There was a crowd gathered outside the lighthouse. I estimated a dozen or more, ranging in age from late teens to eighties. From this distance, they couldn’t make out the details of what was going on above, but they could see what I could, plain as day.
A figure. A small one. She wasn’t looking down. Your face is angled toward the sky. Your feet are close to the edge.
My heart began beating more rapidly in my chest. In our line of work, the margin for error was never large. But this time?
It was inches.
“Excuse me.” Celine had a way of parting crowds—even those intent on watching a train wreck in real time. “FBI.”
That got the attention of about half of the onlookers. Pulling my gaze from the girl on the ledge, I took note of which half and followed in Celine’s wake. Lia hesitated for a brief moment behind me. I knew, without glancing back at her, that she was still staring up at Mackenzie.
Lia wasn’t, generally speaking, a person built for hesitation, but it was different—for all of us—when a case involved a kid.
“FBI.” Celine repeated herself to the two local LEOs—law enforcement officers—posted at the door to the lighthouse.
“Aren’t you a little young to be FBI?” The officer who managed to look Celine in the eye and say those words would probably soon regret it.
“I age well.” Celine had an impressive deadpan. “What can I say? I moisturize.” She gave him a second to process that, then issued an order. “Move.”
The officers moved before they’d even realized they’d done it.
“I don’t moisturize,” Lia told one of them as we passed. “I made a deal with the devil to maintain my youth. You don’t want to know what the devil asked for in return.”
Coming from anyone else, that would have sounded flippant, but Lia could sell any lie. Luckily, her statement saved me from having to say
anything, which was fortunate, because I looked significantly younger than either Lia or Celine.
When people called the FBI, most of them didn’t expect women in their early twenties. Today, we didn’t have time to prove ourselves or win hearts and minds. We didn’t have time for anyone questioning us or our abilities.
Mackenzie didn’t have time.
Before the door to the lighthouse had even closed behind me, I’d already sunk back into observation mode. Behavior. Personality.
Environment. Those were the cornerstones my mom had taught me when I was younger than Mackenzie was now. If you knew any two sides of the triangle, you could predict the third.
By the time I was a teenager, I did so effortlessly, without thinking, all the time. Being a Natural wasn’t something you could turn off. With each step I took, my brain catalogued the details of the environment around me. The ground floor of the lighthouse seemed to be some kind of museum.
There was a woman—early sixties—behind the counter, and two more officers—one of them, based on his clothing and posture, the ranking detective—posted at the door to the stairs.
As Celine began a round of introductions, I zeroed in on the only other person in the room—a man. Forties. Thick hair. Rumpled clothing. If Michael had been with us, he could have read shades of meaning in the man’s expression and posture, but all I saw was the dominant emotion.
Devastation.
“Mr. McBride.” I greeted him, holding out a hand. He took mine and held on for an instant too long. “I’m Cassie Hobbes.” He wouldn’t remember my name later. I wasn’t even sure he’d registered it. “We’re here to help your daughter.” That, he would process.
You already lost your little girl once. You can’t lose her again. You can’t just stand here.
“They won’t let me upstairs,” Mackenzie’s father said dully. “My wife is up there. She’s talking to her.…”
There was only room for one, and it wasn’t you. You’re not the talker.
That much was clear from the gaps in his words, the sporadic eye contact. I wanted to press him, to question him about his daughter. Are you an observer, a listener, or caught up in your own world? Those were the options—and two out of three would be useful to me.
But not now. There was such a thing as professionalism, and the FBI equivalent of bedside manner required a little finesse when it came to grilling a victim’s family. I didn’t have time to finesse anything at the moment.
The first and most important thing was getting to Mackenzie.
As Celine finished shaking the detective’s hand and introduced Lia and me as specialist consultants, we got the thirty-second rundown of the situation. No one knew how Mackenzie had gotten all the way up to the top of the lighthouse. The staircase was typically secure, the lightroom at the top locked and used primarily for storage.
“It’s not big.” The detective paused, and I got the sense that he felt a need to justify his presence on the ground floor to us. “They don’t want to crowd her.”
He didn’t specify who they were. It was just as well—I did best when I was left to form impressions for myself.
As we began our ascent of the lighthouse stairs, I let myself imagine Mackenzie doing the same. When Celine, Lia, and I made it to the top, I wondered if Mackenzie had been tired when she’d reached the ninth-story landing—or if she’d been buzzing.
With energy and adrenaline, dread and hope and fear.
Celine nodded to a ladder overhead. “I’ll go in first.”
I waited, then followed, hoisting myself up into the lightroom overhead.
Immediately, as I pulled myself to a standing position, I took stock of the space and the people occupying it. There were four of them: two men, two women. Mackenzie’s mother was the easiest to pick out—nurse’s scrubs, dark circles under her eyes, hyperfocused on the window. The other woman
—late thirties, early forties, professional dress, hair down—was speaking softly to Mrs. McBride. I pegged her as the psychologist. Even-keeled.
