The Roses of May (The Collector Trilogy Book 2) by Dot Hutchison (4)

Geoffrey MacIntosh lives in the infirmary of his prison, his health still too tenuous to remove him to a cell. He’s on constant oxygen, his lungs permanently seared by the explosion of the greenhouse complex, the plastic tubing for the cannula actually locked behind his head so he can’t loosen it enough to harm himself with it. Or, Eddison would suspect, for anyone else to harm him with it. The attack on Keely has made national news.

He used to be a handsome man, the Gardener. There are pictures in the file, and all over the Internet. A charming, charismatic fifty-something with sea-green eyes and dark blond hair, always impeccably dressed. Filthy rich, both inherited and earned, and willing to spend small fortunes on charities and other philanthropic endeavors.

And his greenhouse, of course. His Garden.

But the man in the hospital bed has bubbling scars running down the right side of his body, the flesh twisted and stretched. His fingers are thick and stiff with rippling tissue. His throat is pocked and sagging, the scars climbing up to tear at his face. His mouth is pulled down on one side nearly to his chin, teeth and bone showing in places, and his eye is simply gone, too damaged to leave in place. The healed burns wrap back around his scalp. His left side is better, but not unscathed. Pain has gouged deep lines around his mouth and eye. Some of the burns are still resistant to healing, seeping infection around fresh grafts.

He looks nothing like the man who spent thirty years kidnapping, killing, and keeping teenage girls as human Butterflies.

Perhaps perversely, Eddison really wishes he could take a picture to show the survivors. To reassure them.

And because Bliss is Bliss, to really enjoy the sense of vindictive glee that will surely arise.

MacIntosh’s lawyer—or one of them, anyway; he’s hired an entire team to defend him—sits to his client’s left, where he can be seen by the remaining eye. He’s a tall, thin man in an expensive suit that isn’t tailored quite right, like he was too impatient to get it done. It leaves him looking a little swallowed by it, and his clear discomfort with the infirmary doesn’t help.

“Is there a reason you needed to see my client in person, Agents?” the lawyer—Redling? Reed?—asks sharply.

Vic leans against the foot of the bed, hands curled around the sturdy plastic rail. His expression is hard to read, even for Eddison. It’s almost like he doesn’t trust himself to show anything, for fear of what might show.

Eddison can understand that.

“Call it a kindness,” Vic says too mildly. “Mr. MacIntosh. An hour and a half ago, your son Desmond was discovered dead in his cell. He shredded his pants to braid together a noose, and tried to hang himself from the end of his bunk. He was unsuccessful in breaking his neck, but he did cut off his air supply. He was pronounced dead at five forty-two.”

Despite the suddenly shrieking heart monitor, MacIntosh looks frozen, unable to react. His eye darts around, landing on the agents, on his lawyer, at the space near the foot of the bed where the nurse says Desmond sat on occasion.

“Suicide?” says the lawyer, fingers twitching toward his phone. “Are they sure?”

“Biometrics on the cell; no one went through the door after he was accounted for last night. Not until they saw him this morning. He left a note.”

“May we see it?”

It’s already in an evidence bag, Vic’s initials the third in the chain, but he holds it out so it can be seen. There’s not much to see, really—just a single line in black ink, the letters slanting forward with the speed of the writing: Tell Maya I’m sorry.

The lawyer glances at his client, but MacIntosh displays no awareness of the note.

One of the nurses bustles over to hush the monitor, her hand on the inmate’s good shoulder. “Sir, you need to breathe.”

“His son just died,” murmurs the lawyer.

“Well, unless he wants to join him, he needs to breathe,” the nurse answers pragmatically.

Vic watches in silence, finally turning to the lawyer. “We don’t need anything from him. We have no questions.”

“This is your kindness?”

“He heard it in person, from someone who isn’t gloating. He heard it from another father. That’s the kindness.”

Eddison gives the man in the bed one last look before following Vic out. He didn’t say anything. He never intended to. He’s there for Vic, and maybe for the survivors.

For Inara, who understood the fraught relationship between father and son perhaps better than the MacIntoshes themselves. Inara, who’ll know this was Desmond giving up as surely as him finally calling the police was. Not bravery, not what’s right. Just giving up.

Vic is silent through the process of leaving the prison, getting their guns back, retrieving the car. He lets his partner do the talking, but Eddison knows how to talk to guards. It’s nothing like the discomfort of talking to victims. They hit the road back to Quantico, Vic still absorbed in thought.

Eddison pulls out his phone, double-checks a few things before firing off some texts. They’re almost to the garage before he gets the response he’s waiting for. He dials, letting the car’s Bluetooth pick up the call. At the sound of the ringtone, Vic gives him a sideways look.

“You’re a bastard for calling before noon,” comes Inara’s sleepy mumble over the line.

Another day, he might tease her. Not today. “I wanted to make sure we were the ones to tell you.” He glances over at Vic, who nods. “Everyone else still asleep?”

“It’s barely after eight; of course they’re asleep.”

“There’s a box just outside your door; take it and your phone and head up to the roof.”

“Is that supposed to make sense?”

“Please, Inara.” There’s something to Vic’s voice, a weight, a grief, that makes Eddison shift in his seat. From the rustle of fabric, he can tell it works on Inara as well.

“Bliss, let go,” she mutters. “Have to get up.”

“’S’early,” they can hear Bliss groan. “Why?”

“You can sleep.”

“Oh, it’s . . . shit. That means it’s important. Where are we going?”

“Roof.”

The agents in the car listen to the rustles and thumps of the girls getting out of bed, and Eddison wonders which of them had the bad night, that they were sharing. The girls did that in the Garden, curled around each other like puppies whenever they needed the comfort. There are snores in the background, one set soft and whuffling, another putting a chainsaw to shame, and a tinkling bit of piano music. A door closes, and the next thing they hear is another heartfelt groan from Bliss.

“Jesus fuck, this box is fucking heavy, Eddison, what the fuck?”

“Your morning eloquence is astounding,” he says dryly.

“Fuck you.”

Eddison grins. Vic just shakes his head.

“Take the phone; I’ll take the box,” Inara says, and there’s a sharp thump before the line disconnects.

Eddison hits the “call” button again.

