Twelve

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Mackenzie’s father ascended another step, but stopped there, below me. My phone was heavy in my hand. I had the files. I could be looking at them while waiting for Sloane’s call. But I knew what it was like to be on the other end of an investigation and to feel like no one was telling you anything—or listening.

  For better or worse, I could give him a minute.

  “What can you tell me about Mackenzie?” I asked.

  In my line of work, details were currency, and given that Sloane could feasibly call me back and say that the physical evidence was consistent with suicide, I needed a backup plan—one that could bring Mackenzie down off that ledge, even if she was wrong.

  “Mackenzie’s a good girl.” Mr. McBride said that stubbornly, like he expected me to argue. When I didn’t, he got nervous and pushed his hands through hair, an alternative to wringing them. “She doesn’t like attention. Not like this.”

  She’s more like you than your wife, I translated. I wondered when that shift had happened. Mackenzie McBride had wanted to be a pop star once.

  She’d loved attention.

  “Does Mackenzie ever talk about what happened to her?” I asked.

  That question shut Mr. McBride down, as immediately as if he’d had an actual off-switch and I’d pressed it.

  “I have a little sister,” I said, trying another tack. “I didn’t know about her for years. Until she was three, almost four. What she’s been through…” I thought of Laurel, of the way that she used to look at swing sets and see shackles and chains. “I won’t ever fully understand it.” I shook my head. “I don’t make her talk about it. Sometimes, though, she says things.” I paused, letting the silence work its way through his brain. “Does Mackenzie ever say things to you?”

  “She said that it was small.” Mr. McBride swallowed, visibly, audibly, practically with his entire body. “The place that bastard kept her, she said that it was dark, and it was small, and he’d leave her there for hours—sometimes days.”

  I thought of Mackenzie, standing on a ledge and looking up at the sky. Up, not down. At least on the ledge, there was air.

  At least you’re in control. At least you’re free.

  “She said she danced.”

  That snapped my attention back to Mackenzie’s father.

  “She what?”

  “She danced,” he repeated. “Every day, all the time, whenever she could. Whenever it was dark. Whenever she couldn’t see anything. Whenever she wanted to cry. She danced.”

  I thought about what it would be like to live in a four-by-four room. You were just a kid. A kid who liked being the center of attention. A kid who wanted to be a pop star.

  He took everything away from you. He locked you up. He hurt you.

  You danced.

  “The older she gets, the harder it is.” Mackenzie’s father looked down. “I thought it would get easier, but she understands more now than she used to. The things she lived through…”

  He couldn’t finish that sentence.

  “She dances five days a week.” Mr. McBride managed a very small smile, fond and hopeful in a way that hit me like a knife to the gut. “Ballet, tap, jazz. A few years ago, she started martial arts—the kid’s practically a prodigy. There’s nothing physical that she can’t do.”

  When it comes to her body—she’s in control.

  “Thank you,” I told Mr. McBride. He asked me what I was thanking him for, but I couldn’t explain what he’d just told me—what he’d really told me.

  If we’d had normal childhoods, Sloane had commented once, a long time ago, we wouldn’t be Naturals. Michael had learned to read emotions because he’d needed to be able to read his abusive father’s. Lia had grown up in a world where deception was a matter of survival. Dean’s father was a serial killer.

  I’d had a mother who was a mentalist, and she’d moved us around so frequently that the only relationships I was able to form with other people were in my mind.

  Mackenzie McBride had been kidnapped at the age of six. I’d known that she’d been held captive. I’d known the size of the shack. I hadn’t known, until this moment, what she’d done to survive.

  You danced. In the dark, you danced. For hours and hours. When you had no control over anything else, you had control over the motion. Over your own muscles. Over the decision to repeat the same moves—familiar moves—again and again and again.

