Chapter Text
Chester was a thorough— fastidious— observer. He had been living in Shauna’s house his entire life but he still seemed skeptical of the origin and purpose of everything in it. Shauna let the dogs out for their morning exercise, nudging at Lola so she wouldn’t linger at the door frame, and watched uneasily as Chester fixed his nose to the living room baseboard.
“It’s the same one as last night,” she promised him.
He looked up with a firm expression: I’m making sure.
Shauna didn’t appreciate Chester’s suspicion. He had bright, frigid blue eyes; he rose from the baseboard, one paw inching onto the porch, and somehow indicated that he hoped Shauna would put to rights whatever had gone amiss.
“Nothing has,” she said, and watched him ignore her to go shit on the driveway. Four acres of open fields and he always chose a spot by her front passenger side tire.
Shauna went back inside for her coffee— chipped and unevenly glazed mug, all she had to show for three pottery classes with Van, her sip made grainy with an unclean handful of sugar scooped from the bowl, nearly cool already. This was her ritual, as close to peace as things were likely to be: coffee at 5:15, sun struggling up from the trees behind her house, not exactly warming her but razoring the dew off the grass. Dogs running, biting each other’s ankles, tumbling over each other in puppyish joy.
She surveyed her property. There weren’t enough dogs in the front yard. Lola, Maria, Joan, Franz, Chester. That left Edith— mostly white face, spot of black over her right ear like a beret— probably halfway into the woods already.
A yelp. Somewhat like a dog, but not enough. Shauna turned her head halfway, thinking of the shotgun locked in her armoire, and set the mug down on the porch railing.
Her boots sank into the lawn, which at least was a blessing for the silence it provided her. There hadn’t been another yelp, no growls, just the susurration of fur on grass. Tussling. There were no dogs back there for Edith to tussle with.
Shauna, with a mounting sense of dread, slowed her steps coming along the side of the house. The sounds of conflict had dissipated— there was a crunch, a quieter animal gasp, and then nothing loud enough for her to hear. Consequences, Shauna thought, earned and uninvited.
Edith was bent low at the edge of what Shauna considered the yard, the place where the grass she bothered mowing transitioned to unruly tick-ridden fields. It was a place Shauna tried to keep the dogs out of; that was where the wilderness reminded her it existed, with reflective eyes in the night and the tips of field grass parting for invisible bodies. Her dogs were mostly border collie, not prepared for any physical altercations. But there was Edith, muzzle ducked into the split-open ribcage of a fox, so maybe they were better suited for it than she thought.
Steam rose from the fox’s innards into the morning chill; its body convulsed, electromagnetic remnants of its conscious mind twitching away from Shauna’s dog. Shauna stepped on a twig half-obscured by fallen leaves. Edith lifted her head, licked her red-dripping lips. Her tail wagged at the sight of her owner.
“Babydog,” Shauna said quietly, “get out of there, you’ll get sick.”
Edith ambled away from her prize, coming to rest with perfect posture at Shauna’s knee. Shauna reached down to stroke Edith’s face, flinching only once at the wetness spread across her jaws. It was rather a large fox; she was surprised Edith had managed to fell it. Somewhat impressive— the thought arose in her mind and was calmly, tidily discarded. Edith’s abrupt jerk into violence was not impressive .
Shauna pulled her shirt off, wrapped it around Edith’s head, carried the dog inside and plunked her in the tub. The water drained pink, almost a pretty color. “You didn’t have to do that. Everything is safe here,” Shauna said, lifting Edith out and onto the bathroom floor. Edith leaned her head into Shauna’s hip. Of course they were safe. It wasn’t why she’d killed the fox.
Shauna was late getting into her car and had already begun preparing the bare-boned apology she would give her class, but it was moot. She’d only turned onto Wolf Trap’s main road when her phone rang from its position on her dashboard.
“Director Scott.”
“ Ben, Shauna.”
“Ben.”
“We need you. West Virginia. I’m sending the address now.”
“And a gift card for the gas you’re making me burn, right?”
“No. Get here.”
“What about my class?”
“Doctor Palmer’s got it,” he said, like he was only waiting for her to ask any question so he could answer it.
Shauna had been dreading the call. Now that it had arrived, she felt appropriately sick. She felt like she’d taken ibuprofen on an empty stomach. She felt like the truest kind of idiot.
Ben Scott had first cornered her while she was prepping for her 300-level forensic psychology lecture— she assumed he’d memorized her schedule and chosen the nosiest class, so news of her involvement with a federal agency would spread and force her hand.
He had sat in the back of the auditorium, exaggeratedly large in the academy’s tiny chairs, and listened to the whole lecture. He had been there before any of the students, only a few minutes after Shauna herself. Shauna didn’t respond to his hello, didn’t remark at all as he climbed up to the back row. His intentions were obvious: seat himself somewhere highly visible so every single student would see him there, put himself directly in front of Shauna’s face, and evaluate her.
Shauna had only met him once before, at the opening of the terribly-named Evil Minds Research Museum, where they had suffered through half of an amicable conversation before Shauna had become unpleasant. As Ben Scott adjusted himself, hoisting his titanium leg over his knee, Shauna tried to remember what she had said. There was a merlot veil over the evening— she vaguely recalled snorting when Ben said he had led the entire project, remembered saying something that probably allied her with the evil minds. “You do everyone a disservice by thinking of them that way,” some such bullshit. Ben had turned nearly purple. He had opened his mouth, closed it, raised a finger, turned away. That was that.
But that was not that. Shauna had glanced up at him for seventy-five minutes, ascertaining how he rolled his neck and drummed his fingers in the crease of his folded arms, wondering all the while if he had come back to humiliate her. She would have told him he’d picked the wrong audience— her students viewed her as a vaguely female cloud of dread and doubted she even had a personal life to care about
Shauna was surprised when he didn’t approach her at all until they were the only people left in the room. Then he came down the stairs— hand always coming down to the top of a chair, supporting his uneven legs, a weakness, Shauna thought and then didn’t think— and approached her table.
“Quite a show.”
“Not a show,” Shauna said, eyes trained on her open bag as she fed her laptop into it, “a class. A remarkably dry one, so.”
“No, they were hanging on every word. Practically peeking through their fingers at the crime scene photos.”
“Given that they’re at Quantico, it’s a bad sign they’re so squeamish.”
Shauna zippered her bag and hoisted the strap over her shoulder. The projector shut off with a descending hum; Ben’s hand came down nearly onto Shauna’s as she pressed its switch.
“ What can I do for you, Director Scott? ” he said.
Shauna raised her eyes to his chin, the neatly maintained whisper of beard atop it. “What can I do for you, Director Scott?”
“There’s a wave coming, Professor. I’m going to need the right crew onboard when it crests.”
“You’re not my captain. You have an entire federal agency at your disposal, you don’t need the B-league.”
“That’s where you’re not entirely correct. Your reputation precedes you— certainly not B-league. I decided it would be worth reviewing your field application.”
“I didn’t make it.”
Ben leaned his weight on the table, hands pressed flat on the lucite. “Excellent physical performance. Imperfect mental evaluation.”
“I didn’t know I was autistic until they told me that was why I hadn’t passed.”
“But that doesn’t really cover it, does it? Because you were the crown jewel of the Miami PD.”
“For one humid year, yes.”
“What happened, Professor?”
Shauna adjusted her glasses and met Ben’s eyes. “What can I do for you, Director Scott?”
“You saw things nobody else did. You noticed, made connections. Found clues nobody had left behind for you.”
“It’s not that, like I’m special.”
“No?”
“I’m just a judgmental bitch.”
Ben stepped back. “Will you come to a crime scene with me?”
“Now?”
“No. When one is available. I don’t know when that’ll be. But I want to take advantage of your imagination, Professor. I think we need it. You could do a lot of good.”