“Shut up,” Bliss answers. “No one’s fucking coordinated in the fucking morning.”

There’s something solid and reassuring about Bliss’s habitual profanity. It’s like counting on the tide.

“All right, we’re up on the roof and it’s fucking freezing,” she announces at a normal volume. “What’s going on?”

“You’re on speaker?”

“Duh.”

“Inara?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” she says, the words garbled by a yawn.

“We’ve got some news for you.”

“Good or bad?”

“Just news, I think. I’ll leave it to you to decide.” He takes a breath, wonders why he’s the one doing this instead of Vic. “Desmond was discovered dead in his cell this morning.”

A long silence crackles over the line. He can hear the whistling of the wind, and even the faint blast of car horns.

“He killed himself,” Inara says eventually.

Bliss snorts directly into the phone. “Someone could have shanked the fucker.”

“No, he did it himself. Didn’t he?”

“He did,” Eddison confirms, and Bliss mutters soft curses. “The box is for if you need to break shit. I had a friend drop it off.”

“If we need to . . . Eddison.” But he can hear the almost-laugh in Inara’s voice, and he knows she’s opened it.

And he knows, because it’s his cousin’s specialty, that the box is full of the most god-awful ugly mugs in existence, cheap things so badly painted you wonder that anyone would pay even a quarter for them. She buys them up by the gross, using them in therapy at the women’s shelter she runs, because there’s just something about smashing the damn things that feels so good.

“If you need more, let me know. I can hook you up.”

Vic flinches at the sound of shattering ceramic.

“That one was Bliss,” Inara informs them wryly. “How did he do it?”

And that’s the thing about conversations with Inara; they circle. Even when she doesn’t mean to, even when she’s not doing it to purposefully confuse people, she has a way of sidling around a thing until she comes back at a more comfortable angle. You just have to wait for it.

“He tried to hang himself,” Vic replies. “He ended up strangling himself.”

“Fucker couldn’t even do that right,” snarls Bliss.

“Inara . . .”

“It’s okay, Vic,” Inara says softly. Weirdly enough, Eddison believes her. “The Gardener can try and brazen through a trial, trusting the faults in the system and his own sense of superiority. That kind of confidence was never going to be Desmond’s.”

One of Vic’s hands leaves the wheel, touches the pocket with Desmond’s last note. Eddison shakes his head.

“The Gardener? Was he told?”

“We just came from the infirmary.”

“You told him in person?”

“Vic’s a father.”

That earns him a sharp look from his partner, but a soft sound of understanding from the speakers. “The prosecutor’s office called about the contents of the letters,” she says. “They said he seemed to get more unstable after Amiko died.”

“You said he bonded with her over music.”

“Finding out I turned the letters over without reading them, the no-contact order . . . well, it’s not really a surprise, is it?”

“That doesn’t mean it makes less of an impact,” Vic tells her.

“True. But this . . . this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Finding out he’s dead?”

“I thought you were calling to tell me another of the girls was dead.”

Shit. Eddison definitely hadn’t thought of that.

From the slightly sick look on Vic’s face, neither had he.

Well, it’s been a hell of a morning.

They can hear another mug shatter.

“Yeah, so we’ll need that hookup to get more of these.”

“Inara? It’s okay to grieve for him, if you want.”

“I don’t know what I want to do, Vic,” she replies, then laughs bitterly. “I guess I don’t want him to be worth any more of my time and attention. But that’s hardly fair, is it?”

“What is?” Eddison asks before he can think better of it.

She gives a soft huff of amusement, an unconscious echo of a hospital hallway and a pacing father and a terrified, traumatized little girl. “We’ll get some of the others to take our shifts tonight. Maybe go back out to that beach.”

“Did it help?”

“We can run forever and there’s no glass wall to stop us.”

So yes, it helped.

“Try not to tell anyone else just yet. They want to control how it hits the news.”

“Thank you for telling us. And for the fucktastic mugs.”

They can hear another one shatter.

Eddison gives up and laughs into his hand. “I’ll give you my contact’s name; she can tell you where she gets them.”

“No, Bliss, not off the roof!” The call ends abruptly.

But Vic is smiling a little, that terrible grimness fading. “They’ll be okay, won’t they?”

“I think Inara will have some bad days, but for the most part, yes. I think this takes some of the burden away from her.”

A cell phone goes off, making them both flinch. Eddison can feel the vibrations against his belt. He pulls it up, his stomach sinking as he sees Priya’s name on the display. “Priya? Are you okay?”

“There are petunias on the doorstep,” she says, her voice sharp and fragile. “Mum forgot something and came back before she even got out of town, and they were there. The camera didn’t see a goddamn thing.”

Friday’s camera footage shows a half hour of static instead of a delivery of petunias. It isn’t frozen in place like before—the time stamp is continuous—but it’s just snow. Just half an hour, though; it comes back on after that. Between that and all the clocks in the front half of the house being reset, Archer’s theory is a short-range EMP. They’re not that hard to find, he says; it’s even easy to make them at home.

Oh, the joys of technology.

Archer does . . . something . . . to the cameras, as Sterling argues urgently into her phone, trying to get permission from the section chief to take Landon’s picture and go out canvassing in the neighborhoods Eddison thought were most likely. The conversation does not go well, and is immediately followed by a call to Finney. He can’t countermand his boss’s restrictions, though, and his garbled voice sounds as frustrated as Sterling does.

Archer does not look optimistic about the camera. “Hopefully the shielding will protect it through another pulse,” he says, screwing in the cover.

“Hopefully?” Mum asks dangerously, still in her work clothes.

“It’s a basic home-security camera; it’s not really meant to be indestructible.”

Mum glowers at the camera, swearing under her breath in Hindi.

On Sunday we drive up to Denver, ostensibly for shopping. Really it’s just to get me out of Huntington for a while. She points out the building where she works in LoDo; she doesn’t suggest going in. Even if I were in any mood to meet colleagues putting in extra time, Mum hasn’t personalized her offices since Boston.

The first two years of moving around, her company was sending her to clean up HR departments in struggling branches. She was there to get things back to where they should be. Right after we got to San Diego, they offered her Director of Human Resources in their Paris branch; the current director was looking to retire within the next few years, but the woman he’d been grooming for his position had just been poached by a German industrial firm. They wanted Mum to keep putting out fires in different offices here in the States, but also start learning all the international aspects of the business, the French and EU laws that required different compliance.

