Such a Pretty Girl

by Tess Diamond

  She would check with Paul in the morning about Gavin’s military history, but she knew he wasn’t lying to her—or spying on the team. His training from that time would likely prove to be an asset—it required a level of calm and thinking on your feet not everyone had.

  As she got ready for bed, Grace turned her focus back to Janice Wacomb and the case that lay ahead. Once again, as she filtered through the facts in her mind, the images of the crime scene, that not-quite-right feeling she’d had niggled at her. She was missing something. What?

  She closed her eyes, visualizing the body. The crime scene was burned in her brain, like they all were.

  Hoodie. Worn leggings and shoes. Ponytail. No makeup.

  She ran the images through her mind, checking them off on a mental list. Something wasn’t right. Something was out of place.

  The earrings.

  She tensed up like lightning had just hit her. She remembered the flash of the diamond studs in the floodlights, half-hidden by the strands of hair that had come loose from Janice’s ponytail.

  Who wore diamond earrings on a run? Especially a woman as dressed down as Janice? They’d been large too—at least a carat each, set in yellow gold. Expensive jewelry for a practical woman—especially one who didn’t like diamonds. The sapphire engagement ring on Janice’s finger told Grace that she liked warmth, color. Not the status a diamond brought.

  Grace frowned, getting into bed, making a mental note to ask Zooey about them in the morning.

  Better be safe than sorry.

  Chapter 6

  When her alarm blared at 6:00 a.m., there was nothing Grace wanted to do more than throw it across the room. Or hit the snooze button a million times.

  It had been past two by the time she got home. She took a good twenty minutes to untangle her hair, but she knew she’d regret it if she slept on the mess of braids. It took another ten minutes to remove her makeup before dragging herself into the shower. She almost nodded off a few times under the soothing beat of the hot water against her body but managed to drag herself out and collapse on her bed. She’d fallen asleep almost immediately, deep but not soundly. She kept dreaming of being chased, of diamond earrings and crushed roses.

  She slapped the alarm off, launching herself out of her four-poster bed, leaving the rustic lavender linen duvet rumpled at the foot.

  Her town house was built in the 1920s, with graceful Art Deco accents and curved alcoves set into the walls that held favorites from the art collection she’d inherited from her grandmother, as well as the pieces she’d purchased on her own. The small collection she’d started buying with her first book advance was nothing compared to what she’d inherited from Gran—Grace leased most of the pieces out to museums because she couldn’t possibly justify keeping such historic beauty to herself. But a few select pieces—her favorites since childhood—she kept at home. A Calder mobile—one of the smaller, earlier ones—hung in her dining room, above the table. A series of sketches of ballerinas by Degas lined her hallway. Her guest room had a trio of Andy Warhol’s early celebrity portraits. In the living room, an enormous Jackson Pollock—one of her Gran’s favorites—dominated one wall, adding bold, abstract color to the otherwise all-white room.

  She pressed a button on her stereo and made her way to the kitchen as the sweet sounds of Miles Davis filled the air. She pulled out a bottle of green juice from her fridge, along with a carton of eggs and some chives and red peppers. Humming along to the trumpet, she expertly cracked the eggs into a bowl and diced the veggies.

  Reading the news on her iPad as she ate her omelet, she forced herself to drink the green juice without much of a grimace—why did that stuff have to be so good for you? It tasted horrible. She didn’t care what the hipsters at Whole Foods said, it was like gulping down liquid grass.

  Janice’s murder had made the papers—just a few sentences in the crime blotter that said the police had no leads so far.

  She checked her phone, but there were no messages. She’d be expected in the office by ten, where Paul would be waiting with Zooey’s team to break down the forensic evidence.

  Gavin would be there too. She tried to ignore the slight twist in her stomach at the thought, but it was getting harder the more it happened.

  It wasn’t as if she’d expected to never see him again. They both worked in law enforcement, so it was inevitable that their jobs and friends and social circles would overlap at some point. She’d heard his name many times before she’d ever met him, always spoken with admiration, often with a hint of jealousy, sometimes from men she dated. And when she met him, she finally understood why.

