“You think Mackenzie’s a Natural?” Lia cut straight to the chase the moment we stepped out of the room.
Celine had hung back to talk down the crisis negotiator, the psychologist, and Mrs. McBride. For someone who had a fondness for throwing gasoline on fires, Celine was also surprisingly adept at putting them out. It hadn’t been my intention to be inflammatory or reckless. I’d said what I needed to say to show Mackenzie that I was listening.
I wasn’t just repeating her own words back to her. I understood.
Convincing Mackenzie of that had been worth the risk of addressing her threat to jump head-on. The fact that I’d succeeded was the only reason that I’d been able to extract a promise that she would sit tight while I made some phone calls.
I’d given her something to hold on to. I’d left her in control.
“There’s only one way to find out if she’s like us,” I told Lia. Feeling different didn’t make a person a Natural. Believing that you knew things, that you could intuit things that other people couldn’t—that didn’t make you a prodigy.
The only way to tell if Mackenzie was a Natural was to find out if she was right.
For that, I needed Sloane. Unfortunately, the FBI Academy was not known for allowing its trainees to keep their cell phones on at all times. I circumvented the system and made a different phone call.
“Briggs.” Even now that he was the FBI director, the founder of the Naturals program had a habit of answering the phone with his last name. Efficient—and just a little egocentric.
“I need you to get Sloane on the phone for me,” I said, not bothering with hello any more than he had. “I also need you to get us access to everything the local PD has on three recent teenage deaths—apparent suicides. The sooner Sloane gets her eyes on those files, the better.”
Maybe the detective in charge of Mackenzie’s case would have handed over the files without receiving a phone call from the director of the FBI, and maybe he wouldn’t have. Either way, I wasn’t about to devote a single ounce of my attention or brain power to figuring out how to finesse the situation. My cognitive resources were already split, half focused on Mackenzie—power and control and desperation—and the other half working through the few facts that I knew about the trio of deaths.
If Mackenzie was right, if I proved it—she’d have a reason to come in.
Three victims. Two female, one male. All teenaged. All local. If these “suicides” really were murders, then I needed the information in the files as much as Sloane did. How far apart were the deaths, timewise? Were numbers two and three closer together or further apart than number one? I knew the third victim was female. If the first had been male, that might suggest a shift in the pattern.
The first could have been practice. The next two—the girls—they might be what you want.
“Check your phone.” Lia had ducked back into the lightroom to check on Celine. Based on the first words out of her mouth when she reappeared on the landing, I concluded that Celine had probably asked her to pass that message along.
I pulled out my phone and checked my secure email. The files were there. If I had them, that meant that Sloane had them. Based on the speed with which she worked, I’d be hearing from her soon.
Not soon enough. I’d made the decision not to go back into the room until I could convince Mackenzie that I’d done something, that I was doing something. I couldn’t go back just to tell her that she had to wait. In the meantime, I had to trust that Celine could handle the adults in the room— and that some part of Mackenzie would have latched on to the way Celine had responded when Mackenzie had described her awareness of her own body—of muscles and movement.
I’m that way with faces. I’d gone into this identifying with Mackenzie and laying the groundwork for her to identify with me, but with a little space, I could see that I wasn’t the only option on that front. Celine’s ability was the closest to Mackenzie’s. Celine was the one who moved like a fighter and a dancer, and Mackenzie had mentioned sparring and dancing both. I knew what it was like to survive trauma, but Celine was the one
who’d gone to great lengths as a teenager to be seen and heard. She was comfortable with anger.
Nobody controlled her. “Excuse me.”
I looked up to see Mr. McBride making his way up the steps. Nine flights of stairs had taken a physical toll on him, but clearly he considered that the least of his problems. “Can you tell me anything?” he asked, breathing heavily. “My wife? My daughter?”
I took note of the order in which he’d asked. “They’re both fine,” I said. “Or as fine as they can be, under the circumstances.”
Mackenzie’s father ascended another step, but stopped there, below me. My phone was heavy in my hand. I had the files. I could be looking at them while waiting for Sloane’s call. But I knew what it was like to be on the other end of an investigation and to feel like no one was telling you anything—or listening.
For better or worse, I could give him a minute. “What can you tell me about Mackenzie?” I asked.
In my line of work, details were currency, and given that Sloane could feasibly call me back and say that the physical evidence was consistent with suicide, I needed a backup plan—one that could bring Mackenzie down off that ledge, even if she was wrong.
“Mackenzie’s a good girl.” Mr. McBride said that stubbornly, like he expected me to argue. When I didn’t, he got nervous and pushed his hands through hair, an alternative to wringing them. “She doesn’t like attention. Not like this.”
