“Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked her.
“I was trying to figure out how the killer managed to pose the girl’s body without being seen,” Sloane said, which both was and wasn’t an answer to my question. When Sloane got absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist. “I have a theory.”
She tugged on the ends of her white-blond hair. I could practically see her waiting for me to snap at her, to tell her that she was handling the situation with Dean wrong. She knew she was different from other people, and I was realizing, bit by bit, that somewhere along the line, someone—or maybe multiple someones—had conditioned her to believe that different, her kind of different, was wrong.
“Let me get dressed,” I told her. “Then you can tell me your theory.”
When Dean was upset, he went to the garage. When Sloane was upset, she went to the basement. I wasn’t sure she had another way of coping.
And besides, I thought as I pulled on a T-shirt, I’m clearly the last person who should be lecturing anyone about giving Dean space.
The basement ran the length of our Victorian-style house and extended out underneath the front and back yards. Walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling divided the space into distinct sets, each missing a fourth wall.
“I had to make some modifications to the car specs,” Sloane said, pulling her hair into a tight ponytail as she stopped in front of a battered car parked on the lawn of a set designed to look like a park. “Briggs had a two-door brought down a couple of weeks ago for a simulation I was running. The hood was two inches too long, and the slope wasn’t quite steep enough, but it was nothing a carefully wielded sledgehammer couldn’t fix.”
Sloane had a willowy build and relatively little regard for recommended safety measures. The idea of her wielding a sledgehammer of any kind was terrifying.
“Cassie, focus,” Sloane ordered. “We were somewhat limited on outdoor sets, so I went with the neighborhood park scene. The grass is one and one-quarter inch tall, slightly less uniform than the crime scene lawn. We had a nice arrangement of crash dummies to choose from, so I was able to match the victim’s height within two centimeters. The rope is the wrong color, but it’s nylon, and the thickness should be a match.”
It was easy to forget sometimes that Sloane’s gift went far beyond the index of statistics stored in her brain. The video we’d seen of the crime scene had been taken from a distance and lasted less than forty-five seconds, but she’d encoded every last numerical detail: the length and width of the rope tied around the victim’s neck; the exact positioning of the body; the height of the grass; the make, model, and specs of the car.
As a result, I was looking at a nearly exact replica of what we’d seen on the film. A faceless, naked dummy was draped across the hood of the car. The dummy’s lower extremities dangled over the front; a rope was knotted around its neck. The body was tilted slightly to one side. On the video, we’d only viewed it from the front, but now, I could actually walk around and take in the three-sixty view. The hands were bound at the wrists, unevenly, twisting the upper body slightly to the left. I closed my eyes and pictured the girl.
You fought, didn’t you? Fought so hard that the bindings cut into your arms.
“One end of the rope was tied around her neck. The other ran up to the sunroof, down, and was anchored to something inside the car.” Sloane’s voice brought me back to the present. I stared at the car.
“The UNSUB didn’t do all that on the front lawn of the university president’s house,” I said.
“Correct!” Sloane beamed at me. “Which means that he strung her up and then placed the car there. I looked up the topography of the streets surrounding the house. There’s a road directly west that curves, but if you don’t take the curve, you go off-road and down a forested slope.”
“A forest could have provided cover,” I said, nibbling at my bottom lip as I tried to picture the UNSUB moving, quickly and quietly, still shrouded in the partial darkness of very early morning. “Assuming he killed her in the car, he could have strung her up in the forest…”
Sloane picked up where I left off. “…pushed her to the edge of the woods, and the slope of the hill would have done the rest. The only question is how he kept the body from bouncing around on the way down.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but someone else beat me to it.
“It was weighted.”
Sloane and I turned in unison. Agent Sterling came striding toward us, her long legs making quick work of the space. She’d traded the gray suit for a black one and the pink shirt for a light, silvery gray, a near-perfect match for her eyes. Her hair was in a French braid, and her face was taut, like she’d fixed the braid in place so firmly it pulled her skin tight across her skull.
She stopped, a few feet away from the scene Sloane had rigged up.
“That’s an impressive likeness,” she said, her clipped words making it clear that the statement wasn’t a compliment. “What source material were you using?”
Sloane, completely oblivious to the steely tone in Agent Sterling’s voice, replied with a smile. “There was a cell phone video leaked online.”
Agent Sterling closed her eyes, bowed her head slightly, and inhaled. I could practically hear her counting silently to ten. When she opened her eyes, they zeroed in on me. “And what was your involvement in all of this, Cassandra?”
I could have told her that Sloane had built the replica completely on her own, but I wasn’t about to throw my own roommate to the wolves. Stepping in between Sloane and Sterling, I drew the agent’s ire to me.
“My involvement?” I repeated, channeling Lia—or possibly Michael. “Let’s go with moral support.”
Sterling pursed her lips, then turned back to Sloane. “Was there a particular reason you wanted to rebuild this crime scene?” she asked, gentling her voice slightly.
I tried to catch Sloane’s eye, telegraphing that she should not, under any circumstances, tell her what Dean had told us about his father.
Sloane met my eyes and nodded. I relaxed slightly, then Sloane turned back to Agent Sterling. “Dean told us this case looks a lot like his father’s,” she said matter-of-factly.
Clearly, Sloane had misinterpreted my look to mean the exact opposite of what I’d been trying to communicate.
“So you rebuilt the scene to figure out if Dean was right about the similarities?” Agent Sterling asked.