The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2) by Dot Hutchison (3)

The temperature isn’t so much warming as it is getting incrementally less cold. It’s the kind of change you don’t actually notice, because cold is cold until it drops to freezing or climbs to chilly, so does it really matter where in the range it falls? But the numbers insist it really is getting warmer.

Burying her face in the high collar of her coat until her eyes barely show, Mum swears the numbers are lying.

I’ve gotten used to it, though, because of chess and the walks, and a few more explorations with my camera. I’m still layered enough to feel like matryoshka dolls, but it takes longer for the tip of my nose to go numb. I wrap myself around Mum’s arm, leaning into her to give her whatever warmth I can share.

“Remind me why I’m doing this?” she asks, voice muffled by her scarf.

“Because it was your idea?”

“Well that’s stupid. You know better, why didn’t you stop me?”

“If I know better, why do I do this multiple times a week?”

“Fair point. We’re both idiots.” She dances in place as we wait for the crosswalk to flash go, making me sway with her. “I miss green things, Priya-love.”

“I offered to get you a plant.”

“If it’s made of fabric or plastic, it isn’t a plant.” She looks down at her heavy gloves and sighs. “I need dirt under my nails again.”

“We’ll stock up on seeds for France.” On second thought . . . “After we check and make sure we’re legally able to carry seeds into foreign countries.”

“That’s a silly law.”

“Invasive species, Mum. It’s a very real problem.”

“Marigolds are a problem?”

“Marigolds are always a problem.”

We stop at the grassy island in the middle of the parking lot. The pavilion is still there, one side rolled up and lashed. Probably so horny teens and twenty-somethings can’t crawl under and make use of privacy. The space heaters are gone, though, and the little generator they all plug in to. It’s a Sunday afternoon, so none of the vets are there.

“You sit out here in this weather?” Mum asks incredulously. “You don’t even like getting dressed.”

“Pajamas are clothes.”

“For going out of the house?”

“Well, no, but that’s not about the clothing, that’s about the people.”

“Oh, my dear antisocial girl.”

“I’m not antisocial; I’m anti-stupid.”

“Same thing.”

“How are you in Human Resources?”

“I lie well.”

I don’t tell Mum stories about chess because at her most supportive, she has exactly zero interest in the game. I keep her updated when and where I’m going, and that’s about the extent of that topic of conversation.

I have told her about Landon, given that he’s still following me into Starbucks. Not out of it, at least, which is something. I suspect she told Eddison about Landon, because I got a text asking if blue is actually my favorite color or if I simply felt it was representative, which would normally be weird except that it was followed by him making sure I was still right-handed. I told him sunshine yellow, not because it is, but because I’d really love to see him try to find a bright yellow Taser.

“I think my nipples are about to freeze off.”

Snickering, I pull Mum down the grass and aim us at the storefronts. “Come on, then. Food.”

After lunch, we head over to Kroger to pick up a few things. She’s considering making a treat to take into the office for her minions, which is fine so long as it’s nothing that requires the oven, mixing bowls, measuring cups, or tins.

Chavi and I were always close with Mum. There was a line there, firmly drawn, between friend and Mum, and if a situation ever neared the line, she was always going to come down on the Mum side. But up until that line, she could be—and was, and is—both. After Chavi, or maybe more importantly after Dad, the line shifted a little bit. It’s still there, still as firmly drawn and nonnegotiable as ever, but there’s a lot more territory where she’s as much friend and sister and instigator. I don’t think Vic believes me half the time when I swear my mother is the biggest reason I get in trouble at school. He likes to say it’s her influence, not her.

I know better. At least seven times out of ten, it is literally my mother at the school, raising hell. I’m usually willing to let insults slide; Mum isn’t, especially if the insults come from teachers.

But at the end of the day, one of my absolute favorite things about Mum is—

“Two ladies as beautiful as you should be smiling!”

“A man as interfering as you should go fuck himself!”

—she doesn’t tolerate bullshit. Not from anybody else, and not from herself. It’s not about being an asshole, though she can be if she thinks it’s the right response, but about being honest.

Mum is the biggest reason I can say I’m broken, and the reason I know that’s okay.

We pick up Oreos, sugar, cream cheese, chocolate chips, heavy cream, and parchment paper, then decide okay, we can buy one new mixing bowl without feeling stupid for not digging out our own, and then compromise further and pick out an enormous popcorn bowl with a lines-and-dots color scheme designed by someone who was clearly tripping. It is the ugliest goddamn bowl we have ever owned, and I’m including the handmade day-camp ceramics in there.

It is kind of amazing.

We get more milk, too, even though we’re going to regret it as soon as we start walking.

Mum complains the entire way home, putting the whine in her voice that always reduces me to giggles and coming up with more and more ridiculous things to say. I think I was eight the first time she did that, when we were at a restaurant and listening to a monstrous little darling having a meltdown. Dad made some comment about the girl’s parents needing to exhibit better control of her, and Mum went to town with the fake whines, until Dad finally gave up and ordered a drink.

Their marriage didn’t always work, but even when it did, it was always a mystery as to how.

The mailbox—because neither of us felt like going out to check it yesterday—is mostly junk, but it has a large envelope of paperwork from the school I’ll be attending in Paris, plus a normal-size envelope from Inara. I shove that one into my pocket to read later. I haven’t mentioned the letters to Mum yet, because she would probably tell Eddison, and that would give him a solid shove in the direction of a breakdown.

When he said a couple of Butterflies would destroy the world rather than be destroyed, I’m comfortable assuming Inara is one of them.

“Priya, look.”

Mum and I both stop short on our walk up, staring at the front step. There’s a bouquet of jonquils there, wrapped in spring-green tissue. They’re a mix of types, some of them yellow straight through, others yellow-throated with white petals like a fan behind. They’re tied with a bit of white curling ribbon near the base, a looser sheer white ribbon in a large bow up where the bouquet gains some width. There looks to be a half-dozen stalks, but multiple blooms add some size.

It’s not the first time flowers have just shown up at our door. After Chavi died, our step used to be full of them. Everybody brought flowers and food. As if we could ever eat that much food before it went bad. Most of the flowers we just threw out, because even with the few we kept, the scents got so heavy and they clashed and it got hard to breathe. Harder. It was always hard to breathe, those first few weeks. The perfumed air made it worse.

It’s been about a year, though. The last time we got surprise flowers, it was in Omaha, and someone in Mum’s office there found out about Chavi. That person was very quickly dissuaded from discussing it with anyone, least of all me or Mum. But the only person here I’ve told is Gunny, and he doesn’t have my address. Wouldn’t send flowers anyway, I don’t think. Before that was . . . San Diego. There were jonquils then, too.

“Mum, wait.”

She pauses in reaching forward for it, her eyebrows lifting when I pull my phone out of my pocket. “Seriously?”

“Humor me.”

She rocks back on her feet, making a go-ahead motion with the bag of milk.

The groceries get carefully placed on the walk. I drag off one of my gloves so I can take several pictures before crouching down next to the bouquet. There’s a card threaded between some of the stems. Almost a card; it’s nothing more than a small sort-of rectangle of white card stock, poorly cut. I yank it out with my hand still gloved. All it says is Priya. The ink is bright blue. The handwriting doesn’t look familiar, but it’s indented slightly into the card stock and has the kind of glisten I usually associate with cheap pens, the kind you get three bucks a dozen on the expectation that they’ll be lost or stolen.

There’s no delivery tag. When florists deliver flowers, there’s some kind of card or tag from the florist with the delivery instructions. That’s how we identified the sender in Omaha.

I take some more pictures, holding the card in front of the bouquet, then scoop up the flowers and groceries. Mum still looks bemused until we get to the kitchen and I can show her the card.

Then her face goes very still, everything tucked away until she decides what she thinks about it. “So he’s here.”

“Maybe,” I murmur. “We’ve gotten jonquils before.”

“Yes, in San Diego,” she replies, one eyebrow tilted. “I’m sure you remember what else happened in San Diego.”

I give her a nasty look.

She just shrugs. Mum saves tact for work, and even then only when she absolutely has to. She doesn’t much bother with it in her personal life.

“We got them in Boston, too,” I remind her. “Once Chavi was connected to the other cases, we got a slew of the earlier flowers.”

“So you think it’s a murder groupie.”

“I think we have to concede the possibility.”

She frowns at the flowers as I dump them, wrapping and all, into the sink. “Do we tell the Quantico Three?”

“Is there something to tell them yet?” I rub my thumb along the edge of the phone, trying to think my way through the options. Just like in chess, you can’t think only of the move you’re making. You have to think three, five, eight moves ahead, to place each play within the context of the full game. “We don’t know that it means anything.”

“Could it be Landon?”

“Maybe? I guess the jonquils could be a coincidence.”

“That would stretch the definition, wouldn’t it?”

“Your daughter was murdered by a serial killer less than a mile from home.”

“Point,” she sighs. She starts putting away groceries, giving herself the chance to think. Mum is nearly never without something to say, but if she has the chance to consider things first, she’ll always take it. “Tell Eddison,” she says when everything is either put away or stacked next to the stove for us to use. “Stalker or killer, the FBI will have to get involved anyway. If they’re here from the beginning, so much the better.”

I lean into her, using her shoulder as a pillow, and wait.

“If it is him,” she says, “if he really has found you again . . . it’s one thing to leave it unresolved when it’s out of our hands.”

“What makes you think it’s in our hands now?”

“I don’t think it is, yet, but if it is him, this is our chance. We’re more likely to succeed if the Bureau’s in the loop. Partial loop,” she corrects herself. “I’m quite sure they don’t need to know everything.”

That’s because Mum’s idea of resolution is seeing the bastard who killed Chavi dead at her feet. Mine usually involves hearing you’re under arrest, followed by a recitation of Miranda rights.

Usually.

A certain awareness of the other cases was inescapable, partly due to the questions the FBI asked us about Chavi and partly because the media seemed to insist we had to know. For a while, we didn’t want to know more.

Then San Diego happened.

I supposed we could have maintained ignorance, but at that point, it seemed not just stupid but actively harmful. So Mum and I researched the other murders, painstakingly sorting out what was true from the theories of the armchair detectives or fans.

It wasn’t that we were hiding what we’d learned from our agents; it was more that . . . well. They’ve always been so careful in their questioning not to give us the weight of those other deaths. Chavi was ours to carry, but it’s so easy in a serial case to feel like you have to hold the entire string of victims to your heart. It’s easy to feel guilty for the deaths that happen after your loved one’s—we got cards from the families of Zoraida Bourret, Mandy Perkins, and Kiersten Knowles when Chavi’s murder hit the national news—and there’s this sense, irrational but strong, of Why couldn’t I provide the information to catch him? It’s not so much What did I do that my daughter/sister got murdered for it? as it is What did I do wrong that he wasn’t stopped?

Guilt doesn’t have to make sense; it just is.

I carry the names of those other victims, but it’s not from guilt. From sorrow, usually, and from rage. Our agents tried to protect us from the extra wounds that come with serial cases, but it isn’t their fault we’re broken people who don’t always react the way we’re expected to.

“How are you going to play it?” Mum asks.

“It doesn’t really matter what kind of flower it is; the fact that whoever delivered them knows where we live is problematic.”

“So you’re telling the truth. Novel way to go about it.”

Only Mum would consider sharing a fraction of the available information to be telling the truth.

I pull up the clearest of the photos, with both the flowers and the card, and text it to Eddison along with These were at the door when we got home from errands.

When there’s no immediate response, Mum and I both go get changed and come back to the kitchen to start the Oreo truffles. About an hour later, as we’re on the couch waiting for things to chill enough for the next step, my special Eddison-only ringtone goes off. “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett; it felt appropriate.

“Hey.”

“Are those jonquils?” he asks, sounding out of breath.

With a glance at Mum, I put the phone on speaker. “Yes, yes they are. Is that important?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re panting.”

“I was out running. Has anyone sent you jonquils before?”

He’s got the Agent tone in his voice, the one that says to let him ask his questions before I try to get clarification. I don’t always like that tone, but I get why it’s important.

“San Diego and Boston.”

“Did you get any other flowers in San Diego?”

Mum and I trade looks. “Yes. I can’t recall what they were, though.”

Mum’s eyebrows inch toward her hairline, but she doesn’t contradict me. I’ve never outright lied to Eddison before; I don’t think I like it.

“Would you have written about it to Chavi?”

“Yes, but I’d have to dig through the journals to find which one they’re in.”

“When you get a chance, do that, please. And there was no delivery tag?”

“Just the bit of card stock. I still had my glove on,” I add.

“I’m going to send someone out from the Denver office to pick the flowers up, just in case. You didn’t throw them out, right?”

“No, they’re in the sink.”

“Is the sink wet?”

Mum snorts. “Please. Like we do dishes.”

There’s a short pause that I think is Eddison trying to decide whether or not he should respond to that. He doesn’t; it’s probably the right choice. “How long do you think it would take you to find the right journal?”

“I don’t know. We’ve got boxes and boxes of journals, and they’re not in any sort of order.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Chavi and I read back through them from time to time, so they got put back very haphazardly. There were some we liked to keep closer than others. I still do.”

Bless his compulsive heart, I think I just broke him, if the very long silence is any indication. I’ve seen his desk—seen Mercedes’s and Vic’s desks, too—and while the boxes may not be quite the breed of hell that Mercedes engenders, it must be close. “Try to find it quickly,” he says finally. “If you can send a list of the flowers you received before back with the agent, that would be helpful. Otherwise just get it to me as soon as you can.”

“Going to tell us what this is now?”

“Five years ago, you said you didn’t want to know about the other cases. Still true?”

Mum’s hand wraps around my ankle, squeezing a little too hard. I don’t tell her to let go.

I’m not sure why I’m hesitating, except that I’m worried telling him a little bit may translate to telling him everything, and there are things he really doesn’t need to know. There are things Mum and I need to figure out, plans we need to make, and we thought we’d have more time.

We expected something to happen—maybe hoped for it—but we didn’t expect it to be this soon after we moved.

“Let me talk to Vic,” Eddison says when I’ve been silent for a little too long. “He needs to know about this new development anyway. You think about it, tell me when you’re ready. If you decide you want to know, we’re doing this in person. Nonnegotiable.”

“Understood,” I whisper, playing up the scared little girl I should be. Would be, maybe, if I were a little smarter.

“As soon as I have the name of the agent they’re sending out, I’ll text it to you. Make them show their credentials. And find that journal.”

“We thought it was a boy in San Diego,” I tell him, hating how small my voice sounds. “I was tutoring someone, and he had a bit of a crush, and we thought he was being creepy-sweet. He said he wasn’t, but we didn’t think it could be anyone else, and they stopped when we moved. We didn’t think it was important, or connected, or—”

“Priya, I’m not accusing you of anything.” His voice is soft, gentle in a way he swears he’s not capable of being. “You didn’t have any reason to know it could be something. But I am very glad you told me about this. I need to call Vic and the Denver office. I’m going to text you that name, okay? And I’ll call you later tonight?”

“Okay. Yes.”

The call ends, and for a while, Mum and I stay on the couch, staring at the phone, Leonardo DiCaprio drowning in the background movie. Then Mum shakes her head, hair sliding out of her loose braid to frame her face. “It’s just about time to make a decision, Priya-love. In the meantime, let’s haul those boxes down and start getting them organized. They’ll need the dates of delivery, at the very least, if they don’t just ask for copies of the entries.”

“What do you think I should do?”

Mum’s silent for a long time. Then she gets off the couch, pulls me up after her, and hugs me so hard we’re rocking in place just to keep breathing. “I am never going to make that decision for you. You are my daughter, and I will always be your sounding board and give you advice, but I can’t just tell you what to do. Not like that. You are your own person, and you have to make the choice you can live with.”

“I think we need to know exactly what this is before we decide. There’s too many other things the flowers could be.”

“Then we’ll wait.” She kisses my cheek, almost by my ear. “We’ll gather all the information we can, and make a decision then.”

There are all kinds of stalkers; the fact that I’m sort of hoping this is a murderous one disturbs me in ways I can’t even name.

He can feel Vic’s eyes on him, heavy and concerned and thoughtful and just a little bit amused. No matter how grave the situation, Vic always seems to be entertained by Eddison’s pacing.

But then, Vic’s never seen himself go completely still when an important piece of information shifts into place, or almost does. Vic goes still, Eddison paces.

Ramirez taps her pen against the table in a frantic tattoo that starts pounding directly into his goddamn brain.

He pivots a little too hard when he reaches the wall, sees Ramirez cringe and carefully set her pen down beside her legal pad. Later, he’ll feel bad about whatever expression he must be wearing. He might even apologize. For now, he’s just grateful that the sound has stopped.

They’re all up in the conference room, waiting to hear back from the Denver office. Eddison is still in the sweat-stained tee and track pants, his windbreaker thrown over the back of a chair. Vic is in jeans, more casual than usual, but traded out his paint-spattered flannel for a clean polo within minutes of arriving at the office. Ramirez . . .

Hell, he’ll really feel bad for her later, because she was very clearly on a date, even if it was the middle of the afternoon when Vic called her. She must have curled her hair, because he can see the natural wave fighting against the neat spirals, and she’s wearing a dress and the spiky kind of heels she doesn’t ever wear to the office even if it’s just supposed to be a paperwork-and-phone kind of day. She hasn’t complained, though, hasn’t made a single mention of having to ditch her date in the middle for what may be Eddison overreacting.

Please let him be overreacting.

The phone console in the middle of the table rings shrilly, and Vic leans over to stab at the speaker button. “Hanoverian.”

“Vic, it’s Finney. They’re okay. Little shaken, maybe a little pissed if I was reading it right, but okay.”

All three let out a breath. Of course they’re okay. It isn’t a threat yet, just the possibility of one.

And it is not at all surprising that, having had time to think on it, one or both of the Sravasti women might be pissed.

