Judd drove in silence. He left it to me to break it, if and when I was ready to do so.
“The police found a body.” It took me ten minutes to push those words past the edge of my lips. “They think it’s my mother’s.”
“I heard,” Judd said simply. “Briggs got a call.”
Special Agent Tanner Briggs was one of the Naturals program’s two FBI supervisors. He’d been the one to recruit me, and he’d used my mother’s case to do it.
Of course he’d gotten a call.
“I want to see the body,” I told Judd, staring out at the road in front of us. Later, I could process. Later, I could grieve. Answers, facts, that was what I needed now. “Pictures of the crime scene,” I continued, “anything Briggs can get from the locals, I want to see it.”
Judd waited a beat. “That all?”
No. That wasn’t all. I wanted, desperately, for the body the police had found not to be my mother. And I wanted it to be her. And it didn’t matter that those things were contradictory. It didn’t matter that I was setting myself up to lose, no matter what.
I bit down, my teeth digging into the inside of my cheek. After a moment, I answered Judd’s question out loud. “No, that’s not all. I also want to take down the person who did this to her.”
That, at least, was simple. That was clear. I’d joined the Naturals program to put killers behind bars. My mother deserved justice. I deserved justice, for everything I’d lost.
“I ought to tell you that hunting down the person who killed her won’t bring her back.” Judd switched lanes, seemingly paying more attention to the road than to me. I wasn’t fooled. Judd was a former marine sniper, always aware of his surroundings. “I ought to tell you,” he continued, “that obsessing over this case won’t make it hurt any less.”
“But you won’t,” I said.
You know what it’s like to have your world torn apart. You know what it’s like to wake up each day to the awareness that the monster who tore it apart is still out there, free to do it again.
Judd wouldn’t tell me I needed to let this go. He couldn’t.
“What would you do,” I said softly, “if it were Scarlett? If there were a lead, no matter how small, on her case?”
I’d never spoken Judd’s daughter’s name in his presence before. Until recently, I hadn’t even been aware she existed. I didn’t know much about her, other than the fact that she’d been the victim of a serial killer known as Nightshade.
The one thing I did know was how Judd would have felt if there were a development in that case.
“It was different for me,” Judd said finally, his eyes fixed out on the road. “There was a body. Don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
Better, probably, because I didn’t have to wonder.” His teeth clamped together for a moment. “Worse,” he continued, “because that’s something no father should ever see.”
I tried to imagine what Judd must have gone through when he saw his daughter’s body and immediately wished that I could stop. Judd was a man with a high tolerance for pain and a face that hid nine-tenths of what he felt. But when he saw his daughter’s lifeless body, there would have been no hiding, no gritting his teeth through the pain—nothing but the roar in his ears and a devastation I knew all too well.
If it were Scarlett whose body had just been found, Scarlett whose necklace had just turned up, you wouldn’t sit idly by. You couldn’t—no matter the cost.
“You’ll tell Briggs and Sterling to get me the files?” I said. Judd wasn’t an FBI agent. His first and only priority was the well-being of the Bureau’s
teenage assets. He was the final word on our involvement in any case.
Including my mother’s.
You understand, I thought, staring at him. Whether you want to or not— you do.
“You can look at the files,” Judd told me. He pulled the car into a private airstrip, then fixed me with a look. “But you’re not doing it alone.”
