Twelve

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “What if you don’t catch him?” Mackenzie turned the full force of her attention back to Celine. She looked younger all of a sudden. Vulnerable. “The person who pushed Kelley. What if he gets away with it?”

  He—or she, my profiler brain filled in. Or they. The possibilities were myriad, and I could start sorting through them just as soon as Mackenzie was in.

  “Sometimes you win,” Celine replied evenly, taking Mackenzie’s question at face value. “Sometimes you lose. But I can promise you that we will fight like hell for Kelley. And our track record?” Celine pressed her palm flat against one of the boards. Not the one Mackenzie was leaning against. Not too close. “It’s not exactly normal.”

  You’re different, Mackenzie, but so are we. We see you. You aren’t alone.

  “You’re good at what you do?” Mackenzie’s voice was hoarse.

  “We found you, didn’t we?” Lia’s tone bordered on flippant, but somehow, that made her words sound less like a rhetorical question and more like an inviolable, uncontested, naked truth.

  You won’t ever be normal, but you’ll be okay.

  “You can trust them, Mackenzie.” That statement came from behind me. The psychologist. I’d almost forgotten she was there, that there was anyone in this room besides Mackenzie and the three of us. “We’ve talked about trust, haven’t we?”

  That was the exact wrong thing to say. I caught Mackenzie’s gaze with my own, willing her to look at me—and at Lia and at Celine.

  We’re not humoring you. We’re like you.

  Before I could say that, Quentin Nichols stepped forward. “You tell us when you’re ready for us to remove the barricade,” the crisis negotiator said. “You’re the one in control here, Mackenzie. It’s your decision.”

  Emphasizing her control of the situation was a good move. It was the right move, one I might have made if he’d given me the chance. But he hadn’t, and my gut said that the words would sound different to Mackenzie coming from him.

  He’s male.

  “Stay back.” Mackenzie jerked her head off the board, so suddenly that I was afraid it might send her flying backward. It didn’t. “You don’t get to give me control. You don’t get to stand there and say…”

  “Breathe, Mackenzie,” the psychologist murmured behind me.

  I snapped so Mackenzie didn’t have to. “She’s already breathing. She’s fine.”

  But I knew: You’re not fine, Mackenzie. You haven’t been fine in a very long time. Something had triggered her, taken her back to a place she didn’t want to go. She was fighting that—would fight it—tooth and nail.

  As long as Mackenzie stayed where she was, she was in control. On the ledge, it was her body, her choice, her life.

  Her eyes stared past me, past Lia, past Celine, past her own mother.

  Straight to the psychologist—and then to Quentin Nichols.

  You’re small. And he’s not. He has power. And you don’t. Mackenzie took a step backward. It was a small one, but…

  “Mackenzie,” Celine said calmly, “I need you to stand very still.”

  I slid sideways, blocking Mackenzie’s view of the men in the room as best I could. The fireman, at least, had the presence of mind to keep his mouth shut. I didn’t trust Quentin Nichols to do the same.

  Mackenzie probably wasn’t his first jumper. This wasn’t his first rodeo. But whether he saw it or not—she was different.

  A clap of thunder boomed in the distance. Mackenzie raised her head to the sky. Her body didn’t shake. She didn’t waver.

  “You need me to stand still,” she repeated back to Celine. “And I need you to find the person who murdered Kelley.”

  This is control. This is setting your own terms.

  “How are we supposed to find the killer if we have to stay here and babysit you?” Lia didn’t pull her punches. She wasn’t a profiler, but she did have a history of trauma and a deep-seated loathing for being treated like she was traumatized.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Mackenzie said fiercely. “I can take care of myself.”

  We’d been so close to her coming in. If it had been just us in the room, we could have done it. I sure as hell wasn’t leaving her alone with the people who’d botched this enough to keep her out there.

  This is control. I wanted to believe that we could undo the damage, talk her down, but everything inside me said that now that she’d set her terms, she’d stick to them. Your body. Your life.