“What’s it looking like?” Vic asks a moment later. He’s the one who actually knows Finney, who is, in fact, his former partner. Eddison hadn’t realized it, but as soon as the Sravastis knew they were relocating to Huntington, Vic had briefed Takashi Finnegan on the case, just so there’d be someone close enough to help if it came down to it.

Clearly, neither of them expected it to come down to it.

“The card is clean for prints. Same with the outside of the tissue paper,” the other agent reports. “Now that it’s to the lab, they’ll unwrap it and check more. The flowers could have come from anywhere, unfortunately: florist, grocery store, private greenhouse, different city, who knows. Check your email for a picture of her journals.”

Ramirez reaches out to spin her laptop around toward Vic so he can sign in. Eddison stalks around the table to lean over. “Holy shit, she wasn’t kidding,” he mutters once the picture loads.

He’s pretty sure he’s never seen so many composition books in one place in his life.

“Those are just hers,” Finney says, and even Vic chokes a little on that one. “They’ve got the sister’s stacked off to the side.”

“So you don’t have the list of other flowers she received,” Vic surmises.

“No, but she’s getting the journals in order. Not even sure how. Every notebook looks different, and no labels I saw. No dates, either, except for the beginning of each year.”

“Not each notebook?”

“Each year.”

“Can we set up a camera for their front door?” Ramirez asks. Her fingers touch the pen, but then she looks at Eddison and puts her hand in her lap.

“Ms. Sravasti is going to put in a request. Her company owns the house and makes it available as a short-term residence, so she has to get permission to make changes. In the meantime, there is a basic windows-and-door alarm system in place, and they’ll start using that.”

“Start?” Vic echoes with a frown.

“It’s a low-crime area; most folks feel safe enough with just locks. One of my agents commutes from Huntington; I’ll have him introduce himself to the Sravastis and check in on them. If they get approval for the camera, he can help them install it.”

Vic coughs into his hand. “Be very careful how you phrase that offer with Deshani.”

“Already offered,” chuckles Finney. “Archer worked as Geek Squad all through college; he can get things installed and set up before most people can finish reading the instructions. You told me yourself the Sravastis have been through hell and are still standing. I’m not going to assume they’re anything less than capable.” Over the line, the Quantico agents can hear the click of tapping on a keyboard, the ding of a computer registering new emails. “Next time she’s at chess, Priya’s going to try to get a picture of the guy who’s been creeping on her. We’ll run it as soon as she gets it to us. Hopefully we can get a last name and some background on him.”

“See if he’s been anywhere near San Diego?” Vic asks dryly, and Finney wheezes a laugh.

“Exactly. Your ladies have cool heads; I’m impressed.”

Vic smiles and shakes his head. “They won’t start the fire, but they’ll dance around it if it will keep them warm.”

“Deshani would start the fire,” Eddison and Ramirez correct in unison.

Their partner’s indignation is drowned out by another wheezy laugh from the speaker. “You know, I got that impression. Terrifying woman, and she knows it.”

Scrubbing his hands over his face, Eddison finally sinks down into a chair. His skin itches, sweat from his run long dried into salty, irritating streaks.

“There is something else you need to be aware of,” Finney says more seriously.

Vic groans. “Nothing good has ever followed that sentence.”

“Of course not; that’s why I use it as a warning.” The speaker crackles with the sound of shuffling papers.

“Out with it, Finney.”

“I was able to get the ball rolling today because it’s a Sunday and I didn’t ask for permission, but I’m going to catch hell for it, and we’re going to hit some blocks moving forward.”

“Why?”

“Did I happen to mention we got a new section chief a few months back?”

“What does—”

“It’s Martha Ward.”

“Shit.”

Eddison and Ramirez both stare at their senior partner. It’s very rare to hear Vic swear, even at work; he mostly stopped when his daughters got old enough to innocently repeat interesting words.

“All right,” Vic sighs. “I’ll talk to our chief, see if there’s any push we can give on this.”

“You think it’ll accomplish anything?”

Vic hesitates.

“I’ll keep you updated,” Finney says. “Good luck.”

The call ends, and all three sit for a time in the strange silence that follows. Finally, Ramirez picks up her pen and does something complicated that somehow ends with her hair twirled and pinned mostly neatly on the back of her head, the pen cap sticking out like an ornament. “Martha Ward?” she asks delicately.

Vic nods.

“So . . . why is she an obstacle? I mean, her reputation says she’s pretty much a badass.”

“Hard-ass,” Vic corrects. “Martha Ward is a hard-ass, who regards profiling as a religion and refuses to accept any deviations. The pattern is paramount.”

Eddison’s the one to connect the dots, muttering curses under his breath until Ramirez launches a dry-erase marker at him. “Our killer has never sent flowers to a girl before he kills her; Priya getting a delivery is a deviation from the pattern. Ward’s not going to be easily convinced that it’s our killer.”

Vic nods again, his expression grim. “Fourteen years ago, Finney and I were pursuing some missing kids in Minnesota. Different ages, boys and girls, but they all had brown hair and brown eyes and light-colored skin. Only three had been found.”

“Dead?”

“Wrapped in heavy-duty plastic, then in blankets, and partially buried. They were curled on their sides, like they were sleeping, and small stuffed animals were tucked in with them.”

“Remorse?” asks Ramirez.

“That’s what we figured. Our initial theory, because all the kids looked alike and were apparently being kept for some time, was that our kidnapper was trying to create a family. That kind of profile leans slightly more female, but not enough to make assumptions.”

“Ward insisted on gendering the profile?”

“Not exactly; she was on a completely different case in roughly the same area. Light-skinned brunettes in their thirties were going missing, one at a time, and showing up dead, dumped in or near construction sites.”

“They were connected, right? They have to be connected.”

Ramirez, for all she’s been through in her life, is still an optimist. Eddison is not. “Ward wouldn’t investigate the possibility,” he guesses, fairly confident he’s right. “You had to go over her head?”

“We didn’t have a choice.” Settling back into the padded chair, Vic frowns at the memory. “She insisted the cases had nothing to do with each other. Our subject was obviously female where hers was male; kids versus adult women; entirely different causes of death and postmortem rituals.”

“The kids who died were accidents, but he was auditioning the women, wasn’t he? Trying to find the perfect mother for his perfect family.” Ramirez sighs at Vic’s nod. “So the best way to find him is to investigate the overlap.”

“While we argued with Ward, another woman turned up dead, and another went missing. Two kids were taken, and a different one was found. Finney and I went up the chain of command, got approval to take her case, and solved it. What we didn’t take into account was that our boss’s boss was good friends with Ward. When she got put on desk duty pending a case audit, he promoted her. Finney was transferred to Denver, and three days later, Eddison came out of the academy with a chip on his shoulder and my name on his papers.”

Eddison refuses to give Vic the satisfaction of seeing him blush. “So you’re saying I was punishment?”

“Not at all; you were already assigned to us. Finney getting transferred was the punishment. Ward’s politically savvy with great connections, so she keeps advancing, but if she can make our lives hell, she will. Finney getting her as section chief is very bad luck.”

“So she’ll punish Priya just to make things difficult for you.”

“Truth be told, she won’t give a shit about Priya; Ward has all the empathy of a dead fish.”

Ramirez tilts her head to one side. “Ward versus Deshani: who wins?”

Vic blinks, thinks about it, then shudders.

Anything that can make Victor Hanoverian cringe is something Eddison never wants to see.

The stack of multicolored folders is on the table near Ramirez’s laptop, ready for fresh notations. Next to it, an empty folder sits and waits. Pretty soon there’ll be a name on the label, probably Vic’s writing because Ramirez’s is a little too pretty for labels and Eddison’s requires a minute to decipher.

PRIYA SRAVASTI.

He wonders if it’s an accident that the folder is blue.

None of them are red, but Chavi’s is a bright yellow, and that makes him think of the Taser and whether or not Priya’s screwing with him on the color and the heels of his hands dig into his eyes as if the pressure could just drag all his thoughts to a stop. Just for a breath, even, because he stopped running hours ago but still feels like he’s panting.

When he pulls his hands away and looks up, Vic’s watching him. “We’ll make sure your schedule is flexible.”

“How do I tell her that the people responsible for protecting her are getting blocked by politics?”

“Just like that, at a guess.”

“She’s going to be pissed.”

“Good. If she and Deshani get angry enough, maybe they can push the case to Ward’s boss.”

He can still remember the first time he met Priya, how relieved he was at her fury, that it meant she was that much less likely to cry, because he stopped being good with weeping girls the first time he was faced with one who wasn’t Faith. But it’s been five years since they met, and while pissed-off Priya is a decidedly entertaining thing to watch, he doesn’t want that fury to focus. Not when he knows what it takes for her to flare from irritation (default) to rage (exhausting). Not when he knows how badly she comes down from that kind of anger, how fragile it can make her and how long it can last.

He promised her he’d never lie, not even to make her feel better, and she said she didn’t want to know anything about any of the other girls, but somewhere along the way, honoring that request started to feel like a lie. Two years ago, it started to feel like lying, but he kept his silence, because she didn’t want to know and he didn’t want to scare her, not when some of that anger had finally started seeping away.

Vic’s battered loafers nudge his ankle. “She’ll be okay. She always is.”

But he knows better than Vic what Priya struggles with when she tries to make sense out of all of this, when she tries to frame her sister’s murder into a bigger picture. Because Vic already had so much to worry about, and Eddison not enough, so he’s kept that secret for Priya and Deshani, and has never mentioned the food binges that leave the girl sweating and vomiting on the bathroom floor because her sister is gone—just gone—and there will never be a way to make sense of that.

When Faith got taken, he started smoking, not in spite of the surgeon general’s warning but because of it, because he knew it was slowly killing him and that made more sense. He didn’t try to stop until a couple of years after Vic took him under his wing, didn’t actually stop until Priya wrinkled her nose and told him he smelled worse than the boys’ locker room at her school.

Somewhere in asking her how she knew what the boys’ room smelled like, he’d forgotten to finish reaching for the cigarette. It’s still there sometimes, the gesture, the need, sometimes even the cigarette, but it isn’t the same as it was. Maybe because of Priya. More likely, because once he saw the impulse manifested in someone else, it didn’t bring the same comfort. So still because of Priya.

This time it’s Ramirez who kicks him—gently, because the pointed toe of her monstrous heels hurts like a bitch when she puts a swing behind it—and nods. The pen shifts, but doesn’t let go of her hair. “No matter how many times they break, they always put each other back together. Deshani’s there to catch the pieces if she falls apart.”

What was it Vic told him, back in November? Some people stay broken, others put themselves back together with all the sharp bits showing?

He’d meant Inara, but it served just as well.

Taking a deep breath, he pulls his phone out of his windbreaker pocket and opens her message thread. No Oreos, okay? Try?

Less than a minute later, he gets back We smashed all of them up to make truffles. Better/worse? And I’ll try.

It shouldn’t even surprise him that his phone buzzes again a minute later, this time from Deshani’s number. I’ll keep an ear out; her room is snack-free, so I’ll hear her on the stairs if she gets itchy.

And she will, because she’ll probably be sitting on the floor of her bedroom, back against the door, and listening through the night to hear the creak of stairs or shuffle of carpet. Deshani is probably what God had in mind when he made mothers so fiercely protective.

“In Colorado, it’s illegal for anyone under the age of eighteen to have or use a stun gun,” he says finally, and both partners give him the slightly jaundiced look that comes of really not trusting where this is going. “She’s already got pepper spray, so what’s the next best thing we can give her?”

“Baseball bat?” suggests Ramirez.

Vic pinches the bridge of his nose and slowly shakes his head.

Her name is Libba Laughran, and the first time you see her, her multi-layered prom dress is hiked up enough to show the shoulders of the boy with his face between her thighs. She’s sitting on the hood of a car, one hand holding up her skirts, the other in his hair, throaty cries filling the night as if they’re not right out in the open, as if no one could possibly hear and come investigate.

Her dress is so bright a pink it nearly glows in the night, but on the wrist of the hand in his hair, you can see a corsage with a white carnation, the edges of the petals deep red like they’ve been dipped in blood.

You see her holding his hand at church, their bodies an appropriate distance from each other but their hands always reaching out to the other whenever one steps away. You see them at the movies, walking to and from school.

Fucking each other in the hammock in her backyard and laughing each time they nearly fall out of it.

They love each other, you think, at least as much as they can understand it when they’re so young. They whisper to each other, end every phone call and conversation with it. Neither of them even seems to notice anyone else.

There’s something to that, maybe, but it’s not going to save her. This isn’t a thing that good girls do, no matter how in love they might be. It isn’t respectful, it isn’t right. She’s young, so it’s understandable, but you can’t let it go unremarked. You can’t let her friends think this is forgivable, acceptable.

It isn’t until they’re caught—her mother comes home several hours earlier than expected, when they’re still naked and involved with each other in the backyard—that you realize just how young she is.

Fourteen years old, and already a harlot.

Her mother is weeping as she chases the half-dressed boy through the yard and away from their property, ignoring her daughter crying behind her. You lean against the other side of the fence and listen to the mother’s lecture, all the ways she and her husband taught their daughter better than this.

You’re not surprised when Libba sneaks out of the house that night to go find the boy she loves.

You’re not surprised when she fights you, because she’s clearly a girl who goes after what she wants, and she wants that boy, she wants to live.

You just can’t let that happen.

This boy may treat her gently, but she’s too young to know what men will do, so you have to show her.

You have to show her all she’ll ever be to men when she stops being a good girl. It’s not something she can get back, after all.

You start to leave her there, on the church floor, but she’s only fourteen. So you drape her rags back around her, enough to cover the important bits, and lay the carnations over the cloth.

White, tipped in red that bleeds down through the petal veins into the heart.

You remember.

Mum shoos me up to bed around one. I sit on my bed, shadows dancing across the walls from the flickering light of the electric tea candle in front of Chavi’s picture. It’s the same one we have downstairs, though this frame is made out of chips of colored glass and sweeps of metal. It’s the same ring of yellow silk chrysanthemums.

My current journal is in the nightstand drawer, a pen hooked to the front cover. It’s decorated with what is, quite frankly, a profoundly disturbing collage of battered stone president heads, all but one pictures from the day trip Mum and I took with Eddison back when we lived in D.C. The exception is tiny, almost invisible in the gap between Kennedy and Taft, a little blue lizard with a placard gripped in its mouth, roman numerals on the little grey square. That lizard appears on all my journals, somewhere. Sometimes on the outside of a cover, sometimes on the inside, sometimes just tucked into a margin on one of the pages.

Chavi’s journals would be easy to put in order, because she was more consistent. The bottom left corner of the inside front cover always had a drawing of me, holding a date. It might be a picture of a page-a-day calendar, or a monthly calendar with one box circled, or a representative doodle for holidays. Each notebook started with the next day of the year. All you have to do to put them in order is look inside the front cover at the calendar.

Chavi was almost to August.

I am never going to fall asleep.

I wait until Mum is probably—hopefully—sleeping across the hall, then ease down the stairs. There’s one three-quarters of the way down that will creak unless you step just to the left of center, but the next one you have to step all the way to the right or it’ll groan. I grab hold of the railing and skip both.

The candle in front of Chavi is dark. The last one to bed blows it out so we don’t accidentally burn the house down. I want to—maybe need to—relight it. I don’t, though. There’s enough light bleeding in through the glass in the front door to make the picture visible, even if not clear. The streetlight, pale and somewhat yellowed, stretches up the walls and along the side of the stairs. It breaks at the hall ceiling, arcing up at strange angles to play along the banister for the landing.

A car drives by outside, shifting the light, and for the second before I can close my eyes, the shadows make it look like something is swaying from the banister.

My heart thumps painfully, and I duck my head as I walk down the hall to the living room. Something brushes my shoulder and I flinch, then call myself ten kinds of idiot when I realize it’s just my hair. We checked every inch of the house, then armed the alarm. There’s no one here but me and Mum. I can list reasons why it’s okay to be this jumpy. I can name them, and naming is supposed to help, but somewhere between wondering who’s dead and if someone is watching the house, there’s a memory that’s a little too present tonight.

When my dad hanged himself from the banister of the house in St. Louis two days before the first anniversary of Chavi’s death, his feet didn’t brush my shoulder. I didn’t get close enough to find out if they would.

I walked home from school, unlocked the front door, and before I could even bend down to kiss Chavi’s frame, I saw him. I stopped and looked up at him, but he’d been there a couple of hours maybe. He was definitely dead. I didn’t have to touch him to check. He’d bought the rope a few weeks ago so we could put up the hammock, only the hammock had never gone up.

I didn’t scream.

I’m still not sure why, but I remember standing there, looking up at my dead father, and just feeling . . . tired. Numb, maybe.

I walked back outside, locked the door, and called Mum, listened to her use her work cell to call the police as she raced home to me. She got there before the cops did, but didn’t go inside to look. We just sat together on the front step until the officers got there, followed by the ambulance that was probably protocol but also very unnecessary.

I was still holding the mail, including the brightly colored envelopes that had my birthday cards from the Quantico Three. They’d arrived exactly on time.

We stayed in a hotel that night, and we had just settled into bed, knowing we wouldn’t sleep, when there was a knock on the door. It was Vic, holding a bag with long-sleeved FBI shirts and fleecy pajama pants, a CVS bag of nonhotel toiletries, and a half gallon of ice cream.

I’d known Vic almost a year at that point, and already respected him, but what made me love him a little was that he didn’t tell me happy birthday. He didn’t even mention it, or the cards. Even though it was clearly a suicide, he still came out to Missouri to talk to us, to make sure we would be okay, and he never once asked us how we were feeling.

It was almost three o’clock before he left to go find his own room somewhere, but he pulled one more thing out of the bag and handed it to me. It was ungainly wrapped in a brown paper grocery bag, but when I opened it up after he left, Oreos spilled out onto the bed, twelve zipped sandwich baggies with three cookies each, and a day and date on each bag in Eddison’s spiky writing.

Acknowledging the need, rationing the impulse.