She’s more like you than your wife, I translated. I wondered when that shift had happened. Mackenzie McBride had wanted to be a pop star once.
She’d loved attention.
“Does Mackenzie ever talk about what happened to her?” I asked.
That question shut Mr. McBride down, as immediately as if he’d had an actual off-switch and I’d pressed it.
“I have a little sister,” I said, trying another tack. “I didn’t know about her for years. Until she was three, almost four. What she’s been through…” I thought of Laurel, of the way that she used to look at swing sets and see shackles and chains. “I won’t ever fully understand it.” I shook my head. “I don’t make her talk about it. Sometimes, though, she says things.” I paused,
letting the silence work its way through his brain. “Does Mackenzie ever say things to you?”
“She said that it was small.” Mr. McBride swallowed, visibly, audibly, practically with his entire body. “The place that bastard kept her, she said that it was dark, and it was small, and he’d leave her there for hours— sometimes days.”
I thought of Mackenzie, standing on a ledge and looking up at the sky.
Up, not down. At least on the ledge, there was air. At least you’re in control. At least you’re free. “She said she danced.”
That snapped my attention back to Mackenzie’s father. “She what?”
“She danced,” he repeated. “Every day, all the time, whenever she could. Whenever it was dark. Whenever she couldn’t see anything.
Whenever she wanted to cry. She danced.”
I thought about what it would be like to live in a four-by-four room. You were just a kid. A kid who liked being the center of attention. A kid who wanted to be a pop star.
He took everything away from you. He locked you up. He hurt you. You danced.
“The older she gets, the harder it is.” Mackenzie’s father looked down. “I thought it would get easier, but she understands more now than she used to. The things she lived through…”
He couldn’t finish that sentence.
“She dances five days a week.” Mr. McBride managed a very small smile, fond and hopeful in a way that hit me like a knife to the gut. “Ballet, tap, jazz. A few years ago, she started martial arts—the kid’s practically a prodigy. There’s nothing physical that she can’t do.”
When it comes to her body—she’s in control.
“Thank you,” I told Mr. McBride. He asked me what I was thanking him for, but I couldn’t explain what he’d just told me—what he’d really told me.
If we’d had normal childhoods, Sloane had commented once, a long time ago, we wouldn’t be Naturals. Michael had learned to read emotions because he’d needed to be able to read his abusive father’s. Lia had grown up in a world where deception was a matter of survival. Dean’s father was a serial killer.
I’d had a mother who was a mentalist, and she’d moved us around so frequently that the only relationships I was able to form with other people were in my mind.
Mackenzie McBride had been kidnapped at the age of six. I’d known that she’d been held captive. I’d known the size of the shack. I hadn’t known, until this moment, what she’d done to survive.
You danced. In the dark, you danced. For hours and hours. When you had no control over anything else, you had control over the motion. Over your own muscles. Over the decision to repeat the same moves—familiar moves—again and again and again.
I suspected, but didn’t know, that when Mackenzie had danced, she’d gone to a place in her mind where other things—the bad things, as Laurel would say—couldn’t touch her. What I did know was that on the ledge, Mackenzie had said that she knew bodies, knew how they moved, knew what she looked like when she was dancing without ever looking in the mirror.
With her childhood? Her very not normal childhood? That made sense.
Even now, losing herself in motion, exerting physical control—it was a coping mechanism.
I’d been trying to approach this objectively. I’d been reserving judgment on whether or not Mackenzie knew things, the way I sometimes did.
The way we all did. But now?
I said good-bye to Mr. McBride and started up the ladder to the lightroom. You know bodies. You know motion.
I’d thought that I couldn’t go back in until I had proof that she was right. But right now? I didn’t need proof.
I knew.
When I made it into the room, the first thing I noticed was that Celine was standing opposite the window, closer to Mackenzie than any of the others.
“You’re back.” Mackenzie didn’t turn to look at me. I wondered if she’d seen me come into the room or if she’d heard me.
How in tune with her environment—with the bodies all around her— was she?
My phone rang, the sound almost obscene in the silence that had followed Mackenzie’s statement. No matter what damage control Special
Agent Delacroix had done with the adults in this room, it was a good bet that none of them quite trusted me or the way I’d chosen to approach things.
In their eyes, this was a delicate situation. Mackenzie was delicate and in need of kid gloves.
I looked down at my phone, then out at the girl on the ledge. “It’s my colleague,” I said. “The expert.”
“The one who’ll tell you I’m right,” Mackenzie said forcefully.
My head wanted to nod, but I forced myself to answer the phone instead. “Tell me what you’ve got, Sloane.”
