As I stepped out of the Petersons’ house, the humidity was a visceral reminder that this wasn’t an ordinary case. It’s going to rain. We weren’t on an ordinary timeline, and the insight I’d been able to glean about our victim from her parents—it wasn’t enough.
I couldn’t let myself spare more than a passing thought for Mackenzie or the lighthouse or the angry wind whipping my hair against my face as Lia and I made our way back to the car.
I had to focus.
I pulled myself into the passenger seat, shut the door, and let my mind linger on a single word. You. Not Mackenzie this time. And not the killer— not yet. Kelley. Knowing her—how she would have reacted, the limited circumstances in which she would have climbed to the top of the steeple of her own free will, who she might have done that with—that was a piece of the puzzle I needed. Behavior. Personality. Environment. Victim’s and killer’s BPEs were intertwined.
A cell phone rang then, pulling me from my thoughts. As Lia started the car, and I reflexively buckled my seat belt, I slipped my phone from my pocket with my free hand, then realized: it wasn’t ringing.
Lia’s was.
She answered it and flipped the audio to speaker. “Hey, Boy Wonder.”
On the other end of the line, Michael responded with all the dignity he could muster. “I appreciate a good Batman reference as much as the next person, but clearly, if I were a character in that particular fictional universe, I would be Batman, not Robin.” He didn’t give Lia the chance to gainsay him before continuing. “Hypothetically, on a scale from thrilled to ecstatic, how delighted would you be if ‘Batman’ commandeered a private plane, left a pleasantly worded note for the fine folks at Quantico, and made his Bat-way to the lovely town of Cape Roane to battle evildoers at your side?”
“Michael.” I beat Lia to a response, but didn’t get more than his name out before she cut in.
“Hypothetically speaking, have you already done and/or are you in the process of doing all of the above?”
“Absolutely not.”
Lia rolled her eyes. “Liar.” She turned toward me. “I’m going to need directions to the church.”
“Spiritual awakening?” Michael asked her.
“Impending vigil for our murder victim,” I corrected. It took all of three minutes for me to get Lia the directions and catch Michael up to speed on the case—all of it. Mackenzie, what she’d seen when she looked at Kelley’s body, the stakes for our newest Natural now.
Kelley.
Her parents.
“Let’s face it,” Lia cut in. “Grief turns everyone into liars. It doesn’t, however, make you a good liar—and our victim’s parents, her father in particular, were very, very good.” She paused. “If I were anyone else, I would have fully believed that he’d never so much as entertained the idea that his daughter had killed herself. And the wife?” Lia pressed her foot on the gas, reminding me for the umpteenth time why I really needed to stop letting her drive. “She totally didn’t buy that any tiffs Kelley had had with her classmates were because other girls were just so jealous.”
“Translation?” Michael asked.
“Far be it from me to act like a profiler,” Lia replied, “but—and I say this as someone who has deeply embraced the title of lovable bitch—I deeply suspect that Kelley Peterson played to win and played for keeps.”
“She was competitive,” I confirmed. “With herself and with other people. I don’t know that I would go so far as to call her a lovable bitch.”
“You say tomato,” Lia commented. “I say to-mah-to.”
You were in pain, Kelley. You hid it. Did you cut down others— deliberately, precisely—the way you cut yourself? Most people tended to turn aggression either inward or outward. There was bleed-over, but it was somewhat rare to find a person with equal proclivities for both. Power.
Pain. Perfection.
I knew Kelley now better than I had before, but it still wasn’t enough. “I sense a disturbance in the force,” Michael observed on the other end
of the phone line. “Heavy silence of the emotionally laden variety.” “Cassie’s composing a mental poem,” Lia told him. “‘Ode to a
Profiler’s Angst.’”
“I’m trying to figure out if Kelley was the type of person who would have climbed the steeple on her own,” I corrected, “or if someone else led her up there.”
Power. Pain. Perfection. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Kelley making the climb. Because she could. Because, on some level, it might hurt. Did the killer take you by surprise? Or, I thought, picturing the aftermath of Kelley’s impact with the ground in my mind, was it his—or her—idea?
I could feel the shift coming. This wasn’t just about Kelley anymore. I was hovering around the edges of someone else’s subconscious. The UNSUB’s.
The Unknown Subject’s. The killer’s.
“We’re about a minute out from the church,” Lia informed me—and Michael. “When do you land, Batboy?”
“Batman,” Michael loftily corrected. “And fifteen minutes, give or take.
Might I suggest that until then, we handle this old-school?”
“Old-school as in sneaking out of the FBI Academy like an unruly teenager and opting to ask for forgiveness instead of permission?” Lia asked innocently. All things considered, that was probably a pretty accurate depiction of what Michael had done when he’d realized that the case we were working now had ties to one of our old ones.
Michael cleared his throat. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘old- school’ as in ‘making liberal use of video surveillance.’”
When we’d first started out, the only way we’d been given access to witnesses was through a video feed, courtesy of our FBI handlers.
“Call me sentimental,” Michael continued, “but it would hit me right in the feelings if my favorite deception detector could deal me in for old times’ sake while I’m in transit. Just think about it, Zhang. You, poking around the vigil, asking questions and listening for lies, me on the lookout for anyone who’s not grieving nearly as much as they’d like us to believe.
…”
“Be still, my heart.” No one could deadpan like Lia. “I will surely be unable to control the animal attraction this nostalgia will provoke.”
I snorted, but all things considered, Michael’s suggestion wasn’t a bad one. It wasn’t unusual for killers to return to the scene of the crime, or to attend funerals, wakes, vigils, or other occasions marking the passing. And if you are there…
Triumph. Anger. Adrenaline. Guilt. The range of emotions Michael would be on the lookout for was wide—but I had every confidence he could spot it.
“And what is Cassie going to be doing while we take this trip down memory lane?” Lia threw the question out there, as much for my benefit as for Michael’s.
If we’d had the time, I might have joined them. But the clock was ticking. We needed every advantage we could get.
“I’m going to get a feel for the crime scene and start a profile on the killer,” I said.