  I suspected, but didn’t know, that when Mackenzie had danced, she’d gone to a place in her mind where other things—the bad things, as Laurel would say—couldn’t touch her. What I did know was that on the ledge, Mackenzie had said that she knew bodies, knew how they moved, knew what she looked like when she was dancing without ever looking in the mirror.

  With her childhood? Her very not normal childhood? That made sense. Even now, losing herself in motion, exerting physical control—it was a coping mechanism.

  I’d been trying to approach this objectively. I’d been reserving judgment on whether or not Mackenzie knew things, the way I sometimes did.

  The way we all did.

  But now?

  I said good-bye to Mr. McBride and started up the ladder to the lightroom. You know bodies. You know motion.

  I’d thought that I couldn’t go back in until I had proof that she was right. But right now? I didn’t need proof.

  I knew.

  When I made it into the room, the first thing I noticed was that Celine was standing opposite the window, closer to Mackenzie than any of the others.

  “You’re back.” Mackenzie didn’t turn to look at me. I wondered if she’d seen me come into the room or if she’d heard me.

  How in tune with her environment—with the bodies all around her—was she?

  My phone rang, the sound almost obscene in the silence that had followed Mackenzie’s statement. No matter what damage control Special Agent Delacroix had done with the adults in this room, it was a good bet that none of them quite trusted me or the way I’d chosen to approach things.

  In their eyes, this was a delicate situation. Mackenzie was delicate and in need of kid gloves.

  I looked down at my phone, then out at the girl on the ledge. “It’s my colleague,” I said. “The expert.”

  “The one who’ll tell you I’m right,” Mackenzie said forcefully.

  My head wanted to nod, but I forced myself to answer the phone instead. “Tell me what you’ve got, Sloane.”

  “She’s got to stop pulling stunts like this, Margot.”

  Sloane knows that the security guard’s usage of the word stunt is a fairly recent linguistic innovation—late nineteenth century, origin unknown. Personally, she prefers the terms exploit and feat.

  “What was it this time?” Sloane’s mother is wearing a tight white T-shirt and jeans. Not her work clothes.

  Interesting. Only 15 percent of Margot Tavish’s personal wardrobe is white.

  “Blackjack tables.” Security keeps the reply brief. Sloane should really learn his name—just like she’s already learned the placement of the three dozen security cameras in the Majesty, the blind spots, and how to work her way through the casino while minimizing the chances that she’ll show up on film. It’s harder to hide from the guards.

  Harder, but not impossible.

  “She was counting cards.” Security does not sound happy about that. “For other players, Margot. Took three hands before we managed to escort her out.”

  “I was not counting anything.” Sloane feels like that has to be clarified, even if clarifying it earns her a glare from an annoyed Margot. “I was tracking the number and distribution of cards that had already been played in an effort to calculate the individual probabilities of the next card being favorable to either the player or the dealer.”

  Security lets out what Sloane deeply suspects is an exasperated sigh. Sloane has a great deal of experience with other people’s exasperation.

  “No more, Margot. Kid’s twelve, and she’s already persona non grata on the strip. I don’t ne
ed to tell you how uncomfortable this could be if word works its way up the chain of command at the Majesty.”

  Sloane knows the chain of command at the Majesty precisely as well as she knows the locations of the security cameras. That is, after all, the point. To get the owner’s attention. To make him see her.

  Margot puts a hand on Sloane’s shoulder and pulls Sloane’s smaller body back against her own. Sloane calculates that there is a 12 percent chance this is a sign of affection. More likely, it is protectiveness.

  Or possibly a warning.

  “If Shaw says anything, you can tell him that it’s not my fault she’s a genius.”

  It is not Sloane’s mother’s fault that Sloane is Sloane. That hurts, and it is not precisely true.

  “Due to genetic polymorphism…” That is as far as Sloane gets before the security guard takes a step forward toward her mother.

  The gesture appears quite threatening.

  “I’m trying to help you out here, Margot. If Shaw wanted your kid around, he’d tell you.”

  “I’m his kid, too,” Sloane says.