  She first laid eyes on him at the Policeman’s Ball, of all events. She was attending as a favor to an old friend, a retiring captain whose wife had fallen ill at the last minute. He ended up leaving the ball early, and Grace found herself alone, but not for long.

  He didn’t feed her some cheesy line or pull any slick crap, like so many men did. He merely held his hand out and said, “Care to dance?”

  Then he smiled. She found herself placing her hand in his without a second thought, and then she was in his arms, spinning across the dance floor.

  If she were a fairy-tale sort of woman, she would’ve thought the spark she felt when his eyes met hers was a portent of things to come. That a night full of magic would lead to a lifetime of it.

  But she was a realist, through and through. And though that night with him was earth-shattering, she was gone the next morning.

  She wasn’t one to leave a glass slipper—or the modern version of one—behind. So when he called, she didn’t pick up. And being the respectful kind of man he was, he’d taken the hint.

  Seeing him again reminded her that a part of her—a small, hidden part—had wished she’d picked up when he called. But that wasn’t a thought she needed in her head, especially now that she had to work with him.

  The alarm on her tablet went off. COUNSELING W/ DOROTHY 8:30 AM.

  Grace checked the time, grateful for the escape from her memories. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late.

  She’d been volunteering since boarding school—it looked good on a girl’s college applications—but the kind of volunteer work her parents and boarding school teachers had approved of was nothing like what she did now. Counseling troubled, at-risk youth was difficult but even more rewarding. And it gave her an excuse to use another side of her psychology degree.

  She ran group and one-on-one sessions, working with kids as young as ten. Many of them had seen too much, experienced too much, in their short lives. Sexual assault. Parental abandonment or imprisonment. Death. Addiction.

  Every day she worked at the counseling center, the more she believed in the resilience of the human spirit. The kids—wary and burned by adults before—didn’t always like her, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t help them.

  The Herman Counseling Center was on the east side of DC. The squat little gray building didn’t look like much, but it was a haven for the kids who had nowhere else to turn. Grace breezed in through the double doors at eight twenty, relieved that she’d made it in time. Starting a one-on-one session late sent the wrong message to the kid—that they weren’t important or worth her time. And the girl she was seeing today would have taken that awful feeling in her stomach and gotten hostile.

  Sheila, the director, was speaking with Jessica, the receptionist, when Grace came in. Both women looked up, smiling.

  “Grace, great to see you,” said Sheila.

  “I wasn’t able to bring coffee today,” Grace said, apologetic. She always liked to bring the staff something—they worked so hard. “I caught a case late last night, threw my entire schedule off.”

  “Didn’t you have your awards dinner last night?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes,” Grace said. “Trust me, it was so crowded, no one noticed I left early.”

  Sheila laughed. “Grace! You were the guest of honor!”

  “Okay, maybe a few people missed me,” Grace admitte
d. “But there was so much champagne and food, I’m sure they forgot quickly.”

  Sheila shook her head, picking up a file on the desk and tucking it under her arm. “You’re hilarious,” she said. “Choosing crime scenes over cocktail parties.”

  “You know it,” Grace replied with a grin.

  “Dorothy’s waiting for you in the teen area, if you want to head in.”

  “How’s she doing?” Grace asked, lowering her voice so they wouldn’t be overheard.

  “So far, I think her mom’s staying away from the abusive boyfriend,” Sheila said. “When he’s around, she spends a lot more of her evenings here.”

  “That’s fantastic to hear,” Grace said.

  “But the grades are still a problem,” Sheila explained. “She’s still flunking math and history.”

  Grace sighed. “She’s so smart.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sheila said. “She scored off the charts on her tests. She just doesn’t have any sense of self-worth. She says that only people who are going to college need to do well in school.”

  Grace shook her head. “I’m going to get that girl to college if it kills me,” she vowed.

  “I’m going to hold you to that.” Sheila smiled. She checked her watch. “You should probably get in there.”

