink and a conversation with his father.
The wheels in my head turned slowly at first, then faster. You don’t believe your father took her. But here you are. Back in Celine’s room, Michael had cavalierly referred to the girl as one of our vics. He’d come here to have a chat with his father, but had focused more on finding out if his father had threatened Celine—if he’d slept with her—than on finding out where Celine might be now.
Because you already know.
Michael took one look at my face and stepped toward me. I thought back to the crime scene. Dean and I had assumed that the shattered glass, the easel, the turned-over tables, all of the debris, had been the result of Celine fighting back against her assailant.
But what if there was no assailant? The possibility took root in my mind.
Sloane had told us that the debris was the result of someone sweeping their hands across the table, knocking its contents violently to the floor. We’d assumed that the UNSUB had done it—to hurt Celine, to scare her, to dominate her.
But Celine was a person who painted her own self-portrait with a knife.
She threw her whole body into everything she did. She was strong-willed. She
was determined. You have a temper.
“She did it herself.” I tested the theory by watching Michael’s response to my words. “That’s why you thought your father went to see Celine the day she disappeared. Something set her off.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Michael’s voice was absolutely devoid of emotion.
“Yes,” Lia countered. “You do.”
You trashed your own studio. I slipped back into Celine’s perspective. You swept the glass off the table. You broke the easel. You turned the table over.
You soaked the place in kerosene. Maybe you were going to burn it. Maybe you were going to send the whole thing up in flames, but then you stopped, and you looked around, and you realized what the destruction you’d wreaked looked like.
It looked like there had been a fight. Like you’d been attacked.
I wondered if that was all it had taken. I wondered if Celine had turned her artist’s eye on the destruction, thinking of ways to make it look even more realistic. The bloody handprint on the door. The drops of blood on the carpet. I wondered how she’d figured out how to delete the security footage, if she’d picked the lock on her own studio door.
“An artistic challenge.” Dean picked up where I’d left off. “A game. To see if she could fool everyone. To see how long…”
How long it would take them to notice you were gone.
“Someone care to tell me what I’m missing here?” Agent Sterling’s voice blared from the phone, reminding me that she was still on the line.
“Michael’s a liar,” Lia said flatly. “And Celine Delacroix is a poor, pathological little rich girl who kidnapped herself.”
“Don’t talk about her that way.” Michael’s response was instantaneous and instinctual. “Whatever she did, she had a reason for it.”
“Did you pine after her when you were growing up?” Lia asked the question like the answer didn’t matter to her in the least. “Did you pursue her, the way you got all moon-eyed over Cassie when she first showed up?” Lia was aiming below the belt. That was the only way she knew how to hit. “Did you convince yourself you weren’t good enough for her,” she said, her voice low, “because a person like you could only ever be good enough for someone as horrible as me?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Michael told her.
“Do you love her?” Lia asked, her voice dripping with syrupy sweetness.
I could see Michael’s temper fraying. He ran his thumb over his bloodied lip and stared at Lia. “Longer and better than I’ve loved you.”
