Page 5 of Twelve
A makeshift shack,I thought, remembering Sloane’s analysis of the property.Four feet by four feet, no windows.
Celine flipped through the file sitting on the table between us. “Mackenzie is how old now?” The plane took off, but I barely felt it. “Twelve?”
When I was twelve years old, my mother had been deemed missing, presumed dead. When Dean was twelve, he’d betrayed his serial killer father, resulting in Daniel Redding’s arrest and the creation of the Naturals program.
When Lia was twelve…
I stopped my thoughts right there. “Mackenzie McBride is twelve years old,” I confirmed. “She lives in Cape Roane, Maine.” If Sloane were here, she would have rattled off every factoid and statistic imaginable about the small coastal town. I cut straight to the chase. “Cape Roane is the home of one of the tallest lighthouses in the United States, and right now…”
You climbed the stairs. You opened the window. You crawled out.…
“Right now,” I managed to continue, “Mackenzie is standing on the edge of that lighthouse, threatening to jump.”
“Unless…” Celine said softly.
Lia finished her sentence for her. “She said she’d jump unless someone called in the FBI—specifically, the agent who found her in that shack.”
Agent Briggs.He was the FBI director now. He couldn’t just run off at a twelve-year-old’s call. Agent Sterling, his wife, hadn’t been part of the team during the Mackenzie McBride case—andshe was thirty-six weeks pregnant.
With twins.
That left those of us who’d worked the case behind the scenes. It left me, because I was the one who’d crawled inside Mackenzie’s brain, way back when.
“If her parents and the local authorities hadn’t found her threat credible,” I forced myself to admit, “they wouldn’t have called us.”
“So we’ve got a potential jumper.” Celine was quiet for a moment, and I wondered if she was thinking about the times in her life when she’d taken drastic measures for attention. Because she needed to matter—to be seen and heard.
Is that what this is?I directed my thoughts toward Mackenzie.Are you just trying to make yourself heard?
I’d been taught to profile in first person or second—never in third. But right now, I wasn’t profiling. I didn’t know enough aboutthisMackenzie to say with any degree of certainty what she did or did not want.
I only knew the child she’d been—and what she’d survived.
You demanded they call us in for a reason. If you really wanted to die—if you were sure—you wouldn’t be up there issuing demands.That was closer to a reasonable conclusion, but I’d been taught early on how easily what you wanted to see could interfere with a profile’s conclusions.
I needed to keep my head clear. I needed to hold off on conclusions. I needed to get to know Mackenzienow.
“We’ll go straight to the lighthouse when we touch down.” Celine wasn’t giving orders so much as thinking out loud.
“Briggs said that the local PD already have a crisis negotiator and a child psychologist out there,” I said.
Child psychologists.Half of my brain was still trying to get acquainted with Mackenzie’s.How many of those have you seen since the kidnapping? How well do you know what to say—or not to say—to convince the shrink du jour that you’re normal?
How long have you known, deep in the recesses of your mind, thatnormalis a lie?
“Cassie.” Lia had to say my name twice before I tuned back in. “Aren’t you forgetting to read Celine in on one little thing?” She paused, then prompted. “ThereasonBriggs said that Mackenzie wants to talk to the FBI.”
Oh, right. That.
I answered in one word. “Murder.”
Mackenzie McBride has never been bothered by heights. Better to be up high, where you can see everything, than down low, boxed in, on the ground.
Jumping would be easy.
The lighthouse ledge sticks out a little less than two feet. It should feel like nothing. Her legs should shake beneath her, but Mackenzie trusts her body. She knows that two feet is half of four, and for a time, four feet by four feet was her world.
Her balance is perfect. Even now, with the wind whipping at her hair and the window barricaded off behind her, she can see herself in three hundred and sixty degrees. She knows exactly what she would look like if she leapt off the edge, if she dove off it, if she fell. She can see the way her body would land in each scenario. One of her teachers tried to tell her once that what she could do, the things she knew—it was just math.