Shauna resented her reaction in that moment: Ben Scott was not her supervisor, really wasn’t affiliated with her at all, should not have made her feel any obligation. And Shauna did not want to accompany him to a crime scene. The postmortem— dry laugh— analysis she did for classes was nothing like being there. The smell, copper and ammonium and the victim’s soured cologne, the splattered walls like a Rorschach, to say nothing of the audience that always lingered. Family and cameras. The blank eyes on the dead and the living. It sounded like a nightmare and Shauna did not want to insert herself into it.
She nodded and shook Ben’s hand. “Do you have my number?”
“Admin gave it to me in case I couldn’t catch you.”
“Fat chance,” Shauna had said. Ben had laughed and walked out of her lecture hall. And Shauna had tried to forget about it.
Now it was a month later and Shauna drove a silent two hours out to the scene. The address led her to a two-story colonial swarmed with emergency vehicles. The house had a wide radius of grass around it, an expensive lawn to push the neighbors back a few dozen yards. The luxury of privacy— also the reason Shauna was here.
Ben met her in the driveway of the Martellis’ house, handed her gloves and an AUTHORIZED VISITOR badge, and led her through the front door.
The arterial spray started in the foyer and curved all the way into the dining room beyond. Its artist lay with her head between the feet of a chair, shirt torn open at the junction of neck and shoulder where a bullet had lodged itself. Shauna looked at it, the well of shining blackness it had created, and shut her eyes.
A familiar sense of gravity hit her— her ears rushed with blood— Shauna could see how it had happened.
It began as a scam, though a sophisticated one: I had spent time with this family, out of their sight but close enough to collect what I needed. Tripping the security system so the wife would have to answer the company’s call: No, false alarm, I’m sorry to have bothered you. Watching the husband at the end of a work week: cufflinks and watch in a keypad-locked box in the closet. They were wealthy and paranoid for it. Most of the time these were excessive steps. This time it wasn’t even enough.
When it happened, I entered through the front door. It must have been last night, late enough that the neighborhood was bedding down— lights blinking off and on, living room-bathroom-bedroom, in Morse code. Time. Late but not so late that someone wouldn’t answer the door.
But they had chosen this neighborhood for its safety. Its closeness, if not geographically then demographically. They knew their neighbors. She had been frightened by my appearance, unknown to her. She had geared up to scream, and I had reacted too quickly. Gunshot aimed for her head, too low, blood loss. The husband upstairs heard everything and tripped the alarm in the hallway before locking his bedroom door. I expected I had time: I stayed by the intercom in the foyer and played my voice note when the call came in. No, false alarm, I’m sorry to have bothered you.
I went upstairs and knew which room to take because it was the only closed door. Two more bullets, one in the door by the flimsy lock and one in his forehead. Square and steady this time. He went down and I stepped over him to get to the lockbox. Blood on the soles of my shoes, something to wash off in the attached bath before I walked back out the front door. The blessing of space: none of the neighbors had even turned their lights on at the disturbance.
Shauna opened her eyes. She felt the weight lift off; she turned around and Ben Scott was standing in the doorway with a short, dark-haired woman.
“Hi, I’m Natalie Scatorccio. Part of the standard investigative package. You’re the extrapolative savant, right? Electromechanical Stimulation To Release Crime Scene Rigor Mortis? ”
Shauna shook her hand but couldn’t manage a response to having her master’s thesis repeated back to her.
“Can you see what phones have pinged at cell towers nearby?” she asked Ben.
He nodded and turned away to give the instructions to the IT nerd van. Shauna flexed her hands— the gloves stuck sweatily to the gaps between fingers, unpleasant and disconcerting. She almost reached for the back of a chair to balance herself but thought better of it when she looked down and saw it flecked with red.
“I think I should go home,” she told her feet. A soft hum of agreement, Natalie’s feet joining hers.
“Stop somewhere for coffee first,” Natalie said. “The first time seeing it at this stage… nobody does well. You shouldn’t be expected to. Coffee, some carbs, and protein.”
“You want me to eat a post-homicide breakfast sandwich?”
“Keep the receipt and maybe we can bully Ben into reimbursing it.”
Shauna smiled despite herself. Natalie should have been even gruffer than Shauna, having this as her actual job. Yet here she was, offering a stranger a small mercy that was likely to backfire on her. Just because Shauna looked shaken up. Shauna didn’t think she could be like that, herself.
“I’m not really one of you,” she said.
“Yeah, not yet. Take some time, decide if you’re willing to let Ben run your life.”
“I’m not.” Shauna let Natalie lead them from the room. She reached out a grabby hand— Shauna peeled off her gloves and handed them over.
Shauna sat in her car for a couple minutes, trying to take a deep breath. She swallowed three aspirin, rubbed her fingertips forcefully against the ache in her forehead, and turned the key in the ignition. Natalie stood on the stoop and watched as Shauna drove away, waving as though it was her house.
Shauna didn’t hear from Ben for several weeks. At first she assumed she had underperformed and he’d decided it wasn’t worth continuing to entertain her as an option, but then Natalie texted her— had everyone stolen her number?— to have lunch in the morgue office.
“We got the guy,” Natalie said, tilting her thermos to the side. She had packed soup— or, God, maybe someone had packed it for her, lovingly pouring pureed red pepper into a preheated thermos for Natalie’s lunchtime— and she was dredging up the last spoonful. “Your tip was good, he texted someone in the house, like, thirty seconds before he disabled the security system.”
“Oh. Idiot.” Shauna had a peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwich, a plastic baggie of Wheat Thins, and a cup of mandarin oranges. It looked as though she had stolen a child’s bag lunch.
“Yeah, Ben was pretty impressed.”
“Well, I haven’t heard from him since then.”
Natalie shrugged, leaning back in her seat. She was lead investigator and thus had the luxury of an office with walls and a door. As far as Shauna could tell, she only used it to eat lunch and pin up the weirdest autopsy photos. She’d been given Natalie’s desk chair— o she of small mercies— because the other chair faced the wall of gore. Shauna felt them looming over her shoulder but was at least spared the imagery while she ate.
“He’ll call you again. It’s probably my fault, actually. I told him you were… you know, not in top shape after.”
“I was fine,” Shauna said. A little jelly had oozed onto her finger. She looked at it, coagulated ruby-pink, and flinched when she licked it off.
“Yeah, well. Keep your phone on you.”
The next she heard from Ben was another two months in coming. Shauna had nearly forgotten about it— at least she had built such a wall around the experience and its potential recurrences that she’d begun habitually shying away from thinking of it. Driving to work, thinking about the halo of pollen around her windshield. Feeding her dogs, thinking about the veterinary appointment in a couple weeks. Sitting in a bar, thinking about nothing at all but the email sitting on her phone at the end of that blessed hiatus.
Professor Shipman,
Do me a favor and meet me in my office tomorrow around ten? New case in development and I know we could use you on it.
Benjamin Scott
Department Head, Behavioral Science Unit
Well, what was Shauna supposed to do? Obligation came down hard and unexpectedly; she didn’t even think about declining.
Shauna sat in the bar for another hour, drinking beer because she didn’t want to ask for a mixed drink in a place with that many pool tables. Wolf Trap was hospitable to the solitary, the private, and the self-contained— nobody tried to take her keys when she tripped into the doorway walking out.
She drove carefully home, five minutes from door to door but scary nonetheless, and then stood in the shower until it got cold. Franz kept pushing his arm under the door; Shauna watched him through the shower’s frosted glass, personifying pawing. The water wouldn’t get warmer and her Suave conditioner was rinsed out.
The bedroom felt impersonal, spinning white walls and a puddle forming under Shauna’s body as she stood there and dripped dry. She should paint the walls. Buy a quilt, something expensive and artisan-made, to replace the comforter she’d dragged up from Florida. Put up stronger curtains. The moon pushed its way through the linen bullshit with obvious glee.