Exactly the right degree of empathetic.
I disliked her on instinct.
That left the two men. One of them strode toward us. The other hung back. Based on his apparel, the one who hung back appeared to be a fireman.
An axe dangled from his hand.
My gaze went to the window. It was open, but wooden boards had been nailed across the frame. From where I was standing, I could barely make out the form of Mackenzie’s body through the gaps in the boards.
You climbed out the window, hammer in hand. You barricaded yourself out there. That showed a presence of mind—and forethought—that I wouldn’t have expected.
“If we try to take down the boards, she’ll jump.” The man who’d approached us followed my gaze. He was in his late fifties, the oldest person in the room—and the one in charge.
The crisis negotiator, I thought.
“Quentin Nichols.” He was good enough at reading situations to introduce himself to Celine first and good enough at reading people that his attention then settled almost immediately on me.
“Special Agent Celine Delacroix,” Celine replied before nodding toward Lia and me. “Lia Zhang and Cassie Hobbes will be consulting.”
“Specialists?” Nichols asked. The question embedded underneath was:
What kind?
Before we could answer, Mrs. McBride’s thin, reedy voice broke through the air. “We asked for Briggs.” She shook her head, back and forth, whip-fast. “Agent Briggs. Special Agent Tanner Briggs.”
She was panicking out loud. You’re the talker in the family. The scrubs she was wearing suggested that she’d come here straight from work. I recalled from the original case file that she’d gone back to school for nursing when Mackenzie had started kindergarten.
“It has to be Agent Briggs. Oh, God, please. Mackenzie said…” “Mackenzie said that she wanted to talk to the agent who found her.” I
was the one who calmly responded, not Celine, not Lia. “Agent Briggs is now the director of the FBI.”
I wasn’t talking to Mrs. McBride—or to the crisis negotiator. I was talking to the girl outside the window, the one who’d gone still the moment we’d walked into the room.
“Mackenzie, sweetheart, we’ll try again.” Mrs. McBride choked on the words—or possibly on a sob.
She thought Mackenzie was going to jump.
I thought Mackenzie was listening.
“Agent Briggs isn’t the one who found you.” I addressed my words to her directly, trying not to think about what could happen if I misstepped, or if I’d read the situation wrong. “He’s the one who came for you—but he’s not the one who found you.”
That got a response. Mackenzie turned.
The sharp intake of breath in the room told me that she hadn’t moved this much in a while. Beside me, the crisis negotiator eased forward. The fireman did the same.
I stepped through them, right up to the window’s edge. I would have had to hoist myself up to climb out through it, but the barricade rendered that possibility null and void. Instead, I angled my head up to look at Mackenzie’s legs.
The way she’d angled her head toward the sky earlier. “We found you,” I said. “Lia and I did.”
“Six years ago?” Mrs. McBride couldn’t stop the question—or the skepticism that marked it. She’d hate herself for that later.
“You’re lying,” Mackenzie said, her voice shaking. I saw her feet move backward, a fraction of an inch, toward the edge. “I wanted to talk to Agent Briggs.”
I had seconds to establish a rapport. I didn’t know Mackenzie. I only knew where she was, what she was doing, and what I’d wanted when I was her age, and police officers had been tiptoeing around me.
Truth.
“I was seventeen years old when we found you. It was one of my first cases.” The Naturals program wasn’t public. I wasn’t supposed to be saying any of this, but right now, security clearances were the least of my concerns. “I guess you could say that I wasn’t a normal seventeen.”
There was more motion outside the window, another collective flinch from those inside.
I didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t blink until Mackenzie’s face appeared on the other side of the boarded frame. She was crouched on the ledge now, her knees pulled tight to her chest.
Safe. Steady—but ready to stand if you need to. Ready to jump. She’d do it, if I backed her into a corner. I knew that the way I always knew things— instinctively.
“What’s your name?” Mackenzie asked me.
The muscles in my chest relaxed, but only slightly. I’d piqued her curiosity. She was engaging. We weren’t out of the woods, but it was something.
“My name is Cassie,” I told her. “Cassandra Hobbes.”
There was a pause, maybe two seconds in length. “I’m Mackenzie.” It was important to her, somehow, to maintain ownership over who and what
she was. It was important to her to stay on even footing with me.
You can’t let yourself feel powerless. You’re out there—you’re up here— because there’s a part of you that desperately needs to be in control. If something threatened that, she’d do what she had to do.
What part of her wanted to do, because that was control.
“Tell me about the murders.” I did the only thing that I could do. I treated her like an adult. Like a person. Like a witness.
Mackenzie was quiet for several seconds, and then she spoke again. “I’m not a normal twelve.”