  Your choice.

  “I’ll stay.”

  I’d been on the verge of saying those words, but Celine beat me to them.

  “I’ll stay with you,” she repeated, her focus solely on Mackenzie. “And Lia and Cassie will work the case.”

  “Fine.” Mackenzie’s voice was like steel, as a gust of wind whipped her tawny brown hair against her face. She stared at Celine for a moment longer, then turned to Lia and me. “You do your jobs,” she promised, “you find Kelley’s killer—and I’ll come down.”

  YOU

  There are names for what you do. Mercy is one. But another? Another is art.

  “Ithought that went well.”

  From the passenger seat of our government-issued SUV, I glared at Lia. I knew she was just pushing my buttons—because the more she pushed them, the less mental space I could devote to how I could have played things differently with Mackenzie.

  Why we’d failed.

  Walking away, leaving her out on that ledge, was hard, bordering on impossible. I could still see the way Mackenzie had looked from the base of the lighthouse. Small. Still. She was little more than a silhouette against the darkening sky. Down below, the ocean churned, angry and haphazard as it bore into the jagged shore.

  The storm was getting closer. We didn’t have long.

  “Are you ignoring your phone on purpose, or is it just a side effect of the brooding?” Lia managed to sound genuinely curious about the answer to that question.

  I looked down at my phone. Three new text messages—all from Celine.

  “Agent Delacroix keeping busy?” Lia asked archly.

  “Apparently, she’s been making some calls.” It didn’t surprise me that Celine was still coordinating the investigation, even though she was the one who’d volunteered to stay behind. Objectively, Lia and I had skill sets that were more useful when it came to talking to witnesses, but Agent Delacroix was the one with the badge.

  She was the one that Mackenzie was currently watching and listening to. Showing the little Natural that the case was moving would be more effective than anything anyone in that room could say to keep Mackenzie calm.

  “Celine was able to get in touch with Kelley’s parents,” I told Lia. “They’re anxious to speak with us.” I rattled off the address Celine had sent, then turned my attention back to my phone—not to the texts, to my in-box—and the files. I had the length of this drive to read through Kelley’s. Before we talked to our victim’s parents, I needed to get acquainted with her.

  Her last name was Peterson. That was one of the many things I learned en route, as I skimmed the file once and read it again. You were a senior at Cape Roane High School. Straight-A student, doctor parents, no siblings. A quick perusal of her social media accounts told me that she had a propensity for standing in the middle of every picture. Based on the photographs her many public mourners were posting, she also had a tendency to come to school wearing workout clothes, like she simply couldn’t have been bothered to change after she hit the gym.

  Her face was fully made up in every single picture.

  But the thing at the forefront of my mind as Lia and I climbed the steps to the Petersons’ front porch wasn’t the way Kelley had looked in those pictures.

  It was the way she’d looked in the autopsy photos.

  “Thank you for meeting with us.” I sat opposite Kelley’s parents in their formal living room. The walls were tastefully decorated with a mix of abstract art and high-quality portraits—some of the whole family, some just of Kelley.
Now that their daughter was dead, the moments captured in time were haunting, but the impression that I couldn’t shake was the association between the portraits and the paintings.

  Kelley as decoration.

  Kelley as art.

  “Of course.” Kelley’s father was the one who replied, but the way his hand was woven through his wife’s made it seem like the words were a joint effort. The doctors Peterson were Type A, good-looking, driven—but whatever else they were or were not, I was certain that they’d loved their daughter.

  “The agent on the phone said that there was a development in Kelley’s…” Isaac Peterson didn’t seem the type to stumble over words, but he hesitated just long enough for his wife to fill in.

  “…case.”

  Not Kelley’s death. Not suicide—or even murder. Her case. It felt like a euphemism, as pristine as the formal white couches on which the four of us sat.

