Dean met my gaze. “Scenario two: I’m the Master who recruited Nightshade. I’m also the person who killed Anna and Todd Kyle. I was never caught, and the case got just enough local press to attract the attention of the Masters, who offered to channel my potential into so much more.” He ran the tips of the fingers on his right hand over my left. “I accepted the offer and learned to kill without a trace, without mercy.”
Beside me, Sloane shivered.
“Years later,” Dean continued quietly, “when it was time for me to choose an apprentice of my own, I remembered Mason Kyle. Maybe I didn’t realize he was in the house when I killed his family. Or maybe,” he continued, his voice nothing like his own, “I chose to let him live. Either way, he’s mine.”
Silence fell over the room. If Nightshade’s parents had been murdered by one of the Masters, solving the Kyle murders might lead us straight to the person who’d recruited Nightshade.
Find one Master, follow the trail.
“Scenario three.” Agent Sterling, who had been remarkably quiet as Dean and I had sorted through our thoughts, added her voice to the mix. “The UNSUB in the Kyle murders killed Nightshade’s parents so that little Mason Kyle would be more suited to becoming a killer himself someday.” She stood up and began pacing the room. I’d never seen her so intent. “I know the Nightshade case inside and out. The killer we were looking for was brilliant, narcissistic, with a need to win and to one-up all competitors. And yet, during his last interrogation, Nightshade accepted that the Pythia was going to have him killed. He didn’t fight it. He didn’t turn on the other Masters to save himself.”
“He was loyal,” I translated.
“You think that loyalty might date back to childhood.” Dean lifted his gaze to Sterling’s. “You think our UNSUB started grooming Nightshade to join the Masters when he was just a boy.”
Sloane frowned. “Nightshade’s parents were killed one thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-seven days before Nightshade’s Master completed his own initiation kills,” she pointed out. “Barring anomalies in the space-time continuum, it seems unlikely that someone could have begun grooming an apprentice to take their place before that someone had a place.”
Sloane’s hands fluttered, a sure sign of anxiety. She calmed herself, turning to the remainder of the time line. “Nine years after Mason Kyle’s parents were murdered, Mason left Gaither and never came back. That puts his exodus at roughly twenty-four years ago. About twelve years after that, Cassie and her mother moved to town.” Sloane’s blue eyes darted toward mine. I could see her trying to calculate the odds that continuing would hurt me.
I saved her the trouble. “Six years after my mom and I left Gaither, Nightshade killed nine people, taking his seat at the Masters’ table. Less than two months after that, my mother was taken.”
My mom and Nightshade had lived in this town more than a decade apart. But one or more of the Masters must have kept tabs on them thereafter. You have a long memory. You have an eye for potential. And you can be very, very patient.
“Assuming the attack on the Kyle family was perpetrated by someone aged sixteen or over,” Sloane said, “we’re looking for an UNSUB no younger than his late forties—and possibly substantially older.”
I thought of the senior citizens back at the diner, the old man who’d invited us into the apothecary museum.
“We need to know what the police didn’t put in the official file,” Dean said. “Gossip. Theories.”
“Luckily for you,” Lia commented, strolling back into the room, “gossip is one of my specialties.” She was wearing a long black skirt and a multilayered top that hung off her shoulders. She’d rimmed her eyes in thick, dark liner, and wore two-inch-wide copper bangles on her wrists. “On a scale of one to ten,” she said, “how psychic do I look?”
“Six-point-four,” Sloane replied without hesitation.
“Psychic?” I asked. I was fairly certain I did not want to know where this was going.
“Lia and I were talking about our little chat with Ree at the Not-A-Diner,” Michael said, coming up behind Lia with a look on his face that made me think they’d been doing a lot more than talking. “And we both seemed to recall Ree saying something about a widow with a big mouth and a penchant for psychics.”
Lia arched an eyebrow at me. I knew that eyebrow arch. It did not bode well.
“No way,” I said. “I spent most of my childhood helping my mom con people into thinking she was psychic. I’m not going to help you do the same.”
Sloane looked at me, looked at Lia, then looked at me again. “There is a very high probability,” she whispered, “that Lia’s about to tell you that you’re lying.”
It could be worse, I told myself as I adjusted the camera pin on my lapel and Lia leaned forward to ring the town gossip’s doorbell. Lia could have chosen a more destructive outlet for her issues.
“Can I help you?” The woman who answered the door was in her early fifties, with vivid red hair that wouldn’t have looked natural even if she were two decades younger. Her sense of fashion tended toward skintight and shiny.
You wear bright pink lipstick, even in your own home. The house is classic, understated—everything you’re not.
“If you’re Marcela Waite, I believe that we can help you,” Lia murmured.
Even a Natural liar’s credibility could only take us so far. As much as I loathed doing it, I picked up the slack. “My name is Cassie Hobbes. You knew my mother, Lorelai. She helped you connect to loved ones on the other side.”
Recognition sparked in Marcela’s eyes.
“Forty-four percent of psychics believe in UFOs,” Sloane blurted out. “But twice that believe in extraterrestrials.”
“The spirit realm speaks to Sloane in numbers,” Lia said solemnly.
“You have four dogs buried in your yard.” Sloane rocked back on her heels. “And you replaced four hundred and seventy-nine shingles on your roof last year.”
Marcela’s hand flew to her chest. Clearly, it had not—and would not—occur to her that Sloane was simply good at math and extremely observant.
“Do you have a message for me?” Marcela asked, her eyes alight.