His tone was uncompromising and full of warning, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Why? Because I’m valuable? Because Naturals work so well as a team, and you’d hate to throw that off?”
Agent Briggs closed the space between us and brought his face down level with mine. “Do you really think that little of me?” he asked quietly. “I’m ambitious. I’m driven. I’m single-minded, but do you really think that I would knowingly put any of you in danger?”
I thought of the moment we’d met. The pen without the cap. His preference for basketball over golf.
“No,” I said. “But we both know that this case is killing you. It’s killing Locke, and now there’s a senator’s daughter involved. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have sent someone to check out that theater. We wouldn’t have discovered the body for hours, maybe days—and who knows what our UNSUB would have done to Genevieve in the meantime?
If you don’t want to use me as bait anymore, fine. But you need to take me with you. You need to take all three of us with you, because we might see something that you can’t.”
That was the whole reason Briggs had started the Naturals program. The whole reason that he’d come to twelve-year-old Dean. No matter how long they did this job, or how much training they had, these agents would never have instincts as finely honed as ours.
“Let her come.” Locke placed a hand on Briggs’s arm, and for the first time, I wondered if there was anything between the two of them other than work. “If Cassie’s old enough to play bait, she’s old enough to learn from the experience.” Locke glanced around the room—at Sloane and Dean. “They all are.”
— — —
Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to 4587 North Oakland Street. The local police were already there, but at the FBI’s insistence, they hadn’t touched a thing. Dean, Sloane, and I waited in the car with Agents Starmans and Vance until the local PD had been cleared off the scene, and then they brought us up to the third floor.
To this tiny theater’s only dressing room. I made it halfway down the hall before Agent Briggs stepped out of the room, blocking the entrance.
“You don’t need to see this, Cassie,” he said.
I could smell it—not rotten, not yet, but coppery: rust with just a hint of decay. I pushed past Briggs. He let me.
The room was rectangular. There was blood smeared across the light switch, blood pooled near the door. The entire left-hand side of the room was lined with mirrors, like a dance studio.
Like my mother’s dressing room.
My limbs felt heavy all of a sudden. My lips were numb. I couldn’t breathe, and just like that, I was right back—
The door is slightly ajar. I push it open. There’s something wet and squishy beneath my feet, and the smell—
I grope for the light switch. My fingers touch something warm and sticky on the wall. Frantically, I search for the light switch—
Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on.
I turn it on.
I’m standing in blood. There’s blood on the walls, blood on my hands. A lamp lies shattered on the wood floor. A desk is upturned, and there’s a jagged line in the floorboards.
From the knife.
Pressure on my shoulders forced me to stop reliving the memory. Hands. Dean’s hands, I realized. He brought his face very close to mine.
“Stay in control,” he said, his voice steady and warm. “Every time you go back there, every time you see it—it’s just blood, just a crime scene, just a body.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “That’s all it is, Cassie. That’s all you can let it be.”
I wondered which memories he relived over and over—wondered about the bodies and the blood. But right now, in this moment, I was just glad that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.
I took his advice. I forced myself to look at the mirror, smeared with blood. I could make out handprints, finger tracks, like the victim had used the mirror to pull herself along the ground after she was too weak to walk.
“Time of death was late last night,” Briggs said. “We’ll have Forensics in here to see if they can lift any fingerprints besides the victim’s off the mirror.”
“That’s not her blood.”
I glanced over at Sloane and realized that she was kneeling next to the body. For the first time, I looked at the victim. Her hair was red. She’d obviously been stabbed repeatedly.
“The medical examiner will tell you the same thing,” Sloane continued. “This woman is five feet tall, approximately a hundred and ten pounds. Given her size, we’re looking at death from exsanguination with the loss of three quarts of blood, maybe less. She’s wearing jeans and a cashmere top. Cashmere—and other forms of wool—can absorb up to thirty percent of its weight in moisture without even appearing damp. Since the deepest wounds are concentrated over her stomach and chest areas, and her top and jeans were both tight, she’d have had to bleed through the fabric before dripping all over the floor.”
I looked at the woman’s clothes. Sure enough, they were soaked with blood.
“By the time her clothes were saturated enough to leave a puddle of that size on the floor over there”—Sloane gestured toward the door—“our victim wouldn’t have been conscious to fight off her attacker, let alone lead him on a merry chase through the room. She’s too small, she doesn’t have enough blood, the fabrics she’s wearing don’t expel liquid quickly enough—the numbers don’t add up.”
“She’s right.” Agent Briggs stood up from examining the floor. “There’s a knife mark on the floor over here. If it was made with a bloody knife, there would be blood embedded in the scratch, but there’s not, meaning that either the UNSUB missed at his first attempt at stabbing the woman—which certainly doesn’t seem likely, given her size and the fact that he would have had the element of surprise—or the UNSUB deliberately made these marks with a clean knife.”
I put myself in the victim’s shoes. She was eight or nine inches shorter than my mother’s five-nine, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have fought. But even if the UNSUB had come after her in the exact same way, what were the chances that the scene would have looked this much like my mother’s dressing room? The mirrors on the wall, the blood smeared on the light switch, the dark liquid pooled by the door.