It was the day I fell a little in love with Eddison, too, as family, as a friend. Because the Oreos admitted I wasn’t okay, and the rationing said I was going to be.

There are no pictures of Dad on display, not the way we have Chavi still with us. That Chavi didn’t choose to leave is part of it, but more than that . . . if Dad had needed to leave, even if he thought suicide was the only thing that could give him relief, Mum would have understood. However their marriage did and did not work, it allowed for that, at least.

But Dad killed himself in a way that would guarantee I would be the one to find him. We’d only been in St. Louis a few months, and I’d very purposefully not joined any clubs or anything that would keep me late at school. Mum wouldn’t get home from work until the evening, so barring catastrophe, there was never a way I wouldn’t be the one to see him first.

Almost anything else Mum could have forgiven and mourned, but she’d never forgive him for making me find him.

I honestly don’t think he thought about it. Don’t think he could have thought about it by that point. Probably the only thing he was capable of thinking about by then was that he couldn’t use one of the trees out back, or a neighbor might see and cut him down before he died, save him somehow when he didn’t think there was anything to save. In my heart of hearts, I firmly believe he was so focused on making sure he wouldn’t be found that it didn’t occur to him that at some point, he would be.

That will never matter to Mum.

The pictures of him weren’t burned, they’re just not out. Carefully packed away, preserved, because someday I’ll want them even if Mum never looks at them again.

We called his family, that next day. When we left London, Mum and Dad cut ties with both families. Or maybe they left London because they cut ties. I’ve never been entirely sure what happened, only that neither of them liked speaking of it, so I have no idea how many cousins I have anymore. They left family, and religion, and maybe faith in its way, and the first time we talked to my grandparents since leaving was to tell them that Chavi had been murdered.

They blamed my parents for taking us away, for taking us to America, the land of guns and violence, and somehow it didn’t matter to them that she’d been killed with a knife in a neighborhood a hell of a lot safer than the one we’d lived in in London, it was my parents’ fault for leaving.

We didn’t talk to them again for a year, and then it was to tell them about Dad, and again somehow it was our fault. If Mum hadn’t taken him away from his family, he would have had the support he needed. If Mum wasn’t a heathen, he would have had the comfort he needed. Mum hung up before Dad’s mother could really get going. They needed to know he’d died, so she told them, and that was as far as she was willing to take things. We have, in theory, this massive family, but in reality it’s only me and Mum and the bit of Chavi we keep with us.

Like the little over two hundred notebooks filled with her large, loopy handwriting, stacked off to one side of the living room like a broken mountain.

If I can’t sleep, I should be productive and sort through my journals, find the ones from San Diego, but I can’t do it without turning the light on. It’s too late (or too early) for light that harsh and there isn’t an outlet close enough to the pile of notebooks for me to drag the table lamp over.

When I walk into the kitchen and flick on the soft, muted light over the stove, the bags of chocolate chips are still plopped on the counter. In the fridge, fake trays of cardboard covered in parchment paper hold small, lumpy balls of crushed Oreos, cream cheese, and sugar. Grabbing the cartons of heavy cream, I dump them into the one pot we keep out and set the burner to medium-low. Cream heats slowly, and you have to be careful not to boil it or it gets gross. When the little bubbles start flocking along the sides, I stir in some sugar, then drop in the chocolate and cover the mess, turning off the heat to let the cream melt the chips on its own.

The trays line up neatly on the counter, along with the box of toothpicks. I open the box so I can stick a pick into each ball, but my hands are shaking. I stare at them for a minute, trying to figure out if I’m pissed off, scared, or tired.

Or, you know, all three, because fuck.

But the answer really seems to be: need. Because I know what happened in San Diego, and what happened after we left; because patterns rarely repeat by accident; because Dad gave up and I’m not as strong as Mum . . . because Chavi’s death is a pain that does not, cannot, make sense, and I have trays full of ways to make it feel a little more real.

I pull the cover off the pot and stir it all together. As I use the toothpicks to roll the Oreo balls in the chocolate, my hands are still shaking. My stomach is still cramping with need. It doesn’t matter that I know it’ll make me sick, that the concrete pain doesn’t actually make the emotional pain any better. It doesn’t matter that I’ve learned again and again and again that it doesn’t help.

It just matters that it feels like it should.

When all the balls are covered in chocolate, I shove the trays back into the fridge to cool and set. I wish fridge doors could slam. It would feel satisfying, wouldn’t it, to know that at least for the moment, I haven’t given in to that?

Mum’s leaning against the doorway into the hall. The way her weight is slouched against the frame, her throat bared because her temple rests against the wood, tells me she’s been watching me for a while. “How much chocolate is left?” she asks, voice husky and a little thick.

“Some. Not a lot.”

“We’ve got a couple of bananas.” She shifts slightly, her toes curling away from the cold tile. “Mushier than you like, but not bruised yet.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

So that’s how we end up sitting on the floor of the living room dipping bananas into the pot of chocolate, a dozen or so fat white candles covering the various tables. I can’t magically make more bananas appear when the two and a half bananas are gone, and Mum takes the pot to the sink before I can think of looking for something else to dip in there.

“I was kind of expecting there’d be a dent in the truffles,” she says when she comes back, sinking gracefully to the carpet.

“You’d have stopped me after a few.”

“Yes. But I didn’t have to.”

“It doesn’t help.”

“When has that ever mattered, when you wanted it to help so badly?”

I don’t really have an answer for that—it’s not like it isn’t something I think every goddamn time—so I snag the edges of the bottom notebook and pull the closest stack in front of me. I find the lizard clinging to a leg of the Eiffel Tower and show it to her. “Split out anything from one-forty to one-eighty, just in case. That’s at least fewer to page through.”

“You came up with this when you were five?” she mutters.

“Nine. I had them covered in gift-wrap before that, but I redid all of the early ones when I decided I liked the lizards.”

By the time she goes upstairs to get ready for work, we’ve got the five and a half months of San Diego split out for me to read through. Mum being Mum, I have a feeling her next project is going to be putting the rest of the notebooks in order so they can be boxed up properly. Keeping them out won’t drive her up the wall quite as much as it would Eddison, but she doesn’t have much use for looking back.

I spend the rest of the morning logged into my virtual school trying to focus on schoolwork. I don’t have much mind for it, but in the Skype session with the instructor, I must look like hell, because she forgives me for it. She tells me not to worry about checking in until Wednesday, and if I need extra time just tell her, and everyday kindness feels so strange after the last twenty-four hours and I’m not even sure if I can put a finger on why.

But by eleven, I’ve done as much as I’m going to do, so I throw the journals in the backpack I haven’t used in months, carefully check over my nice camera and settle it in its case in the bag, and head out to chess. My pepper spray is a comforting weight in my pocket.

I don’t really expect anything to happen. Jonquils . . . those are an opening gambit. There’s time, as strange as that sounds. In chess, the fastest possible victory with resignation or forfeit is called a Fool’s Mate. It takes only two moves per player, but—and here’s the thing—it relies on White being extraordinarily stupid.

A reasonably stupid man might avoid detection if every murder is in a different jurisdiction, but this case has been in the hands of the FBI for seven years now; remaining uncaught all this time hints at someone not just patient, but smart.

The most interesting chess games are between opponents who know each other well. They know what the other is likely to do and try to prevent it at the same time they try to advance their own gambit. Every move requires both players to completely reassess the board, like a twelve-by-twelve Rubik’s Cube. I don’t know who killed my sister, but I know a fair amount about him. His murders tell a story.

He doesn’t repeat flowers, and he doesn’t taunt.

Whatever the jonquils mean—if they are from the killer—it’s only an opening move.

If they’re not from the killer . . . whoever it is already knows where I live. Trying to make myself a prisoner in my own house won’t make me any safer than continuing to go out.

I remind myself of that during the walk. I even mostly believe it.

Corgi’s out in the parking lot when I arrive, walking toward the pavilion with two cups of coffee in his hand. Not the Starbucks kind, just the crappy free shit the grocery store gives out in tiny Styrofoam cups for the seniors. He startles when he sees me, almost spilling the coffee over his gloves. “Jesus wept, Blue Girl, had a night?”

“That’s what we’re calling it,” I agree. “Looks that bad?”

“I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley.” He gives me a head-to-toe once-over, then nods and sips from one of the cups. “Maybe not a lit one, neither.”

“How ’bout a parking lot?”

“I hear us soldiers are brave, or used to be.” He grins at me, and he really does have a nose out of a hobbit movie, but his eyes are clear. I’ve seen him after a bad day, and the week that follows. He’s doing okay.

Everyone’s there, including a very hungover Happy. Rather than take a seat, I clear my throat. “Does anyone mind if I take some pictures?”

The men look at each other blankly, then back at me.

“I take photos. It’s kind of what I want to do for a living. If it’s okay with all of you, I’d really like to get some pictures to keep once we move. Not posed or anything, because that’s awkward, but just . . . all of you. As you.”

Happy stares mournfully into his coffee, as if the answers to the universe are in there somewhere but fucked if he can muster the energy to find them. “You would pick today,” he sighs.

“Not just today. Sometimes.”

“Take your pictures, Blue Girl,” says Pierce, setting up his pieces. “Today you’re like to set fire to the board, you stare at it too long.”

I watch the games for a while, my camera still in its case in my bag, letting them get back to normal. It’s not at all uncommon for someone to not be able to focus on a game, to prowl around the tables and sort of keep an eye on all the matches in progress, or if someone has a doctor’s appointment or something and we have an odd number. It doesn’t take them long to settle in.

When I pull out the camera and look through the viewer, the world seems to sharpen. Focus. Not that terrible things aren’t still out there, or even in here, but there’s a glass barrier between all of that and me.

It’s like I’ve forgotten how to breathe, and someone just poked me in the ribs to make me suck in air.

I take shots in both black and white and color, making especially sure to catch some good, clear angles on Landon. The only last name I know is Gunny’s, and there’s really not a way to ask around without being very weird.

Things seem more obvious behind the camera. Like the way Corgi keeps one eye on the game and the other on Happy. The way Yelp’s hands are shaking and his eyes are shadowed, and the way Jorge watches him without seeming to. Jorge usually moves lightning fast, slamming his pieces against the board and pulling his hand back like he’s about to get shot, but today he moves slowly, sliding the pieces so the felt bottoms stay in contact with the polished wood. Nothing sudden, nothing sharp. When Phillip reaches out to capture Steven’s bishop, his sleeve rides up, showing the monorail track of stitches over a long-ago wound, just a thick, pale line with dots running to either side.

Gunny looks even older, if such a thing is possible. The soft folds of skin look deeper, the scar tissue around his temple more stretched. I get a few shots of Hannah, too, both when she’s up to check on her grandfather and when she’s back in the car with her knitting. She’s got a stack of knit baby blankets on the backseat; when I ask her about it, she says she gives them to the local hospital, for the neonatal ward. So every baby goes home with a good blanket. It’s the first time I’ve ever asked her what she spends so much time knitting, because it’s always seemed like a strange question to ask, but I love the thought of it, someone brand new and innocent going home in something made with love.

Eventually I head inside to get a drink. For the first time, I actually take it to a table and sit down. They have a new kind of cookie that smells amazing, and I haven’t eaten since the bananas, but I’m not going to, not until Mum is there and I know she’ll tell me to stop if I go too far. I’m still a little too fragile from last night (this morning?) to trust myself.

I’m barely seated, the notebooks in a stack at my elbow, when I see Landon walk in and look around. Fuck. He’s obnoxious enough when I can just walk past him, but if I’m an easy target?

“Do you mind if I join you?”

I glance up to find Joshua standing almost behind me, his eyes on Landon. He was already at a table when I came in, nose buried in a new hardcover and apparently oblivious to the world. We’ve chatted, occasionally, when we’ve crossed paths. He’s nice enough, never pushy or inappropriate. I don’t really want the company today, but . . . I really don’t want Landon’s company. “Sure.”

He sits down across from me at the four-seater, giving me space, and drops his coat into the chair next to him. I shift mine from the table to the last chair. Oh look, no more room. I eye him warily, not sure if I’m up for casual conversation, but he just opens to his bookmark, wraps his hand around his drink, and goes back to reading.

All right then.

Landon sits down a few tables away, with a battered, coverless paperback that’s either the same one he was reading a month ago or one that’s been similarly mistreated. I’m constitutionally incapable of trusting people who treat their books that badly. But he opens the pages, and aside from looking over at me a bit too much, he seems to be stationary, so I lay my keys in easy reach on the table, the trigger for the pepper spray nice and accessible, and open the first notebook.

The thing about the journals is that there is nothing consistent about them. I write almost every day, but not every day, and the entries could be anything from all is well, nothing to report to pages of infodump. The first time Dad grounded Chavi (for holding hands with a boy in the couples’ skate during her eighth-grade field trip to the roller rink) she went off on an epic rant that took her fourteen hours and a little over half the notebook to get down. We both used it for whatever was on our minds, whatever that might be, so there are drawings and photos and maps, phone numbers or addresses or even shopping lists, to-do lists, test review, all mixed in with the actual commentary of what we were doing or how we were feeling on any given day. It’s possible to skim the entries, but with how quickly thought can jump without any kind of break or segue or warning, it’s not possible to do so quickly.

As I dive into the entries I remember how, against all odds, and entirely in spite of myself, I was actually kind of happy in San Diego. I had friends there.

Well.

I had a friend there, and others I was friendly with.

The flowers started in March, just like now, with a bundle of jonquils, but I had no context for them. No reason to think it wasn’t the boy I was tutoring, who blushed every time I looked at him and could never talk above a whisper. They were just flowers; it was just a boy who might have been sweet if he’d given me the flowers directly instead of putting them at my door.

After the jonquils came calla lilies, then a crown of baby’s breath, a wreath of honeysuckle, sprays of freesia. The last one was a bouquet of carnations, the white ones with the red tips that look like they’re bleeding. There are pictures tucked in there, the pages fluffed around them.

The carnations arrived two days before the movers did, and the next week we were in Washington, D.C.

A week after that, I no longer had a friend in San Diego. The Quantico Three asked me new rounds of questions, looked at me with new shadows in their eyes, and I decided I could research the other deaths myself, rather than ask anything of my agents that would make those shadows deeper. Eddison asked me if I wanted context for their questions, and I said no.

He looked so relieved.

Reading how happy I was in San Diego hurts, because it was an anomaly. It hurts, and it pisses me off, and I’ve been so angry since Chavi died, and I just . . .

I want . . .

I am so fucking tired.

I close the last notebook, scrub at my face as if I can peel away the layers of rage and grief. Joshua is long gone, but so is Landon, thankfully. There’s a little folded note where Joshua was sitting, though, with the same phone number that was on the card he gave me a few weeks ago. His friend’s shuttle service.

I toss the note, because I still have the card in my wallet. It’s a nice gesture for him to make, and he isn’t being pushy about it. I just don’t want to use the service.

The walk home is freezing, and gets even colder as the last bits of sunset give way to full dark. Mum will probably arrive not long after I do. To keep my mind on something other than the cold, I go over my to-do list for the night: scan the photos from the journals, upload the ones from chess, and pass them along to the agents.

There’s nothing on the front step. I want that to be a good thing.

I’m not sure I know how to recognize a good thing anymore.

He’s never really thought about it, Ramirez’s teasing being a part of the team dynamic nearly since she joined, but he actually misses it when she’s being sensitive.

Because Eddison knows it’s ridiculous that he’s got his personal cell in or near his hand at all times, that he flinches every time any phone around him rings. He knows he’s twitchier than a long-tailed cat on the front porch of a Cracker Barrel, and it would actually be refreshing for his partner to needle him a little for it.

But of course, she knows why he’s twitchy. She agrees with it. So she won’t mock him for it, even if he sort of needs it (and how fucked up is that?), because it’s probably taking all her restraint not to tap her pen straight through her damn desk.

She’s off at lunch right now, an apology sort-of date with the gal from Counterterrorism she had to abandon on Sunday, and Vic is being silent support for Danelle as she goes through her newest round of interviews with the DA’s office. Danelle is fairly stable, all things considered, practical enough to acknowledge the nightmare she’s in, just optimistic enough to wait it out and hope for better.

His work cell goes off, and he flinches, checks his personal phone even though he knows by the ring it’s the official one. He frowns at the name on the display. “Hello, Inara.”

“Eddison. Vic still with Danelle?”

“Yes. What’s up?”

“Bliss and I aren’t coming down this weekend like we’d planned.” Under her voice, he can hear wind and car horns, the sounds of the city. She must be out on her fire escape, or maybe on the roof. Outside, anyway, and he’s not surprised she took the conversation away from her roommates. “I left a voice mail for Hanoverian, but he doesn’t immediately check his personal one if there isn’t a second call.”

“Something came up?”

“Sort of. Bliss is having A Day.”

There’s a snarled “Fuck you!” in the background, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to ask how that’s different from any other day, but he’s growing. Or something.

“Any particular reason?”

“Some. Her parents are pushing for her to come visit. They don’t like that she’s not ready.”

Bliss was missing for two and a half years. One year into that, her entire family moved when her father was offered a teaching position in Paris. As difficult as it is for the other girls to settle into families that never gave up, how much harder to reforge connections with the family that moved on?

“And they keep calling her Chelsea,” she continues after a moment, and he can hear Bliss’s swearing getting distant, softer.

“It’s her name,” he feels obliged to point out.

“It isn’t. Call me Maya, I won’t even blink. Call me Samira, I’ll cut you.”

He laughs in spite of himself, not because he thinks she’s joking, but because she’s absolutely serious. She spent years making sure Samira Grantaire didn’t mean anything, the ghost of a little girl left behind long before she was physically abandoned. Inara is the name she chose, Maya the name she accepted because the Gardener gave it to her and she wanted to live, and she’s too pragmatic to stumble over a thing like survival. Maya may be a scar, the ink on her back, but Samira is, in some ways, the wound that can only heal if it’s never, ever mentioned.