I think that may have been what let me bond with Aimée, actually, when I’d spent the other moves avoiding friendships. She was so damn excited when she found out I’d eventually be living in Paris; that was her dream. So, while everyone else in the class learned enough to meet graduation and scholarship requirements, Aimée and I drove the teacher crazy needing more.

We eat someplace a bit nicer than usual because why not, and the whole time we’re there, I can feel the anger curling and crawling and clawing up my gut, hungry for far more than what’s on my plate, because I can’t get the petunias out of my head.

Everyone who knew Kiersten Knowles talked about her laugh. She was always laughing, and had one of those laughs that could fill a room, make you join in before you’d even finished turning around to see what was funny. Kiersten Knowles was a creature of joy. That is, until her aunt—her best friend in the world—was killed by a drunk driver.

Kiersten stopped laughing.

She was murdered after her aunt’s funeral. She stayed in the church while everyone else headed to the reception; she told her father she needed a little time alone to say goodbye. When he got worried and came back to check on her, he found her dead on the floor, parallel to her aunt’s coffin, her body dotted with little nosegays of petunias.

It makes a hell of a picture. I’ve seen it online, along with one that was never meant to be included in the case file much less leaked to the world at large: her father, finally allowed near her, caught as he was falling to his knees, one hand braced against his sister’s casket, the other hovering over the petunias in his daughter’s hair.

There’s a picture of Aimée’s mother, weeping as she tears all the amaranth out of the garden on the roof of their porch. They’re powerful, emotional photographs, the kind of expressive, one-in-a-million shots any photographer is lucky to get, like the one of me reaching back for my sister as the paramedic carried me away.

Those pictures get plastered everywhere because we’re a culture fascinated with crime, because we think the families’ private pain is for public consumption.

Kiersten’s was the first case the FBI worked. One of the officers was friends with Mandy Perkins’s brother and mentioned the similarities to his captain, according to the articles I read. Mandy Perkins was victim number five—five years and five murders before Kiersten—the one who liked to make fairy villages in gardens. Mercedes was still in her last year of college, not even to the academy yet when Kiersten was murdered, but there’s a picture of Eddison and Vic standing outside the church, talking to a uniformed policewoman. Vic looks calm, competent, completely in control of everyone around him.

Eddison looks pissed.

When we get home, there’s a wreath of clover over the doorknob, stiff wire holding the shape, and wires dangling from the overhang where the camera should be.

Mum and I just stand there for a few minutes, looking between the two points.

Clover is for Rachel Ortiz, who was killed at the Renaissance Faire where she was in the cast. Clover was her character name, a silly shepherdess who danced everywhere and carried a basket of pink and white clover blossoms to give to children. On her bodice, she wore a pewter pin that said gaolbait so people would know she was a minor and therefore not to be harassed.

She was raped, the bodice with its pin beside her when she was found in the tiny wooden chapel the Faire used for weddings.

Mum offers to call Finney and Eddison, so I stomp up the stairs to change back into pajamas. Archer will be over in a few minutes, she calls up, because he’s local; Sterling and Finney will drive down from Denver and bring a new camera with them. We saw Archer on his drive-by this morning, before we left for Denver. Patrolling might make Finney and Vic feel better, but it’s sure as shit not doing anything for my peace of mind.

I don’t come downstairs. There’s nothing I can give them. Finney calls up the staircase when he gets here, but I don’t answer, and a moment later I hear Mum’s soft murmur. I know he’s hoping to see me, to check on me so he can tell the Quantico Three he saw for himself that I’m doing okay.

Instead, I go into my closet, find the shoe box on the top that used to hold my photography ribbons back when I entered contests, and pull it down. I switched the ribbons to another box a few moves back, in theory consolidating. To be honest, I’d kept the ribbons in this one so long that it just became the ribbon box, so Mum never thinks to check for an Oreo stash there.

My hands are shaking, making the cellophane rattle. I drop the first Oreo twice before I can actually get a hold of it, dark crumbs flaking off on my thumb and index finger from the strength of my grip.

It tastes like ash.

But I swallow it, and shove the next in my mouth, chewing only as much as I have to before I can swallow that one too.

I should never have researched the other cases. I told myself I needed to, that I owed it to Aimée to hold their names in my heart, but I should never have done it, because I can see them so clearly, because I know what friends and family have said about them, because I feel like I know them.

Because now it’s not just Chavi I see when I close my eyes, butter-yellow chrysanthemums spread around her, the tips of the petal fringe dipping into blood. It’s Aimée, her hands folded to clutch a spray of amaranth to her ballerina-flat chest, her entire body surrounded by the flowers. It’s Darla Jean Carmichael, the first girl, her throat destroyed amidst a fall of white and yellow jonquils. It’s Leigh Clark, raped so viciously the medical examiner had doubts she would have survived even if her throat hadn’t been slashed. It’s Natalie Root, her head pillowed on thick stalks of hyacinth, all shades of pink and purple and white like a patchwork quilt.

The Oreos sit heavy on top of an already larger-than-usual dinner, but I can’t stop, because I can see the numb look on Dad’s face when he met us at the hospital, the shock that never entirely left his eyes. I can still hear Frank’s weeping as he tries to pull me away from Chavi, still feel the blood, cold and tacky on my hands, my cheek, my chest, my clothing soaked through in a way Chavi’s wasn’t, safely set aside, because my sister was naked on the floor of the church.

I can see that picture of Inara, the fierce and protective rage on her face as she tried to shield a child from yet another senseless attack.

My stomach is rolling, protesting, but when I finish the first package, I open a second, forcing the damn cookies past the cramping nausea. This is a pain that makes sense, this is a pain that will stop as soon as I stop, and I can’t stop, because none of this makes sense.

None of this makes any fucking sense at all, and I can’t think how they choose this, my Quantico Three, and Agent Finnegan, too, and Sterling and Archer, I don’t understand how they can face this day in and day out. It doesn’t matter that it happens to strangers.

Kiersten Knowles, Julie McCarthy, Mandy Perkins, they were all strangers to me.

