“Who is she?” I asked. If taking this girl was the killer’s way of lashing out because the FBI had tried to keep him from me, she wouldn’t be just anyone. This girl didn’t fit with the victimology of the UNSUB’s other victims, but if there was one thing I knew about this killer, it was that he always chose his targets for a reason.
“Ms. Hobbes, I appreciate your personal interest in this case, but that information is above your pay grade.”
I gave the director a look. “You don’t pay me. And if the killer is watching, and you insist on keeping me locked up out of reach, it’s going to get worse.”
Why couldn’t he see that? Why couldn’t Briggs? It was
“What does the card say?” Locke asked. “The picture is only part of the message.”
Briggs looked at me, then at the director. Then he flipped the card around so that we could read it for ourselves.
The implication was clear. This girl was alive. But she wouldn’t be for long.
“Who is she?” I asked again.
Briggs kept his mouth clamped shut. He had priorities, and keeping his job was number one.
“Genevieve Ridgerton.” Locke answered my question, her voice flat. “Her father is a U.S. senator.”
The director took a step toward Locke. “That information is need-to-know, Agent Locke.”
She waved off his objection. “Cassie’s right. Genevieve was taken as a deliberate strike at us. We put protection on Cassie, we kept her from leaving the house, and this was the direct response. We’re no closer to catching this monster than we were four days ago, and he will kill Genevieve unless we give him a reason not to.”
He would kill Genevieve because of me.
“What are you suggesting?” The director said those words in a tone brimming with warning, but Locke responded as if the question had been posed in earnest.
“I’m suggesting that we give this killer exactly what he wants. We deal Cassie in. We take her with us and pay another visit to the crime scene.”
“You really think she’ll find something we missed?”
Locke shot me an apologetic look. “No—but I think that if we take Cassie to the crime scene, the killer might follow.”
“We’re not training these kids to play bait,” Agent Briggs said sharply.
The director turned his attention from Locke to Briggs. “You promised me three cold cases by the end of the year,” he said. “So far, your Naturals have delivered one.”
I could feel the dynamics in the room shifting. Agent Briggs didn’t want to risk something happening to one of his precious Naturals. The director was skeptical that our abilities were worth the cost of this program, and whatever objections he had to bringing a seventeen-year-old to a crime scene must have been outweighed by the fact that this situation could have major political ramifications.
This UNSUB hadn’t chosen a senator’s daughter by chance.
“Take her with you to the club, Briggs,” the director grunted. “If anyone asks, she’s a witness.” He turned to me. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Cassandra.”
I knew that. I also knew that I did want to—and not just because Locke might be right about my presence being enough to lure the killer out. I couldn’t just sit back and watch this happen.
I was a Natural—and as sick as it was, I had a relationship with this UNSUB. If they brought me to the crime scene, I might see something the others had missed.
“I’ll go,” I told the director. “But I’m bringing backup of my own.”
CHAPTER 31
Club Muse was an eighteen-and-over establishment. They only served alcohol to patrons wearing twenty- one-plus wristbands. And yet, somehow, Genevieve Ridgerton, who was neither eighteen nor twenty-one, had— according to all witness reports—been more than a little tipsy when she’d disappeared from the Club Muse bathroom three nights earlier.
Director Sterling had reluctantly agreed to allow me to bring two of the others with me to the crime scene, and then he’d put as much distance between us and him as possible. As a result, Briggs and Locke were the ones who escorted me to the club—and they were the ones who’d decided which of my housemates got to tag along.
Sloane was currently walking the inside perimeter of the club, looking for points of entry and doing some sort of calculation involving maximum occupancy, the popularity of the band playing, total amount of alcohol consumed, and the line for the bathroom.
Dean, Locke, and I were tracing Genevieve’s last steps.
“Two unisex bathrooms. Dead bolts on each of the doors.” Dean’s dark eyes scanned the area with almost military precision.
“Genevieve was in line with a friend,” Locke told us. “The friend went into Bathroom A, leaving Genevieve next in line. When the friend came out, Genevieve wasn’t in line. The friend assumed she was in the second bathroom and went back to the bar. She never saw Genevieve again.”
I thought of the Genevieve I’d seen in the UNSUB’s picture, the Genevieve with bruises and blood crusted on her scalp. Then I pushed that image out of my head and forced myself to think about the events that had led to her abduction.
“Okay,” I said. “So I’m Genevieve. I’m a little drunk, maybe more than a little. I stumble my way through the crowd, wait in line. My friend goes into one of the bathrooms. The next one opens up.” I weaved on my feet a bit as I walked through the motions the girl would have taken. “I slip into the bathroom. Maybe I remember to throw the dead bolt. Maybe I don’t.”
Mulling that over, I scanned the room: a toilet, a sink, a broken mirror. Had the mirror been that way before Genevieve was taken? Or had it gotten broken when she was abducted? I turned three hundred and sixty degrees, taking it all in and trying to ignore just how disgusting the bathrooms at eighteen-and-over clubs really were. The floor was permanently sticky. I didn’t even want to look at the toilet, and there was graffiti scrawled across every surface of the bathroom walls.
“If you forgot to bolt the door, I might have followed you in.”
It took me a moment to realize that Dean was speaking from the UNSUB’s perspective. He took a step toward me, making the small space feel even smaller. I stumbled backward, but there was nowhere to go.
“Sorry,” he said, holding his hands up. Channeling Genevieve, I felt my lips curl into a loopy smile. After all, this was a club, and he was kind of cute.…
A second later, Dean had his hand over my mouth. “I could have chloroformed you.”
I twisted out of his hold, all too aware of how close my body was to his. “You didn’t.”
“No,” he agreed, his eyes on mine. “I didn’t.”
This time, he wrapped a hand around my waist. I leaned into him.
“Maybe I’m not just a little drunk,” I said. “Maybe I’m drunker than I should be.”
Dean caught on. “Maybe I slipped a little something extra into your drink.”
“It’s five feet from the bathroom door to the nearest emergency exit.” Sloane issued that observation from just outside the bathroom door. Clearly, she had better sense than to join the two of us in already cramped—and disgusting—quarters.
That went double for Agent Locke. “We have a witness who can place Genevieve going into this bathroom,” she said. “But no one remembers seeing her leave.”