  “Thanks, Sheila,” Grace called over her shoulder, hurrying down the hall to a room with tables and chairs and an unsteady foosball table that had a stack of books jammed under one leg. A tall dark-haired girl with a permanent scowl and at least six piercings in her ears was slumped on one of the faded couches, reading a thick book. Her jeans were tucked into her combat boots, the neon blue laces a stark contrast against the scuffed black leather. “Dorothy, hey.”

  Dorothy glanced up from her book, looking bored. “We doing this?” she asked.

  “Right this way.” Grace gestured down the hall, where a series of private rooms lined the corridor.

  Once they had settled in the second room, Grace in one worn red armchair and Dorothy in the other, she pulled out the leather folder she kept her notes in. She’d already met with Dorothy a few times—the teen had grown up in an abusive household and was a repeat runaway. There had been an incident with drugs last year. Dorothy insisted that she wasn’t using anymore, and she’d tested clean, so the center had given her a chance to turn things around.

  “How have things been going?” Grace asked, uncapping her pen.

  Dorothy shrugged. “Same old, same old. Sheila’s riding my ass, as usual.”

  “Sheila cares about you,” Grace said.

  Dorothy snorted. “Yessirree,” she drawled.

  “Last time we talked, things with your mom were getting better. Is that still the case?”

  The girl shrugged. “Things are okay, I guess.”

  “Has Randy come back?” Grace asked, naming her mom’s (hopefully) ex-boyfriend.

  “Not yet,” Dorothy said. “But it’s just a matter of time.”

  “You don’t think they’ll stay broken up?” Grace knew the answer to the question, but she was curious to see if Dorothy did.

  “They never stay broken up,” Dorothy said. “He’ll be back. She’ll take him back. She always takes him back, no matter what he does.”

  “And you don’t want him back in your lives,” Grace said.

  “Would you want a woman-beating asshole in your life?” Dorothy asked, her eyes challenging, her mouth pressed together tight, like she was trying to keep all her feelings trapped inside.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Grace said.

  “If he ever moves from hitting Mom to hitting Jamie, I’m gonna kill him,” Dorothy muttered.

  Jamie was her half brother. He was one of the few things that caused Dorothy to light up when she talked about him. Grace got the impression she’d done most of the child rearing, her mother too high or too beat up or just too tired to deal with another kid.

  “Or you could call the cops,” Grace suggested.

  Dorothy laughed, a harsh sound that said everything about how she saw the world—how she’d been forced to see the world. “The cops don’t care about people like us,” she said.

  “That’s not true,” Grace said. “I’m a cop. I care about you.”

  “You’re not a real cop,” Dorothy sneered. “You’re, like, a fancy agent profiler. You don’t go around arresting people for beating on their women.”

  “Sometimes I do,” Grace said. “I’ve worked domestic violence cases before.”

  “You can’t help someone who doesn’t want help,” Dorothy said in a monotone, like she was parroting it from something that was said or read to her. “My mom’s her own worst enemy. She’s in love. The kind of love that gets you beaten is fucking stupid, if you ask me.”

  “You already help your mom,” Grace pointed out. “You take care of Jamie. You’re staying in school, even though I know you don’t want to, because you promised her you’d graduate. You could make a better life for yourself, Dorothy.”

  The teen snorted again, shifting in her seat, unable to meet Grace’s eyes. “You know that from your weird profiling stuff?”

  “I know that because I’ve talked to you,” Grace said. “And because Sheila and I believe in you. And because it’s clear you don’t want to mess up the opportunities you’ve been given. If you did, you wouldn’t show up for counseling.”

  “Don’t get too big a head,” Dorothy said. “I’m just here because it’s better than at home.”

  Grace’s heart twinged. Dorothy was such a smart girl. There was a part of Grace who looked at Dorothy and saw another angry, grieving girl. That girl Grace had been, leaving boarding school, starting college, ostracized by her parents, looking for any kind of comfort.

  But where Grace had had wealth and opportunities, Dorothy had nothing. No one to value her intelligence, no one to encourage it—or her—no one to bolster her self-confidence.

