“Mackenzie McBride.” I said the name out loud. It had been years since I’d so much as thought it, but in the time it had taken to get the assignment from Briggs, grab my go-bag, and get to the plane, it had been playing in my mind on repeat.
Little Mackenzie.
Celine stuck her head into the cockpit to let the pilot know we were ready to go, then took a seat opposite Lia and me. “Who wants to read me in?”
Special Agent Delacroix did more than live up to the title. She embodied it. It was hard to connect her to the poor little rich girl she’d been when we’d first made her acquaintance, but even in a suit, her tone businesslike, I could still see shades of the girl that Celine had been. She was an artist, evident in the calluses on her fingers and the bright print she wore beneath her steel-gray jacket. I gave it fifty-fifty odds that she’d designed the pattern on the silk shirt herself. Her expression was alert—controlled, but with a hint of adrenaline.
She still moved like a dancer or a fighter—or both.
“Mackenzie was a kidnapping victim.” I tried to stick to the facts and not delve down into the emotions I associated with this particular case. “She was six years old when she was taken. By the time we were read in, the case had been cold for months.”
Back in those days, the Naturals program had only allowed us access to cold cases. Mackenzie’s was one of the first we’d solved as a team.
“She wanted to be a veterinarian pop star.” I hadn’t meant to say that, was surprised I even remembered the details after nearly six years and who-knows-how-many cases, active and cold. “Her favorite color was purple.”
“Family lawyer was a lying liar who lied.” Lia picked up where I left off. Back when we’d solved this case, she’d done a good job of pretending that it hadn’t touched her, but nowadays she wasn’t quite so intent on seeming heartless. “He was the one who took Mackenzie, then got off on the press attention surrounding it. He had her for months, hidden away in some back room or godforsaken hole.”
A makeshift shack, I thought, remembering Sloane’s analysis of the property. Four feet by four feet, no windows.
Celine flipped through the file sitting on the table between us. “Mackenzie is how old now?” The plane took off, but I barely felt it. “Twelve?”
When I was twelve years old, my mother had been deemed missing, presumed dead. When Dean was twelve, he’d betrayed his serial killer father, resulting in Daniel Redding’s arrest and the creation of the Naturals program.
When Lia was twelve…
I stopped my thoughts right there. “Mackenzie McBride is twelve years old,” I confirmed. “She lives in Cape Roane, Maine.” If Sloane were here, she would have rattled off every factoid and statistic imaginable about the small coastal town. I cut straight to the chase. “Cape Roane is the home of one of the tallest lighthouses in the United States, and right now…”
You climbed the stairs. You opened the window. You crawled out.…
“Right now,” I managed to continue, “Mackenzie is standing on the edge of that lighthouse, threatening to jump.”
“Unless…” Celine said softly.
Lia finished her sentence for her. “She said she’d jump unless someone called in the FBI—specifically, the agent who found her in that shack.”
Agent Briggs. He was the FBI director now. He couldn’t just run off at a twelve-year-old’s call. Agent Sterling, his wife, hadn’t been part of the team during the Mackenzie McBride case—and she was thirty-six weeks pregnant.
With twins.
That left those of us who’d worked the case behind the scenes. It left me, because I was the one who’d crawled inside Mackenzie’s brain, way back when.
“If her parents and the local authorities hadn’t found her threat credible,” I forced myself to admit, “they wouldn’t have called us.”
“So we’ve got a potential jumper.” Celine was quiet for a moment, and I wondered if she was thinking about the times in her life when she’d taken drastic measures for attention. Because she needed to matter—to be seen and heard.
Is that what this is? I directed my thoughts toward Mackenzie. Are you just trying to make yourself heard?
I’d been taught to profile in first person or second—never in third. But right now, I wasn’t profiling. I didn’t know enough about this Mackenzie to say with any degree of certainty what she did or did not want.
I only knew the child she’d been—and what she’d survived.
You demanded they call us in for a reason. If you really wanted to die—if you were sure—you wouldn’t be up there issuing demands. That was closer to a reasonable conclusion, but I’d been taught early on how easily what you wanted to see could interfere with a profile’s conclusions.
I needed to keep my head clear. I needed to hold off on conclusions. I needed to get to know Mackenzie now.
“We’ll go straight to the lighthouse when we touch down.” Celine wasn’t giving orders so much as thinking out loud.
“Briggs said that the local PD already have a crisis negotiator and a child psychologist out there,” I said.
Child psychologists. Half of my brain was still trying to get acquainted with Mackenzie’s. How many of those have you seen since the kidnapping? How well do you know what to say—or not to say—to convince the shrink du jour that you’re normal?
How long have you known, deep in the recesses of your mind, that normal is a lie?
“Cassie.” Lia had to say my name twice before I tuned back in. “Aren’t you forgetting to read Celine in on one little thing?” She paused, then prompted. “The reason Briggs said that Mackenzie wants to talk to the FBI.”
Oh, right. That.
I answered in one word. “Murder.”