Twelve

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  He sees his kids when he looks at her.

  “I have two little girls—Ally and Maura.”

  The names don’t fit together. He picked one, the ex-wife picked the other—or maybe one is a family name.

  “I’m not your daughters,” Cassie states clearly. She knows she’s probably staring at him too hard. “You can ask me whatever you need to ask me. I saw people at the theater. I can describe them to you.” She doesn’t pause, because she knows that if she does, he’ll tell her to slow down. “My mom doesn’t date, but she does meet with clients one-on-one. She’s a mentalist. Do you know what a mentalist is? People think she’s psychic, but she’s not.” That seems important, when Cassie thinks back on the blood on the walls, the floor…

  Too much blood.

  “Maybe she fooled the wrong person,” Cassie thinks out loud. “Whoever did this—they meant to. They planned it.” Cassie sees it every time she closes her eyes. She sees it even when her eyes are open. “I need to go back there.”

  For the first time, her voice trembles. She hears it, and the detective does, too, and Cassie senses immediately that he’s relieved. Relieved that she’s showing emotion. Relieved that he can comfort her. Relieved that he can treat her like a kid.

  “I need to see the evidence,” Cassie insists. “The pictures you took. Are you interviewing anyone?”

  She sees his answer coming, as he places a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  “Breathe, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Just breathe.”

  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. Th
ere 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.”

  There’s not a single person at this too-formal dinner table that Celine would like to draw. To be fair, she’s already drawn Michael a dozen or more times.

  She knows his face almost as well as her own.

  “The boys will be lining up for this one soon.” Mr. Pritchett—the guest of honor—nods at Celine and smiles knowingly at her parents. “If they aren’t already.”

  Why do grown men say such stupid things? Celine manages not to say that out loud. Her parents should truly appreciate her discretion. They’re the ones who insisted that this grown-ass man—the one acting like pretty is the ultimate honorific an adolescent girl could receive—is important.

  A valuable business connection. It is all Celine can do to keep from rolling her eyes. In a show of great restraint, she instead pictures the muscles and bones buried beneath Mr. Pritchett’s healthy jowls.

  “Celine isn’t interested in boys yet.” Her mother, college professor that she is, has just enough feminist bones in her body to add, “She’s really more invested in her studies.”

  Studies come easily to Celine. It’s the seventh grade, not rocket science.

  “And her art,” Michael interjects. The comment, in addition to being true, yields an immediate result: his father’s attention. The shift in Thatcher Townsend’s position is noticeable, even to Celine. She’s done a good job of not looking at Michael’s father this evening.

  At the elder Townsend’s face.

  It’s amazing, really, that no one else sees it. Not Michael, not Thatcher, not Celine’s hapless father, who has no idea that she doesn’t carry his DNA at all. It’s all there in the bone structure that she and her father’s long-time business partner share.

  It’s all in the face.

  “You might not be interested in boys now, Celine,” Michael’s father says, playing to Mr. Pritchett’s ego by shooting him a conspiratorial look, “but you will be someday.”

  You want to bet? Celine, again, restrains herself.

  Michael doesn’t. “Leave her alone.”

  Celine’s stomach flips. Those words will cost Michael. Thatcher Townsend is charming. Thatcher Townsend is generous, a renowned philanthropist, an excellent businessman.

  Thatcher Townsend is a monster.

  Most of the time, Michael tries to hide the bruises, but he can’t hide the way his nose isn’t quite straight anymore. Not from Celine. Faces don’t lie. And if Michael’s father has broken one bone, who says he won’t break another?

  No. Celine won’t let that happen. Not tonight. She speaks up before Thatcher can turn his gaze intently toward his son. “Why?”

  If she can distract Thatcher, then maybe he’ll forget what Michael said. Maybe Michael won’t have to stay home “sick” tomorrow. Maybe Celine won’t see the echoes of it in his cheek or nasal or jaw bones, long after the bruises have healed.

  “Why, what, sweetheart?” Thatcher asks indulgently. His gaze is on Celine’s, but he hasn’t forgotten the way Michael spoke to him.

  I’ll just have to make you forget. This isn’t how Celine planned on making this particular announcement. But this is her truth, and her decision. Screw her parents—and screw Thatcher Townsend.