  There is a long pause. A 12.35-second pause, by Sloane’s estimation.

  “Your boss has always been very clear,” Margot Tavish whispers finally, “about what he does and does not want.”

  “There are three cases.” Sloane had gotten better, over the years, at easing me into her calculations, but I knew from experience that soon, the numbers would be flying fast.

  Fast was good. Mackenzie wasn’t backlit anymore. I hadn’t realized it out on the landing, but in a room with a window, it was clear that the sky outside had begun to darken.

  It looked like it might storm.

  “The first case I analyzed,” Sloane said brightly, “was a female, seventeen years old, sixty-four inches tall, approximately one hundred and forty-two pounds fully clothed. She was found in a supine position on uneven ground with a negative twelve-degree incline.”

  No one else could hear Sloane, but I could feel the eyes of every person in the room on me, gauging my reaction. Mrs. McBride. The psychologist. The fireman. The crisis negotiator.

  Mackenzie.

  “Photographs of the scene have allowed me to pinpoint the likely launch point. Working backward from the point of impact, taking into account wind resistance, vertical and horizontal distance traveled, and a range estimate for the victim’s muscle density—”

  “Sloane.” I kept my interruption gentle.

  Obligingly, my favorite human calculator cut to the chase. “She jumped.”

  I couldn’t let my breath hitch in my throat or allow even a flicker of surprise to show on my face. Mackenzie was watching.

  I’d expected Sloane to tell me that the victims had been pushed.

  “Second case,” Sloane continued in a tone that anyone who didn’t know her well might have mistaken for cheerful. “Male, eighteen, seventy-point-two inches tall, one hundred and thirty-one pounds. Different landing pattern, different launch point on the cliff, different point of impact—same conclusion.”

  I wouldn’t let my insides lurch. I wouldn’t let myself look at Mackenzie, out on the ledge.

  The boy jumped. I’d been so sure that Mackenzie was a Natural, that she was right, that I could use that to bring her down off the ledge. Now, when I got off this phone, I’d either have to lie to her or tell her that she was wrong.

  That I didn’t believe her.

  That I was just like everyone else.

  You dance five days a week. You do martial arts. You exert control over your own body when you feel like you have control of nothing else.

  Right now, your body is on the ledge.

  Your body could jump.

  “Cassie?” Sloane’s voice broke through my thoughts. “You didn’t ask me about the third victim.”

  In the distance, I heard thunder. I’d come into this assuming we were working with a ticking clock, but if a storm was rolling in off the ocean—we had to get Mackenzie down. Even someone who had incredible control of her own body could fall if the surface she was standing on got slick.

  If there was a strong enough wind.

  “What about the third victim?” I said. “Kelley.”

  I asked that question, because I wanted the still-listening Mackenzie to know that I’d tried. I wanted her to know, regardless of the outcome, that I’d gone into this in good faith. Kelley was the only one of the three victims Mackenzie had referenced by name.

  Kelley was the one who mattered to her.

  “Greater vertical distance traveled, less horizontal,” Sloane rattled off. “Post-mortem X-rays suggest moderate forward rotation, despite a feet-first landing. I modeled a scenario where she stepped off the ledge with one foot and shifted weight, leading to a free fall, as well as trajectories with a greater lead-up and initial vertical push—”

  “Translation?” I cut in.

  “The first two victims jumped.” Sloane paused. “The third didn’t.”

  I stopped breathing, and then, without warning, the air came whooshing out of my lungs. She was right. Mackenzie was right.

  “I’d need better photographs of the area surrounding the launch point, as well as a more detailed analysis of weather conditions, to rule out a fall, but the most likely conclusion is…”

  I finished Sloane’s statement for her. “The third victim was pushed.”

  I shouldn’t have felt relieved. No part of me should have been grateful that a teenage girl had been murdered. But the third victim was the only one Mackenzie had actually seen, the one she’d based her conclusion on.