He clears his throat to get rid of the last of the laugh. “But she doesn’t want to go by Bliss forever, surely?”

“Not especially. For now she thinks it’s funny. She’s got a list of possibilities.”

“Any contenders?”

“I’m rooting for Victoria, myself,” she says blandly. “Think Vic will be flattered?”

Eddison chokes, and then gives up and laughs again. Vic would be flattered, is the thing, but it would never be less than hilarious. “Jesus.”

“So Bliss is feeling fragile, which means she shouldn’t be around breakable people.”

“I know you and your roommates have unique definitions of breakable when it comes to each other, but is it a good idea to stay in?”

“No, which is why we’re going to get a hotel for a couple of days. We already had the nights off from work. She can rant and rave, and not have to feel guilty about shredding innocent people.”

“I’m not sure we count as innocent. Or breakable.”

“Vic’s daughters are, and she would never forgive herself for hurting them.” Her voice is soft, probably too quiet for Bliss to pick up. “I know his girls are strong. We both know that. But they are innocent, despite his work, and it’s . . . it’s a bad idea.”

“What else is going on?” he asks, and receives a sour noise in response. Not that he’s often perceptive, but Inara always seems to hold a grudge when he manages it. “What else is setting her off?”

There’s a long silence, made staticky by wind and the distant sound of Bliss’s cursing, but that’s okay. Eddison may not be the most patient person in the Bureau, but he does know how to wait when he’s sure there’s an answer on the other end of it.

When Inara finally answers, her voice is pained, the words slow and reluctant. “I got another letter from Desmond.”

“A letter from—wait, another?”

“This is the fourth one. They come to the restaurant, and the return address is his lawyer’s office. I guess that explains how he knows where I work.”

“What is he saying?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t opened them.” She sighs. “I have them. I’ll give them over. I really did mean to tell you guys at the first one, but that was when Ravenna had her meltdown with her mother, and I forgot. Then the second one, and I meant to, I did.”

“But you’re used to keeping secrets.” He’s actually rather proud of himself, how evenly and neutral and nonjudgmental that came out. It might even sound supportive.

“The third one came once Amiko’s suicide hit the news.”

“Her you call by her birth name.”

“Her I saw safely lowered into the ground.” It makes more of a difference than it probably should, but he’s sure as shit not going to argue with her about it.

“And now a fourth one.”

“The envelopes are thick. They don’t feel like there’s anything but paper, but it feels like a lot of paper.”

In the least complicated sense of things—and since when has that been his life?—Desmond MacIntosh shouldn’t be contacting Inara because he’s a defendant and she’s a witness and a victim kidnapped by his father.

“If I give the New York office a heads-up, can you drop off the letters before you hole up in the hotel?”

Anyone who hasn’t danced with her in an interrogation room probably wouldn’t catch the hesitation before she says yes.

“Get out to a beach, if you don’t have a place already,” he suggests. “It’s not warm enough for tourists yet. Might help.”

“Yeah?”

“Wide open, wild. Endless expanse.”

She hums thoughtfully, and he knows she’s picking up on all the layers in the words: because the Garden was contained, perfectly manicured and maintained, artificial, but the ocean is untamed, big enough to make you feel tiny, and completely itself. There’s no façade, no mask, no glitter.

It just is, and he thinks Bliss isn’t the only one who’ll find it soothing.

Even if neither she nor Inara will admit to it later.

“I’ll let Vic know about the change of plans,” he tells her, rather than make her commit one way or the other to the idea.

“Text me the name of the agent you talk to,” she says. “I’ll ask for them.”

He hesitates before signing off, because shit, this really isn’t his thing. “If you need anything . . .”

“Why, Eddison, are you going soft? What a terrifying thought.”

Maybe it shouldn’t be comforting, but it is.

She’ll be okay. Bliss will be okay.

Someday.

When I’m leaving the house for chess on Thursday and find the bundle of purple-throated calla lilies on the step, I realize that whatever Mum and I are trying to achieve in Huntington, it’s going to be more complicated than we’d originally planned for. I take the pictures, check the card—just Priya again—and leave them there for the police or the agents or whoever gets sent out in response to my text to Eddison and the email to Agent Finnegan. After giving myself five minutes to wrestle with the decision—mostly to make sure I’ll be able to live with it afterward—I send a second text to Eddison.

Tell me the rest.

If the rest of the game is going to play out, there’s not a way to avoid it. I have no doubt he’ll limit what he tells us, and Mum and I can pretend ignorance to the rest. No one has to give away any secrets yet.

Life did not use to be this complicated.

Ten minutes later, I get a reply with a time and a flight number, which I forward on to Mum. She’ll offer to pick him up, he’ll refuse because he doesn’t do well as a passenger unless it’s Vic driving, and he’ll probably get to Huntington about an hour before she does.

Which still leaves me with most of a day to fill, and a little too much fury to risk going to chess.

Another few minutes, and my phone dings with an email from Agent Finnegan with the names of the two agents he’s sending out to pick up the flowers. It should take about an hour from Denver.

They pull in forty minutes later, lights flashing from their black SUV. I’m in the kitchen, sitting in the little nook at the window and poking a spoon into a bowl of congealed oatmeal. As you do. The agents are young, probably not long out of the academy, one of them a pretty blonde who’ll have to fight tooth and nail to ever get respected in her field, the other a broad-shouldered black man with shoulders that suggest he got a football ride through college.

“Priya Sravasti?” the man calls through the front door after knocking. “I’m Agent Archer, this is Agent Sterling. Agent Finnegan sent us.”

Through the window, I can see Sterling already crouching by the lilies, blue neoprene gloves on her hands.

I check the email with the names again, then head to the door. “You guys make good time.”

Agent Archer smiles, warm and easy but still professional. “Finney—Agent Finnegan—told us he’d consider it a personal favor if we took up as little of your day as possible.”

Vic has some good friends, I think.

Archer asks me a few questions—did I touch the flowers, did I see or hear anyone, do I feel safe staying on my own?—all things that I already sent in the email to Finney, but more than most people, I suppose, I understand that this is the job, even when it seems a little redundant. So I answer patiently, even when he purposefully repeats himself to see if my answer changes or if I remember something new.

As we talk, Sterling examines the bouquet carefully, making sure not to dislodge anything in the wrapping. The tissue paper is that same cheerful spring green, the color sharp, and the folds are still visible from the packaging. When she’s seen as much as can be seen without unwrapping it, she lowers the bouquet gently into a large plastic bag and tapes it shut. Her writing across the bag and seal is a little rough, awkward where the plastic pleats. It seems like it would be easier to label it before the bag is sealed.

Then again, they probably have to guarantee that what’s on the label is what’s in the bag, which is harder to do if it’s prelabeled.

Sterling takes the bagged bouquet to their car and puts it in a lockbox in the trunk. Then she pulls out a stepladder and a pair of toolboxes.

I look at Archer.

He smiles again and tucks his small notebook into his coat pocket. “Finney said your mother’s company approved the cameras; we’ll get them set up while we’re here.”

“Boxes are in there,” I tell him, pointing at the coat closet. “They’re a brand your Agent Finnegan recommended.”

“Front and back, any other doors?”

“No.”

I walk Sterling through the house to the back door. Mum and I honestly kind of forgot there was a back door until Finnegan asked to check if any flowers were there. There weren’t, and the fence makes that yard a little difficult to get to discreetly, but it makes more sense to have a camera there than not.

Just in case.

From her toolbox, Sterling pulls a rolled-up kit that hooks neatly over the door like a wreath hanger. It has all sorts of pockets on it, so all her tools are in easy reach when she’s up on the stepladder. It’s kind of genius, really.

Archer, however, does not have one, so I shrug into my coat and join him on the front step, and when he points to a thing, I hand it to him. Our kitchen stepstool is sturdy enough for me and Mum, but it creaks under the agent whenever he shifts his weight.

“I studied your sister’s case at the academy,” he says after a while, the wires for the camera tangled through his fingers.

I should probably respond, at least make some kind of polite acknowledgment.

I don’t.

He doesn’t seem put off by that. “They have us go through some open unsolveds, so we know before we get to the field that we can’t settle every case. Hand me those pliers, please? The needle-nose?”

I do.

“You must really miss your sister.”

“It’s not something I like to discuss.”

His hands still. “I guess not,” he mutters. For a while he works in silence. One of the neighbors across the street waves as she hauls her twin toddlers to her van. I wave back, even though she isn’t looking anymore, because one of the boys is. Archer clears his throat. “I’m sorry.”

“For?”

“It was inappropriate of me to get personal. I was just trying to make conversation.”

“Conversation is the weather, Agent Archer, or traffic. Spring training. I don’t really need to know that you’ve probably seen naked photos of my dead sister.” I watch the van pull out of the drive. The other twin presses his face against the window in an unsuccessful raspberry; I give him a little wave all his own. “I’m aware the academy uses the case as a teaching tool; Agent Hanoverian warned us a few years ago.”

“But you gave permission, or your mother did.”

“We didn’t. We weren’t asked. The FBI is allowed to use its own cases to train new agents; they don’t have to have permission from victims or families. Let me guess: you found the case fascinating and you’re grateful for the chance to work on it?”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t be grateful. That means being glad terrible things are happening.”

“Hanoverian lectures at the academy from time to time. He’s pretty big on gratitude.” He points at an Allen wrench, so I hand it to him.

“Do you listen to what he’s grateful for?”

“Finney didn’t tell us you were feisty.”

I eye the stepstool, then decide there’s no way to kick it out from under him without risking injury to myself. Vic would be disappointed if I broke an agent; Eddison would be pissed if I broke myself. “I’m going to check on Sterling.”

When I carefully open the back door, Sterling glances at me and shakes her head. “I told him not to bring it up.”

“So you studied it too?”

“When I was in middle school, my best friend and I walked home one day to find her father getting arrested for a series of murders. What he did to those women . . . the day we studied him, I went home and spent the rest of the night throwing up, because I used to spend the night at his house once or twice a week. I’ve never told her.”

“Why not?” Would it make a difference, coming from a friend?

“It shaped her life enough; why should I add to it?” Dusting her hands, she unhooks her kit and steps down the ladder. “I’d guess you already live your sister’s case every day. Do you need me to talk to him?”

“Not this time. We’ll see if it happens again.”

I appreciate it, though, that she’s willing. She looks young, probably not long out of the academy, and taking a senior partner to task can’t be easy.

“Let’s make sure your computer can communicate with the cameras, and then we’ll be out of your hair.” With a small, sideways kind of smile, she hands me a business card. “That has my cell and email, if you need something and Finney’s busy.”

“We’re going to get along just fine, Agent Sterling.”

Archer’s the one who actually gets everything linked up, but Sterling shows me how to scan through and isolate time stamps, and how to grab a screenshot from the stream and attach it directly to email without having to save it first. Once I show her I’m comfortable with it, they gear up to go.

“You know,” Archer says abruptly, as Sterling gets the tools back in the SUV, “if you’re going to hide your head in the sand about the other cases, you should be grateful other people have studied them. The Bureau’s not up in arms just because someone sent you flowers. They have meaning.”

“No one’s sending me flowers,” I tell him, aware of Sterling’s watchful eye. “They’re delivering them to my door. If I didn’t think that meant something, I would never have mentioned them.”

They pull out of the drive a little after noon. Eddison isn’t going to be here until six or so, depending on traffic out of Denver, which gives me a lot of time and not enough schoolwork or focus to fill it.

Here’s the thing about purple-throated calla lilies: the second known victim, Zoraida Bourret, had them framing her head like the arch in a Mucha print. Her crossed hands kept a single lily clasped to her sternum.

Every victim has a flower, and it has a meaning, something that ties it to the girl in the killer’s mind. Two days before she died, Chavi wore a crown of silk chrysanthemums, and when I found her, there were real ones through her hair. Easter morning, when Zoraida helped corral her younger brothers and sisters for a family photo, she wore a single calla lily as a corsage on her white Easter dress.

I don’t know what the flowers mean to the bastard, but I do know that Eddison wouldn’t be so scared if any other families got deliveries like this. Whether this is a fan or the killer, it’s meant for me.

That’s something Archer in his I-studied-the-case-so-I-must-be-an-expert arrogance probably doesn’t get.

Eddison does; I can’t help but wonder if he’ll mention it.

I heat up a can of soup for lunch and pour it into a travel mug. A lady in Starbucks last week was telling her phone really loudly about the new stained-glass windows her church just put in and how beautiful they are. At the time, I didn’t particularly appreciate having to listen to the conversation; I might be a little good with it now. Investigating the windows sounds like a perfect way to fill these hours.

Jonquils followed by calla lilies. It’s hard to call something a sequence with only two entries on the list, but so far it follows the order of the murders, and it follows the order of the deliveries in San Diego. No one starts a pattern with the intent of abandoning it partway through; if something’s going to happen to me, it won’t be until the flowers run out. I’m safe enough for now, even in churches.

With my camera bag over one shoulder, I pull up the address on my phone and start walking, sipping every so often at the soup. I finish lunch before I reach the church, a yellow-faced monstrosity that cannot possibly be the right place. It’s one of those churches that sacrificed character for size, large and looming and more than a bit soulless. I’m not Christian—I’m not really anything—but growing up beside the little grey stone church in Boston gave me certain opinions of what the buildings ought to feel like.

There are windows in the building, tall and narrow and completely colorless. What the hell was that lady talking about then?

I stand for a bit in the parking lot, the temperature fairly comfortable in the midtwenties, and shit, what is wrong with me that I now find that comfortable?

“You lost, honey?” calls a woman leaning against a side door, pale smoke curling upward from the cigarette in one hand.

“Maybe,” I answer, walking up to her. “I heard someone talking about new windows, and—”

“Oh, that’s over in the chapel.” She waves her hand, accidentally trailing the smoke into my face. “Here, I’ll show you. One of the church founders got pissy when they put up the new building, so he bequeathed money that could only go into making a traditional chapel. He didn’t like the way the church was modernizing.”

The woman leads me through what can only be called a complex of buildings, all faced in that ugly yellow stone, but over the curve of the parking lot, and after a grassy stretch, there’s a little red-brick building tucked up against the woods, and holy hell, there’s probably as much glass as brick, if not more.

The woman smiles at me, or at my awestruck expression, and flaps her hand toward the door. “It’s unlocked, honey. Take as much time as you need.”

Setting the empty mug down on the front step, I pull out my camera and pace around the outside of the chapel. Most of the windows are bigger than I am, intricate and graceful without being cluttered. I’m used to churches where the pictures are either biblical scenes and figures or complete abstracts, but these are mostly nature based. One has mountains and clouds, stretching out into the distance. Another has swirls of white through a dozen shades of blue and green, the rush of water giving way to tall trees in the next window, and great bunches of flowers in the one after that.

Between the large windows, small rosettes maybe twice the size of my head are stacked vertically in threes, a little more traditional in the kaleidoscopes of color, the leading beautifully detailed. Even when I switch over to black and white, the richness of the colors still manages to shade in.

I’m not sure how many times I circle the building before collecting my mug and heading inside. There, where the sunlight spills colors across the floor, it’s a little more chaotic, the colors from the north and west windows all layering over each other and canceling each other in fragments of clean light. There are no chairs, no pews, just a quartet of velvet-cushioned kneelers made of dark wood.

Chavi would have both loved and hated this tiny chapel with its mess of color and light.

I find the strange angles, the ones where the dust glitters and dances and makes the light look tangible, the places where the colors pool on the stone in a way that forms new images recognizable only because we’re human and so very strange.

Eventually, I sit down on one of the kneeler-cushions, tilting my head back against the wood, and soak in that feeling that reminds me so much of Chavi’s quest to capture the light and color on paper. As much as it frustrated her, she would never have given up pursuing her own version of the Grail, because sometimes it’s the quest that holds the meaning, not the reward.

When I lean forward to nestle my camera back into its case, my pocket crinkles.

Oh, right, Inara’s letter. From a week ago. Somehow I completely forgot about it in all the fuss.

I should probably apologize for that.

Dear Priya,

Thanks for writing back; I have to admit, I feel a bit less like an idiot now. And less of an imposition.

Still flailing, though.

As much as the general public knows about the Garden, there’s so much more that they don’t. I have a feeling most of it’s going to come out in trial, and I already know some pieces are going to get very problematic reactions. The Gardener’s lawyers are trying to insist that I be brought up on charges. Being a runaway isn’t a crime, but using a false ID to work is, and if they could prove I stole cash from my grandmother’s house after she died, I’m sure they’d be on that, too.

I’m honestly surprised they haven’t tried to claim I murdered my Gran, as if a woman who did nothing but smoke and drink in front of the television couldn’t possibly drop dead without help.

And I get it, I really do. I’m a powerful witness. I’m articulate and not overtly emotional, and I can go a long way in speaking for the girls who aren’t here to do so themselves. Anything the defense can do to discredit me would help cast shadows on all of us.

Do you ever feel like pop culture has lied to you?

When I read articles or watch segments on the Garden and the investigation, Inara always comes off as calm and completely in control of herself. She doesn’t make abrupt turns in conversation, never gives interviewers a chance to be confused by what she’s saying.

I wonder if this is her being unguarded, giving up some of that control. Or maybe just setting it aside, letting herself rest until she needs it again.

I know what that feels like.

We have all these movies and shows obsessed with the justice system. They give this impression that everything happens immediately, the trial and the investigation happening at the same time, cops desperately getting some new piece of significant evidence to the prosecutor just in time for the big reveal and dramatic closing statements. They make it look like a conviction is something the victims have in hand to help them start the grieving process.

It’s bullshit, of course, but until now, I didn’t realize just how far it is from the truth.

Thirty years of crimes causes a lot of delays, especially if the asshole is rich and has a really good legal team. The destruction of the Garden—it never occurred to me that could make things harder. It was our way out. It also destroyed the code-locked doors that kept us prisoner, so the defense is trying to claim that we were free to come and go and we chose to stay. The prosecution is trying to put a name (and proof) to every victim, but some of the bodies were destroyed in the explosion and some weren’t even in the Garden, but out on the property. You’d think the rest of the bodies on display would be sufficient.