Shauna made sure she had an alarm set, touched the book on her bedside table, and fell asleep without turning the sheets down or the overhead light off.
Ben’s office was on the fourth floor of an Academy building with an elevator Shauna didn’t trust. She took off her jacket before braving the stairs and was consequently three minutes late but markedly less sweaty than she would’ve been with the jacket on.
The hallway was bleak: flickering halogen lights, a sparsely populated corkboard, a water fountain taped over like a crime scene. She found Ben’s office because he had the only door with a window. The rest— what few there were— were solid metal, either janitor’s closets or, God knew, interrogation rooms, torture chambers. Shauna stood still, catching her breath and listening for the anguished cries of foreign nationals.
Nothing.
She knocked on Ben’s door and opened it without waiting.
The office was a decent size— it stretched off to the left with stuffed bookcases and black leather chairs and more than one wheeled chalkboard. His paper-covered desk was directly in front of the door, a blockade between it and the only window. Spring was being coy, the trees only just beginning to bud despite them being a week into April. Shauna imagined the whole office was tinted green when summer came.
Ben was seated at his desk, hands around a paper coffee cup, smiling. Shauna knew the smile couldn’t be for her, which was how she noticed another person in the room.
She was seated in front of Ben’s desk, stiffly upright with her arms positioned delicately over the armrests of Ben’s uncomfortable wooden guest chairs. She had a severe, glossy bob toying with the tops of her shoulders— not quite brunette, not quite blonde, shifting with the light. High heels, cognac leather. Champagne silk skirt, something made of camel cashmere on top. Delicate wristwatch in gold and silver, hands ticking the seconds in a mother-of-pearl face.
“Ben,” Shauna said. She was suddenly aware of the age of her bra.
“Shauna. Thanks for coming in.”
“Well, how can I resist?”
“Do you want to have a seat?”
“Introductions first.”
“Right,” Ben said, and moved to stand before the other woman held out her hand. (Neatly maintained, nails uniformly filed and painted the color of her shoes.)
She turned in her seat and Shauna nearly lost her grip on her jacket. She knew that face— she knew the curve of the mouth, the round tip of the nose, those enormous, night-creature eyes, so expressive back then. Now they shone only with the projection of affability: it’s nice to make your acquaintance, coded into her very body.
“Shauna Shipman,” she said, reaching out to take that elegant hand.
“Doctor Jacqueline Harris. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, that was easier than I expected,” Ben said, which reminded Shauna that he existed and that she had always dreamed of pouring hot coffee on his dick.
Shauna stayed standing, watching while Jackie Taylor settled back into her seat. Her posture was unbelievable. Shauna could have stacked books on her head.
“Do you want to sit, Shauna? Never mind. I asked you to come in for this.” Ben held out a manila folder.
Shauna opened it— a map of the East Coast with red Xs dotted along it. Photo after photo of fresh-looking teenage girls, smiling and squinting their blue eyes and tossing their dark barrel-curled hair. A speculative report of crime scene signatures, signed off on by Kevyn Tan. A deposition from a Mrs. Alice Olsen, mostly outlining her daughter’s last college visit. A stack of glossy crime scene photos, the same pretty high schoolers.
“What am I looking at here?”
“They’ve been calling him the Osprey. It wouldn’t have been my choice, don’t look at me. MurderBeat was on the last scene and talked to the right person, blabbed absolutely everything about it.”
“Ospreys get their fish right out of the ocean. Travel all over. Won’t eat dead or dying fish.”
“Anything else?”
“Um, Pliny the Elder said they test their young by making them stare at the sun. They push them out of the nest if they blink.”
“Do you think Jessica Roberts knew about Pliny the Elder when she named him?”
“No,” Shauna said, flipping through the photos, “not a chance.”
“The Osprey either kills girls in backyards or— we don’t know, he kills them elsewhere and drags them there. He likes to carve them.”
“With symbols, or just, um, stabby?”
Ben pointed to the manila file, gestured for her to flip to a certain image. “ Stabby. He’s basically pulverizing the dermal layer until it’s less of a barrier and then excavating what’s underneath. They’re dead when he finishes but not when he starts.”
Shauna looked at Ben’s recommended photo: the girl was lying on her front, wearing a denim jacket that had been mashed with the flesh underneath into a fibrous red pulp. The center of the abrasion seemed to be at the bottom left of her torso, though enthusiasm or transportation had spread viscera across most of her body. She was lying with her head and shoulders in a plastic Barbie playhouse.
“I had a playhouse like that,” Shauna said.
“Did you spend a lot of time outside as a child?” Jackie Taylor— Doctor Harris was still in the room. Shauna had forgotten. Harris had a cup of coffee, too. She sipped it with her cupid’s bow mouth and kept her eyes on Shauna.
“Outside and alone.”
“You’re your own best company.”
“In all circumstances, Doctor.” Shauna kept looking at the crime scene photos. Blood dried red like a spilled cherry slush over the exposed legs of a girl slumped against an oak tree.
“Isolated children develop intense personalities without their peers to stifle them.”
“Right. Good one.”
“Do you have trouble with eye contact?” Shauna glanced up— Doctor Harris had leaned forward, just a millimeter, and ducked her head so her bob spilled forward in a glossy wave like a ribbon unfurling. Meeting her eye felt like being slapped in the face with Harris’s glowing, ringed hand.
“No.” Shauna kept her eyes on Harris’s. Her skin was one even color all over her face. No dark circles, no emotional blush. “No, I can make eye contact.”
Harris smiled. She had two perfect rows of teeth so white and straight they looked like she had caulked tiles into her gums.
Shauna turned away, toward the chalkboards. Ben had flipped one over, push-pinning crime scene photos and class photos and maps by some unknown logic all over the cork. “Tell me about this, Ben.”
She heard him stomp toward her, pausing just over her shoulder. No other steps.
“He’s killed eleven girls. Eleven that we’ve tied to him, though you’ve seen the victim profile, we probably would’ve picked up any other girls who fit the description. He’s been as far north as Vermont, as far south as Williamsburg. He doesn’t care much about how he leaves them, but he takes his souvenirs.”
“Trophies?”
“Yeah, organs,” Ben said, pointing to a photo of a girl in a peasant top. Her eyes were delicately closed— blood over the lids, the Osprey had slid them gently closed when he was done— and her chest was flayed open. Ribs stuck up through the ruined skin and cotton, shards of bone pointing upwards like the wrenched-apart dome of a birdcage. Shauna looked closer, and yes— there was space, visible even in the photo, where lungs should have been. “Sometimes hair, too. Teeth.”
“Are we sure it’s a man?”
“Yes,” Harris said, “any particular reason you’ve pegged him that way?”
Shauna twisted her neck around to look at her, but she was still seated impeccably in her chair. She had crossed one slim leg over the other. She smiled at Shauna, tapping one neat fingernail on the lid of her cardboard coffee cup.
“I mean, not really except for precedent. You think it could be a woman?” Ben stepped up next to Shauna to look closely at an incident report strung to Massachusetts. P. Cohen.
“No, it’s a man. They’re all sixteen to eighteen?”
“Mona Kunkel was nineteen. Otherwise, yeah.”
“So’s his daughter. She’ll look like them. They’re going on college tours. He’s noticing that he’s got less control of her.”
“Where should we start looking?”
“Dunno,” Shauna said. She squinted at the map, the nonsensical connect-the-dots of victims. “Maybe New Jersey?”
“That’s remarkable,” Harris said.
Shauna turned fully around. “Not to be a dick, but why are you here, Doctor Harris?”
“I invited her,” Ben said. He moved back to his desk; Shauna stayed where she was, haloed by the Osprey’s girls.
“What kind of doctor are you?”
Harris smiled like she’d been waiting for Shauna to ask that question. LIke she was glad to give up the game. “I’m a psychiatrist. I was invited by Director Scott to construct a profile.”
“A profile?”