But I can see them, petunias and dahlias and freesia, bloody skin and church floors and it doesn’t—

“Priya! No, sweetheart, no.”

My hands close around the package of Oreos before Mum can yank them away. She grabs the ribbon box, sees two more packages there, and ducks out the door to throw the whole damn thing down the stairs. She kneels down in front of me, hands spread over mine, thumbs covering the ragged opening in the plastic so I can’t pull any out.

“Priya, no.”

She’s crying.

Mum’s crying.

But she’s the strong one, the one who’s always okay even when she isn’t (especially when she isn’t) and how can she be crying? It shocks me enough that I let go, and she throws the package back, heedless of the crumbs that spill over the grey carpet. Her arms wrap around me like a vise.

The back of my throat is burning, and now that I’m not shoving more Oreos in my mouth, I can feel the nausea rising.

“Come on, sweetheart. Up you get.”

She hauls me up with her, always stronger than she looks, and together we stumble across the hall to her bathroom, because I still can’t look at my bathroom without expecting to see all Chavi’s things strewn about. But Mum’s is neat and tidy, everything stacked or in little containers or cups or tucked away behind the side mirror. As she rummages through the cabinet, I drop down onto the soft, thick rug between the toilet and tub. It’s soft, a pale, glittering kind of gold like candlelight.

Sweat beads and drips along my hairline, down the sides of my face, and I can feel the tremors move up from my hands to the rest of my body.

“Two glasses,” says Mum, folding down next to me. She holds out the first cup of salt water. It’s disgusting and hard to drink, and I’m gagging more often than I can swallow, but when I’ve choked it down, she hands me the second one. Vomiting is always painful and nasty, purposefully triggering it even more so, but if I can do it now before it has a chance to build up, it won’t be quite as bad.

Still really bad, though.

Mum pulls my hair back and knots it into a messy bun, one of her terry-cloth headbands keeping the stray bits from my clammy forehead. Her manicure bowl sits at her knee, a washcloth folded into the cool water.

It’s been months since I’ve done this—I swear to God I was getting better—but it’s still a routine.

With one spectacularly vicious cramp, I start puking into the toilet. Between rounds of heaving, Mum flushes the bowl, wringing out the cloth to wipe sweat and sick from my face. Even when the puking is (probably) done, that nasty feeling remains, the will-it-won’t-it hesitation that makes me reluctant to leave the bathroom.

The vomiting hurts, strong and acidic and tearing at my throat, and I start crying, which only makes it worse. My chest aches with the force of the heaves, with the effort it takes just to try to breathe.

Mum curls around me, stroking my hair, the sides of my throat, her fingers cool and moist from changing out the cloth. “It all adds up,” she whispers against my ear. “We’re going to get through this.”

“I just want it to stop,” I croak, “but then . . .”

“What?”

“We told him where to find us. We told him where we were going next and we dared him to come.”

“Dared? No. Begged,” Mum says firmly. “But if you are having even the slightest doubt, we stop now.”

It seemed simple when Mum proposed the idea back in Birmingham. If the killer really is watching us, if him being in San Diego, killing Aimée, wasn’t a coincidence, he’d almost certainly notice the profile in the Economist. Tell him where we’ll be, she said, and he’ll be there. It’ll be the best chance for him to be caught.

Which might be fine, except we still can’t fucking find him.

There was no way to anticipate the Denver FBI office having the section chief from hell. We should have anticipated he’d get around the cameras; he hasn’t been getting away with this for so long by being careless. It just seemed like such a brilliant plan when Mum told me about it, even if we had very different reasons for liking it. She wants to find him and kill him.

I want to hand his ass over to our agents.

Wanted.

Now I want . . . I don’t know. It’s hard to think through the cramping pain in my belly and the feeling of being marooned. I’m far from abandoned, I know that, but logic doesn’t help much against the fear at realizing the FBI is hamstringing its own agents, that we’ll suffer for that.

“We’re not giving up,” I mumble.

“Sweetheart—”

“He’ll kill until he’s stopped. Isn’t that what they always say? That if they’re getting away with it, they have no reason to stop?”

“Priya—”

“Other mothers will lose their daughters.”

“Other sisters,” she sighs. “You know, I am this close to sending you off somewhere to vacation for a month. Should send you ahead to Paris to decorate the house.”

“He’ll keep killing.”

“Stopping him is not worth destroying you.”

I watch her get up and walk away, knowing she won’t go far. To my room, maybe, to clean up the cookies before they attract bugs. The mini-vac whirrs, and a moment later she comes back with my toothbrush in hand.

My mouth is currently a kind of nasty I’m not sure a toothbrush can touch, but I brush and rinse and spit obediently, and when there isn’t imminent danger of more hurling, Mum helps me wash my face. It’s early yet, especially for us, but we curl up in her bed that’s been too big since Dad died. She clicks the TV on, skipping through channels until she can put on a nature documentary narrated by a man with a deep, soothing British voice.

Mum says BBC is the only thing she really misses about London.

I’m not sure either of us ever really sleep; we just sort of drift on exhaustion and emotion-numbed minds. When her alarm goes off, she throws it across the room.

It keeps going off.

I bury my face in her shoulder. “There’s nothing to unplug.”

“I know.”

“It’s not going to stop until you make it.”

“Shush.”

It’s another five minutes before either of us feels like making the effort, and even then we just haul her comforter downstairs to curl up together on the couch. She has her phone in hand, and I can hear her fingernail tapping against the screen as her thumb flies, typing out a message. I’m assuming it’s to her boss.

It could also be to Eddison.

I should probably let him know I had an Oreo incident, but I really don’t want to. Not because he’ll be disappointed—he understands—but because he’ll be worried.

More worried.

Shit.

Eventually Mum’s stomach starts growling enough she has to leave our nest of warmth. I’m hungry, but the thought of eating anything makes me queasy. She brings back a bowl of oatmeal and bananas for herself, and hands me a smoothie. It’s a good compromise. Substance, which my body still kind of needs, but not heavy. And it’s a drink. I’m not sure why that makes a difference, being able to drink it instead of bite and chew, but it does, and it might just be purely in my head.

“Will going to chess make you feel better?”

