Page 6 of Twelve
It isn’t.
She rises up on her toes. Arelevé—and a warning for the adults gathered below as well as those in the room immediately behind her.I can step off this ledge before you can stop me.
It would be so easy, but she doesn’t want to do that. Does she?The FBI will be here soon. They have to be. They have to listen.If they listened, maybe she could come in. Maybe she could end this.
They have to believe me.
Because the others? The dead ones? They didn’t leap or dive. They didn’t dance off the edge. They didn’t jump.
They were pushed.
There was a crowd gathered outside the lighthouse. I estimated a dozen or more, ranging in age from late teens to eighties. From this distance, they couldn’t make out the details of what was going on above, but they could see what I could, plain as day.
A figure. A small one. She wasn’t looking down.Your face is angled toward the sky. Your feet are close to the edge.
My heart began beating more rapidly in my chest. In our line of work, the margin for error was never large. But this time?
It was inches.
“Excuse me.” Celine had a way of parting crowds—even those intent on watching a train wreck in real time. “FBI.”
That got the attention of about half of the onlookers. Pulling my gaze from the girl on the ledge, I took note of which half and followed in Celine’s wake. Lia hesitated for a brief moment behind me. I knew, without glancing back at her, that she was still staring up at Mackenzie.
Lia wasn’t, generally speaking, a person built for hesitation, but it was different—for all of us—when a case involved a kid.
“FBI.” Celine repeated herself to the two local LEOs—law enforcement officers—posted at the door to the lighthouse.
“Aren’t you a little young to be FBI?” The officer who managed to look Celine in the eye and say those words would probably soon regret it.
“I age well.” Celine had an impressive deadpan. “What can I say? I moisturize.” She gave him a second to process that, then issued an order. “Move.”
The officers moved before they’d even realized they’d done it.
“I don’t moisturize,” Lia told one of them as we passed. “I made a deal with the devil to maintain my youth. You don’t want to know what the devil asked for in return.”
Coming from anyone else, that would have sounded flippant, but Lia could sellanylie. Luckily, her statement saved me from having to say anything, which was fortunate, because I looked significantly younger than either Lia or Celine.
When people called the FBI, most of them didn’t expect women in their early twenties. Today, we didn’t have time to prove ourselves or win hearts and minds. We didn’t have time for anyone questioning us or our abilities.
Mackenziedidn’t have time.
Before the door to the lighthouse had even closed behind me, I’d already sunk back into observation mode.Behavior. Personality. Environment.Those were the cornerstones my mom had taught me when I was younger than Mackenzie was now. If you knew any two sides of the triangle, you could predict the third.
By the time I was a teenager, I did so effortlessly, without thinking, all the time. Being a Natural wasn’t something you could turn off. With each step I took, my brain catalogued the details of the environment around me. The ground floor of the lighthouse seemed to be some kind of museum. There was a woman—early sixties—behind the counter, and two more officers—one of them, based on his clothing and posture, the ranking detective—posted at the door to the stairs.
As Celine began a round of introductions, I zeroed in on the only other person in the room—a man.Forties. Thick hair. Rumpled clothing.If Michael had been with us, he could have read shades of meaning in the man’s expression and posture, but all I saw was the dominant emotion.Devastation.
“Mr. McBride.” I greeted him, holding out a hand. He took mine and held on for an instant too long. “I’m Cassie Hobbes.” He wouldn’t remember my name later. I wasn’t even sure he’d registered it. “We’re here to help your daughter.” That, he would process.
You already lost your little girl once. You can’t lose her again. You can’t just stand here.
“They won’t let me upstairs,” Mackenzie’s father said dully. “My wife is up there. She’s talking to her.…”
There was only room for one, and it wasn’t you. You’re not the talker.That much was clear from the gaps in his words, the sporadic eye contact. I wanted to press him, to question him about his daughter.Are you an observer, a listener, or caught up in your own world?Those were the options—and two out of three would be useful to me.
But not now. There was such a thing as professionalism, and the FBI equivalent of bedside manner required a little finesse when it came to grilling a victim’s family. I didn’t have time to finesse anything at the moment.
The first and most important thing was getting to Mackenzie.