“Yes.”
“Whose profile are you— Ben, whose profile is she working on?”
Ben put his head in his hands. “Shauna, I can’t have you breaking down on my watch.”
“You’re just giving yourself a paper trail.”
“Shauna.” Ben put his hands down. His beard was starting to gray in single strands. “You had an abnormal reaction to the Martelli scene. At the same time, your contributions are valuable. Uh, remarkable. I cannot afford to subject you to this kind of work, which is harrowing and invasive, without any safeguards in place. And I can’t afford to take you off the team, either.”
“I’m not on the fucking team, Ben. We’ve spoken four times in our lives, including right now. You have solved many goddamn cases before me.”
“This is new,” Ben said, “worse. You want me to grovel? You’re gonna put a one-legged man on his knees?”
“Am I laughing?”
“If I may,” Harris said. “I have no interest in prying into your mind or your personal life, Professor. I’m just a resource. Use me, that’s all I or Director Scott want.”
“Frankly, Doctor, I don’t give a shit what you want.”
“Shauna.” Ben again. “Do you want to help stop a monster? Or do you want more girls to die?”
“False dichotomy,” Shauna said, “just call me when you need me.”
She lingered long enough to wrench her jacket back on— not easy, when her hands felt like claws and her arms were stiff with rage— and then departed for the parking lot.
Of course, her luck wasn’t that good. She’d made it halfway down the hall when she heard heels behind her.
“Professor Shipman.”
Doctor Harris, standing upright, was willowy, elegant, possessing a sort of wry sophistication as though she knew how someone could see the irony in her presentation. She walked slowly— or no, Shauna thought, she was moving quickly but with such grace that the movements seemed fluid as red lava.
“Please let me see you downstairs.”
“Can’t get enough of my company?”
Doctor Harris smiled. They were near the elevators; she pressed the button, apparently unsurprised by the impossible fortune of the door instantly sliding open.
When the door had slid shut, she depressed the EMERGENCY STOP. “I’m loath to begin an acquaintanceship with a favor.”
“But that’s not really what this is, right?”
“A favor?”
“An acquaintanceship.”
Doctor Harris smoothed her hands over the fabric of her ballet wrap. “I suppose not.”
“So.”
“My legal name is Jacqueline Harris. Everybody in my life knows me as Jacqueline Harris. My origins are remote. Quaintly charming. There’s no need for anything else to be true, or for any additional details to be integrated.”
“You mean Jackie Taylor is dead.”
“Long live Jackie Taylor,” she said with that kitchen-backsplash smile.
“And nobody knows any of it? Wiskayok? The, um.”
“No. It seemed unfair, when I entered my undergraduate program, that that should follow me.”
“So you just reimagined yourself.”
“Even I can forget my private history now.” To Shauna it sounded a lot like I can forget you.
“Did you know it would be me?”
“Yes. Director Scott gave me your name.”
“Isn’t there some kind of rule you’re supposed to follow about psychoanalyzing people you know?”
“Yes.”
“You’re doing it anyway?”
“I don’t believe it applies. We haven’t known each other for quite some time.”
Shauna thought that over.
“I’m not going to ruin your life, Doctor. I have no interest in that. I just want you to leave mine alone.”
“That I can’t do, Shauna.” She pressed EMERGENCY STOP again and the elevator returned to life.
They rode in silence to the first floor, rattling and shaking with the elevator’s dated mechanics. Doctor Harris held out her hand when the door slid open. Shauna walked through, half-turned her head to see Harris stepping out after her. She moved toward the parking lot.
Shauna stopped in the cafeteria first when she got to the academy. Whoever had gotten Ben and Harris’s coffees hadn’t deigned to include her— she was obligated to pick up her own Mr. Coffee bullshit before class. She sequestered herself in a remote corner to finish it while she reviewed student submissions for the last essay she’d assigned. Shocking: more bullshit.
The chair across the table screeched as it was pulled away. Van Palmer had found her.
“There you are, you ray of sunshine. Nice plaid.” She pulled the top off her Tupperware, Caesar salad fanning its scent toward Shauna.
“It’s buffalo check.”
“Oh, forgive me.” Van was the only friend Shauna had bothered making at work— she was funny, bracingly intelligent, and another of Ben’s pinch-hitters. When Ben had told her he’d heard about her, she had been a little surprised he hadn’t cited Van. But Van was a stringently moral person, guided by both a personal compass and the medical ethics requirements of the American Psychiatric Association, and Shauna suspected she’d quashed any thoughts of giving Shauna away.
“Had an interesting morning.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Shauna chewed on the lip of her coffee cup. It smelled like hot asphalt under her nose. “Do you know, um, Jacqueline Harris?”
Van set her fork down. “How do you know Jacqueline?” Jacqueline, so distinguished in Van’s mouth.
“I don’t, really. But I met her today. Ben ambushed me— he had me out for the Martelli case and now he thinks I’m going to shake apart if I go to another scene.”
“Why would he think that?”
“I don’t know,” Shauna said. “I was the reason they found the guy.”
“And did you also only tell Natalie Scatorccio your idea and then disappear with no goodbyes? Just drove away in your 2013 Volvo looking like you were gonna hork all over the windshield?”
Shauna sighed, digging her hands into the hem of her shirt. Plaid, Van thought it was plaid, she thought she’d bought a really cute checked blouse at Macy’s and now she was being told it was no better than a goddamn flannel. Van always threw her off-kilter— she was so relaxed, so at ease with herself, Shauna was never sure if she was laughing with or at her. It made Shauna want very badly to make Van laugh with her.
“Natalie told you?”
“I was consulting on something and we were waiting for Ben to finish sniffing around. She got bored and spilled it. Don’t be mad at her.”
“I’m not,” Shauna said, lying. “Though I think she’s mischaracterized a lot of that day.”
“Did you tell Natalie your thoughts?”
“Yes.”
“And then you left?”
“Yes.”
“Looking like you were going to upchuck all over the upholstery?”
“That’s where our recollections differ. Van, the point is Ben wants some shrink walking me around on a leash.”
“Jacqueline wouldn’t be like that,” Van said. She looked at the table like she could see Shauna’s hands fumbling with her shirt underneath. “We were in the same cohort during my doctorate. She’s, like, scary smart.”
“She is?”
“You didn’t think so?”
Shauna nodded slowly. There was a clock above Van’s head— seventeen minutes before Shauna’s class was supposed to start. In fact, she did think Doctor Harris was scary smart. Far smarter than Jackie Taylor had ever been.
“Can’t you just rubber-stamp me?”
“Fuck no. One, then we can’t be friends. Two, this sounds like a genuine concern. No, I get it, Ben has his own motivations for this, but honestly, Shauna? Natalie was a little worried. I don’t think it would be the worst thing in the world for you to talk to someone. I mean talk. ”
“And I’m so good at that.” Shauna slumped back into her seat.
Somehow Van had gotten through her lunch without Shauna noticing. She resealed the Tupperware, slid it into her tote bag, stood and stretched her arms above her shoulders so her Mars Attacks! tee shirt rode up. The tiniest peek of stomach. Shauna stayed in her seat.
“Would it really be so bad to let someone know you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Shauna said, “maybe.”
Two weeks later Shauna was in her office, trying to review Canvas discussion board responses. Every single one of her students was stupid. Too stupid to be worth the measly salary and the tin-can office she turtle-shelled into after classes. She wanted to be distracted.
But she didn’t want the distraction to be Ben Scott opening her door without knocking.
“Shauna, I’m getting antsy.”
“Do you need the number for an exterminator?”
“He got number twelve while we’re sitting here with our thumbs up our asses.”
“Speak for your own thumb. I’m supposed to give you profiles, not find psychopathic needles in haystacks.”
“Then give me a fucking profile, Shauna!” He brought his hand down on her desk, hard, and Shauna stood up.
“Don’t you do that.”