Brotherhood isn’t the only reason struggling vets cluster. Seeing your own demons reflected back at you, it creates a safe place to just be wounded. It gives permission, in a way, to not be okay. You go to your brothers (and sisters) and not only will they watch over you when you are clearly incapable of doing so yourself, they will never tell you to be anything other than what you are, even if on that particular day what you are is a collapsing wreck of a human being.

“Maybe,” I say eventually.

“Then go get showered and dressed; I’ll go with you.”

“To shower and get dressed?”

She shoves me off the couch.

When I come back downstairs, still slicking on violently red gloss over the lip stain, she’s standing at the base of the stairs dressed to go out. As I lock the door behind us, she checks to make sure the new camera is on and positioned.

Given the casual way he disarmed and ripped out the last one, I don’t think the camera is really going to help.

But it’s like locking the door, the sense of safety more than the fact of it, so I wait until she’s finished fussing with it before I lead the way down the sidewalk. At the end of the street, she stops, looks back over her shoulder at the house, and shakes her head.

When we walk up the grass—slowly brightening as spring settles in—half the vets stumble awkwardly to their feet at the sight of my mother.

Happy and Corgi let out wolf whistles.

Mum gives them one of her sharp-edged, charming smiles.

They gulp, and Pierce starts laughing. “You must be where Blue Girl learned it,” he wheezes, one hand clutching his chest.

Settling comfortably across from the slumbering Gunny, Mum shoots me a look. “Blue Girl?”

“Speaking of, we should really pick up some dye. My roots are nearing voting age.”

The weird thing about Mum coming to chess—one of many weird things, really, given that it’s the middle of a workday—is that she hates chess. She hates playing it, hates watching it, hates even hearing about it. She once canceled our cable subscription for a week so Dad couldn’t try to make her watch any more documentaries about famous games or players. So the fact that she’s sitting at the end of the table, watching all the games with barely concealed bemusement, isn’t about chess, it’s about me.

Because Mum isn’t clingy, doesn’t hover, but sometimes you just need that visceral affirmation that the people you love are all right, that they’re just there in front of you. Close enough to touch.

Sometime after Gunny’s woken up and introduced himself, a navy-banded police car pulls up next to the island and parks. All the vets straighten, the ones with their backs to the lot twisting around to try to see. A pair of officers climb out, puffy black jackets over dark blue uniforms with mustard trim down the pant legs.

A handful of the men relax, recognizing them.

“Pierce, Jorge,” greets the older of the pair, his thick hair entirely white and silver. “How you doin’?”

“Nice and warm today, Lou,” answers Jorge. “What brings you out here?”

Lou pulls a hand-size notebook out of his back pocket. “We heard from some neighbors that Landon Burnside plays with you sometimes.”

Burnside?

Mum pokes me hard in the thigh.

Corgi scratches at his bulbous nose. “We’ve got a Landon, sure enough. Don’t know his last name, though. Average sort of guy?”

A bland, little nothing of a man.

Lou’s partner holds up a photo, and yes, it’s Landon, not that there was really any expectation otherwise.

Corgi nods along with some of the others. “That’s him. What’s he done?” His eyes don’t go to me when he says it, but Yelp’s do, and Steven’s.

“He was found dead last night in his room.”

White light flares in my vision, but doesn’t clear with frantic blinking. It just hangs there, blinding me, until Mum’s finger pokes between my ribs hard enough to make me choke. Spots dance as the world flickers back into view.

“How was he killed?” Mum asks calmly. “Can you say?”

The officers exchange a look and a shrug. “Hard to say; he’s been dead awhile. Examiner’s working to figure out what was done to him.”

“Done to him,” Mum echoes. “So you do suspect foul play.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Tapping the back of my hand to pull my attention to her face, Mum nods toward the parking lot. “I’ll tell them. You call.”

“Ma’am? You have any information on Mr. Burnside?”

“I can tell you that the FBI considers him a person of interest in an ongoing investigation,” she says, and her voice is smooth and strong the way it is at work.

I pull away from the table, careful to keep within sight of the officers as I take a few steps from the island. My hands shake, and the phone nearly drops twice before I can get a good grip on it.

“Hey, Priya,” comes Eddison’s hoarse voice in my ear a minute later. “Checking in?”

“Landon’s last name is Burnside.”

“A last name? Excellent, that will—Priya, how in the hell do you know his last name?”

I choke on a bewildered laugh. “He was murdered a while ago. He was found yesterday.”

“Local cops?”

“Who else?”

“Hand over the phone, will you?”

The cops are both looking at me, though Lou is listening attentively to Mum. I walk back up and hold out the phone. “This is Special Agent Brandon Eddison; he’d like to talk to you.”

Lou’s partner looks at me intently, then takes the phone from my hand, gently, like he’s afraid if he touches me I’ll shatter, and steps to the far end of the island before speaking. He must introduce himself, but I can’t really hear. Before I can sit back down, Mum hands me her phone.

“Agent Finnegan. Just in case.”

I nod, walk away again, and pull up the number Agent Finnegan gave us. I usually email him, though lately I’ve fallen to texting whenever there’s a new flower delivery. I count the rings until he picks up.

“Agent Finnegan,” he says crisply, half a bite away from brusque.

“Sir, this is Priya Sravasti, and Landon the creep was found dead yesterday.”

He mutters a handful of curses in Japanese. “I’m going to ask this, understanding that it’s a rude question—”

“They don’t know when he was killed, so I can’t try to tell you where we were.”

“Have you informed Hanoverian?”

“Eddison’s on the phone with one of the local cops right now.”

“All right, I’ll get the contact info from him so we can request a visit to the body and scene. Are you safe?”

“Mum and I are out at the chess park.” Which, come to think of it, isn’t exactly an answer. It’s all I’ve got, though.

“Once the officers let you go, head home and stay there. If you don’t feel safe there, come up to Denver and get a hotel, just let me know which one.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Priya?”

“Yes, sir?”

“We’re going to get you through this.” His voice is warm and firm, and under other circumstances I’d probably find it reassuring, perhaps even comforting.

But his hands are tied.

I sit back down and give the phone to Mum. God, the smoothie feels so heavy in my stomach, and I keep swallowing against the need to vomit.

“So this man was stalking you?” asks the older officer.