Vic is trying so hard not to let any of us get discouraged, but he told us recently to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we could see the anniversary of our escape before the actual trial starts.

Even if they only sought justice for those of us who’ve survived, they have so much proof, and it might not even matter. Eddison says the defense has a whole roster of doctors and shrinks ready to delay things further.

Eddison actually scolded me once for wishing the Gardener had died in the explosion. He said a trial was the way for us all to get justice.

Is that what any of this is? Justice? Girls afraid to leave their homes for all the attention they’re getting, harassed at school and work and therapy? A boy who swears being in love absolves him of all sin? A man who might escape sentencing to live in an expensive nursing facility the rest of his life?

People keep telling me to be patient, to wait for justice.

Even if he gets convicted, even if he gets sentenced to life without parole or even death, how is it justice? We have to keep opening our wounds for everyone, bleeding again and again and again, knowing full well what he did to us; how is a verdict of guilty going to change any of that?

What kind of justice puts a twelve-year-old girl on the stand before court and cameras and makes her talk about being raped?

If they found the man who killed Chavi, do you think it would help you? Is this just me being cynical?

I really am trying to believe in this justice thing, but I can’t help but think how much easier this would be if all three MacIntosh men had died that night.

If there’s not enough left of Chavi for her to care about justice, why should the rest of us need it so badly? What can we even do with it?

I don’t have an answer for Inara; I don’t even have an answer for me.

But I wonder, sometimes, if it had been me that died that night, if it had been Chavi left behind to mourn and change: given how much she loved the idea of grace, would that be enough to preserve her belief in justice?

Eddison pulls into the parking lot, looks up at the stone chapel, and shudders. To his dying day, he will never understand why Priya doesn’t hate churches after how she found her sister’s body. He knows the no-longer-a-church back in Boston held dear memories for both of them, knows that she looks at the windows and thinks of sunny afternoons with Chavi, but he can’t quite wrap his brain around her continued love for little churches with great windows.

Priya walks out in her long winter coat, the one she bought purely because it sweeps dramatically down the stairs like a Disney villain and makes her mother laugh. Those two have a relationship far outside his ability to explain. She ducks into the passenger side, tucking her camera bag and a stainless-steel mug around the base of the seat before she sits. “Welcome to Colorado, population: frozen.”

“What makes it worse than D.C.?”

“Mountains.”

He watches as she leans her head back against the seat, closing her eyes. “You okay?”

“Tired. Nightmares.” She cracks her neck, settles almost sideways against the window so she can see him. “Getting kind of pissed.”

He nods. “Oreos?”

“I’ve been okay, actually.” But she’s frowning, twisting her gloved hands in her lap. “Tempted, yes, but so far, I’m okay.”

“Scared?”

“Yes.”

He appreciates that she doesn’t feel the need to mask it.

The Sravastis’ rental is a blandly nice house on a street of blandly nice houses, none of them particularly distinct. Where some of the neighbors have tried to add personality with flags or statues, the Sravastis’ house has a bleakly impersonal façade. He can’t say he’s surprised by it.

Before following her into the house, he stops at the front step, looking up at the overhang. He can see the camera, the lens aimed where it can take in the widest view possible. There’s no light to show whether or not it’s on, which he likes. Helps it to be a bit more discreet.

“He doesn’t look out of place,” she tells him, pulling off her heavy coat and hanging it in the closet.

“What’s that?”

“Whoever’s leaving the flowers. Both times they’ve been left in broad daylight, so whoever it is, he doesn’t look out of place in this neighborhood. There are people on the street who work from home, or just don’t work, and he doesn’t stand out as not belonging.”

“Tell Finney that?”

“No, but I told Sterling and Archer.” She holds a hand out for his coat. He pulls off his gloves and scarf and shoves them into pockets before giving it to her. “Coffee?”

“I’ll make it.” Because he’s had Priya’s coffee, and it definitely tastes like it was made by someone who doesn’t drink coffee. It’s an experience he’d rather not repeat.

“I’ll meet you in the living room, then.” Leaning down, she reaches into the small drawer of the spindly table and pulls out a box of matches. She strikes a match without looking and lights the squat red candle as she presses a kiss to the worn corner of Chavi’s glittery gold frame.

After she heads upstairs, he looks at the picture. Chavi was significantly darker than Deshani and Priya, almost as dark as her father, but Christ, she looks like Priya. Or maybe Priya looks like her. He’s seen her put on her makeup with nothing but a tiny compact, never faltering with the heavy black liner or the soft silver, white, and blue shimmers.

How much of that is because she sees her sister looking back at her from the mirror?

Shaking his head, he walks down the hall to drop his computer bag on the couch and turns into the kitchen. Priya may not like coffee but her mother mainlines it, and sure enough the coffeemaker is the most well-loved element of the kitchen. He has to fuss over it a moment, figuring out the settings because Deshani has something against basic coffee, but it doesn’t take long for it to start doing its thing. He can hear Priya come back downstairs, settling into the living room.

When he walks back into the living room, he nearly drops the mug. Priya is stretched out on her back on the carpet, dark hair in a puddle around her, her legs crossed at the ankles and propped on the arm of the couch. Her hands are clasped against her stomach. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath to push back the images from the files he’s gone over often enough to memorize.

“Blue,” she says.

“What now?”

“Chavi liked red; I’m all blue.”

He opens his eyes, looks for the blue in her hair, around her eyes, the blue spark of the crystals at her nose and between her eyes. Her red lipstick is a few shades darker than all the pictures of Chavi, but she’s blue and silver, not red and gold, and maybe it shouldn’t make as much of a difference as it does, but it helps.

He sits on the couch and reaches for his bag, but she shakes her head. “Wait for Mum. No sense in doing it twice.”

So they spend the next hour talking about Ramirez and the woman in Counterterrorism she isn’t calling a girlfriend yet, about Vic and his panic about his eldest daughter going off to college in the fall. They talk about spring training, making guesses about who might make the long slog all the way to the World Series, and that’s something he was able to give her, that love of baseball and numbers and crazy statistics.

Deshani comes home half past seven, dropping bags on the coffee table and grunting at them before trudging up the stairs.

He glances at Priya.

“She’ll be more human once she’s changed clothes,” she answers, plucking at her striped fleece pajama pants. “Once she gets home, she wants to be in real clothes.”

“You two are the only people I know who consider pajamas more real than suits.”

“Because you’d rather be in a tie than a Nationals shirt?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that. Or rather, he does, but it isn’t going to help him any.

Priya rolls to her hands and knees, then levers up to standing so she can get plates and silverware from the kitchen. She also comes back with a bowl, and shrugs at his curious look. “We only have two plates unpacked.”

“Heathens.”

“Quite literally.”

He snorts, but accepts one of the plates. By the time Deshani joins them wearing leggings and a long-sleeve Cambridge T-shirt, Priya’s got the food sorted out for all three of them. The routine is comfortable, familiar from those seven-odd months they lived just outside of D.C. Deshani regales them with tales of her misogynist assistant, who can’t manage to hide how disgusted he is to be reporting to a woman, and her own delight in offering him a demotion if he’d prefer a male boss. It’s sharp and funny, and Eddison gets the feeling that the only reason the idiot hasn’t been fired is because Deshani finds him entertaining.

It’s a little disturbing.

It’s only after the meal is cleared, and Priya’s fingers are crumbling the fortune cookie without actually eating any of it, that Deshani sighs and glances over at the battered black case. “All right. What’s the bad news?”

Christ.

He leans back into the couch, scrubbing at his face to pull his thoughts into some semblance of order. “When Aimée Browder was murdered in San Diego, we came to the conclusion that it must honestly be a terrible coincidence.”

Priya closes her eyes, too deliberately to be called a wince, but it still makes him feel like a heel. There’s probably a better way to start this conversation but damned if he knows what it is.

“You didn’t notice anything out of place, no one who looked familiar from Boston, and we couldn’t find any connections. As strange as it was for you to have ties with a second victim, there wasn’t anything to point to it being anything more than a freak chance.”

“You suspected, surely?” Deshani asks sharply.

“Yes, but there was nothing to back it up.”

“The flower deliveries would have changed that, though.”

He nods reluctantly. He doesn’t want to make Priya feel bad—worse—but her mother’s statement is an obvious one. “There wasn’t any reason for you to attach significance to them. Not without knowing the details of the other cases.”

“Why are the flowers significant?” Priya asks quietly. She leans against Deshani’s bent legs, her eyes still closed, and Deshani’s fingers run gently through the blue-streaked hair.

“Just like Chavi was found with chrysanthemums, each victim has been left with some kind of flower. The first girl had jonquils; the second had calla lilies.”

“And Aimée?”

“Amaranth.”

Priya lets out a soft huff. “Her mother grew amaranth. She had a garden on the roof of their front porch, and she grew amaranth to cook with. Aimée used to steal some every day to pin around her bun. Her mother could never keep a straight face when scolding her for it, and they’d always end up laughing together. You know another name for amaranth?”

He shakes his head.

“Love-Lies-Bleeding.”

Oh, hell.

“So whoever’s delivering the flowers is copying the order of the murders,” Deshani says. She frowns down at Priya’s hair, using her thumb to measure growth from roots to the base of the colored streaks. “We need to fix this.”

“I keep meaning to ask.”

Eddison clears his throat.

Deshani arches an eyebrow in response.

“There isn’t a way to know yet if this is our killer, or a local creep who figured out who you are and is getting off on terrorizing you. The presence of the flowers in San Diego, the similarity you remember in the cards, suggests the former, but we can’t back it up yet.”

“What would be proof?”

He freezes, and both women shift to look at him more clearly.

“Oh,” Priya whispers.

“Oh?” Deshani echoes, tugging lightly on a lock of her daughter’s hair. “Meaning what, precisely?”

Eddison nods. “Unless or until he tries to attack, or we catch him in the act of leaving the flowers, there’s no way to know. The flowers by themselves don’t mean enough.”

“Don’t mean enough?”

“Aren’t by themselves a threat,” Priya says. “Without evidence to the contrary, they’re both gift and warning.”

“Schrödinger’s flowers,” snorts her mother. “Lovely.”

“What does that mean for FBI involvement?”

Why didn’t he ask Vic to come with him? Vic is so much better at all of this.

“Eddison?” Deshani’s eyebrows are in danger of disappearing into her hair. “Why do you look like we just called an executioner?”

“No matter who’s leaving the flowers, it’s still an FBI matter,” he tells them. “It crossed state lines, which makes it ours.”

“But?”

With a sigh, he gives them a carefully edited version of Vic and Finney’s history with Section Chief Martha Ward, and her very narrow view of case responsibility. They listen intently, with the kind of focus that can be intimidating if you don’t know them and downright terrifying when you do. When he’s finished, mother and daughter share a long, inscrutable look.

“Small picture,” Deshani says eventually. “How likely is she to prevent the agents coming down here?”

“If it stays intermittent, not very,” he admits. “Finney doesn’t like politics and he doesn’t want to leave the field, but if it comes down to it, he’s been in the Bureau almost as long as Vic; if he wants to take a swing at her, he can probably make it hurt. As long as the visits don’t take up much time, she likely won’t interfere.”

“Until they get more frequent?” Priya shakes her head, and there’s something shadowed in her eyes, something he’s not sure how to ask about. “When the lab reports on the bouquets start showing more time and expense than she’ll approve?”

“Priya . . .”

“Are we stuck in the middle of this?”

“Maybe.” He ignores Deshani’s muttered curses in favor of maintaining eye contact with Priya, trying to be as reassuring as possible. “Vic and Finney aren’t going to just roll over and take it. They’re going to fight for you. We just have to catch this guy before it comes to that.”

“But in the meantime, my daughter is left at the mercy of someone who knows where we live and may have killed her sister.”

He can’t help but cringe at that.

“So what’s being done right now?”

“Finney’s looking into Landon,” Eddison says. “The lack of a last name is making it difficult.”

“So you think he’s a possible suspect?”

“Person of interest, at this point. We’ll see where it goes.”

“Is it always waiting?” Priya asks quietly.

“It is, until it isn’t.” He gives her a lopsided smile. “But you already know that.”

“So we wait.”

“Why did you come all the way out here to tell us this?” Deshani’s head is cocked to one side, her thumbs tapping the top of her feet in a repetitive but indiscernible rhythm. “There’s nothing that couldn’t have been delivered over the phone.”

“Because I wanted you to see my face when I promise you that I’m not letting this bastard touch you.”

Both women study him long enough to make sweat bead along his hairline. They have that effect on people separately; together they can be overwhelming.

Then Priya lets out a huff of air that might be laughter. “He needed to see our faces, Mum. We’re family; he wants to make sure we’re okay.”

Deshani’s snickering isn’t what brings the blood rushing to his face, but it doesn’t help.

He can’t say she’s wrong.

The next morning, Eddison brings fresh donuts and sits on the couch with a stack of paperwork while I Skype with my tutor in France. Despite everything else going on, I’m actually on top of my assignments, and the tutor is confident I’ll be able to fold into a normal classroom without too much difficulty come fall.

Mum and I discussed trying to graduate early, here in the States, and starting university in the fall, but that felt a little like cliff-diving: exhilarating in theory, maybe not the most sensible way to live your life. The school my tutor is partnered with has a lot of international students, so they have a good support system in place for kids struggling with the transition to all French, all the time.

When I’ve gotten in enough work to feel virtuous—and Eddison has drunk half his body weight in nonhotel coffee—we bundle up to head out to chess.

“You walk this every day?” he asks.

I shake my head, waiting for the light to change at the intersection. “I average out to three times a week. Just whenever I feel like it.”

“Any pattern?”

“I tend to skip Tuesdays; they’re popular for doctor appointments.”

Eddison nods, silently repeating the words, and it’s like I can almost see him writing it down in his little mental notebook. As much as he lives out of the Moleskine in his back pocket, he really does try not to whip it out as a part of normal conversation, even when it involves a case.

It’s warm enough today that my heavy coat isn’t necessary, cold enough that the hoodie over a long-sleeve tee isn’t quite doing the trick. I still have my scarf wrapped around my throat and tucked down under the zipper, with gloves and hat and boots in place. But it’s mid-March in Colorado, and it’s finally starting to feel a little like spring.

He has the photos that I took from chess, but he wants to get a feel for the men themselves. Specifically, though he hasn’t said it, he wants to get a feel for Landon.

Happy hails me from halfway across the parking lot. “Blue Girl! Come play me! I’ve been losing!”

Eddison snorts softly beside me.

Shaking my head, I walk up onto the grassy island and greet everyone. Gunny is asleep, the sides of his face covered by the flaps of a hat I’m pretty sure I saw Hannah knitting last week. Landon is down at the opposite end, where he tends to hover. Gunny doesn’t quite trust him, I think, but won’t tell him to leave. “This is my friend Eddison,” I announce. “He’s in town for a couple of days.”

Eddison nods, looking a bit menacing in his long tan coat. Somehow, the neon-green scarf isn’t quite enough to ruin the look.

Pierce scratches at his nose, looking Eddison up and down. “Cop?” he asks finally.

“More or less.”

Several of the men nod, and that’s about as far as introductions go. The photos I emailed had captions with names so far as I knew them, and while names like Yelp and Corgi and Happy aren’t especially helpful, they were something to start on.

I sit down across from Happy so I can hear the conversations start back up. Eddison prowls around the tables, looking down at the games in progress. I guess cop (more or less) is enough like veteran to establish rapport. No one looks at him twice, really.

Except Landon.

Landon fidgets, more than usual. His eyes dart around as if to see how everyone else is taking the intrusion, and he drops almost every piece as he tries to move it. One of the rooks drops so hard it leaves a dent in the board, despite the felt padding on the bottom.

As Eddison settles onto the very end of the bench next to Landon, he strikes up an easy, comfortable conversation with the other men. It’s interesting to see the agent side of Eddison, when he isn’t tap-dancing around a child’s sensibilities.

They talk about neighborhoods and safety, and I don’t think they even realize how much they’re telling him about where they live and what’s going on around them. He invites introductions from them, garnering last names without any apparent effort, and makes them all laugh with stories from physical training at the FBI academy, which they try to top with boot camp escapades.

Landon is again the exception. He doesn’t offer his name—not even his first one, though it’s already been said by one of the others—and he doesn’t look away from the board the entire time they’re talking neighborhoods. Eddison takes note of whenever Landon flinches, and I’m willing to bet he has a map of Huntington ready to mark up with possible areas for Landon’s residence.

Without any overt intimidation, Eddison has Landon absolutely terrified.

It’s a little worrisome, actually, because yes, Landon is a creep, but he shouldn’t be this scared unless he’s a creep with something to hide. It’s also kind of hilarious, because Eddison and Mum have more in common than I thought. I’m pretty sure he’d be offended if I told him.

I’ll save it for a special occasion.

Generally—by which I mean every single time I’ve been here—Landon doesn’t leave the pavilion until I do, so he can follow me into the market. This time, he barely makes it an hour before he mumbles a goodbye and walks very quickly away.

Steven, one of the Desert Storm vets, looks after him, glances at Eddison’s thoughtful smirk, then turns to me. “You should have said if he was bothering you.”

“Didn’t want to disrupt the dynamic.”

“Safety’s more important.”

But they’re old soldiers, and sometimes there are different views of what is or is not appropriate behavior between males and females. I like the vets, and their awkward chivalry, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to assume we hold the same views.

“Eddison is in town for a work thing,” I say instead. “Being able to assess whether or not I’m paranoid was just a perk.”

Steven turns back to Eddison, who’s settling himself comfortably into the abandoned camp chair. “So is she?”

“Paranoid?” At Steven’s nod, he shrugs. “No. Man doesn’t run like that unless he knows he’s thinking wrong thoughts.”

“Going to do anything about it?”

