Twelve

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Family lawyer was a lying liar who lied.” Lia picked up where I left off. Back when we’d solved this case, she’d done a good job of pretending that it hadn’t touched her, but nowadays she wasn’t quite so intent on seeming heartless. “He was the one who took Mackenzie, then got off on the press attention surrounding it. He had her for months, hidden away in some back room or godforsaken hole.”

  A makeshift shack, I thought, remembering Sloane’s analysis of the property. Four feet by four feet, no windows.

  Celine flipped through the file sitting on the table between us. “Mackenzie is how old now?” The plane took off, but I barely felt it. “Twelve?”

  When I was twelve years old, my mother had been deemed missing, presumed dead. When Dean was twelve, he’d betrayed his serial killer father, resulting in Daniel Redding’s arrest and the creation of the Naturals program.

  When Lia was twelve…

  I stopped my thoughts right there. “Mackenzie McBride is twelve years old,” I confirmed. “She lives in Cape Roane, Maine.” If Sloane were here, she would have rattled off every factoid and statistic imaginable about the small coastal town. I cut straight to the chase. “Cape Roane is the home of one of the tallest lighthouses in the United States, and right now…”

  You climbed the stairs. You opened the window. You crawled out.…

  “Right now,” I managed to continue, “Mackenzie is standing on the edge of that lighthouse, threatening to jump.”

  “Unless…” Celine said softly.

  Lia finished her sentence for her. “She said she’d jump unless someone called in the FBI—specifically, the agent who found her in that shack.”

  Agent Briggs. He was the FBI director now. He couldn’t just run off at a twelve-year-old’s call. Agent Sterling, his wife, hadn’t been part of the team during the Mackenzie McBride case—and she was thirty-six weeks pregnant.

  With twins.

  That left those of us who’d worked the case behind the scenes. It left me, because I was the one who’d crawled inside Mackenzie’s brain, way back when.

  “If her parents and the local authorities hadn’t found her threat credible,” I forced myself to admit, “they wouldn’t have called us.”

  “So we’ve got a potential jumper.” Celine was quiet for a moment, and I wondered if she was thinking about the times in her life when she’d taken drastic measures for attention. Because she needed to matter—to be seen and heard.

  Is that what this is? I directed my thoughts toward Mackenzie. Are you just trying to make yourself heard?

  I’d been taught to profile in first person or second—never in third. But right now, I wasn’t profiling. I didn’t know enough about this Mackenzie to say with any degree of certainty what she did or did not want.

  I only knew the child she’d been—and what she’d survived.

  You demanded they call us in for a reason. If you really wanted to die—if you were sure—you wouldn’t be up there issuing demands. That was closer to a reasonable conclusion, but I’d been taught early on how easily what you wanted to see could interfere with a profile’s conclusions.

  I needed to keep my head clear. I needed to hold off on conclusions. I needed to get to know Mackenzie now.

  “We’ll go straight to the lighthouse when we touch down.” Celine wasn’t giving orders so much as thinking out loud.

  “Briggs said that the local PD already have a crisis negotiator and a child psychologist out there,” I said.

  Child psychologists. Half of my brain was still trying to get acquainted with Mackenzie’s. How many of those have you seen since the kidnapping? How well do you know what to say—or not to say—to convince the shrink du jour that you’re normal?

  How long have you known, deep in the recesses of your mind, that normal is a lie?

  “Cassie.” Lia had to say my name twice before I tuned back in. “Aren’t you forgetting to read Celine in on one little thing?” She paused, then prompted. “The reason Briggs said that Mackenzie wants to talk to the FBI.”

  Oh, right. That.

  I answered in one word. “Murder.”

  Mackenzie McBride has never been bothered by heights. Better to be up high, where you can see everything, than down low, boxed in, on the ground.

  Jumping would be easy.

  The lighthouse ledge sticks out a little less than two feet. It should feel like nothing. Her legs should shake beneath her, but Mackenzie trusts her body. She knows that two feet is half of four, and for a time, four feet by four feet was her world.

  Her balance is perfect. Even now, with the wind whipping at her hair and the window barricaded off behind her, she can see herself in three hundred and sixty degrees. She knows exactly what she would look like if she leapt off the edge, if she dove off it, if she fell. She can see the way her body would land in each scenario. One of her teachers tried to tell her once that what she could do, the things she knew—it was just math.

  It isn’t.

  She rises up on her toes. A relevé—and a warning for the adults gathered below as well as those in the room immediately behind her. I can step off this ledge before you can stop me.

  It would be so easy, but she doesn’t want to do that. Does she? The FBI will be here soon. They have to be. They have to listen. If they listened, maybe she could come in. Maybe she could end this.

  They have to believe me.

  Because the others? The dead ones? They didn’t leap or dive. They didn’t dance off the edge. They didn’t jump.

  They were pushed.

  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.”

  They don’t want her to think of this as an interrogation room. Cassie knows that, just like she knows, objectively, that the blood has been scrubbed from her hands. They took pictures first—so many pictures of her hands, her clothes…

  The blood on the walls.

  Cassie wasn’t there for the crime scene photos. Of course she wasn’t, but she can read between the lines. Behavior. Personality. Environment. The BPEs are reliable when nothing and no one else is. They are constant.

  Behavior. The detective pulls a chair over to her side of the table. He got her chips and a Coke, and he hands them to her now.

  Environment. This is a police station, and not a well-funded one. For the detective, it’s his place of business. She’s the new element here, the thing that has the potential to throw him off-kilter.

  She’s a kid.

  She’s quiet.

  She’s not crying.

  “Is my mom dead?” Cassie’s voice is low, but she beats the detective to the first question.

  “We don’t know, sweetheart.” That answer comes quickly. The truth takes a little longer. “At this point, it seems likely.”

  Personality. Cassie forces herself to ignore the ringing in her ears and think. “You have kids.” This time, the words that come out of her mouth aren’t a question. The detective, she thinks, is probably divorced, and he probably has daughters, and it’s probably hard for him not to bring his work home.