  Lia leaned forward slightly. “We have reason to believe that your daughter didn’t jump.” Lia knew Celine had told the parents that much. It was why they’d agreed to meet with us—but it was also our strongest entry to what would doubtlessly be a difficult conversation.

  “I knew it,” Kelley’s mom bit out. “I knew that our little girl…” She drew in a ragged breath.

  Now it was her husband’s turn to finish her sentence. “We knew that Kelley couldn’t and wouldn’t have killed herself. We told the police as much, but they’re used to parents being biased when it comes to their children.”

  The subtext there told me that Dr. Isaac Peterson considered himself, above all, an objective and rational person. I filed that away for future reference, but paid more attention to the way that Lia tapped two fingers—middle and index—lightly against the side of my leg. The signal was subtle, but unmistakable.

  She’d caught a lie.

  We knew that Kelley couldn’t and wouldn’t have killed herself. Dr. Alice Peterson might have believed that, but her husband was the one who’d spoken those words, and he did not.

  No matter what he’d told the police, no matter how objective and rational his tone, he’d doubted his daughter. He’d believed she’d jumped.

  My mind went to the autopsy—not the photographs documenting the damage wreaked by impact, but the close-up shots of Kelley’s lower abdomen. Scars—small, deliberate half-moons—had stretched from one of Kelley’s hip bones to the next, too low to show unless she was naked.

  “Were you aware that Kelley was a cutter?” I asked Kelley’s father. I knew the question wouldn’t be a welcome one, but I needed to get to know Kelley well enough to crawl into her head, and I needed any information, no matter how seemingly insignificant, that might give me insight into her killer’s.

  “Kelley put a lot of pressure on herself.” Alice Peterson seemed to consider that a full and sufficient response to my question. “She was very driven.”

  “A perfectionist,” her husband added, sitting ramrod straight.

  “She was perfect.” Alice’s voice cracked. I glanced at Lia, but she gave no indication that Kelley’s mother was lying. Whether or not Alice Peterson had believed her daughter was flawless when she was alive, now that she was gone, she was perfect.

  Grief had a way of warping perceptions.

  “Tell me about Kelley,” I suggested gently. That was all it took to open the floodgates, for both Dr. Petersons. How beautiful Kelley was. How smart. The fact that she’d applied early to an Ivy League university. The number of times she’d made homecoming court. How mercilessly she’d been able to dismantle her opponents in debate.

  As the Petersons described their perfect daughter, I thought back again to Kelley’s scars. You didn’t cut your wrists, your legs, or even your stomach. You sliced below your panty line.

  She’d literally hidden her pain, preserving the image.

  If you had killed yourself? I thought, slipping into her mind. You wouldn’t have wanted a closed-casket funeral. She wouldn’t have wanted to mangle the body she left behind.

  You wouldn’t have jumped.

  “Did Kelley have any rivals?” I asked. “Was there anyone she’d had conflict with? Any issues socially?”

  “Kelley was very social,” her father said immediately. “Everyone loved her.”

  Another tap on my leg, another lie. Even in grief, Isaac Peterson knew quite well that his daughter had not been universally beloved.

  “You can’t think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt her?” Lia pressed.

  “Kelley didn’t always get along with other girls.” Alice pursed her lips. “They could be so jealous.”

  That was a loaded statement if I’d ever heard one.

  “And boys?” I asked.

  “They all wanted to date her,” Isaac said immediately. He shook his head—in memory? In denial?

  “I’m guessing she had to turn a lot of would-be Romeos down.” Lia gave no indication of how carefully she was studying their responses to that statement. “Was that hard for her?”

  The answers came in tandem. “I think so.”

  “Of course.”

  Two taps from Lia. Neither one of them thought Kelley disliked turning people down.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Alice said suddenly, leaning toward us. “What happened with the Summers boy. He was obviously very ill.”

  I took a moment to connect the dots. Before Kelley’s death, two of her classmates had killed themselves. One was a boy.

  The Summers boy?

  “Kelley knew the boy who jumped?” I asked.