“You’re a big girl, Shauna, you can handle a little tough love.”
“You can do your fucking job,” Shauna said. She had no window in her door but the material was crap, paper-thin, so she hoped someone could hear him losing his mind. “How could this not take time? Seems to me things are moving apace.”
“That’s not going to cut it. Apace. Apace means he’s killing girls, destroying families, violating young women.”
“He doesn’t do that.” Shauna picked up her glasses and slid them on. “Violate them. Unless you forgot to tell me about something, my understanding was that he wasn’t raping any of them.”
“Who knows what he’s doing that doesn’t leave a stain? Sure, he’s not penetrating the bodies but he’s probably whacking off into a napkin while he has them.”
“ That’s your grand theory? He’s a pedophile with a side of dismemberment?”
“Considering you won’t give me anything else, that’s what I’ve got, yeah.”
“He would never do that. It’s disrespectful, it’s disgusting to him. These are his girls. Or, or she’s his girl and they’re all placeholders. He has to treat them kindly.”
“He doesn’t treat them kindly.”
“Eventually his impulses win out. It’s his only outlet. His record’s a hundred percent clean, never any road rage or fights or stolen candy. This was a shock to him too, didn’t start until the daughter hit puberty. No mother in the picture. Uh, he’s well-liked by the people who know him but no close friends. He works for himself. The daughter works there, too.”
“There we go. There we go, Shauna, thank you.”
“I’m completely serious, Ben, if you do that again I’m never coming back. They can kill who they want and you can skip around after them and I’ll just sit in this office. With the door locked. ”
“Toughen up. This is the work we do.”
“Call me when you actually have a lead.”
Ben left with a dirty, mean look and a guarantee that the lead would be coming soon. Like, next week, Shauna. Shauna doubted that— she was sure her information was good, but she was also sure it was too broad to come through that quickly. She pulled her sweater over her head. Her cheeks were radiating heat; she felt sweat pooling between her shoulder blades.
Shauna was not at all surprised to be on a train headed north to Wiskayok, New Jersey a month later. Why wouldn’t it be there?
Ben’s team had done a sweep of non-franchised businesses along the coast, further inland, and finally at the furthest edges of the eastern states. He reported, perversely, a “good feeling” about the three options in Wiskayok: an Italian restaurant, a furniture store, and a dry cleaner’s. The whole team was there, ready to split up and investigate. Shauna noted that Harris was seated in the row closest to the door, alone. She’d put a leather duffel bag on the aisle seat to prevent anyone sitting with her.
They arrived too close to dusk to make good on any of their hunches. Everything would be closed by the time they got there; there was no point in doing anything but heading to the hotel until morning. Shauna was glad to take the offered out— Natalie had called an Uber before the train had rolled to a stop, and Shauna nearly ran to the passenger seat to carpool with her.
It was a surprisingly nice hotel. Fifteen minutes away from even the suburbs of Wiskayok, overlooking cornfields, but for a highway Ramada it was clean, bright, and smelled strongly of boiled linens once she was in Room 513. Shauna pulled off her shoes and pants, set a phone alarm, and slept deeply.
She was roused by a knock on her door. The room was pitch black; her phone, when she tapped it, read 11:12 PM.
Whoever was bothering her at this point would have to live with sweatpants and the smeared mascara Shauna could feel under her eyes. She pulled open the door prepared to curse out her agitator, but it was Natalie.
“Do you have shoes?” she said.
“I have shoes.”
“Put them on,” she said, “we have something.”
Two miles south of their hotel, in a field spiky with six inches of shorn cornstalks, a girl lay flat on a folding card table. Shauna was apparently part of the second wave arriving to view her; police tape had already been looped around a constructed perimeter and teams had raised large light poles blasting the body with LED light.
The card table was square, not long enough to hold her, so her head and legs dangled over the rounded-off edges. Something dripped off the center of the table, black in the overexposed light. Shauna took the gloves Natalie offered and nodded at the PO who parted the tape for her.
They had slashed right through her clothes: the center-table drip was, of course, blood oozing from a slice in her side. Blood also ran down her left leg, three long, thin cuts through the jeans and spilling over her tennis shoe. Her shirt was low-cut. They had cut a strip along her collarbone, making her face a slick red mess as the blood pumped easily out of the nearby heart. Her hair dripped blood, shone with it like henna, but Shauna could tell it was dark brown underneath. Her eyes, partially open and glassy, were a sweet chambray blue.
Gravity pressed hard on her shoulders.
I found her in a Target parking lot in another town. I told her I was her Uber, that the system hadn’t updated with my new car yet. She threatened to give me one star.
I waited until we reached a stop sign in an area without streetlights. I slammed her face against the dashboard so hard that her forehead crumpled inward. She was unconscious if not brain-dead by the time her head ricocheted back.
I steered the car onto the side of the road and shifted into park. I had a card table in the trunk— I dragged her into the field first, then brought the table over. I threw her onto the table still breathing shallowly. I made my incisions quickly and without particular finesse or logic. She must have been truly injured by the impact to her head because she didn’t react beyond an instinctual contraction of the muscles under the skin as it parted. I cut too deep on her left forearm, caught bone. I was curious so I bent her arm— she had to have died by this point— until I saw the beginning of the ulna poke through the slit. I was satisfied.
Shauna walked around the girl’s head— yes. Bone, grisly with whatever else had burst through under the killer’s machinations, poking persistently out.
“Ben,” she said quietly. She assumed he was nearby.
“He knows we’re here.” She heard his voice over her left shoulder.
“No, he doesn’t.” Shauna turned to look at him— he was still wearing the suit he’d rode the train in. His hand was already worrying itself over his beard. “This isn’t him.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, I know. But this is— so wrong. There was no intention beyond finding a girl who matched. They don’t regret doing this to her, they didn’t panic once they’d started. The cuts themselves were fast and precise. They didn’t get swept up in it, they didn’t rush it. They just didn’t bother cleaning up after themselves.”
“So we can swab her down for DNA?”
“You can try. They won’t have left any.”
“Fucking great.” Ben sighed, following Shauna’s eyes to the card table and the game played on it. “The Osprey has an admirer.”
“Maybe. Maybe somebody just wanted to try it out.”
Natalie’s team moved in, Kevyn and Rich producing plastic baggies from thin air. Kevyn raised her broken arm to rest against her stomach. Shauna watched them, feeling stupid and useless next to Ben.
“Do we know her name?” Shauna asked.
“You should avoid stepping that far into it.”
“What, I can close my eyes and watch her die but I can’t memorialize her?”
Ben shifted onto his prosthetic. “Anna Tattersall. Seventeen. Junior at Trenton Central.”
“Anna Tattersall.” Natalie was kneeling by her head, carefully clipping off a section of damp, tacky hair to send back for analysis. Shauna closed her eyes, trying to will an image of the living Anna into her head, but she couldn’t. It was all black.
Shauna made it back to the hotel. Took her pants off again. Put three aspirin in her mouth and held her face under the bathroom faucet to swallow them down. She’d been asleep for two hours when someone knocked on the door again.
She opened the door with her eyes half-open. “Why is it you?”
“Why is it me?” Doctor Harris asked. Her eyebrows drew together, a single honey-blonde line of confusion. She was dressed in wide-legged navy pants and a white cardigan buttoned to the neck with embossed gold buttons. One thin chain with diamond pendant around her neck, two carats in her ears, navy heels Shauna almost didn’t notice because they were dyed satin in an almost invisibly close match with her pants.
Shauna was wearing a GWU GRADS PIE BAKE 2016 tee and a pair of briefs.
“Yes,” she said, doubling down, “why is it you?”
“Instead of Director Scott, you mean. Deposed in court, unfortunately. He’s left his instructions. We’ll be paired off for a little furniture hunting.”
“I need to get dressed. And there’s no way they’re open for another two hours at least,” Shauna said, gesturing at Harris’s watch face pointed to 7:00.