“Maybe,” I mumble. “He was definitely a little too focused on me for comfort.” I glance at Mum, who nods. It’s not like they aren’t going to learn all this anyway. “I’ve been getting flowers that correspond to a series of unsolved murders; given Landon’s attention on me, the agents thought he might be connected. They wanted to talk to him but he stopped coming to chess, and they weren’t finding any trace of him on paper.”

“He didn’t have ID; his landlord told us his name.”

His partner returns to the table and offers me my phone. “You seem to have Murphy’s own luck, Miss Priya.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, only that I was on the force in Boston when your sister died,” he explains in a thick Texas drawl. Oh God, no wonder he looked at me so intently. He recognized me. “My wife and I moved here when her pop got sick, but I’m not like to forget your family. What a tragedy. Tell you what, though, you’ve grown just as pretty as your sister.”

I gape at him. I don’t think I’m even capable of more than that.

Mum gets to her feet and slides around until she’s mostly blocking me. “If that’s how you feel is appropriate to speak to my daughter, you won’t be speaking to her at all,” she informs him frostily. “Your partner can deal with us, while you back the hell away.”

As the officer stumbles through an apology, Corgi leans over to tap my knee. “Keep learning from your mama, Blue Girl,” he whispers. “Together you two could scare the world into behaving right.”

I squeeze his hand because I can’t even attempt a smile.

“Go call the captain,” Lou tells his partner, and watches him walk away. “My apologies, ma’am, miss. I’ll speak to him about it.”

“Remind me of his name,” Mum says, in a tone that’s far less question than command.

“Officer Michael Clare,” he replies. “I’m Officer Lou Hamilton, and I’m sorry to be doing this, I know it’s a stressful time, but I do have to ask you both some questions in light of this new information. I promise, I will be the one asking.” He gestures up to the Krogers. “You might be more comfortable inside. Gentlemen,” he adds to the concerned vets, “Clare will have some questions for you, too, about Mr. Burnside, if you don’t mind.”

Gunny nods gravely. “We’ll wait for him. Be safe, Miss Priya.”

Inside the café, Lou settles us at a table and goes to get us drinks. I can see Joshua a couple of tables away, buried in a book, and behind the counter, the sparrow-barista greets the officer with cheerful familiarity.

I don’t remember Officer Clare. To be fair, I don’t remember any of the uniformed people I met the night of Chavi’s murder, or the couple of days after. Really the first strangers to make an impression were the Quantico Three. Five years later, though, Officer Clare remembers me.

Even though I never really thought Landon was behind the deliveries, there’s something terrifying about learning for sure that he isn’t.

If it isn’t him, then who?

“All right, Finney, you’ve been digging for a week now; tell us something good.”

The helpless laugh from the speaker in the middle of the conference table is less than reassuring. “I really wish I could, Vic, but we lost the only person remotely on our radar.”

“Now that we know more about him, was he likely for the previous murders?” asks Vic, sprawled in one of the high-back rolling chairs. One elbow is braced on the plastic arm to prop himself up, two fingers digging into his temple to hold off what looks like a hell of a headache. Ramirez’s pen is tapping a mile a minute against the table, which can’t be helping.

It’s most of why Eddison is being careful to pace behind Vic.

“Landon Burnside lived off the grid. No state-issued ID, no car, no credit cards, no bank accounts, no property. Worked odd jobs for cash, rented the mother-in-law suite for cash in a friend’s house.”

“But?”

“But the friend was a cousin, and our guy’s name was actually Landon Cooper. Did two and a half years of a seven-year sentence for statutory rape and assorted charges. Was supposed to register when he got out, instead he skipped state and turned up in Colorado. DNA came back this morning to confirm his identity.”

“Any chance he detoured through San Diego two years ago?”

“No; he was still locked up. He just got out fourteen months ago. He only served time the once, but he went to trial a couple other times, and had complaints that never made it that far. Garden-variety creep”—all three agents cringe—“who likes teen girls a hell of a lot more than teen girls like him. He was in prison in Michigan when Aimée Browder was killed.”

“What if he was killed to protect Priya?”

Ramirez and Vic both swivel in their chairs to look at Eddison, and even Finney is silent on the phone.

Eddison shrugs. “Asking seriously: what if the bastard killed Landon because he was bothering Priya?”

Ramirez is still staring, looking somewhat sick, but Vic’s clearly had the thought already. “Walk us through it,” he suggests.

“I could buy the flowers being taunts, if anyone else got them. Any other family member, any other victim. But it’s just Priya. The deliveries are about her, not the murders. If we look at the flowers as gifts . . .”

“He was courting her, and when she moved away, he killed Aimée because it was as close as he could get to Priya,” Ramirez says.

“Whatever motivates him to kill, it isn’t sex; only half of his victims are raped, and even that seems more about punishment than sex. He sees something else in them, and whatever that thing is, he sees Priya as being better. He wants Priya for something the others were never even considered for. She means enough to him that he actively looks for her not once, but twice. And he finds her.”

“So he starts courting her again,” Ramirez picks up, the flow familiar from a thousand other conversations, when the teasing falls away for the sake of work, and they’re so close to being on the same page on a case. “Flowers, cards. But then there’s Landon. If he’s watching her, he knows Landon is bothering her.”

“How?” asks Finney.

“Because he’s watching, too. He knows when the Sravastis are out of the house, knows when to make the deliveries or have them made. Deshani’s schedule is fairly fixed, but Priya’s changes based on her mood. And we know the psychology of these kinds of gifts: he’ll want to see the reaction to them.”

“He sees Landon because he’s already following Priya.”

“And that’s where Landon crosses the line this guy has drawn. He thinks of Priya as his, and Landon was encroaching.”

“It’ll be a few days before the official autopsy results are in,” adds Finney, his voice crackling through the speaker, “but the Huntington ME feels pretty comfortable loosely mapping out the events. Landon had been dead roughly three weeks when he was found, probably since just after Eddison’s visit. He didn’t have heat, so the cold slowed decay, but eventually the smell started filtering into the rest of the house and the cousin went to investigate. First came a couple of subduing blows, and there’s evidence of some kind of restraint. Rope, probably. Once he was tied up, he was castrated.”

Eddison knows that, the local lieutenant told him that, but it still makes him wince.