“Can’t arrest a man for thinking, but he’s less likely to act if he’s got the fear of God in him.”

And they all nod, because the man took care of business, and if it weren’t so entertaining, I’d probably be offended.

Sea level and mountains have very different kinds of cold, even if the temperature is theoretically the same, so Eddison doesn’t even make it another hour before his teeth start chattering in spite of the heaters. I kiss Gunny on the cheek, making the others catcall and chortle, and lead Eddison into the store.

He scowls at the Starbucks logo. He has something against fancy coffee, so any place that charges him more than a dollar for a big-ass cup of black coffee has his eternal enmity. When we lived in D.C., Mercedes’s favorite form of entertainment was Eddison and Mum getting coffee together.

While he’s trying to set the sign on fire with his glare, I see Joshua get up from his table, a peacoat draped over his arm. He seems to like fisherman sweaters; at the least, he seems to have an endless supply of them. This one is a sort of faded heather that works well with his greying auburn hair. He sees me and smiles, lifting his cup of tea in a kind of salute, but doesn’t stop to chat on his way out the door.

Drinks in hand, Eddison and I walk back to the house in comfortable silence. We both stop and look at the empty doorstep.

“I’m not sure if I wanted flowers to be there or not,” he says after a minute.

“I know that feeling.”

Once I’m safely inside, the door locked behind me, he takes off back to Denver, to check in with Finney and then fly back east. I’m not ignorant of how far he’s stretched allowable limits for my sake, and maybe for his own. I was only ever supposed to be part of a case, not a part of his life, but here I am, five years later, closer family than blood in many ways, and I don’t regret it.

I don’t think he does either, even when it forces him into some difficult decisions.

I give a few hours over to getting ahead on schoolwork, because it seems like the responsible thing to do, quibble with Mum via text over what to do for dinner (she wins, but only because we haven’t actually had curry since Birmingham), and then pull out Inara’s letter.

I’m not sure why I haven’t mentioned it to Eddison. He knows her, even if he doesn’t know whether or not he likes her (he gives away a lot more than he realizes). It’s nice, though, keeping it to myself. Keeping it for myself, maybe.

Setting the letter on top of my current journal, I grab the first of the Washington, D.C. journals from the stack on my floor. All the rest are still downstairs, but San Diego is where things changed and D.C. is where I realized how much things changed, and I can’t help but read back through them looking for clues.

Two years ago, I made a friend in San Diego. Her name was Aimée Browder, and she was in love with all things French. Despite my intention to keep myself to myself, she was there; just all the time there, without being pushy or nosy. I let her talk me into French Club and movies and hanging out, and some afternoons I’d sit by the door in the ballet studio where she took classes and do my homework to the sounds of classical music, murmured instructions, and the thumps of successfully landed jumps.

In spite of everything, she was my friend, so when Mum and I were about to move to D.C., I asked Aimée if we could keep in touch. And we did, actually, for about a week and a half. I wasn’t worried for the first few days of silence; we were both busy. She’d respond when she got the chance.

Then I got a call from her mother, who was sobbing so hard she had to hand the phone to her husband so he could tell me Aimée was dead. Their daughter, my friend, had been murdered, and as soon as he said church and flowers, I knew it was connected to Chavi in some way. It didn’t seem possible that it could be coincidence.

That night wasn’t the first time I ate myself sick. Far from, really; it had been almost three years by that point. I think it was the worst, though. I stuffed myself so overfull I couldn’t even cry it hurt so badly, gasping for breath and feeling like I was about to split down my sides. Mum was two seconds from hauling me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped, but somehow that was the thing that tipped me into full-blown hysterics.

I didn’t want Eddison to know it was that bad. Didn’t want Vic and Mercedes to know at all.

They called from San Diego with questions about Aimée, things they had to ask for the investigation even if they really didn’t want to. I could hear how worried they were, and though I was still sick as shit, I craved more, just because it hurt so badly.

It took days before I could eat again. Even then, Mum had to make me. I couldn’t look at food without my stomach cramping painfully.

To distract myself, I started researching the other murders, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that my ignorance had gotten Aimée killed. Mum pretended she wasn’t clinging as she looked over my shoulder. She was the one to notice that the flowers surrounding the murdered girls matched the bouquets that had shown up on our doorstep in San Diego.

Yellow and white jonquils for Darla Jean Carmichael, dead as long as I’d been alive.

Purple-throated calla lilies for Zoraida Bourret, found in her family’s Methodist church on Easter Sunday.

Clumps of baby’s breath for Leigh Clark, a preacher’s daughter in Eugene, Oregon.

A crown of honeysuckle for Sasha Wolfson, whose cousin told stories of a girl who plucked blossoms out of her hair to touch their sweetness to her tongue.

Colorful sprays of freesia for Mandy Perkins, who built fairy villages in nursing home gardens around Jacksonville, Florida.

White carnations for Libba Laughran, veined and tipped and red so they looked like they were bleeding. She was only fourteen when she was raped and killed outside of Phoenix.

No flowers came to D.C., though, nor to Atlanta after we moved that November. There were none in Omaha or Birmingham, aside from the ones sent by the idiot coworker in Nebraska. No mystery flowers, then, so it never seemed worth telling my agents.

If we hadn’t left San Diego when we did, it would have been columbines at our door next, for Emily Adams, seventeen years old, from St. Paul, Minnesota, and no relation to later victim Meaghan Adams. She was a musician, according to the articles and tribute pages we read. She sang like an angel, especially with folk songs, and played every instrument she could get her hands on. A few days before she was murdered, she organized a rally in response to a school shooting in Connecticut; she clipped a couple blue columbines to the end of her guitar, to honor decades of victims as she played.

When the bastard killed Emily, he draped a ribbon of flowers over her throat, to hide the gaping wound. It was mentioned in a couple of articles about the killing, but there were pictures, too, on true crime websites that somehow managed to get crime scene photos from most of the murders.

Impressive, considering the FBI wasn’t brought in until the tenth victim, Kiersten Knowles.

Even with all the research Mum and I did, we don’t have half the information the FBI does, but I’d guess we’re no further from the answer. All these facts to be found but nothing that leads anywhere. If I get a name someday, the identity of the man who murdered Chavi and the others, will that bring peace? If he goes to trial and is found guilty, is that justice?

I look at the folded pages of Inara’s letter, then reach for a pen and loose paper.

Dear Inara,

My mum has said on occasion that it’s a shame people can only die once; one of her dearest wishes is to find our nightmare and kill him again and again and again, once for each person he killed and once again just for us.

I don’t know that it’s any more or less just than imprisonment or formal execution.

I used to think it would mean something. I’d dream about being in a courtroom when a jury foreman read out guilty, and the unknown man with the blurred-out face behind the defense table would start weeping. Noisily, messily, the kind of crying that leaves you mortified because there are just globs of snot dripping everywhere. He’d be broken, and Mum and I would laugh, giddy and bright, and fall into each other’s arms.

We’d be happy.

We wouldn’t hurt anymore.

At some point, I realized that it wouldn’t bring Chavi back. Nothing would.

Suddenly I couldn’t stand the thought of any resolution that left the asshole alive, weeping or not.

I have no answers.

I have no wisdom.

What I have is a healthy sense of spite and a determination that someday I’m going to learn how to do this thing called living. Maybe that’s as far as justice can stretch.

There’s no actual reason to switch his destination from D.C. to New York, but Eddison does it anyway, thumb rubbing against the dark screen of his phone where the message from Vic sleeps. At the moment, still a little raw from worry and frustration, he doesn’t want to look into his motivations all that deeply. Not when there’s something itching at him about how the Sravastis took the news about the stalker, and he can’t put his finger on what it is or why it’s bothering him.

So he makes the switch, knowing he can take the train between cities and get a few hours of paperwork in, and maybe he’ll even call it virtuous. The train is a hell of a lot more comfortable than the plane, anyway.

He hates the subway, isn’t particularly fond of the metro back home, but it still seems a better option than dropping fifty bucks on a taxi just to get into the city. He stands against one of the poles, a safe distance from heaped shopping bags, luggage, and sprawled limbs, counting stops and listening to the familiar mix of phone calls, conversations in a dozen languages, and the fuzzy music that seeps too loud out of headphones and earbuds.

A little girl perched on her grandfather’s lap catches his eye and giggles, her hands fisted in a hand-knit scarf almost the same obnoxiously bright green as his. He smiles slightly, and she giggles again before burying her face in her grandfather’s shoulder. She’s still laughing, though; he can see the two puffs of ponytail high on her head shake.

He knows, in a purely theoretical sort of way, that Inara lives in a shit neighborhood. She was straightforward about that much the first time they questioned her. When she was released from the hospital, she moved right back in. The agents in the New York office prefer to visit the restaurant if they need to see her or Bliss for something.

Knowing it is very different from seeing it.

Standing outside the stairs to the subway, he takes a deep breath and promptly gags on an unexpected lungful of garbage and urine from the alley. He adjusts to the smell after a minute or two—he’s breathed worse, in his line of work—and carefully buttons his suit coat and trench to cover the gun at his hip. He’d feel better if he could access it quickly, but that’s not the kind of attention he wants to bring to himself, especially not when he’s technically on his own time.

He finds the building, a faded brick monstrosity with the remains of a wrought-iron gate hanging around the front steps. There’s an intercom to the left of the door so guests can be buzzed in, but that seems more like wishful thinking. He’s not sure if the sledgehammer hit it before or after the bullets but either way, it’s not working. In the tiny lobby, half the mailboxes are cracked open, envelopes and circulars strewn over the floor. He can see official letterhead on some of the stomped-on envelopes.

The girls’ mailbox is just fine, though, freshly painted in dull silver that almost matches the tarnished metal beneath, and covered in flower stickers. Above it, a note on cheerful pink paper is pinned to the wall. He recognizes Bliss’s handwriting, large and round, almost bubbly, really only missing the cute shapes above the lowercase i’s. If you take our mail, I take your balls. Or lady-balls, I’m not particular.

Jesus.

It’s signed with a fucking smiley face.

Both paper and ink are a little faded, and their mailbox is intact, so clearly it struck the right tone for the building. Adjusting the weight of his bags on his back, he heads into the stairwell. There’s an elevator shaft, but it seems to be lacking the rather necessary elevator.

And doors. Doors would be important.

He’s a little winded by the time he reaches their floor, second from the top, and is contemplating adding stadiums to his exercise regimen. He can run for miles across level surface, but stairs are surprisingly problematic.

Fortunately—or not—he doesn’t even have to remember the apartment number. All he has to do is look for the drunk passed out on the floor. The man’s been sleeping outside their door for years, apparently, and none of the girls have the heart to chase him off or tell the cops, so they just go up to the roof and down the fire escape to come in through their very large window.

Eddison isn’t that kind.

He kicks the drunk’s feet, just hard enough to jolt him without risking energy. “Find someplace else, buddy.”

“’Sa free country,” the man slurs, curling tighter around his bottle.

Leaning over, Eddison grabs the man’s ankle and starts walking backward, hauling the swearing and wailing drunk along with him until he can plant him halfway between doors.

Inara’s door opens and a head pops out, red-gold hair fluffing out around it in an enormous halo. “Hey, are you harassing our drunk?”

“Just moving him,” Eddison replies. He drops the man’s ankle. The drunk promptly sprawls along the floor, messily gulping from his bottle. “Are you Whitney?”

“And you are?”

He’s unaccountably relieved by her blatant suspicion. “Special Agent Brandon Eddison, here to see Inara if she’s in.”

The woman’s face lights up in recognition. She’s probably in her mid or late twenties, one eye discolored and the pupil blown in a way that looks permanent. “Hang on. I’ll get her.”

After a short wait, a sleepy-eyed Inara walks out into the hall, still shrugging into a hoodie. Her hair is mussed around her, her feet shoved in Eeyore slippers. “Eddison?”

“If we go to the roof, will you be warm enough?”

She nods and fumbles with the hoodie’s zipper. She has to stop halfway up to wrestle her hair out of the way before she can close it the rest of the way. Her hands, curled into the sleeves, rub at her eyes as she leads the way up to the roof. The roof is strewn with furniture, from basic lawn chairs to a plastic-wrapped couch under a makeshift awning that may have started life as a pair of hammocks.

She walks all the way across the roof until they can sit in a cluster of canvas camp chairs against the front ledge. If he leans over just a little, he can see their landing of the fire escape, two of Inara’s roommates smoking and laughing.

“You realize it’s three in the afternoon?” he asks eventually.

She scowls sleepily, and it’s a little bit adorable in a way she generally isn’t, soft and growling and a bit like a grumpy kitten. “Kegs had a party after closing,” she mumbles around a yawn. “We didn’t get back till eight this morning. And then we were helping Noémie practice her presentation for her eleven-o’clock class.”

“And you go to work . . .”

“We have to leave around four-thirty.” She pulls her feet up onto the chair. “What’s up?”

“Judge Merrill granted the no-contact order,” he tells her without preamble. “Any further attempts to contact you, and Desmond can be charged.”

Well, that wakes her up. She stares at him for a moment, her pale, almost amber eyes wide and fixed on him. Then she blinks, thinking her way through it, and finally nods. “That was fast.”

“There wasn’t really a way for the defense to argue against it. While it wasn’t illegal for Desmond to write you, it was inappropriate, and the judge wasn’t happy with the content of the letters.”

“The cont—shit. Of course you had to read them.”

He clears his throat. “Vic read them. And the judge and lawyers, but Vic. Vic read them.”

She rests her chin on her knees, and he has the uncomfortable feeling she’s stripping the words far past what he wanted them to mean. Christ, his mental health and well-being are suddenly very dependent on her never meeting the Sravastis. Priya and Deshani understand him far too well as it is; he does not need them teaching Inara anything. A man needs to preserve some capacity for self-delusion, after all. All she says, though, is “I guess you wouldn’t find the letters of a lovesick twat very interesting.”

He snorts and leans back in the chair. “From what I understand, that part of it wasn’t the problem.”

“Problem?”

“From what Vic tells me, somewhere in the midst of begging your forgiveness, Desmond slipped in a few pleas for you not to testify against him or his father. To, ah . . . understand.”

She blinks at him.

“Asking forgiveness is one thing, even if he still doesn’t seem to have a full grasp of his part in things. Asking you not to testify, putting that kind of pressure on you with the weight of your history . . . that’s attempting to influence a witness, and that crosses into bad territory.”

“Still claims to love me?”

“Yes. Do you believe him?”

“No?”

He looks out over the roof, noting scorch marks where there used to be a flourishing crop of marijuana, from her stories. There are baskets of toys here and there, and it looks like someone tried to make a swing set out of piping at one point or another. He wouldn’t ever trust a child on it, but it probably makes parties a little more interesting.

She sighs, and it takes more than he expected not to look back at her. Some truths are easier when no one’s watching. “I know he believes he loves me,” she says slowly. “Whether or not I believe he actually does . . . I don’t know. Maybe he’s like his father, it’s love as he knows it, but I don’t . . . I don’t think I want to believe that love can be that out of touch with reality.”

“Maybe he needs to believe it’s love,” he offers. From the corner of his eye, he can see her nod.

“I’ll buy that. If it’s real, maybe it absolves him in some way. Everyone’s fascinated by the things people do for love.”

“But you think it’s a little more than that.”

“If it wasn’t love, what was it?”

“Rape,” he says bluntly.

“Exactly. Boy like Desmond, he doesn’t want to think of himself as a rapist.”

“Why didn’t you read the letters?”

She’s silent for long enough that this time he does look back at her. She’s staring down at her slippers, fingers stroking the tufts of black along the Eeyore heads. The slippers are ridiculous and not something he’d expect her to love or even really to wear, but that’s probably exactly why someone gave them to her.

“Surviving the Garden,” she says finally, voice barely more than a whisper, “thriving in the Garden, relied on understanding the Gardener. Understanding his sons. I’m out of the Garden now, and I don’t want to understand anymore. I don’t want to live in that anymore. I get that he needs to explain, but I need to not listen. I need to not bear that weight. I need . . .” She swallows, her eyes bright with tears, but he suspects she’s pissed more than sad. “I need to not hear him swear he loves me.”

There’s something there, something Vic would probably recognize and know how to gracefully address.

“His feelings aren’t your fault, you know.”

Eddison is not graceful.

She snorts, blinking away the tears and the rage, back to more comfortable ground with mockery and sniping. “I learned a long time ago not to claim responsibility for men’s feelings about me.”

“Then you already know that whatever his feelings for you, whatever he thinks those feelings are, you don’t have to feel guilty about the pain they’re causing him.”

“Okay, Yoda.”

A squeal of metal gives them half a moment’s notice before a head pops up over the ladder to the fire escape. “Inara! Come introduce your agent!”

He glances at Inara, mouths Your agent?

She just shrugs. “It’s better than pet agent.”

Thank fucking God.

“Come on,” she tells him, sliding to her feet. “You can meet the ones here and then come with us. Now you’ve seen the apartment, you’re going to twitch until you check out our route to work.”

“You always take the same route?”

She just rolls her eyes and starts down the ladder.

Most of the young women are familiar from Inara’s stories of them. After introductions, four of them get dressed and head out, their uniforms already at the restaurant. They chatter and laugh on the subway, doing hair and makeup without mirrors or mistakes despite the swaying of the train and the constant stops and starts. They exchange greetings with a few people who seem to be regulars on the route.

Eddison has shared a hotel room with Ramirez enough to have a slightly befuddled awe for the process of full makeup, but that was seeing her tools spread out across the entire top of the dresser with multiple mirrors. Watching this quartet makes him fervently glad to be male, where getting his face ready for work may or may not mean shaving.

The Evening Star is much nicer than he expects, given where the girls choose to live. Even in his suit, he feels a little underdressed.

“Come meet Guilian,” Inara says, pushing him into the restaurant. “Besides, Bliss will pout if she knows you were here and didn’t say hello.”

“Pout? Or cheer?”