“I thought we could spend the time eating.” Harris hitched up the boxy brown bag on her shoulder.
Shauna stepped aside to let her in. Harris breezed through the doorway, leaving Shauna with the impression of her powdery perfume and her hair wisping past her cheek, and made quick work setting up breakfast. There was a tray table just large enough to balance two glass containers; she positioned it between the desk chair and the armchair. Shauna suspected Harris wasn’t being polite when she took the hard plastic desk chair.
The smell of spiced meat bloomed in the small room, drifting under the bathroom door where Shauna changed. Everything in her duffel now seemed hideous: the thick-knit sweaters, the halfheartedly feminine blouses, the jeans she had to cuff, the one skirt she’d packed as though she was a person who wore skirts. In the end it was a green and navy striped shirt under a Canadian tuxedo. It said, if not style, then I know in the abstract what a good outfit might be.
“You look lovely,” Harris said when she stepped out. Shauna gave a meaningful look to her scuffed Adidas. Harris followed her eyes and then looked back up with that mystifying smile. Stop it, Jackie. Shauna sat in the armchair.
“What is this?”
Harris removed the lids from both containers with a flourish, waving the steam into little curlicues in the air. Shauna looked at the perfect tableau: two precisely equal bowls of fluffy, crayon-yellow eggs dotted with diced sausage and peppers and decorative herbs like inlaid gemstones. Two tin cups of coffee from a thermos, the warm brown of a carefully milked and sugared presentation. Two forks set up opposite each other.
“A protein scramble. I understand there’s continental breakfast downstairs, but I prefer homemade when possible.”
“How the fuck did you cook in a room like this?”
Harris smiled and pressed her fork slowly into the bowl, seizing the eggs fold by fold until she had a delicate bite. “Meal preparation, a cooler bag, and a microwave, Shauna.”
“Oh.” Shauna assembled her own bite. It was shockingly good: buttery eggs with some light, mellow spice, sweet onions, peppers that tasted like the earth itself. And the sausage.
“What is in this?”
“The sausage? Mostly Chinese five spice. Ginger and cinnamon.”
“You never— this is very good. You’re an excellent cook.”
“Thank you, Shauna.”
They ate in silence. Shauna tried to covertly observe Doctor Harris. Her perfect posture relaxed slightly when she ate; she leaned forward as if chasing the bite. But she chewed so deliberately, actually setting her fork down between each one as if delaying the end of the meal. She kept her mouth closed. Her shoulders hunched up ever so slightly. It was the first time Shauna had managed to read anything in Harris’s demeanor, and it scanned as fervency. Harris valued food.
“So we’re checking out the furniture store.”
Harris took another ten seconds— Shauna counted with the ticking of Harris’s watch where it rested on the arm of her chair— to chew and swallow before responding. “Yes. Kevyn and Rich are on their way to the dry cleaner’s and Natalie, I think, will be taking a small team to D’Agostino’s.”
“Makes me jealous of Natalie.”
“Director Scott must put a lot of faith in you to trust that you’ll protect me, if we happen to find our prize.”
“You don’t seem all that helpless to me, Doctor Harris.” Shauna licked the tines of her fork— saffron? “And Ben doesn’t exactly think highly of me. He’s goal-oriented, not a lot of regard for methodology.”
“Director Scott sees you as something fragile. October ice over a warm lake.”
Shauna stared at Harris’s chin. She seemed to mean that unironically. She was stroking one finger over her fork, steadily seeking eye contact.
“How do you see me?” The answer felt incredibly important, like Shauna was picking a number from a cootie catcher Harris held out.
Harris grinned. “You remind me that wolves chose to domesticate themselves.”
Something thudded in Shauna’s chest. An engine turning over, a brick dropped from a great height. She took another bite— the last bite— to give her mouth something to do other than smile. Wolves.
“Your empathy is remarkable as ever, it seems.”
“No,” Shauna said, falling back into the armchair. She crossed her arms tightly under her chest. “That will always be off the table. If this really has to happen then you need to understand right now that you can’t ask about it.”
“Doctor Palmer did let me know you’d been the subject of some scrutiny in the past for it.”
“Your kind always wants to scrutinize me.”
“My kind?”
“Shrinks. You want brain scans and exclusive rights and fucking book deals.”
“Did you ever grant anyone access?”
“Van. Brain scans and a series of interviews. She agreed to only publish posthumously.”
“And yet your relationship with her endures.”
Shauna looked up again. Harris had placed her fork in her empty container and was closing the lid slowly, snap by snap. Shauna imagined it should be meaningful that Harris was, for once, not trying to meet her eye. “We’re friends. Good try, Doctor.”
Harris shrugged. Even that looked like something balletic, something with a French name and its own pedigree. Shauna thought abruptly of the original Jackie Taylor— the hair yellow with Sun-In, the halter top printed with hibiscus flowers, a Playboy bunny suntan tattoo on her hip just over her bikini bottoms, her crooked-tooth smile and the way she liked to sling her arm around Shauna’s waist— and had to take a hasty swallow of coffee to force it away. It burned the sides of her throat as it went down.
“No relationship, then?” Harris must have seen how Shauna had struggled not to cough, how she had fought it for nearly a minute.
“Boy, we’re just running up a list of forbidden topics.”
“How do we become friends if we can’t discuss anything?”
“We’re not friends, Doctor. It wasn’t Jacqueline Harris I was friends with.”
“I misunderstood,” Harris said. She took Shauna’s container and set both gently in their cooler bag. She offered a hand like an olive branch to Shauna. Shauna— a masochist and stubborn— took it. Harris’s hand was thin-fingered but her palm was surprisingly rough. She imagined this was a great anxiety to Harris. The thought failed to bring her pleasure.
“Our history is remote. Quaintly charming. It has no bearing on my life now and I don’t have any interest in reviewing it.”
Harris just smiled— Shauna was probably reading into it when she imagined that voice scraping over a smug You will.
Shauna felt like she needed to be the one to drive them to the furniture store. She wasn’t sure what the parameters of her position were, exactly— she had signed at least an inch of onboarding paperwork and come away with no better understanding of her role, just an AUTHORIZED ACCESS pass to flash and an embossed holster for her gun— but she assumed it was better for the Bureau’s insurance if they didn’t let the unaffiliated psychiatrist clip anyone’s bumper.
Wiskayok looked virtually unchanged. Some of the restaurants had turned over— a Chipotle where an Arby’s had been— and a couple of the banks had installed scrolling LED signs. But altogether it was the Wiskayok that Shauna recalled fleeing at seventeen.
Sadecki Furniture Emporium was a long, blocky tile-and-concrete building pressing itself against the side of the highway out of Wiskayok. Shauna pulled into the lot, a far corner next to the beaten-up Marble & Granite Warehouse next door. Her black SUV rental looked conspicuous in the empty, early-morning lot, but once she’d parked it would’ve looked worse to adjust.
“Are you worried about, um. Recognition?”
Harris shook her head lightly. Her eyes were trained on the sign above the door: SADECKI FURNITURE EMPORIUM in script, with some guy— Sadecki himself?— smiling smarmily out at the highway. “I won’t lie if I see an old friend.”
“Right.”
Shauna pulled open the door and held it for Harris to glide through.
The store was vast. The lights in the vaulted ceiling were weak, casting the labyrinth of model living rooms in half-shadow. It smelled like plastic and aerosol freshener. It was 9:02 a.m. and Shauna and Harris seemed to be alone in the store.
They moved slowly toward the back of the showroom, Shauna drifting her hands over the backs of couches— leather, polyester, chenille, wool— and Harris keeping hers carefully folded in front of her. Shauna felt Harris hovering over her shoulder all the time; she was primed to jump when a door slammed to her right.
A man with a square jaw and an overlong tie dangling over his belt was nearly jogging to get to them. “Hello! Hello! Welcome, sorry I wasn’t there to greet you. I was back there dropping the kids off at the pool, huh?”