  Celine smiles sweetly. “Why would I be interested in boys,” she asks the table innocently, “when there are girls?”

  “You think Mackenzie’s a Natural?” Lia cut straight to the chase the moment we stepped out of the room.

  Celine had hung back to talk down the crisis negotiator, the psychologist, and Mrs. McBride. For someone who had a fondness for throwing gasoline on fires, Celine was also surprisingly adept at putting them out. It hadn’t been my intention to be inflammatory or reckless. I’d said what I needed to say to show Mackenzie that I was listening.

  I wasn’t just repeating her own words back to her. I understood. Convincing Mackenzie of that had been worth the risk of addressing her threat to jump head-on. The fact that I’d succeeded was the only reason that I’d been able to extract a promise that she would sit tight while I made some phone calls.

  I’d given her something to hold on to.

  I’d left her in control.

  “There’s only one way to find out if she’s like us,” I told Lia. Feeling different didn’t make a person a Natural. Believing that you knew things, that you could intuit things that other people couldn’t—that didn’t make you a prodigy.

  The only way to tell if Mackenzie was a Natural was to find out if she was right.

  For that, I needed Sloane. Unfortunately, the FBI Academy was not known for allowing its trainees to keep their cell phones on at all times. I circumvented the system and made a different phone call.

  “Briggs.” Even now that he was the FBI director, the founder of the Naturals program had a habit of answering the phone with his last name. Efficient—and just a little egocentric.

  “I need you to get Sloane on the phone for me,” I said, not bothering with hello any more than he had. “I also need you to get us access to everything the local PD has on three recent teenage deaths—apparent suicides. The sooner Sloane gets her eyes on those files, the better.”

  Maybe the detective in charge of Mackenzie’s case would have handed over the files without receiving a phone call from the director of the FBI, and maybe he wouldn’t have. Either way, I wasn’t about to devote a single ounce of my attention or brain power to figuring out how to finesse the situation. My cognitive resources were already split, half focused on Mackenzie—power and control and desperation—and the other half working through the few facts that I knew about the trio of deaths.

  If Mackenzie was right, if I proved it—she’d have a reason to come in.

  Three victims. Two female, one male. All teenaged. All local. If these “suicides” really were murders, then I needed the information in the files as much as Sloane did. How far apart were the deaths, timewise? Were numbers two and three closer together or further apart than number one? I knew the third victim was female. If the first had been male, that might suggest a shift in the pattern.

  Th
e first could have been practice. The next two—the girls—they might be what you want.

  “Check your phone.” Lia had ducked back into the lightroom to check on Celine. Based on the first words out of her mouth when she reappeared on the landing, I concluded that Celine had probably asked her to pass that message along.

  I pulled out my phone and checked my secure email. The files were there. If I had them, that meant that Sloane had them. Based on the speed with which she worked, I’d be hearing from her soon.

  Not soon enough. I’d made the decision not to go back into the room until I could convince Mackenzie that I’d done something, that I was doing something. I couldn’t go back just to tell her that she had to wait. In the meantime, I had to trust that Celine could handle the adults in the room—and that some part of Mackenzie would have latched on to the way Celine had responded when Mackenzie had described her awareness of her own body—of muscles and movement.

  I’m that way with faces. I’d gone into this identifying with Mackenzie and laying the groundwork for her to identify with me, but with a little space, I could see that I wasn’t the only option on that front. Celine’s ability was the closest to Mackenzie’s. Celine was the one who moved like a fighter and a dancer, and Mackenzie had mentioned sparring and dancing both. I knew what it was like to survive trauma, but Celine was the one who’d gone to great lengths as a teenager to be seen and heard. She was comfortable with anger.

  Nobody controlled her.

  “Excuse me.”

  I looked up to see Mr. McBride making his way up the steps. Nine flights of stairs had taken a physical toll on him, but clearly he considered that the least of his problems. “Can you tell me anything?” he asked, breathing heavily. “My wife? My daughter?”

  I took note of the order in which he’d asked. “They’re both fine,” I said. “Or as fine as they can be, under the circumstances.”