“I don’t see why she can’t do both.”

Guilian is a large, heavyset redhead whose thinning hair is retreating from his scalp and finding refuge in the bristling moustache that hides most of the lower half of his face. He clasps Eddison’s hand in a firm grip, his other hand on the agent’s shoulder. “Thank you for helping Inara get home safely,” he says solemnly.

If Eddison looks half as uncomfortable as he feels, he can completely understand why Inara is snickering beside him.

Bliss is hardly five feet of snarls and attitude and a mouth bigger than the world, but when she bares her teeth at him, it’s a hell of a lot closer to a smile than he usually sees from her. “I thought I felt the tone of the place lower.” Her curly black hair is pinned back in an intricate twist, safely away from the food, and it’s only seeing her stand next to one of the other waitresses that he realizes her uniform is slightly different.

The waiters all wear tuxedos, the waitresses strapless black evening gowns with stand-alone collars and cuffs in crisp white, black bowties at their throats. But Bliss—and, he’s willing to bet, Inara—has a style that comes up over her back, the collar stitched to the neck. It covers the wings.

He looks over at Guilian, standing in the door to the kitchen, and the restaurant owner and chef nods.

Small wonder Inara came back to work at the same restaurant.

Bliss kicks him in the ankle, more annoying than painful, and it isn’t hard to imagine a yappy little ankle-biter dog with her curly hair. “Please tell me he can’t write her anymore,” she says quietly.

“Not without consequence.”

“He doesn’t understand consequence as well as he should.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Is your other pet okay?” Her smile gets wider at his groan, almost friendly. Almost. “Vic mentioned you were gone for a case. Seemed a little strange he and Mercedes wouldn’t be there.”

“We do individual consults, you know.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine for now,” he sighs. He’s starting to think he did something terrible in a previous life to be surrounded by such dangerous women in this one.

He’d do it again in a heartbeat.

“If Guilian offers you the chef’s table, take it,” she advises him. “He doesn’t do it often.”

“Isn’t that in the kitchen?”

“Yep.”

“Don’t you all hang out in the kitchen when you’re not checking on patrons?”

Her wicked laugh answers that. A wiser man would make his excuses, maybe. Make his escape, definitely.

But Guilian holds the kitchen door open in invitation, and Eddison finds himself nodding, and what the hell, how often is he going to get to eat in a restaurant this nice?

The baby’s breath looks different this time. The tissue paper wrapping is sky blue, not green, and there are thin blue ribbons twined through the stiff clusters. The card is the same, though, and I dutifully send pictures along to Finney and Eddison before heading back inside to make sure we have a couple of clean mugs.

When my new agents arrive, Archer accepts the offer of coffee with a startled smile, while Sterling sheepishly asks if we have any tea.

Lord, do we ever.

Archer keeps giving me strange looks as they check over the bundle and ask me questions, like he expects me to still be bitchy about last Thursday. I don’t generally have the energy for grudges, but if it makes him sweat, I’m content to leave the impression uncorrected. Sterling keeps an eye on him, in a very subtle, understated way. Archer probably doesn’t even notice. I don’t know that I would have picked up on it if she hadn’t deliberately caught my eye before turning back to him.

It’s weirdly comforting.

I have the security footage pulled up on my laptop, cued to about half an hour after Mum left for work. It’s too dark to get a good picture of whoever left the flowers and I’m not sure if that’s purposeful or not. There’s maybe an impression of height (average) but even when Archer fiddles with filters to bring out more detail, the person is too bundled up against the cold to get anything useful. Only their eyes and a bit of the nose are visible.

“Do you recognize him?” Archer asks, as Sterling scans back earlier than the time stamp.

“How are you so sure it’s a he?”

“Way he walks, stands,” Sterling answers absently. Her eyes are glued to the screen, looking for anything that jumps out before the mystery man approached.

Archer leans against the back of the couch. “So that’s a no on the recognition, then.”

“I can see why they gave you the shiny, shiny badge.”

Sterling turns her aborted laugh into a throat-clearing cough. “We’ll ask your neighbors, find out if anyone saw where he came from or went. Maybe someone will know who he is.”

“Did your section chief give approval for that?”

“We’re not going to stop doing our jobs in anticipation of being told to back off,” she says easily.

“And when the neighbors ask what’s going on?”

“You really think they don’t already know who you are?” Archer shakes his head at his partner’s glare. “Every spring, every city with a victim starts plastering photos all over the place with if-you-have-new-information-call banners. Your mother was profiled in the Economist and said you were moving to Huntington. People know who you are, Priya. It’s inescapable.”

“Just because you’ve studied a case obsessively doesn’t mean everyone else is familiar with it,” I retort. “Most people don’t pay that much attention to something that doesn’t directly affect them.”

“When the new neighbors bring a serial killer trailing along after them, it tends to affect people.”

It affected Aimée, but of course, none of us knew that was a possibility until it was too late. He’s still an asshole for pointing it out.

“You don’t even know if this is the killer,” I say, and Sterling nods.

“Who else could it possibly be?”

“You should have seen some of the letters and gifts we got from the crime fans and amateur grief counselors. You’d be amazed how many people thought it was appropriate to send us chrysanthemums.”

A tinkling piano theme rings out during the appalled silence, and Sterling glances at it with a frown. “Finney. I’ll be right back.” Answering the call with a perfunctory “Sir,” she heads into the kitchen.

“When do you move to Paris?” asks Archer.

“May.”

“Hm.” He fidgets with the cuff of his coat, fingers running along the nearly invisible line of stitches. “You know . . .”

“I’m assuming I’m about to.”

“Finney really didn’t warn us about your mouth.”

“How would Finney know?” I give him a sweet, innocent smile and swallow the last of my tea.

Archer stares at me, then visibly collects himself. “You know that if this is the killer, this could be our only chance to catch him? We may never again know what city he’s in before he kills.”

“Looking for a career boost, Agent Archer?”

“Trying to bring to justice a man who’s killed sixteen girls,” he snaps. “Seeing as one of them is your sister, I’d think you’d be a bit more appreciative.”

“You’d think.”

I can actually hear his teeth grinding.

“Finney said you live here in Huntington,” I say after a while. Warmth seeps into my fingers where they’re wrapped around my empty mug. “From what I understand, you’re supposed to be doing drive-bys before and after work?”

“I am driving by, yes.”

“Then it seems to me the person in the best position to learn anything would be you. After all, if he wanted me or Mum to see him, he’d just knock on the door or ring the bell.” I shrug at his nasty look. “The problem with making me bait—as I assume you were going to propose—is that it’s of limited value if the target doesn’t know he’s on a deadline. Why should he hurry?”

“But if you leave before the flowers finish—”

“Did any of his victims get flowers before their deaths?”

“Not that we’ve been able to determine,” Sterling answers, standing in the kitchen doorway and watching us thoughtfully. She flips her phone in her hand, catching it easily. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we don’t know enough to guess at the intentions of the person sending these,” I say honestly. “If it’s the killer, he’s breaking pattern. If it’s not the killer, we can’t trust him to follow a pattern he didn’t create. There’s no way to know if he’ll go all the way down the line.” I know what I’m willing to trust, but they’re federal agents; they’re not supposed to make assumptions based on gut feelings. “Bait is only useful if you know what the reaction is going to be.”

“No one is going to suggest using you as bait,” Sterling says, her voice sharp.

We both look at Archer, who at least has the grace to look uncomfortable.

“Finney needs us up in Denver,” Sterling continues after a moment. “We’ll be back this evening, though, to talk to the neighbors. Hopefully we’ll catch them home from work. I’ll check in with you when we call it a night.”

“Bring a travel mug. We’ll hook you up with tea for the drive home.”

She actually smiles, a bright flash of a thing here and gone that lights up her whole face.

The agents head out into the grey Monday, sleet drizzling down unpleasantly. I don’t have any intention of walking through that to go to chess. Checking the porch has become a habit, though, even when I have no plans to leave the house.

I text the Quantico Three to give them an update, then knuckle down to schoolwork for a few hours. After a lunch of leftover pizza, I plant myself in the living room with the empty journal boxes. For the past week, the journals have just sat there in heaps except when I’m reading them.

Neatly ordered heaps, thanks to Mum, but heaps nonetheless. It’s time to put them away for now. I even bring down the journals I have in my room.

Still, when I get to the San Diego books, I take them to the couch and curl up with them. I only skimmed through before, looking for the entries about the flower deliveries, and Mum was the one to make scans for the agents. This time, I want to actually read them.

It feels like sitting with Aimée for a while, and I owe her that much. I’m not naïve enough to think her death is my fault, but it is my burden. I owe it to her to remember her not just as a victim, but as my friend.

Aimée was the effortless kind of pretty, and genuinely didn’t seem to recognize that she was. Not that she thought she was ugly, she just didn’t seem to pay attention to what was in the mirror short of making sure her hair was in order. When the amaranth was in bloom, she’d pin pink-red clusters around her ribbon-wrapped bun, and her mother would tease her about stealing food. She was in ballet and ran the French Club. Her love for all things French came from her mother, I’m sure, who moved from Mexico to France for school and then fell in love with an American.

We were in French class together, the only two with the intent of actually using the language, not just because we needed it to graduate or get scholarships. I’m still not entirely sure how she talked me into French Club, except that she promised it wouldn’t ask anything of me, and maybe I was lonely by that point. I used to be a social creature. I remember that. I just can’t remember what it was that made me work that way.

Aimée was sweet, and kind, and she never asked me why I was hurting, and I never explained. It was such a relief to have one person in my life who didn’t know about Chavi. One person who didn’t know the old Priya, and so couldn’t compare me to who I’d been and find me lacking or discomfiting now. Aimée saw my thorns and never tried to tell me I shouldn’t have them.

Asking her if we could stay in touch may have been the bravest thing I’d ever done. I couldn’t decide how I wanted her to answer. Keeping a friend seemed just as terrifying as losing one.

She was there with me the day I found baby’s breath on the doorstep. She’d laughed and said someone forgot to add the flowers, and I pinned it all around her bun until she had a bristling crown like a fairy.

And when I told Chavi about it, the ink all glittery pink for a good mood, I said how much it reminded me of that last birthday party, all the flower crowns and the wreath of white silk roses I still had in my dresser.

Still have in my dresser.

Thoughts of Aimée keep running through my head as I pack my journals back into the boxes, this time keeping them carefully in order. Chavi and I used the journals to settle any number of arguments or faulty memories, or just reminiscing for the hell of it, and they always ended up repacked however we happened to shove them in, hers and mine all mixed together. This time, though, it’s just mine in each box, until the last three finished books sit atop the taped boxes.

Over dinner, Mum points at the stacks of Chavi’s journals, the sushi roll nearly falling from her chopsticks as she waves them around. “Have you thought about what to do with those?”

“What to do with them?”

“Are we taking them with us?”

The whole house is a mess, as we’re finally going through boxes and deciding what we are definitely taking with us to France, what we need to think about more, and what we’re either throwing out or donating. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about the journals.

“I’m not suggesting throwing them out,” she continues after a moment. She eyes me carefully, like she’s afraid I’m about to explode. “I’m saying maybe you should read back through them, decide what you want to do.”

“Will you mind if I keep them?”

She twirls her chopsticks to flick me on the nose with the clean ends. “I don’t like holding on to the past, you know that, but this is not something for me to decide. As much as those are Chavi’s diaries, they’re also letters to you. If you want to keep them, keep them. Whatever you decide . . .” She blows out a sharp breath, tongue flicking over her lip to catch a grain of rice clinging to the gold hoop. “France can be a fresh start for us, but I will never, ever suggest leaving Chavi behind. I just want to make sure we’re keeping them because you want them, not because you feel like you should.”

Okay, I can see that.

So while Mum rattles around the kitchen swearing at the boxes of pots and plates and all, I settle back into the couch with the first stack of love letters from my sister. I’ve only ever seen the pieces Chavi chose to show me.

The early ones are written in crayon, the letters huge and sometimes oddly formed, the spelling absolutely atrocious in a way that’s only cute when the writer is in a single-digit age. She was so excited about me, promising to be the best-ever big sister, to love me always, even swearing up and down to share her favorite toys. The one about two days after I was born is freaking adorable, mainly because she was so sulky it practically oozes off the paper.

Somehow five-year-old Chavi hadn’t quite understood that a baby sister would be, you know, a baby, and therefore not able to play with her right away.

It sets a comfortable pattern. I get up in the morning, check the front step, do my schoolwork, sometimes head to chess or the store, come back in the afternoon to go through my stuff and the linens, more schoolwork, dinner, help Mum with downstairs boxes, and then spend half the night reading Chavi’s journals.

On Friday, there’s a wreath of honeysuckle nestled on a bed of blue tissue paper, sitting in what looks to be a cake box on the porch.

On Monday, there’s a bouquet of freesia in a violent explosion of color, pink and yellow and white and purple and rusty orange, the stems curling out past the large blooms to show the partially unfurled buds.

The carnations come on Wednesday, the burgundy tips bleeding down through the veins of the white petals. That’s where they stopped last time. Instead of Agents Sterling and Archer, the latter of whom I’ve seen only in passing as he drives down our street, Agent Finnegan comes to check on those.

“Are you doing okay?” he asks, not looking away from the rectangle of card stock in his gloved hands.

“Sure.” I lean against the doorframe, holding my cup of cocoa close to my face so the steam can offset the breeze. It is warming up outside, hovering in the high fifties the past couple of days, and the meteorologist is cheerfully predicting low seventies next week. It’s just that I’m in pajamas meant for inside only, without the urge to reach for the coat only a few feet away. “Just wish I knew what to expect next.”

“Columbines,” he answers absently, tucking the card into a separate plastic bag. “You know what those look like?”

“Blue? There’s a song about them, I think.” I didn’t actually mean the flowers, but his response is weirdly reassuring, like it didn’t occur to him not to tell me.

He stays in his crouch, forearms draped over his knees as he looks up at me. “Your friendly neighborhood creep is hard to learn about.”

“Landon?”

“Eddison narrowed down his possible neighborhoods, but no one in those areas claims to recognize him and we’re having trouble finding any paperwork on him. No lease, no mortgage. Neither the DMV nor post office has any records of a Landon in the area. We’re expanding the search, but it’s slow going.”

“It isn’t Landon on the security camera,” I remind him. “The eyes are the wrong shape.”

He frowns and glances up at me. “Archer was supposed to tell you: we found the one on the camera.”

“What?”

“Student down at Hunt U; he makes extra cash doing deliveries. One of your neighbors identified him in the picture with the freesia. When we talked to him, he said the flowers were dropped off in his car with an envelope containing the address and his delivery fee, and a requested time of delivery.”

“He leaves his car unlocked so people can anonymously deliver things through him?” I ask incredulously. “That sounds . . . that’s . . .”

“Idiotic in the extreme,” he agrees. “Also a good way to land in prison if he assists with illegal goods. He said he’d contact us if anything else showed up.”

“So either he chose not to, or these were delivered a different way.”

“Exactly. And something off the grid like this could match your paperless friend Landon. He’s not at the chess pavilion this morning—I checked on my way here—and we’re in court the rest of the week; next week, either Archer or I will accompany you to chess, and hopefully we can talk to him, or even follow him home.”

“I haven’t seen him since Eddison was out here. So, week and a half?”

“Not at all?”

“Nope.”

“Have your vets?”

“Haven’t asked.” I watch his frown deepen, his gloved fingers rubbing against each other in thought. “You’re worried.”

He reaches for his hair, catching himself just in time. He’s an odd mix of parentage, delicate of face but burly of body, his skin Irish pale and densely spattered with very light brown freckles, but his hair silky and dark. “Victor Hanoverian trained me. We were partners until I got my own team and he pulled Eddison and Ramirez. I’ve seen him walk into hostage situations and crossfire without so much as twitching. So the fact that he emails me every day to ask if there’s any new information? Yes, I’m worried, because him being twitchy scares the shit out of me.”

It’s an honesty I don’t expect out of someone who’s practically a stranger, but I’m grateful for it. “He’s scared about what happens when the flowers catch up to last year’s victim, isn’t he?”

“Or what happens if you leave before they’re cycled through,” he admits. “If you move, what if he does too? That puts the case out of FBI hands.”

“Could you give the case file to Interpol?”

“Yes, and if it comes to it, we will. But will they give it any attention?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not downplaying,” I say with a shrug. “If I hadn’t hidden my head in the sand after Chavi died, maybe I would have known to report the flowers in San Diego. We wouldn’t be doing all this, and you wouldn’t have to sneak around your section chief. Maybe Aimée would still be alive, and the girl after her.”

“Hey, now, no.” He straightens out of his crouch, one knee cracking painfully, but aside from a wince he doesn’t seem to care. He’s a little shorter than I am, but he holds himself taller, a presence even when he isn’t putting effort into it. “You can’t think that way.”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“We have absolutely no way to know that. Priya, look at me.”

His eyes are dark, iris almost impossible to discern from pupil, but he has the most ridiculously long lashes I’ve ever seen on a man.

“You cannot think that way,” he repeats firmly. “None of this is your fault. We have no way to know what would have happened if things had been different in San Diego. What we’ve got is right now. You are doing everything you can.”

“Okay.”

He looks frustrated, and I wonder if I’m going to be getting a call from Eddison or Vic. Agent Finnegan, while very kind, doesn’t know me well enough to successfully argue a point. “Let’s see what the camera caught.”

The footage shows a woman this time, a heavy sweater open over the black, red, and yellow polo shirt worn by the employees at the gas station a few blocks down. I don’t recognize the woman herself, but that’s no surprise; I only go into the store when the cold makes me have to pee too badly to get all the way home from chess. When that happens, I’ll buy a drink or a candy bar so I’m not the asshole who uses the bathroom without being a customer, but it’s not so often that I know anyone who works there.

“I’ll go down and see if they can identify her,” Finney says as he heads out. “And, Priya . . . the sum of what you can do is what you’re already doing. Don’t suffer weight that isn’t yours to carry.”

