Dean didn’t answer when I called. I tailed Lia to the church’s front office, but once she’d been directed to the youth area, where Kelley’s friends—or possibly, her “friends”—were setting up for the vigil, I peeled off and stepped back outside.
In all likelihood, most of Kelley’s social group still believed that she had killed herself. I knew better. Standing with my feet on solid ground, I stared up at the steeple.
The sky was dark enough to send a shiver down my spine.
With or without Dean, there was no time to spare in stepping into the UNSUB’s mind. You know your way around this church—well enough to know how to get up to the steeple. Did you know Kelley, too?
Did she trust you?
As a profiler, my most important task was to separate the parts of a murder that were incidental from the parts that signified something specific about the killer. To the extent that a murder had been planned, the question morphed: Which parts of the plan were necessary?
Which parts were required only to fulfill your needs?
With what little I knew, I couldn’t begin to guess motive yet. Maybe the killer had hated Kelley—or been fixated on her—for some time. Maybe her recent actions had drawn attention. Based on the way Kelley’s parents had staunchly insisted that what happened to the Summers boy was not Kelley’s fault, it was also possible that some people had blamed her for her classmate’s suicide.
Maybe the suicides did nothing more than provide you convenient cover for Kelley’s death—or maybe, in your mind, they’re connected. As I addressed the killer, I couldn’t even rule out the possibility that Kelley’s death had been unplanned—that she’d climbed the steeple of her own volition, for her own reasons, and the killer had followed and acted on impulse.
There were too many variables. To sort through them—and I had to sort through them now, not later—I needed to concentrate on what I knew to be
true. There were three elements to any murder: the victim, the location, and the method of killing.
I knew all three, and that was a start.
Victim: You chose Kelley. Why? That question could cycle too easily right back to motive, so I tried again. Why this girl? What was it about her that got your attention? Did you see the Kelley the world saw— homecoming court and Ivy League and standing dead-center in every picture? Or did you know the real Kelley? She was vulnerable. Most people didn’t see that.
Did you? I rolled that question over in my mind. Did she remind you of someone—or was this about her? Did she do something? Did you hate her?
Did she trust you?
That was too many questions and not enough answers, so I turned to the next element of the crime. Location: You killed her at a church. I found myself pacing around the base of the building, my face tilting toward the sky the way Mackenzie’s had, back at the lighthouse. Churches are holy.
Sacred. You killed this girl on holy ground.
What did that say about our killer? For some, it might have been about sending a message, but not for an UNSUB who’d never intended for anyone to know that the victim had been murdered.
If you chose the church, you didn’t choose it to send a message. You chose it for you—either for your convenience or your satisfaction. Are you religious? Or would any structure this tall do?
There was something about heights. Even standing with my feet on the ground, looking up at the way the steeple stretched into the sky, I felt it.
The higher you go, the farther away the rest of the world feels. It was just you and Kelley up there. Just Kelley and you.
On the brink of something but unable to push through, I tried Dean a second time, and this time, he answered.
“Cassie.” Hearing him say my name sent a wave of something like relief—with a side of anticipation—through my body.
“Strangling someone is intimate,” I said, well aware that was not the way that normal girls started conversations with their boyfriends. “Shooting someone is not. But pushing them off a building…”
Pushing involves physical contact. You touched her. Did you want to?
Either way, given the lack of defensive wounds, it had been quick.
“Cassie.” Dean said my name again, and this time, I heard something different in his tone. The two of us were used to profiling in tandem. I profiled in second person. He profiled killers in first.
He wasn’t profiling anyone or anything now.
“Briggs sent Sloane some files,” I said, taking a step back. I’d assumed that Sloane had shared them, that Dean would have started sorting through them as surely as Michael, whose emotion-reading ability was of the most use in person, had taken off.
“I’ve seen the files,” Dean told me. “All three of them.” That gave me pause. “All three?”
Sloane’s conclusion had been clear: the first two victims had jumped.
That was why we were focusing on Kelley—and the church.
“I’m sorry I missed your call,” Dean continued. “I was getting ready to return it. I just wanted to be sure first.”
“Sure?” I asked, wishing he were here, that I could see him, touch him, get a preview of some kind as to what he was thinking.
“Look at the first file,” Dean said. “The photos of the victim taken at the scene.”
I set my phone to speaker and went back to the original email from Briggs, pulling up the file.
The pictures.
The body.
At first, all I saw was blood and bone, a body mangled on the rocks. I knew from Mackenzie that the first two teens had jumped from a cliff, but that wasn’t visible in the picture.
“Do you see it?” The moment the question exited Dean’s mouth, I did.
Beside the body, a foot or two removed and even with the victim’s neck, was a plant of some kind, caught between two rocks. At first glance, it looked like it was growing there, but something about the positioning made me question that conclusion.
“I see it. Have you asked Sloane—”
“To ID the plant?” Dean finished. “She says it’s from the genus hedera.
Ivy. She’s in the process of identifying the exact species, but she gave it a ninety-eight point seven percent chance that it doesn’t grow naturally nearby.”
The fingers on my right hand tightened around the phone. If the plant didn’t grow nearby, that meant that it had been left there, tucked between
two rocks.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Dean murmured. Something in his tone made me think that the first time I’d called, he’d been buried too deep in the UNSUB’s mind to hear the phone ring. He wanted to know if he’d gone too deep, if I saw it, too.
“The first two victims weren’t murdered,” I said. “Sloane said they jumped.”
And yet…
Without being prompted to, I downloaded a photograph of the second suicide victim. Scanning the surroundings didn’t reveal any plants— flowered or otherwise—among the rocks, but there was a small collection of stones.
Four of them, clustered a foot or two to the right of the victim’s neck. “Mourning,” I said, parsing through it out loud. “Or marking.” I paused,
then went ahead and took that logic one step further. “Someone found the bodies before the police did and marked the sites.”
Were you the one who found them? Did you know them? Mourn for them?
“What are the chances of the same person finding both suicide victims?” I asked. The markers might have been different, but the positioning was the same.
Dean’s response was a long time in coming. “The chances are good,” he said finally, his voice reverberating in my bones, “if I watched.”
YOU
There have been so many over the years. Kelley was different. Kelley was not your best work. You failed her.
You won’t fail again.
