Page 12 of Twelve
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 wasright.
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 withhelloany 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 fileswithoutreceiving 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—powerandcontrolanddesperation—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.
The 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’ddonesomething, that I wasdoingsomething. 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.”
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 evidencewasconsistent 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’dlovedattention.
“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.”
