“Chutes and Ladders?” I repeated.
Lia’s eyes glittered. “My version is much more interesting.”
“That is concerning on so many levels,” I said.
“Welcome back,” Agent Briggs told me. Across from him, Agent Sterling looked up from the file she was reading and met my eyes. Briggs’s ex-wife was a profiler. She was my mentor.
If Briggs knows, Sterling knows. Within a heartbeat, my eyes went to the file in her hand.
“Grab a seat,” she told me.
I took that to mean, We’ll talk later. Sterling was leaving it up to me to decide what I wanted to tell the others—and when. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep this a secret indefinitely. Lia’s specialty was deception detection. Lying was out of the question, and no matter how firmly I locked this away, it wouldn’t take Dean long to realize that something had happened.
I had to tell them. But I might be able to put it off for a couple of hours—especially since the one person who would have known immediately that something was wrong wasn’t on this plane.
“Where’s Michael?” I asked, sliding into the seat next to Dean.
“Fifteen miles southeast of Westchester, due north of Long Island Sound.” Sloane tilted her head to one side, like her slightly off-center ponytail was weighing it down.
“He went home for Christmas,” Dean translated. Underneath the table, his hand found its way to mine. Initiating physical contact wasn’t easy for Dean, but slowly, he’d begun to reach out more.
“Michael went home for Christmas?” I repeated. My eyes darted to Lia’s. She and Michael had been on-again, off-again long before I’d arrived on the scene. We both knew—everyone on this plane knew—that “home” wasn’t a place Michael should be.
“Michael wanted to go home for a visit.” Agent Briggs inserted himself into the middle of the conversation, coming to stand in the aisle just behind Sloane. “It was his request and his choice.”
Of course it was. My stomach twisted. Michael had told me once that if you couldn’t keep someone from hitting you, the best thing to do was make them hit you. When Michael was hurting, when there was even a chance he might be hurt, he sought out conflict.
He’d taken my choosing Dean like a backhanded slap.
“He wanted to see his mom,” Sloane chirped up innocently. “He said he hadn’t seen her in a really long time.”
The rest of us understood people. Sloane understood facts. Whatever Michael had told her, she would have believed.
“I gave him a list of conversation starters before he left,” Sloane told me seriously. “In case he and his mom need something to talk about.”
Knowing Sloane, that probably meant she’d encouraged Michael to break the ice by informing his family that the last word in the dictionary was zyzzyva, a form of tropical weevil.
“Michael,” Briggs cut in, “will be fine.” Something about the way the agent’s jaw clenched told me that Briggs had made sure that Michael’s father knew his continued freedom depended on Michael’s continued well-being.
We’d all come to the Naturals program in different ways. Michael’s father—the one who’d taught him all about being hit—had traded Michael to the FBI for immunity on white-collar crimes.
“There, there,” Lia cut in flatly, “everyone’s fine, Kumbaya. If the comforting-Cassie portion of our daily ritual is over, can we get on with something a bit less tedious?”
One good thing about Lia: she didn’t let you indulge in worry or angst for long.
“Wheels up in five,” Briggs replied. “And Sloane?”
Our resident numbers expert bent her head back so she was staring up at Briggs. “There’s a high probability you’re going to tell me to get off the table,” she said.
Briggs almost smiled. “Get off the table.”
We’d been airborne for about twenty minutes when Briggs and Sterling started briefing us on where we were going—and why.
“We have a case.” Sterling’s voice was calm and cool. Not too long ago, she would have insisted that there was no we, that minors—no matter how skilled—had no place in an FBI investigation.
Not too long ago, the Naturals program had been restricted to cold cases.
A lot had changed.
“Three bodies in three days.” Briggs picked up where Sterling had left off. “Local police didn’t realize they were dealing with a single UNSUB until an initial autopsy was done on the third victim this morning. They immediately requested FBI assistance.”
Why? I let the question take hold. Why didn’t the police connect the first two victims? Why request FBI intervention so quickly after victim number three? The busier my brain was, the easier it would be to keep it from going back to the body the police had found.
Back to a thousand and one memories of my mother.
“Our victims seem to have very little in common,” Briggs continued, “aside from physical proximity and what appears to be our UNSUB’s calling card.”
Profilers used the term modus operandi—or MO—to refer to the aspects of a crime that were necessary and functional. But leaving a calling card? That wasn’t functional. It wasn’t necessary. And that made it a part of our Unknown Subject’s signature.
“What kind of calling card?” Dean asked. His voice was soft and had just enough of a hum in it to tell me that he was already shifting into profiling mode. It was the tiny details—what the calling card was, where the police had found it in each case, what, if anything, it said—that would let us understand the UNSUB. Was our killer signing his work, or delivering a message? Tagging his victims as a sign of ownership, or opening a line of communication with the police?