“Jesus Christ,” Shauna said quietly. Harris breathed out sharply— nearly a laugh.
“What can I do for you ladies? We’re running a new sale, trying to get 2024 inventory out the door— now hold on. Hold on.” The man was before them now, dragging an offensively musky cloud of cologne, and he put his hands on his hips when he looked at them. “No fucking way. Shippy?”
“ Shippy? ”
“Been a while since you heard that one, right? I remember you! Randy Walsh, hey!” The man— Randy Walsh— held out his hand. Shauna was obligated to take it and swallow her reaction to his damp palm. Please, God, let it be hand soap.
“Randy. How funny. Yeah, Shippy, wow.”
“And your friend, I’m sorry— you look so familiar.”
Harris stepped up beside Shauna. “I’m sorry, Mister Walsh, I’m not sure we’ve met. Doctor Jacqueline Harris. Accompanying Shauna today.”
“Girls’ day. Nice. Well, I’m happy to help you out. Hey, you know who owns this place now? You see the sign out front? Jeff Sadecki.”
“Really.” Now, suddenly, Shauna remembered Jeff Sadecki— football build, handsome, so stupid Shauna thought he must eat bananas with the skins still on. He had asked her on a date once, but Shauna suspected he’d wanted homework help more than anything. Even then it seemed clear that high school would be his peak. Sports, girls, cafeteria pizza. Difficult for things to improve from there.
“Yeah, yeah. He’s not in today, he’s got a plumber or something coming to the house so he’s waiting there. Crazy that we’re the adults now, huh? Selling bunk beds and having kids.”
Shauna looked Randy up and down, subtle as possible. He was unremarkable. If he was dangerous it was for drunk driving, shooting off a cousin’s BB gun, bar fights on Christmas Eve. She was absolutely certain he’d never been married, either— quite likely hadn’t gotten his dick wet since community college. Still, she asked: “Oh, do you have children?”
“Me? No, no, no. Good luck tying this down, am I right, Miss Harris?”
Harris said nothing. Shauna said, “It’s Doctor.”
“Yeah, shit, sorry. Anyway, no, I meant Jeff’s kid. She helps out here sometimes. Kind of a bitch, but, whatever, what fifteen year old girl isn’t a mega bitch? That’s her on the wall. Employee of the month going on, like, nine months straight.”
“You sound a little jealous, Mister Walsh,” Harris said. It could almost sound like teasing, but it wasn’t.
Shauna followed Randy’s pointed finger to the wall behind the reception desk. Yes, there she was: Callista Sadecki, photographed and framed and plaqued with Employee of the Month! She barreled the camera with sharp blue eyes and her dark hair loose and long. She wasn’t smiling.
It seemed too easy, but Shauna knew this was right. She turned around— Harris was watching her. She nodded, cleared her throat, and turned to Randy.
“Do you think Jeff would find it totally weird if I dropped by to say hey?”
Harris slipped past them, murmuring bathroom and walking through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door so smoothly that Randy didn’t think to object. He nodded and pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket.
“That’s him,” he said, handing the scrap over with an address written down in chicken scratch. “You gonna shoot your shot one more time?”
“I don’t really recall shooting any shot with him.” Shauna slid the address into her pocket.
“Right,” Randy said. He winked— kind of fucked it up, squinted both eyes. “Well, you might have luck. Don’t tell him I told you about this, but his wife left him. Like, ten years ago. And he gets the divorce papers, and he’s trying to figure out how to tell his kid, and then the wife just fucking dies. ”
“Wow. Car accident? Home invasion?”
Randy looked at her sideways. Shauna pressed her cards back against her chest.
“Cancer. Kidney, I think— it started in a cyst but then it got into a renal artery and just, like. Kablam. All over. Done in six months.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, and Callie was only five. Maybe six by the time she died.”
Harris emerged from the swinging doors. Her hands flexed at her sides. Shauna watched her, the neutral face, the elegant shoulders.
“Well,” she said. “We should get going.”
“But you were furniture shopping?”
Harris was already walking toward the front doors. Shauna shrugged. “I’ll come back.”
In the car, Shauna drove toward the house without directions. She remembered the curvature of the neighborhoods now— Jeff Sadecki’s daughter could walk to school. Shauna was certain that she never did. She handed Harris the address to hold and asked her to call Ben. They’d go there, ask a couple questions to kill time until Ben could get a team to follow, and wrap it all up by lunch.
Jeff Sadecki’s neighborhood was subpar. The houses were probably all built in a run between the seventies and eighties, that era of tree-uprooting and lawn-spreading that left them with shadeless cul-de-sacs and split-levels. None of the properties had pools or playhouses. Some had hanging plastic pots of flowers, crispy and underwatered like the grass. Most of the pavement was cracked.
Shauna parked them by the curb in front of the Sadecki house. The exterior was half brick, half siding. The walkway was flanked by strips of dirt, fuchsia begonias beginning to slump as they fell out of their prime. The driveway was empty— Shauna expected there was a minivan in the attached garage. The front door, painted a surprising, moody blue, was recessed into a brick alcove. The place looked better maintained than the others on the block, though it only made Shauna think of the obsessive time spent keeping it clean and tidy.
“Are you frightened?” Harris asked.
“No. I used to do this.”
“But you don’t anymore.”
“I remain capable,” Shauna said, hand drifting to the holster on her hip. She was, in fact, a little nervous. She knew she was right about this. She knew this was the house of a man with a hair trigger and a violent pathology, a man who had used knives like spoons on a dozen girls. She was a woman about to walk into the home of a dangerously paternalistic man. She was too old for his tastes, but— the situation merited caution.
She shut the car door quietly; Harris one-upped her by shutting hers silently. They approached the house casually, no swiveling heads, no badges in hands. Shauna knocked on the front door.
There was a crashing of glass just beyond the door— a wooden scraping— more wooden sounds, chairs knocking together— a female voice exclaiming wordlessly, then NO, NO—
Shauna forced the door. It was impulsive, might’ve made things worse, and it absolutely murdered her shoulder, but the frame caved and she was through with a shower of blue splinters. A substantial frame lay face-down in the entryway, scattering mirrored shards around the floor and an overturned hall table. Shauna drew her gun, muzzle pointed down and finger slipping twitchily over the trigger guard, and jerked her head back. Harris needed to stay outside.
Shauna followed the path of destruction and the sounds of a panicked, whispered conversation down the dim hallway. Into the kitchen.
Jeff Sadecki had his back braced against the sink. There was an island, the same light beige as the walls and the cabinetry, loaded down with homework and lunch preparation, between him and Shauna. His face was pale, half-obscured by his daughter’s hair. He had his arm around Callie’s stomach, pressing her flush against him, and her eyes rolled wildly as her pulse fluttered against the knife he held to her throat. Shauna watched one florid bead roll under the blade and soak into the neck of Callie’s shirt.
Words built up under the tent of her soft palate. “Sh— Shauna Shipman, FBI,” she said weakly. The gun was still pointed at the floor. This was so much worse than she’d been expecting. Raise it, he’d react. Move toward him, he’d react. He had already reacted unfavorably to her appearance— he remembered her, impossibly, and his mouth fell open as though she’d betrayed him.
“Please, Jeff, it’s alright. You can let her go.”
He shook his head. She watched him make the decision, digging his face into Callie’s hair as he pressed the knife in and drew it across her throat.
The room burst into color: red across Shauna’s glasses, in her mouth like rare steak, over the cabinets and the fridge, pouring down Callie’s neck and chest as he let her slide down, gagging, to the floor. In the same moment Shauna had the gun raised and her finger on the trigger. One to his forearm as he raised it to block her shot, two and three to his chest when the arm fell down useless, four-five-six-seven-eight all over his torso as Shauna lost herself for a moment.
