“I didn’t push Kelley Peterson. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t even know her.”
The suspect’s hands were in the air. I took one step away from her, then
another, easing down the staircase toward Michael and— “True.”
I whipped my head toward Lia, who shrugged. “She’s telling the truth.
My heart skipped a beat, and I looked for a loophole in the psychologist’s statement. You didn’t push Kelley. You didn’t kill her. You didn’t even know her.
“Then why, pray tell,” Michael said, his gun still pointed toward her, “do you feel guilty?”
“I don’t—”
“Head tilted downward, forehead fighting furrows, gaze averted, mouth drooping—don’t even get me started on the direction your eyebrows are arching.” Michael lowered his weapon—most likely to put her at ease. “That combination puts you somewhere between shame and guilt, even if that lovely narrowing of your eyes and the way your muscles just tightened suggest you’re pissed, too.”
You didn’t push Kelley. You didn’t kill her. You feel guilty. I tried to make the situation compute, but it didn’t, because the UNSUB we were looking for might have mourned victims, might even have felt remorse at the way things had to be, but that wasn’t the dominant emotion in these kills.
Neither was anger.
Exaltation. Release.
“You didn’t kill Kelley,” I said, trying a new tack. “You saved her. You didn’t push her; you set her free. And you feel guilty because you weren’t able to honor her passing, the way you did with the others.…”
“No,” the psychologist snapped. “I feel guilty because when Mackenzie told me that Kelley was pushed, I didn’t believe her. I feel guilty that I left my most vulnerable patient—on a ledge that’s getting slicker by the second
—for this.”
You feel guilty, I thought reflexively, because if you’d kept your mouth shut when I was on the verge of talking Mackenzie down, she might not still be up there.
That wasn’t me profiling the killer. That was me profiling the woman standing two steps above me—and that distinction was enough to send my heart pounding in my ears.
As if from a great distance, I heard Lia confirm that every word that the psychologist had just spoken was true. Her guilt was centered on Mackenzie.
You’re the reason she’s still in such a precarious position. A crack of thunder drowned out every other noise in the stairwell, but not the deafening roar of my own thoughts. But you’re not the only reason.
Mackenzie’s psychologist wasn’t the only one who’d spoken up and whose words had kept Mackenzie out on that ledge. You weren’t the only person in that room with a background in psychology, motivation, mental illness, and the human mind.
I had similar training—and I was willing to lay a lot of money on it that any crisis negotiator worth his salt had the same.
You’re the one in control here, Quentin Nichols had told Mackenzie. It’s your decision.
I’d assumed that he hadn’t realized how Mackenzie would take a man in a position of power giving her control, like it was his to dole out. But in Quentin Nichols’s line of work, he had to know what to say, how to manipulate a target, how to defuse a dangerous situation…
Or how to blow it up.