  She was right. And that meant that I didn’t have to tell her that she was wrong. It meant that I’d been right, too—about Mackenzie’s ability, about the circumstances that had honed it.

  Mackenzie McBride was a Natural.

  “Kelley didn’t jump.” I stated the truth, plainly and loud enough for everyone in this room—and just outside of it—to hear. Mackenzie deserved to know that she was right. She deserved for everyone in this room to know it.

  She deserved to be told something other than to calm down and breathe.

  If someone pushed Kelley… My brain snaked its way to the obvious conclusion. We’re not just looking at suicide contagion.

  We were looking at an UNSUB who’d used a duo of tragic deaths in an attempt to disguise a third.

  YOU

  You are the witness. The power, the painkiller, the peace.

  Strangers have no right to take that—not from you and not from those you bless.

  How dare they talk about your work? Outsiders. The thought crawls beneath your skin. What do they know about this town? About its history?

  About you.

  “What are you going to do?” Mackenzie demanded. She was squatting outside the window now. Her neck was bent, her forehead nearly touching the barricade.

  “We’ll open an investigation.” Celine kept her answer to Mackenzie short and to the point. “A murder investigation. Technically, the case won’t be federal, but I have a feeling that the local police department will welcome our involvement.”

  Briggs would make sure of it.

  As I approached the window—and Mackenzie—I wished Michael was here to tell me exactly what to read into the way Mackenzie finally allowed her forehead to rest against the barricade. Was she tired? Relieved? Now that someone believed her, was the magnitude of what she’d done to get our attention sinking in?

  I stopped inches away from her. The room was silent enough that I could hear her breathing. Outside, the sky was still painted in shades of gray, but there was no thunder, no sound at all except for Mackenzie’s breathing and the barest whistling of the wind.

  “You’ll find out who pushed her,” Mackenzie said quietly. That wasn’t a question—or a request. I’d expected something like hope in her tone, but I couldn’t hear much emotion in it at all.

  “We will.” Lia stepped forward. Of the three of us, she’d interacted with Mackenzie the least, but she was
also capable of speaking with a level of conviction with which an unsuspecting listener simply could not argue. “Cassie will start crawling into people’s heads. I’ll interrogate—witnesses, suspects, anyone who gets on my bad side.”

  That got a very small smile out of Mackenzie.

  “Agent Delacroix will flash her badge around and put the fear of God and the FBI in this whole town,” Lia promised. “It will be a sight to behold.”

  If Mackenzie’s only reason for crawling out on that ledge had been to make someone listen, the fact that I’d confirmed her belief, and Lia’s assurances of action, would have been enough to bring her in. But thinking back on my conversation with her father, I had to wonder if that was all there was to this.

  You survived. You danced. And you’ve been dancing ever since.

  “Mackenzie, baby…” Mrs. McBride had been remarkably silent the past few minutes. “Please.” Mackenzie’s mother was the talker in the family. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about Kelley. We should have listened. I’m so sorry, but can’t you—”

  “Don’t apologize,” Mackenzie interrupted tersely. “It’s okay.”

  Beside me, Lia’s gaze darted almost imperceptibly toward mine. Mackenzie was lying. It wasn’t okay.

  A lot of things in Mackenzie’s life weren’t.

  “Before we can leave,” I said carefully, “before we can find the person who killed Kelley…”

  I waited for her to fill in the blank. She had to say it herself.

  “You need me to come in.” Mackenzie didn’t sound angry or sad, but there was something in her tone that I recognized. Something deep and cavernous, something I’d felt.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I told our newest Natural, my voice catching in my throat. “Lots of things in your life—things that have happened, things that are going to happen—won’t be, but you will.” I let that register. No kid gloves, no sugarcoating. “You won’t ever be normal, Mackenzie, but you’ll be okay.”

  “Personally,” Lia commented, “I find normal overrated.”

  I willed Mackenzie to hear us. We see you. You can come down now. You can come in.