  That was why Grace dedicated so much time at the center. She’d been born into a privileged, if lonely, life and had all the prospects possible. Every door in the world had been opened to her and she knew how valuable that was. This was one of her ways of paying it forward. Because girls like Dorothy deserved all the chances Grace could give them.

  “Where’d you learn all that stuff anyway?” Dorothy asked in that bored voice teens used when they really wanted to know something but didn’t want the person they were asking to know that.

  “The profiling?” Grace asked, seizing on her curiosity.

  “Yeah, it’s like, what, mind reading or something?”

  Grace laughed. “I wish!” she said. “That would make my job a lot easier. I got my BA in psychology and criminology, and then I earned my master’s in psychology while doing a doctorate in criminology.”

  “That’s a lot of school.” Dorothy shook her head.

  “I always liked school,” Grace said. “Between you and me, I was kind of a geek.”

  Dorothy’s stormy face, usually so bored and apathetic, broke into a reluctant smile. “I can totally see that,” she said. “I bet girls like me teased you.”

  Grace didn’t want to tell her that there weren’t any girls like her at the exclusive $100,000-a-year boarding school she’d attended. “There were a few,” she said. “But I couldn’t have landed my job by just studying hard,” Grace explained. “When it comes to some of the special fields like profiling or hostage negotiation, for instance, you really need to have a knack for it. An instinct.”

  “How’d you know you had it?” Dorothy asked.

  Though Grace usually hesitated to talk about herself, this was the first time Dorothy had shown real interest in anything other than weaseling out of their counseling session as soon as possible. It gave Grace a spark of hope—if the girl was intrigued by profiling, that might be a way to connect with her and encourage her.

  Maybe that dream of getting her to college wasn’t an impossible one.

  “A lot of profiling is noticing details that other people don’t see. We lo
ok beyond the surface, into the heart of people.”

  “Like into their souls?” Dorothy asked skeptically.

  “More like into their minds,” Grace said. “What do you see when you look at me?”

  “Expensive clothes, long hair, you need a manicure.”

  Grace had to suppress a smile at the teen’s bluntness. “Okay,” Grace said. “Good start. But what do those things tell you about me?”

  Dorothy frowned, thinking. “Fancy clothes mean you’re probably rich, right? Maybe you keep your hair long because you’re girly but you’re not in a really girly job. So it’s, like, your thing. To stay girly. To remind people that you’re not just one of the guys. And I bet it trips some people up, that you’re so pretty but you’re so smart. People always think pretty girls aren’t smart, like they don’t have to be. And the manicure . . . You probably haven’t had the time. You were almost late today, and you’re never late. You’ve been busy. Probably with FBI stuff. Was there a murder or something?”

  Grace was impressed but not terribly surprised. Dorothy was a survivor—her experience in an abusive household had taught her how to read people in order to stay safe and protect her little brother. “Those are excellent insights, Dorothy,” she told her. “I am very girly, and I do like to keep my hair long because it makes me feel feminine in a career that’s male dominated. Law enforcement is still a boys’ club. That’s why, as a woman, I want to bring as many talented women into the field as possible. And I’ve missed three mani-pedi appointments in the last month. You don’t even want to see the state of my feet. It’s a full-on lizard situation.”

  There it was—another rare grin flitting across the girl’s somber face. Progress! Finally, something to connect with her on. Grace was overjoyed. So far, Dorothy had been a hard nut to crack.

  “Do you think . . . I mean, I know it sounds stupid,” Dorothy began. “But do you think I could do that? Do what you do?”

  “Absolutely,” Grace said, meaning it 100 percent. “Dorothy, you are a smart young woman. The only reason you’re getting bad grades is because you’re not applying yourself. And you’re tough. If you study hard and get your degree, I will write you a recommendation when you apply to Quantico—that’s the FBI school. I can’t promise you’ll get in, but if you do the right things, study the right stuff, and get good grades, I’d be surprised if they didn’t want someone like you.”