  “This is Cape Roane,” her father said dismissively. “Everyone knows everyone.”

  And everyone loves Kelley, I echoed his earlier lie silently back at him.

  “What about the other victim?” I asked. “The girl? Did she and Kelley know each other?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Have you been talking to the school?” Alice Peterson couldn’t have bristled more if she were actually feline. I took that to mean that someone at the school might have had something less than flattering to say about her perfect daughter.

  “Was Kelley ever bullied?” I asked. That was an easier question for a parent to be asked than Was your daughter ever accused of bullying someone else?

  “There were tiffs, of course.” Kelley’s mother relaxed slightly. “But nothing major. Kelley knew who she was. She wasn’t the type who needed anyone’s approval.”

  Kelley’s father squeezed his wife’s hand. “I will say,” he told me carefully, “that the last few weeks were very hard on our daughter.”

  The last few weeks. Since the Summers boy jumped off a cliff? Since another of Kelley’s classmates did the same?

  My gut said that if I pushed either of them on that point, they would end this interview, so I sidestepped. “The police file on Kelley’s death indicated that she had no defensive wounds.” That, along with the other suicides and Kelley’s history of self-inflicted injuries, was what had biased the police in favor of the suicide interpretation. “That suggests,” I explained, “that whoever pushed Kelley didn’t physically engage her beforehand. She wasn’t dragged up to the steeple.” I kept my tone gentle, to counteract the words. “Unless her attacker had a gun, the most likely explanation is that she went willingly.”

  Maybe someone coerced you into going up there. Blackmailed you. Guilted you. I sorted through the possibilities, one by one. Or maybe the person who pushed you was someone you trusted. Maybe you went willingly, because you wanted to be alone with that person.

  Or maybe you went on your own, and your killer followed.

  “Would Kelley have gone up there on a dare?” I asked. “Or for privacy—or to meet someone?”

  “I…” Alice bowed her head slightly, the motion more graceful than it should have been. “I don’t know.”

  “Is there anyone she might have trusted enough to go—”

  “We don’t know.” Isaac Peterson repeated his wife’s sentiment, and I had the distinct sense that of everythi
ng that had passed their lips during this interview, these words hurt the most.

  You thought you knew your daughter, but you’ve realized since she died how much you don’t—and didn’t—know.

  “Is there anyone else we should talk to?” I asked. “Anyone Kelley might have confided in? Anyone she was close to?”

  That line of inquiry seemed to center Kelley’s parents. Alice folded her free hand neatly in her lap, the other still woven through her husband’s.

  “Kelley had a lot of friends,” she declared. Kelley was popular. Kelley was perfect. Kelley was loved. “In fact,” Alice Peterson continued, her voice shaking slightly, “the pastor called to let us know that a group of students from the high school are planning a vigil for her tonight. At the church.”

  YOU

  There’s something about heights. Something pure and true. There’s clarity in those final moments.

  You’ll feel it again soon.

  As I stepped out of the Petersons’ house, the humidity was a visceral reminder that this wasn’t an ordinary case. It’s going to rain. We weren’t on an ordinary timeline, and the insight I’d been able to glean about our victim from her parents—it wasn’t enough.

  I couldn’t let myself spare more than a passing thought for Mackenzie or the lighthouse or the angry wind whipping my hair against my face as Lia and I made our way back to the car.

  I had to focus.

  I pulled myself into the passenger seat, shut the door, and let my mind linger on a single word. You. Not Mackenzie this time. And not the killer—not yet. Kelley. Knowing her—how she would have reacted, the limited circumstances in which she would have climbed to the top of the steeple of her own free will, who she might have done that with—that was a piece of the puzzle I needed. Behavior. Personality. Environment. Victim’s and killer’s BPEs were intertwined.

  A cell phone rang then, pulling me from my thoughts. As Lia started the car, and I reflexively buckled my seat belt, I slipped my phone from my pocket with my free hand, then realized: it wasn’t ringing.

  Lia’s was.