Mackenzie was backlit. There was something haunting about the image: her face visible through the wooden boards, the sun reflecting in a halo off her hair, her eyes in shadow.
“Three kids from the high school are dead.” Mackenzie’s voice wasn’t emotionless, but it wasn’t expressive, either. She said dead like it was any other word. “Two girls, one boy. People say it was suicide. They say the kids jumped.” She paused, and I got the sense that she was watching me every bit as closely as I was observing her. “There are cliffs, where the older kids go to party. My brother goes there sometimes. He knew one of the girls.”
I forced myself to concentrate on what she was saying and not just the way she was saying it. I couldn’t just go through the motions here. I had to listen to her. I had to believe her.
I had to let her take control.
“Three victims,” I repeated back to her. “Two girls, one boy.” If this were a normal case, I’d be thinking victimology—what did the three have in common, what need did they fulfill for the person who’d killed them? “People say they jumped.” I continued echoing Mackenzie’s statement back to her, all the better to burrow into her subconscious and water the seed I’d planted when I’d told her that I wasn’t normal.
We are the same.
“But you don’t think they did,” I continued.
“I know they didn’t jump.” Mackenzie’s voice turned harsh—vicious, even.
You’re angry.
I should have seen that coming. I should have been ready for it. This wasn’t the kind of anger that popped up overnight. This was old and deep and more powerful than anything else she was capable of feeling.
“Tell me how you know,” I said.
My understanding of emotions wasn’t like Michael’s. He read what someone was feeling in the moment. He looked at a person and read, based
on physical cues, what they felt—and how they felt about what they felt and precisely which emotions they were trying not to show.
But what I did wasn’t just about the moment. It was about who someone was. Emotions were a part of that, but I couldn’t separate them from everything else.
Like the fact that Mackenzie had been victimized as a child.
Like the fact that the man who’d taken her had killed himself before the case could ever go to trial.
He took control. He took that from you. She wouldn’t let anyone else do that, not ever again. Adults didn’t get to look through her. They didn’t get to make decisions for her.
They didn’t get to ignore her.
“I saw the body.” Mackenzie raised her head to the sky again, when most people in her position would have looked down. “The third one. After the first two, the adults blocked off the cliffs. There’s a police officer there all the time now. They brought counselors into the schools—not just the high school. The middle school, too.”
Unlike most of her classmates, Mackenzie would have been familiar with counselors, with grief, with things that no kid should have to experience.
“They talked about warning signs,” Mackenzie continued bitterly. “And prevention and suicide contagion, like that’s a thing.”
It was a thing, but I didn’t say that. I knew better. “It didn’t help.” Mackenzie’s voice was soft now.
How many other things haven’t helped? I wondered. How many times has someone told you what you’re feeling, what you experienced, how to heal?
I’d both been there and done that.
Stop projecting. That warning came to me in Agent Sterling’s voice. My old mentor hadn’t just taught me how to profile. She’d taught me to separate my instincts from the rest of my subconscious.
She’d taught me to recognize when I identified with a victim.
“What the adults said, the teachers and the parents and the experts—it didn’t help. When the police blocked off the cliffs…” Mackenzie brought her eyes back to stare directly into mine. “The next body was found next to the church. They say she jumped off the steeple.”
“She?”
“Kelley.” Mackenzie’s response confirmed for me what I’d suspected— she knew the third victim. From church? Through her brother?
That was information I could get from a source other than Mackenzie.
She’d brought us here to tell us something specific. This wasn’t an interrogation, and if I tried to turn it into one, I’d be treading dangerous ground.
I had to let her say what she needed to say. I had to listen. I had to believe her.
“Kelley didn’t jump?” I was very careful not to tack the phrase you think on the front of the sentence this time. I was—almost certainly—not the first person Mackenzie had told this to.
If anyone believed you, you wouldn’t be up here. You wouldn’t need me.
“I saw the body.” Mackenzie repeated what she’d said earlier. “I saw the way Kelley landed. The way her bones broke. She didn’t jump.”
Lia stepped into my peripheral vision. With the boards across the windows, the chances that Mackenzie would see her standing there were slim. I allowed myself one second to glance sideways.
Lia gave a brief nod. Mackenzie was telling the truth as she knew it— no doubt, no embellishments.
“You don’t believe me, either.” Mackenzie stood suddenly.
A second looking away was a second too much. She’d taken a risk telling me her truth, knowing that I might just be another in a long line of adults to dismiss it. She’d asked for the FBI. Here we were.
There was nothing left for her to ask for.
You expect me to humor you. To lie to you. To try to manipulate or control you.
From somewhere in my memory, I could hear a male voice saying,
Breathe, sweetheart. Just breathe.
The muscles in my jaw tightened. I wasn’t going to humor Mackenzie— or lie to her.
I was going to listen. And ask: “How would Kelley have landed if she’d jumped?”
Mackenzie hadn’t expected the question, and that was a mark in my favor. She rose up on her toes—just slightly, her hands held out to either side. “It depends. On how close she was to the edge, how she moved. There wouldn’t have been room for a running start, but she could have taken a step. Did she hold one foot out over the edge and jump from the one that
remained? Did she just step off? Did she leap? Did she hold her arms out to the side and fall? How did her knees bend, how did she leap? Were her toes pointed?”
As she spoke, Mackenzie’s body echoed her words in tiny, almost imperceptible ways. There was something graceful about even the subtlest of her movements, something remarkably unperturbed, considering what she was saying—and the fact that a strong wind could take her off that edge.
“She could have landed so many ways.” Mackenzie went suddenly still. For the first time since we’d started speaking, my stomach clenched. “She didn’t.”
Didn’t land the way she should have.
“I know I sound crazy.” Mackenzie knelt again—too fast this time, too suddenly. Behind me, her mother whimpered. The girl should have fallen. She should have at least stumbled or wavered, but she didn’t. “I know that you think I’m just a kid. But I’m not. I know bodies. I know how they move. When I spar, I can see other people’s moves coming. When I dance, I always know exactly how I look without ever glancing in the mirror.”
Celine came to stand beside me. She caught my gaze, and I knew exactly what she was thinking.
“I’m that way,” Celine told Mackenzie. “With faces.”
Sloane was that way with numbers, Michael with emotions, Lia with lies.
I was that way with people—with what they wanted and needed and what they were willing to do to get it.
“You don’t want to jump,” I said, my voice echoing through the tight quarters. “But you will. You already know exactly how—how you’d hold your arms, the way you’d look up, not down. You’d point your toes.”
The crisis negotiator grabbed me by the arm, his fingers digging into the tendons just above the elbow. I could hear the child psychologist hiss something behind me. They thought I was being reckless, that I was saying the wrong thing, putting ideas in Mackenzie’s mind.
The ideas are already there.
I ignored the negotiator’s punishing grip. “You know exactly how you would land,” I told Mackenzie, “because you know bodies. You know movement.”
“I know,” the girl on the ledge said desperately, “that Kelley didn’t jump.”
