I wasn’t wrong.
“What makes you think she has a boyfriend?” Dean asked, and under his quiet drawl I could hear curiosity—and maybe even admiration.
I shrugged in response to his question—mainly because I didn’t want to tell him that the reason I’d been sure this girl wasn’t single was the fact that the entire time we’d been there, she hadn’t so much as glanced at Dean.
From a distance, he would have looked older.
Even in jeans and a faded black T-shirt, you could see the muscles tensing against the fabric of his sleeves. And the muscles not covered by his sleeves.
His hair, his eyes, the way he stood, and the way he moved—if she’d been single, she would have looked.
— — —
“New game,” Agent Locke said. “I point to the car, you tell me about the person who owns it.”
We’d been at the mall for three hours. I’d thought coming out to the parking lot had signaled the end of today’s training, but apparently I was wrong.
“That one, Cassie. Go.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I was used to starting with people: their posture, the way they talked, their clothes, their occupations, their gender, the way they arranged a napkin on their lap—that was my language. Starting with a car was like flying blind.
“In our line of work,” Agent Locke told me as I stared at a white Acura, debating whether it belonged to a shopper or someone who worked at the mall, “you don’t get to meet the suspect before you profile the crime. You go to the scene and you rebuild what happened. You take physical evidence, you turn it into behavior, and then you try to narrow down the range of suspects. You don’t know if you’re looking for a man or a woman, a teenager or an old man. You know how they killed, but you don’t know why. You know how they left the body, but you have to figure out how they found the victim.” She paused. “So, Cassie. Who owns this car?”
The make and model weren’t telling me much. This car could have belonged to either a man or a woman, and it was parked in front of the food court, which meant that I had no idea what the owner’s destination inside the mall was. The parking space wasn’t a good one, but it wasn’t bad. The parking job left a little to be desired.
“They were in a hurry,” I said. “The parking job is crooked, and they didn’t bother cruising for a better space.” That also told me that the driver didn’t have the kind of ego that would push a person to hunt for a prime spot, as if getting a great parking place at the mall was an indicator of personal worth. “No car seat, so no young children. No bumper stickers, relatively recently washed. They’re not here for food—no reason to hurry for that—but they parked at the food court, so either they don’t know where they’re going once they get inside the mall or their store of choice is close by.”
I paused, waiting for Dean to pick up where I had left off, but he didn’t. Instead, Agent Locke gave me a single piece of advice.
“Don’t say they.”
“I didn’t mean they as in plural,” I said hastily. “I just haven’t decided yet if it’s a man or a woman.”
Dean glanced at the mall entrance and then back at me. “That’s not what she means. They keeps you on the outside. So do he and she.”
“So what word am I supposed to use?”
“Officially,” Agent Locke said, “we use the term Unknown Subject—or UNSUB.”
“And unofficially?” I asked.
Dean shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “If you want to climb inside someone’s head,” he said roughly, “you use the word I.”
The night before, I’d imagined myself in Lia’s body, imagined what it was like to be her. I could imagine driving this car, parking it like this, climbing out—but this wasn’t about cars. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be profiling shoppers.
I’d be profiling killers.
“What if I don’t want to be them?” I asked. I knew that if I closed my eyes, if I so much as blinked, I would be right back in my mother’s dressing room. I’d be able to see the blood. I’d be able to smell it. “What if I can’t?”
“Then you’re lucky.” Dean’s voice was quiet, but his eyes were hard. “And you’d be better off at home.”
My stomach twisted. He didn’t think I belonged here. Suddenly, it was all too easy to remember that when we’d met the day before and he’d said “nice to meet you,” it had been a lie.
Agent Locke set a hand on my shoulder. “If you want to get close to an UNSUB, but you don’t want to put yourself in their shoes, there’s another word you can use.”
I turned my back on Dean and focused my full attention on Agent Locke. “And what word is that?” I asked.
Locke met my gaze. “You.”
CHAPTER 12
That night, I dreamed that I was walking through a narrow hallway. The floor was tiled. The walls were white. The only sound in the entire room was my sneaker-clad feet scuffing against the freshly mopped floor.
This isn’t right. Something about this isn’t right.
Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and on the ground, my shadow flickered, too. At the end of the hallway, there was a metal door, painted to match the walls. It was slightly ajar, and I wondered if I’d left it that way or if my mother had cracked the door open to keep an eye out for me.
Don’t go in there. Stop. You have to stop.
I smiled and kept right on walking. One step, two steps, three steps, four. On some level, I knew that this was a dream, knew what I would find when I opened that door—but I couldn’t stop. My body felt numb from the waist down. My smile hurt.
I laid my hand flat against the metal door and pushed.
“Cassie?”
My mother was standing there, dressed in blue. A breath caught in my throat—not because she was beautiful, though she was, and not because she was on the verge of scolding me for taking so long to report back on the crowd.
A vise closed in around my lungs, because this was wrong. This hadn’t happened, and I wished to God it had.
Please don’t be a dream. Just this once, let it be real. Don’t let it—
“Cassie?” My mom stumbled backward. She fell. Blood turned blue silk red. It splattered against the walls. There was so much of it—too much.