A few hours in my pocket hadn’t changed the text on the card. FBI? Seriously? Who was this guy trying to kid? He’d looked sixteen, seventeen, max.
Not like a special agent.
Just special. I couldn’t push that thought down, and my eyes flitted reflexively toward the mirror on my wall. It was one of the great ironies of my life that I’d inherited all of my mother’s features, but none of the magic with which they’d come together on her face. She’d been beautiful. I was odd—odd-looking, oddly quiet, always the odd one out.
Even after five years, I still couldn’t think of my mother without thinking of the last time I’d seen her, shooing me out of her dressing room, a wide smile on her face. Then I thought about coming back to the dressing room. About the blood—on the floor, on the walls, on the mirror. I hadn’t been gone long. I’d opened the door—
“Snap out of it,” I told myself. I sat up and pushed my back up against the headboard, unable to quit thinking about the smell of blood and that moment of knowing it was my mother’s and praying it wasn’t.
What if that was what this was about? What if the card wasn’t a joke? What if the FBI was looking into my mother’s murder?
It’s been five years, I told myself. But the case was still open. My mother’s body had never been found. Based on the amount of blood, that was what the police had been looking for from the beginning.
A body.
I turned the business card over in my hands. On the back, there was a handwritten note.
Cassandra, it said, PLEASE CALL.
That was it. My name, and then the directive to call, in capital letters. No explanation. No nothing.
Below those words, someone else had scribbled a second set of instructions in small, sharp letters—barely readable. I traced my finger over the letters and thought about the boy from the diner.
Maybe he wasn’t the special agent.
So that makes him what? The messenger?
I didn’t have an answer, but the words scrawled across the bottom of the card stood out to me, every bit as much as Special Agent Tanner Briggs’s PLEASE CALL.
If I were you, I wouldn’t.
YOU
You’re good at waiting. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for the right girl. You have her now, and still, you’re waiting. Waiting for her to wake up. Waiting for her to open those eyes and see you.
Waiting for her to scream.
And scream.
And scream.
And realize that no one can hear her but you.
You know how this will go, how she’ll be angry, then scared, then swear up and down that if you let her go, she won’t tell a soul. She’ll lie to you, and she’ll try to manipulate you, and you’ll have to show her—the way you’ve showed so many others—how that just won’t do.
But not yet. Right now, she’s still sleeping. Beautiful—but not as beautiful as she will be when you’re done.
CHAPTER 3
It took me two days, but I called the number. Of course I did, because even though there was a 99 percent chance this was some kind of hoax, there was a 1 percent chance that it wasn’t.
I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until someone picked up.
“This is Briggs.”
I couldn’t pinpoint what was more disarming—the fact that this “Agent Briggs” had apparently given me the number to his direct line or the way he answered the phone, like saying “hello” would have been a waste of breath.
“Hello?” As if he could read my mind, Special Agent Tanner Briggs spoke again. “Anyone there?”
“This is Cassandra Hobbes,” I said. “Cassie.”
“Cassie.” Something about the way Agent Briggs said my name made me think that he’d known before I’d said a single word that I didn’t go by my full name. “I’m glad you called.”
He waited for me to say something else, but I stayed silent. Everything you said or did was a data point you put out there in the world, and I didn’t want to give this man any more information than I had to—not until I knew what he wanted from me.
“I’m sure you must be wondering why I contacted you—why I had Michael contact you.”
Michael. So now the boy from the diner had a name.
“I have an offer I’d like you to consider.”
“An offer?” It amazed me that my voice stayed every bit as calm and even as his.
“I believe this is a conversation best had in person, Ms. Hobbes. Is there somewhere you would be comfortable meeting?”
He knew what he was doing—letting me pick the location, because if he’d specified one, I might not have gone. I probably should have refused to meet with him anyway, but I couldn’t, for the same reason that I’d had to pick up the phone and call.
Five years was a long time to go without a body. Without answers.
“Do you have an office?” I asked.
The slight pause on the other end of the phone told me that wasn’t what he’d expected me to say. I could have asked him to meet me at the diner or a coffee shop near the high school or anywhere that I would have had the home court advantage, but I’d been taught to believe that there was no home court advantage.
You could tell more about a stranger by seeing their house than you ever would by inviting them to yours.
Besides, if this guy wasn’t really an FBI agent, if he was some kind of pervert and this was some kind of game, I figured he’d probably have a heck of a time arranging a meeting at the local FBI office.
“I don’t actually work out of Denver,” he said finally. “But I’m sure I can set something up.”
Probably not a pervert, then.
He gave me an address. I gave him a time.
“And Cassandra?”
I wondered what Agent Briggs hoped to accomplish by using my full first name. “Yes?”
“This isn’t about your mother.”
— — —
I went to the meeting anyway. Of course I did. Special Agent Tanner Briggs knew enough about me to know that my mother’s case was the reason I’d followed the instructions on the card and called. I wanted to know how he’d come by that information, if he’d looked at her police file, if he would look at her file, provided I gave him whatever it was he wanted from me.
I wanted to know why Special Agent Tanner Briggs had made it his business to know about me, the same way a man shopping for a new computer might have memorized the specs of the model that had caught his eye.
“What floor?” The woman beside me in the elevator was in her early sixties. Her silvery blond hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck, and the suit she was wearing was perfectly tailored.