“Guy wasn’t neat about it, either,” Finny continues. “He wanted it to hurt. There was a hell of a beating after, just to let it really sink in, before he went at Landon’s throat. It’s messy, strong, full of rage. This guy was pissed.”

“Same knife?”

“Impossible to know. They’ll make casts, but the decay will make it hard to be definitive. It’s similar, at the very least.”

“And nothing left behind.”

“Just Landon. Took the rope with him, even.”

“So why hasn’t he tried to go inside Priya’s house?” Ramirez asks. “Clearly he can take care of the cameras, but there’s no sign that he’s tried to go in, even when Priya has been home alone. Why not?”

Scrubbing at his face, Eddison bites off a growl. He jerks his chin at the bright stack of case folders. “The answer’s in there somewhere. Something we haven’t connected because he’s seeing something we’re not.”

“Finney?” says Vic. “You have the freshest eyes when it comes to these cases. Anything jump?”

They can hear the click of keys and the shuffle of papers, Finney going through his copies of the case reports and his own notes on them. “Maybe.”

The agents at Quantico wait, but he doesn’t immediately continue. When the silence stretches into discomfort, Ramirez throws her pen at the speaker. “Well?”

“What makes him decide whether or not to rape?”

“We’ve never known,” Eddison answers automatically.

“Look at Leigh Clark,” Vic says. Neither of his partners reaches for that folder; they don’t need to see those pictures. “Of the girls, hers was the most vicious attack. If she’d somehow survived, she would have almost certainly had permanent damage from the rape alone. What was it about her that made him lose control like that?”

“Her parents held back in their statements. They didn’t want to say anything bad about their daughter, but most of the other interviews mentioned that Leigh was a wild child. Sex, smoking, drugs . . . so the extra viciousness was a punishment?”

“Zoraida Bourret was treated gently, her throat was slit while she was unconscious, and unconscious not from a blow to the head but from partial asphyxiation.” Vic’s thick fingers drum on the table. “Every statement in that folder says she was a good girl, family first, never went out with anyone because she was needed at home.”

“But Natalie Root wasn’t a virgin,” Eddison points out. “She was only a few months out from a pregnancy scare, and she was left unmolested.”

“And Rachel Ortiz,” adds Ramirez. “She was raped, but the ME said she was almost definitely a virgin before the attack.”

“But we’re looking at facts; he’s deciding based on his perception of them.”

“I’m starting to see why none of the bosses want to split you three up,” Finney observes dryly. “But let’s play: if he was watching the girls to pass judgment on them, then he watched Priya five years ago. She and her sister were incredibly close, so for him to make any meaningful evaluation of Chavi, he saw a lot of Priya, too.”

“And he fell in love with her.”

“Isn’t that a jump? Especially if we’re saying this isn’t about sex?”

Ramirez shakes her head. “I said love, not lust. Like courtly love: it’s supposed to be chaste, pure. And think about it, Priya doesn’t date. She isn’t friends with boys. She does her schoolwork, she plays chess with a bunch of veterans, she stays in with her mother. If it’s perceived purity he’s hung up on, you can’t really do better than Priya.”

“Then wouldn’t he have attacked her after I was there?” Eddison points out, an ache gripping his chest.

“You didn’t spend the night.”

“No, but we were alone in the house for a few hours before Deshani came home. And we walked to and from chess together the next morning.”

They all absorb that in silence, then Finney clears his throat. “You were protecting her. In nosing around Landon, you were protecting Priya. He probably saw you as an ally.”

Ramirez glances to Eddison, the corner of her mouth jumping slightly. “And anyone who’s seen you and Priya spend time together wouldn’t see you as anything other than family.”

He flips her off rather than answer, though she’s not wrong.

“So when he gets up to date on the flowers, what happens then?” Finney asks. “Do we think he’s going to approach somehow? Attack her?”

“She’s moving in a month.”

“Chavi’s girlfriend, Josephine,” Ramirez says, skimming through the yellow folder. “She mentioned an unfamiliar man at the neighborhood spring festival a couple weeks before the murder. Said he wasn’t creepy, just attentive, especially to Chavi and Priya.”

“To both of them?”

“She said he mentioned having a sister. He seemed to find it charming how close they were.” She closes the folder and taps her thumbs against it, not in any discernible rhythm. “Chavi and Josephine weren’t out except to their mothers and Priya. Deshani said her husband would have gone through the roof, but the girls had been best friends since the Sravastis moved to Boston, so no one ever suspected they were dating.”

“So as far as he knew, Chavi was a good friend and a great sister.”

“Josephine is . . .” After a flurry of clicking keys, Finney makes a soft sound of triumph. “She’s in New York. Columbia Law.”

“I could take the train up,” Eddison offers. “Take the pictures Priya gave us, see if anyone looks familiar. It’s been five years, but something might ring a bell.”

“Get more mugs from your friend,” Vic tells him. “Inara says they’re almost out.”

“In a week and a half? The box had three dozen!”

Smacking her forehead against the table, Ramirez dissolves into soft, semi-hysterical laughter.

“Priya called this afternoon,” Finney says once they’ve settled somewhat. “There were yellow chrysanthemums on the doorstep when she got home from a field trip; the oldest vet and his granddaughter took her to their church to see the windows. First flowers in just over a week.”

Chavi had a sunburst of yellow chrysanthemums around her head, a few blossoms placed in her dark hair.

“Did Priya . . .” But Eddison doesn’t know how to ask that question, not of Finney. Not in front of Ramirez and Vic.

“She asked me for Ward’s phone number so she could give it to her mother,” he replies. “Speaking of which . . .”

“Don’t say it,” groans Vic.

“Ward rejected the request for a protection detail on the house, then chewed me out for wasting Bureau resources on a community service murder that has no connection to any active case.”

Eddison sputters. “No connection?”

But Vic gives a resigned sigh. “Let me guess: can’t be our killer because the profile says he doesn’t kill men, can’t be the stalker because he’s shown no signs of being violent. Pure coincidence.”

“Pretty much, and her boss is backing her up. Huntington PD is being remarkably polite over us not telling them about the stalking investigation—I suspect we can thank Deshani for that, after she eviscerated the captain for the behavior of Officer Clare—and they’ve agreed to keep me updated on the progress of their investigation.”

“Is Ward pushing against Sterling and Archer yet?”