Columbine comes in a variety of colors, and looks like two different flowers stacked together with a white broad-petaled heart, throats dark to match the thinner, longer petals underneath. The ones that arrive on Friday, delivered by a very confused postal worker who found them in his passenger seat, are blue and purple.

Emily Adams sang about blue columbines, just a few days before she died.

Which is probably why, for the first time, the ribbon on the bouquet isn’t curled plastic. It’s white satin, printed with black music notes. Not just the flowers of her death, but something of her life, as well.

Ramirez is in Delaware, doing a follow-up consultation to a case they closed in February, but apparently she didn’t tell the sort-of girlfriend this, because there is an enormous bouquet of sunflowers on her desk. The deliveryman had to hold them while Eddison shoved aside enough paper to make room for it. Ramirez loves sunflowers. He knows this.

But he also knows that he’s got flowers of an entirely different sort on his mind, so he can’t find the delivery anything less than disturbing.

He’s a decent partner, though, so he takes a picture and sends it to her so she can make the appropriate noises of appreciation to the gal from Counterterrorism.

Then Vic walks into the bullpen, half a chicken salad sandwich in his hand and a pinched look on his face. “Get your coat,” he snaps out. “We’re going to Sharpsburg.”

“Sharps—Keely?”

“Got attacked. Inara’s with Keely and her parents at the hospital.”

“Inara’s in Maryland?” But he’s already got his coat and Vic’s, as well as their guns and badges, and they can sort those out once Vic’s swallowed down the rest of his lunch. He grabs the small bags under their desks just in case. They shouldn’t need to spend the night, not so close to home, but it doesn’t cost him more than a second so he might as well.

“Keely’s on spring break; she asked Inara to visit for a couple of days.”

It’s probably for the best that Inara works at such a ridiculously upscale restaurant, given how much time she’s having to take off in all of this.

Vic finishes the sandwich in the elevator and takes his gun and badge, getting them hooked on his belt. “We’ll get an update on the way.”

Except for the update—which really only tells them which hospital Keely was taken to, and that the attacker is in custody—it’s a silent two hours to Sharpsburg. It’s hard not to imagine the worst.

Keely has been dealing . . . as well as she could possibly be expected to. She was kidnapped on her twelfth birthday, brutally raped and beaten, only to wake up in the Garden. She was only there a few days, staunchly protected by Inara and the other girls, but to hear Inara and even Bliss tell it, those few days stank of more fear than any other time. Then the explosion, and the rescue, and the publicity . . . Keely has already dealt with more than any child her age should have to.

The local police told the hospital they were coming; they’ve barely held up their badges before they’re being directed to a private room near the ER.

They find Keely’s father pacing anxiously up and down the hallway, scrubbing at his face. Inara stands beside the doorway, watching him, her arms crossed over her belly. Eddison’s not sure if it’s to ward off vulnerability or cold; the air-conditioning is blowing a little too cold for her tank top to be comfortable. He can see the edges of one tattooed wing over the curve of her shoulder.

“Her mother is in with her, and one of the female officers,” Inara tells them instead of hello.

“Our update was terse,” Vic replies. “What happened?”

“We were in the mall, and decided to stop for lunch. Her parents were in another part of the food court. Keely picked a table for us, I went up to get the food. Heard a fuss and turned around, a woman was going after her with a knife. Called her a whore, said rape was a punishment from God.”

“And then?”

“It caught everyone by surprise. They were just sort of frozen. So I pushed through and decked the bitch. May have broken her nose. She dropped the knife, and by then one of the security guards had approached, so he cuffed her and I got to Keely.”

“How bad?”

After shrugging out of his coat and handing it to Vic, Eddison pulls off his thick black sweater. It had seemed more comfortable over his shirt and tie than a blazer that morning, when they were supposed to be at their desks all day. Now he’s glad for it, because Inara actually smiles at him when he holds it out to her.

“Thanks. I gave my hoodie to Keely, to help her hide a bit. People were staring.” The sweater is big on her, the neck wide enough to show her collarbones, but she shoves her hands in her pockets rather than crossing them again. “The cuts are shallow, mostly on her arms because Keely was holding her arms up to defend herself. There’s one on her cheek, but they called in a plastic surgeon to come take a look at it.”

“Is this the same mall where she was kidnapped?”

“Yes. It’s not her first time back there. Her therapist encourages her to go.”

“So her attacker knew who Keely was.”

“Hard not to,” Inara says dryly. “Not like our faces haven’t been plastered all over the news or anything. And Keely lives here.”

Keely’s father acknowledges them when he paces close enough, but spins on his heel to keep pacing the other way.

“They’ve been trying really hard not to be clingy,” Inara tells the agents. “There, but not hovering. It was their idea to let the two of us eat alone.”

“Are we about to have a conversation about where guilt belongs?” Vic asks in a mild voice.

Inara snorts. “No. I’ve had enough of those for a while, thank you. He’s just trying to pace himself exhausted before he goes in to see her, I think.”

Vic gives Eddison a look, then knocks on the door. “Keely? This is Agent Hanoverian. Is it okay if I come in?” He waits for her muffled assent before he pushes the door open, and gently closes it behind him.

Eddison leans against the wall next to Inara, both of them watching Keely’s father pace. “You only hit her the once?”

“Yes.”

“I’m impressed at your restraint.”

“If the security guard hadn’t been there by that point, I might have done more. Maybe not. Guess it would have depended on whether or not she came at Keely again.”

Mr. Rudolph finishes another lap and spins to start the next.

“They’ve been talking about moving to Baltimore. He can transfer, and her mom has family there. They think it might be better for Keely to get out of Sharpsburg.”

“What do you think?”

“I think Baltimore gets basically the same news,” she sighs. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not the best judge. I went back to the same apartment, the same job.”

“Eighteen is different from twelve.”

“Is it really? I never would have guessed.”

He smirks, and because they’re side by side, he can even pretend she doesn’t see it. “You injured at all?”

She holds up her left hand, which has a bandage wrapped around the palm. It’s not the same as when he first met her, but it’s close enough to make him wince. “I was an idiot. Went to grab her hand, grabbed the knife instead. But it gave me the leverage I needed for the punch. It’s a couple of stitches. Shouldn’t scar too badly.”

The burns from the explosion in the Garden scarred, and she has a set of stretches to do whenever she thinks of them so she doesn’t lose flexibility with the hand.

“I’m surprised you’re not in there with her.”

“I was for a while, but she kept looking over to me when the officer was trying to take her statement. I offered to come out here so the officer could be confident the statement was Keely’s alone.”

“And you stayed out because?”

She mutters a curse and pulls her phone out of her pocket, awkwardly because it’s on her left and her grip isn’t as strong. But as she thumbs the screen on, ignoring a fresh stream of texts with names he can recognize as other Butterflies, she pulls up a message from Bliss that makes his heart skip.

It’s a screenshot from an article online, time-stamped less than an hour ago, and under an obnoxious click-bait headline, there’s a picture of Inara. He can’t see much of Keely, hidden behind Inara’s body with the older girl’s too-large hoodie wrapped completely around her, arms holding it in place in a tight embrace. But he can see where Inara’s tank top rode up her back and hasn’t been fixed yet, showing the lower wings of a Western Pine Elfin, can see the fierce protectiveness on her face as she looks off to one side.

“They call me by name. The restaurant, too. Bliss is warning Guilian; he’ll remind the staff that no one answers questions about anything that isn’t connected to the food.”

“Do they mention her?”

“Keely Rudolph of Sharpsburg, Maryland. They even say her school. Her fucking middle school.”

“Maybe Baltimore wouldn’t be a bad idea. They could register her under her mother’s name.”

“We survived. We shouldn’t have to keep hiding.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“Some of her classmates have been giving her a hard time. Keep covering her locker in butterfly stickers. Leaving craft-shop butterflies on her desk. Even one of her teachers asked if the Gardener had a butterfly picked out for her.”

“Inara.”

“I’m used to a shit life. It means I’m grateful for my friends at every moment, but it also means I’m used to being deluged with terrible things. She’s not. She shouldn’t have to be. She’s a good kid, with parents who would do anything for her, and . . .”

He clears his throat uncomfortably. “It isn’t fair?”

“What is? This is just wrong.” She puts her phone away and knocks her head gently against the wall behind them, closing her eyes. “Scars fade,” she says quietly. “They don’t disappear. It isn’t right. We live with the memories; why do we have to live with the scars as well?”

He doesn’t have an answer for her.

She wouldn’t accept one if he tried.

So they watch Keely’s father pace the hospital hallway, listen to the indistinct murmurs that come through from the room, and wait.

Her name is Laini Testerman, and the silk hibiscus she wears tucked behind one ear every day may be the most concealing piece of clothing she willingly wears.

You’ve really never seen anything like it, but the hotter-than-usual Mississippi spring has this girl stripping down at every opportunity, even when she really shouldn’t. You’ve never seen shorts so short, so high up her ass you can see the curves of her cheeks. If she’s not at school, she’s in a bikini top, each one smaller than the last.

When she babysits, she brings the children out of doors to run through sprinklers and hoses, or to play in pools, and never urges them to change into swimsuits first. Right out in the open where anyone can see, she tells little girls to just strip down to their underwear and jump in, often with boys there in the yard or pool with them. Right out facing the street.

You were contemplating killing her for her own lack of modesty, but this seals it. You can’t let her corrupt other girls like this.

You don’t want the children to see, though, and she spends most of her time when she’s not at school babysitting. She’s saving up for a car, you learn, listening as she waxes eloquent to a friend about the freedoms she’ll have with her own car. It’s hard to get her alone given how busy she is.

But late one night, she leaves her house and rides her bike to the community pool, climbing over the fence despite the lock on the gate. She drops her bag and towel on a chair, but follows it with her swimsuit, until she’s diving gracefully into the water naked as the day she was born.

The clip is still in her hair, bright and bold even in the distant glow of the streetlights.

Then you hear the fence rattle again, and a boy drops down to the deck. He drops his towel and trunks next to her things, but he doesn’t jump in. Instead, he sits down on the side, his legs in the water, and watches her swim laps. She’s swift in the water, her strokes strong and clean, and you know she swims competitively for school.

Would they still want her on the team if they knew about this?

She laughs when she notices the boy, and swims over to brace her elbows over his spread knees.

It’s tempting to get it over with that night, but you don’t have any flowers. You know where you can find them—you’ve been watching her, after all, you’ve known it would have to be her—but it takes another day to drive a few hours out. It’s more effort than you’d normally go to, but the town’s having a Hibiscus Festival. It feels appropriate.

And it feels appropriate to place a bloom over each nipple, where her tops should cover, a cluster of them over her too-often revealed crotch, and one more, the brightest bloom you could find, right in her whore mouth.

After seeing Agents Sterling and Archer off with the Tuesday delivery of marigolds, I head to chess, needing an escape from the house and the boxes and journals. Mum loves marigolds. Dad was allergic to them, or said he was. Really he just hated them, and said he was allergic so Mum wouldn’t bring them into the house or plant them outside. It meant that she planted a border of marigolds along an entire wall of the old church, and he always had to go around to the other door in order to maintain the fiction.

But just as we’re coming up on the anniversary of Chavi’s death, we’re also coming up on the anniversary of his, so marigolds are a little more painful today, the wound a little more jagged.

It’s warm enough for jeans and a fleece, with a scarf draped around my neck just in case. The fleece is bright red and used to be Chavi’s, and it’s so much louder than anything I usually like to wear. There’s something comforting about it, though. It’s as red as my lipstick, and the scarf is a deep, cool emerald like Mum favors, and it’s like wearing pieces of them.

Only not in a creepy Ed Gein sort of way, because no.

I’m aware of the looks the vets are giving each other long before they finally designate someone to ask about it. It’s Pierce who clears his throat, looking steadily down at the board between us. “You all right, Blue Girl?”

“Coming up on a couple of painful dates,” I answer, because it’s true and that’s about as far as I want to get into it right now. Gunny knows I have a murdered sister. They all know I’ve mentioned a mother, but never a father. We wear our scars, and sometimes the pain is as much fact as memory.

“Landon hasn’t been back.”

I drop my hands to my lap. “Is this something I should be apologizing for?”

“No!” he squawks, and Jorge and Steven both shake their heads at him. “No,” he says again, more calmly. “We just wanted to check if he was bothering you elsewhere.”

“I haven’t seen him.” But that makes me remember Finney’s concern. “Have any of you?”

They all shake their heads.

Tapping my queen across a three-square diagonal to where she can be easily captured, I put my hands back in my lap. Pierce gives me a flat look, but accepts the sacrifice. It’s as good a way to change the subject as any.

“How much longer you with us, Blue Girl?” asks Corgi.

“Not quite six weeks. We’re neck deep in the Sorting of Things, getting rid of a lot of things we’ve been hauling move to move for no apparent reason.”

“Women are so sentimental,” Happy sighs.

Yelp elbows him.

“More lazy than sentimental,” I tell him with a small smile. “We just move so often it never seemed worth unpacking everything, and if we weren’t unpacking, why go through the boxes?”

“But if you’re not using it, why keep it?”

“Because the important things were mixed in with the other stuff; we couldn’t just throw out the whole box.”

“Don’t argue with a woman, Hap,” urges Corgi. “Not even a younger one. Their logic ain’t like ours.”

Gunny wakes to a pavilion full of laughter, and smiles at me even as he blinks sleep from his eyes. “You’re good for these weary old souls, Miss Priya.”

“You’re all good for me,” I murmur, and it’s true. With the exception of Landon, this is a safe place, full of people who make me feel not just accepted but welcome, scars and scary smiles and all.

After losing spectacularly to Pierce—and isn’t he disgruntled about that—I play a quiet game with Gunny, then wander around with my camera in hand. The FBI has the pictures they can use; I want more for me, for when I’m gone.

My camera’s still up around my neck when I walk up to Kroger. I can see Joshua walking out, in yet another fisherman sweater and no coat. I take a couple of pictures, because he’s been kind without being pushy. When he notices me, he smiles, but doesn’t stop. There’s no sign of Landon, so I get my drink and head home. I still pay attention as I walk, but I don’t feel the lingering discomfort of anyone’s eyes on me.

I shoot Finney and Sterling texts to let them know that the vets haven’t seen Landon, then scroll down to Eddison’s contact and press “call.” I read about the attack on Keely, saw the picture of Inara; I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to write her about it or let her take the lead on whether or not to mention it. Given that Eddison spent half the weekend texting me rants about the Nationals’ spring training roster, he’s still too pissed to be finished processing.

“I’m not sure if that’s good news or not,” he says when I tell him about Landon. “I’m glad he’s not bothering you, but this makes it a hell of a lot harder to find him.”

“Why are you so sure it’s him?”

“Why are you so sure it’s not?” he counters.

“Did he strike you as being smart enough?”

“Socially incompetent doesn’t mean unintelligent.”

“It does mean he’d be noticed. If you were a teenage girl, would you be inclined to meet him at night?”

“If I were a teenage girl,” he echoes. “I think I’ve had nightmares that started out that way.”

“Well, here’s another nightmare for you,” I mutter, coming up to the doorstep. “There’s been another delivery in the past couple of hours.”

He swears softly, a solid string of sharp syllables, sounding stressed and stretched too thin. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” There are three flowers on the list with h names, and honeysuckle is the only one I can keep straight. “Something tropical? Looks like it belongs on a sunscreen bottle.” The individual blossoms are big, with a handful of large, frilled petals overlapping slightly on the edges and a long, long stamen sticking out like a pollen-beaded erection. The petals are dark purple at the heart, brightening quickly into a bold, orange-tinted scarlet, then to a cheerful yellow on the edges. From above, they look like they belong on Fantasia. I switch him to speakerphone so I can snap pictures and text them.

“Hibiscus,” he says after a minute, husky with resignation. “Do you feel safe, Priya?”

“Nothing’s gone inside the house so far.”

“Priya.”

“Vic’s rubbing off on you.”

“Do. You. Feel. Safe.”

“Safe enough,” I tell him. “I promise. I’ll lock the door, I’ll stay away from the windows, I’ll keep one of the good knives in hand.”

“Do you even know where your good knives are?”

“Sure, Mum found them yesterday. They’re sitting on the counter until we get enough stuff for a full box.”

There’s a soft slap of flesh audible through the phone; I suspect he just smacked himself in the forehead. “All right. Finney will stay with you until your mother is home. Or Sterling and Archer, whoever comes out. Don’t argue on this. They will stay.”

“Wasn’t going to argue.” With the way all three agents drive, it takes less an hour from the Denver office. Mum won’t be home for three. At some point, it feels like they should be able to hand things off to the local police, get the lab reports from them, but I don’t know the rules for that.

“I’m going to call Finney. You call me back if you need to, okay? Let me know you’re still doing okay?”

“I’ll check the feed, get the delivery cued up for them.”

“Good.”

I settle into the couch with one knife on the padded arm and another on the coffee table, my computer open on my lap. I was only gone two, maybe two and a half hours, so the delivery footage should be easy to isolate.

Should be.

The only person I see on the camera after the departure of the agents is me, leaving and coming back. The delivery doesn’t seem to exist. I scan back through, more slowly, and find ten minutes where the feed is frozen. Just stuck on a single frame. The cameras are hooked to our Wi-Fi, which is supposed to be a secured network. It shouldn’t be hackable.

I check the time stamps around the freeze. Oh God. The flowers were left right before I got home.

I don’t remember reaching for one of the knives but there it is, my fingers white-knuckled around the handle. I didn’t pass any pedestrians or cyclists, so whoever left these had to be in one of the cars that went by me.

Don’t ask me why this is more frightening than being home alone when they get delivered. Maybe because when I’m out walking, I’m more vulnerable. In here I have weapons—knives, blunt objects, Chavi’s bat from softball—but out there I only have pepper spray.

I should be safe until the flowers finish.

If I keep repeating it, maybe I’ll believe it again.