Page 4 of Twelve
“I stayed here for Laurel.” That was my story, and I was sticking to it. “She’s fine with me leaving on short trips, but four months? I have no idea what that would do to her.” This was a conversation we’d had before. He probably knew my next words as well or better than I did. “Besides, we don’t all need to be agents—or analysts. I’m happy to stay a civilian consultant if the agents I’m consulting for are the three of you.”
“I know,” Dean murmured.
“The program is here,” I continued. “Somebody needs to run it.”
Or, at least, someone would need to if the brothers in Texas panned out. If my analysis said the Naturals program would be for them—oroneof them, anyway—what it had been for the five of us.
A sanctuary.
An opportunity.
A home.
Thatwas the real reason I’d recruited so few young Naturals since we’d taken over. The Naturals program was designed to provide training and experience to gifted individuals whose brains were still developing—adolescents. But after everything I’d been through as a result of working with the FBI, I couldn’t and wouldn’t bring any kid here unless I thought they would be better off with us than in the life they were leaving behind.
Given that this was an FBI think tank devoted to using gifted teenagers to profile and catch killers?
Betterwas a very relative term.
Before I could say any of that out loud, a new call came in. When I saw the caller ID, I glanced back at Lia.
“Don’t mind me,” she said lightly. “I’m just taking note of your half of this private conversation so that I can mock and/or cross-examine you later.”
I gave her a look. “Briggs is calling.”
Dean heard me. “Call me later?”
“Will do.” I hit a button on the phone, and as the new call picked up, I felt Dean’s absence on the other end of the line like a physical thing.
Ten weeks down, ten weeks to go.
“Cassie?” FBI Director Tanner Briggs was closer to family than friend. He was the one who’d founded this program. He’d recruited me when I was seventeen years old.
He was also my boss.
“I have a case in Maine.”
I waited for the details to come.
What I got was: “It has to be you.”
“Mackenzie McBride.” I said the name out loud. It had been years since I’d so much as thought it, but in the time it had taken to get the assignment from Briggs, grab my go-bag, and get to the plane, it had been playing in my mind on repeat.
Little Mackenzie.
Celine stuck her head into the cockpit to let the pilot know we were ready to go, then took a seat opposite Lia and me. “Who wants to read me in?”
Special Agent Delacroix did more than live up to the title. She embodied it. It was hard to connect her to the poor little rich girl she’d been when we’d first made her acquaintance, but even in a suit, her tone businesslike, I could still see shades of the girl that Celine had been. She was an artist, evident in the calluses on her fingers and the bright print she wore beneath her steel-gray jacket. I gave it fifty-fifty odds that she’d designed the pattern on the silk shirt herself. Her expression was alert—controlled, but with a hint of adrenaline.
She still moved like a dancer or a fighter—or both.
“Mackenzie was a kidnapping victim.” I tried to stick to the facts and not delve down into the emotions I associated with this particular case. “She was six years old when she was taken. By the time we were read in, the case had been cold for months.”
Back in those days, the Naturals program had only allowed us access to cold cases. Mackenzie’s was one of the first we’d solved as a team.
“She wanted to be a veterinarian pop star.” I hadn’t meant to say that, was surprised I even remembered the details after nearly six years and who-knows-how-many cases, active and cold. “Her favorite color was purple.”
“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.”