She was left with two bodies. Jeff had landed sideways, back pressed up against the dishwasher. He smiled at her, really smiled, grinning cheerfully and oozing blood through his teeth. “Now you know,” he breathed, and then it was over.
Callie was gasping, jerking like a fish, and Shauna fell down to try and staunch the blood that continued to leak from her gaping throat. Her hands fluttered around the wound, unsure what to do, if anything could be done. They were knocked aside as Doctor Harris came into view— she knelt behind Callie’s head, carefully lifting Callie into her lap and fitting one hand over Callie’s throat. Shauna, through her numbness, found it remarkable that Harris would ruin her elegant sweater this way.
Calmly, in a gentle and nearly casual tone, Harris said, “Call them, Shauna.”
“Right,” she said. “Right. Right.”
Impossibly soon after, Shauna watched Doctor Harris assist the paramedic team as they lifted Callie’s stretcher into the back of an ambulance. Her body was almost entirely obscured by tubing and bandages; Shauna could barely imagine there was a girl under all of that, clinging to life if not consciousness.
Harris stepped down from the ambulance after Callie had been secured. She looked at Shauna steadily, red up to the elbows and smeared under her chin and streaked through her silky hair, and nodded. Shauna had no clue what that meant.
Shauna didn’t ask Van to cover her classes. She let her phone go dead, paid for another week in the hotel room, and stayed within shouting distance of Callie’s hospital. Van would cover the classes. Or Shauna would get fired. It didn’t seem important just then.
The first two days, she didn’t go to the hospital. She studied WebMD, then the paywalled Mayo Clinic articles, trying to understand what exactly had happened to Callie. She spun out hypotheticals— the depth of the cut, the amount of blood lost. If Harris’s hands had been dirty and infected her as they held together the ragged flaps of her skin. The helpful vultures on Reddit suggested she wouldn’t wake up for three days at the least.
On day three, Shauna took the rental car— certainly overdue now, amassing a bill for the Bureau to whine about— to the hospital. She had reasonable expectations of what she was going to walk into. She imagined crowds of reporters, a federal security detail, and a refusal of entry to Callie’s room.
She was partially correct.
There were a few sleepy-looking photographers sharing a bench outside the entrance to the St. Francis Medical Center ICU. They perked up slightly when Shauna passed them— one looked at her with a squint of burgeoning recognition— but they slouched back, unable to feed a random woman’s appearance to the vultures.
The sucking wind of the sliding doors blew Shauna’s hair back and then pushed it forward into her face. She imagined walking into Callie’s room as she was, disheveled and frumpy, and found that the image was displeasing. Like being a kid and looking at the other girls dressed up for picture day, knowing she’d gotten it wrong once again.
Shauna waved apologetically at the front desk and ducked instead into the ladies’ room. She had a comb… somewhere… in her bag. She was still digging for it when the door opened.
“Agent Shipman.”
“Not Agent,” Shauna said, pleased to finally pull a comb out from under her checkbook and a bottle of ibuprofen. She looked up then— another woman had joined her at the trough sink, watching Shauna in the mirror. Her first thought was that she was disconcertingly beautiful: she had dark, glowing skin, an aquiline nose, and thick hair that curled to her chin. She looked like she should be wearing something jewel-toned in satin, not a gray quarter-zip with MB stitched onto the breast.
“Not Agent,” she repeated. Shauna looked meaningfully at the hand the woman kept in her jacket pocket. She raised her eyes dubiously to her.
“Okay, got me. I’m not trying to spring anything on anyone.” She removed her hand— and the small digital recorder she was holding.
“Oh, fuck me.”
“Not trying to fuck you, not-Agent Shipman. Jessica Roberts.” She offered the hand that wasn’t holding the recorder.
Shauna turned back to the mirror, picking hurriedly through her hair. “I know who you are now. MurderBeat. You came up with that name for Sadecki.”
“I think the Osprey is pretty clever. Picking off girls along the coast, et cetera.”
“You have no context for what happened. No idea what was actually going on in this case.”
“And I hear you’re just the lady to help me understand.”
“Again, Jessica Roberts, fuck me. Or get fucked. I have to go.”
Shauna moved to the exit, but Roberts was faster. She stepped smoothly in front of the door, recorder held more brazenly now.
“Are you seriously obstructing a federal agent right now?”
“But you’re not an agent, I thought.”
“Right,” Shauna said, “I’m not. But I am a consultant on a federal investigation, one which remains active and highly classified, so what you’re doing here is still unbelievably stupid.”
Roberts put her back against the door, perfectly casual. “Do they usually let consultants take killing shots? Or, you know, eight killing shots? I think the coroner decided shot number two did it.”
“You need to let me past.”
“Consultants who failed to pass the FBI’s own entry examinations?”
“I’m serious, Ms. Roberts, now. ”
“And do those consultants usually visit their victims’ orphans?”
Shauna stepped close: close enough to smell the chemical sweetness of Bath and Body Works on Roberts’s neck, to see the flash of a challenge in her eye. “Whatever Jeffrey Sadecki was, he was never a victim. Not ever.”
Roberts stepped aside. “What a soundbite, not-Agent. Thank you so much.”
Shauna grabbed her wrist, brought the recorder up to her mouth. “One more for the road: go fuck yourself.”
She stood outside the bathroom for the four minutes it took for Roberts to pretend to use the toilet and wash her hands and flounce leisurely out into the overcast summer day. Decidedly more shaken but at least with flatter hair, Shauna got directions to Callie’s room. It wasn’t as hard as she’d been thinking: she flashed the AUTHORIZED ACCESS badge and the receptionist, too intimidated or bored to protest, gave her the information.
She struggled to stay still in the elevator— how much of what just happened did she have to tell Ben? Had she just fucked something up?
And then she was on the fifth floor and her worries narrowed to one.
The receptionist hadn’t said Oh, Callie Sadecki? She’s dead. But if Shauna was a receptionist she wouldn’t want to give people the hard news either. So the odds were still even on Shauna arriving at 517 and finding an empty bed in dim lighting. She was at least grateful that nobody seemed to know who she was; she smiled blandly at the nurses at their station, the techs wheeling carts of blood and laptops and bulbous IV bags. Some of them smiled back. Most of them were busy.
Room 517 was down the hallway, just off to the right in an alcove none of the other rooms had. Shauna imagined it was because the room was bigger, a luxury wasted on the comatose. She lingered at the turn— the point where she was still in the hallway, before she could face any undisturbed sheets. There was no security outside the room.
But there was a sound like fabric shifting which attuned Shauna to the hushed whirring of machinery. Neither of those would happen in an empty room.
Shauna turned the corner. The door was propped open, affording a clear view of the windows with their blinds partially drawn, the black TV screen mounted in the corner, and Callie’s bed in the center.
No roommates for Sadecki, Callista— the space where another bed could have fit was occupied by a menagerie of medical equipment, beeping, pumping, pulsing things into and out of Callie’s body lying motionless under perfectly smooth sheets.
She seemed so small in the bed. Shauna looked at the lump of her covered feet, how much space was left between them and the footboard, the tubing weaving over her chest so thickly that they covered her completely, the padded bandages on her neck. Her eyelids flickered— sometimes her mouth twitched— but she was not there.
Shauna drifted past the doorway, then paused. There at Callie’s bedside, invisible from her previous angle, was Doctor Harris. She wore a pale blue linen dress, hem drifting along her calves, and a loose white pullover sweater that pooled at her wrists. She was slouched uncharacteristically in the chair she’d placed at Callie’s side, head tilted to one side so her pristine hair dangled below her diamond-pierced ear. Her eyes were closed, her breathing was slow and deep, and she had nestled one hand, palm-up, underneath Callie’s on the bed.
Shauna stood there, shifting on her feet, before she grabbed the extra chair sitting under the window. She pulled it to Callie’s other side. They could wait for her together.