“So far she’s focused on me and I’m trying to keep it that way. I’ve got to be honest, Vic, if she gets me much more against the wall, I’m doing my best, but . . .”

“Understood. I’ve got a meeting with one of the assistant directors tomorrow. He doesn’t like Ward, but he also doesn’t like interfering in other agents’ cases. I’m not sure how that’s going to go.”

“Both Sravastis mapped out their movements in the days around Landon’s estimated date of death,” Finney says after a minute. “No holes large enough for the locals to accuse them of anything. That’s something.”

“Oh?” Vic’s voice is far too mild for the complicated expression. “I thought we were all politely ignoring the fact that Deshani is one hundred percent capable of killing a man who threatens her daughter.”

“She wouldn’t have been messy,” Eddison and Ramirez say together.

Finney groans. “Terrifying woman. Let me know what you get from Josephine.”

It’s Ramirez who reaches across to shut off the speaker, ending the call. “Priya and Deshani are careful,” she whispers. “They’re smart, and observant, and they pay attention. When their gut tells them something is off, they listen. How do we find someone they don’t notice?”

Neither of the men tries to answer her.

Neither of them points out there are only four flowers left to be delivered.

The fourth mega-crash of the morning has Mum swearing in an accent she mostly left in London, with a few Hindi curses slipped in for good measure. A glance outside says the shipping container is once again in the middle of the driveway, not off to the right as it needs to be so Mum can still pull the car out of the garage. I could almost feel bad for the deliverymen—Mum started out displeased about having to take the day off work so she could sign for the delivery, some bullshit about my signature not being acceptable because I’m a minor, but four times? Really?

And because she’s in a bad mood, and because we woke up to hyacinths on the doorstep, I am safely sequestered in my room with one of Chavi’s journals, staying the hell out of the way.

I haven’t read straight through the journals—there’s too many to manage it quickly—but I’ve jumped around, picking them up at random and skimming through. Where mine have photographs slipped in all over the place like bizarre bookmarks, hers are full of sketches, many on the pages themselves, as she either lost track of what she wanted to say or couldn’t make the words she had say it. Even after she died, it never felt right to read them. They were still private.

The Chavi of five springs ago was excited and scared in pretty equal measure. She was so happy with Josephine, almost giddy to be dating her best friend, but she was scared of Dad’s reaction when he eventually found out. Not just for herself and Josephine, but for me, too—would Dad have insisted on cutting off contact between us once she left for school? And school, too. She’d been accepted to Sarah Lawrence and Josephine was going to NYU, so they’d even be in the same metropolitan area, but it was college and new, and as much as she was looking forward to it, she worried.

I squirm through her entry about her and Mum giving me my bindi, mainly because it segued into a discussion on tampons and pads and other period things, and on the second day of my first period, I was still a bit squicky about it all. I’d known the theory, and obviously I’d been around Chavi and Mum for many, many periods, but still. Not even twelve, at that point. There really isn’t a way for a lesson in using tampons to not be mortifying at that age.

Toward the end, there are drawings tucked in between the memories from the spring festival. We held all sorts of neighborhood parties and festivals at the old church, sometimes to raise money for repairs and to augment Frank’s salary without him knowing, sometimes for charity. Sometimes just for fun. Chavi had spent both days painting faces and drawing caricatures, and I’d helped younger kids make flower crowns and run a maze made of old bedsheets.

It was what gave me the idea for my birthday party, seeing all the munchkins running around with flowers and trailing ribbons.

Leaving the notebook open on the bed, I slide off and open the top middle drawer of my dresser. I think it’s meant for socks or something, but I have it lined in velvet to hold the flower crowns from my birthday. Chavi’s was made of silk chrysanthemums, like a fringed headband, and Mum’s was a bristling, angular wreath of lavender that made her look like a brown-skinned Demeter. Mine was white roses, big bloomed and heavy, with five different shades of blue ribbon weaving through and trailing down the back.

It’s still heavy, but a little too small now.

When we were on a break during the festival, Chavi had chased me through the maze, both of us laughing our heads off, and when I made it through to the exit, Josephine had caught and twirled me in great circles until Chavi crashed into us both. We couldn’t even get up we were giggling so hard, breathless and full of life.

I didn’t mean to lose contact with Josephine, but I think we both knew it was going to happen. As much as I loved her as another sister, there was a Chavi-shaped space between us, and the edges of it hurt.

With the too-small crown of roses still on my head, perched at a somewhat precarious angle, I plop back onto the bed and start reading again.

She’s talking about the second day, when Dad gave Mum so much shit about eating a burger that she went and got two beef hot dogs just to be spiteful, and the tone shifts. I remember us sitting a little apart from everyone, sprawled over a blanket with Josephine in the shade rather than at the picnic tables or the pavilions. Chavi and I always made a point of scarfing our burgers down first so Dad wouldn’t see them.

He wasn’t any more religious or observant than Mum, but he felt guiltier about it.

Or just guilty, I suppose. Mum seemed to embrace plainspoken agnosticism with a sense of relief.

Reading Chavi’s words, I can sort of remember the man who came up to us, because he asked us if we were sisters. I was sitting in her lap, and even back then, when I was a too-skinny almost-twelve-year-old waiting for my weight to catch up with my growth spurt, it was just a stupid question. Sure, Chavi was darker than me, but I was still spectrums browner than any of our very white neighbors.

He seemed sad. I couldn’t put my finger on why I thought that, not even when Chavi asked me later, but I remember that. He just seemed sad, even though he was smiling at us.

Chavi mentions him again a week later, after our monthly Sister Day breakfast at the diner. We went to the cinema after that—Saturday mornings, they’d play black-and-white classics on the big screens—and she went to get candy while I was in the restroom. She seemed flustered, but when I asked her about it, she said a jerk from one of her classes asked for her number.

That isn’t what she wrote, though. She’d noticed what I hadn’t, that someone had followed us from the diner. When I was in the bathroom, she lit into him for being creepy, told him she’d call the manager and the cops if he didn’t leave us the hell alone.

He thanked her.

She writes that she was confused as shit by it, but he thanked her for being such a good sister and then left the cinema.

She doesn’t mention him again.

A week later, she was dead.

Dammit. I can’t remember anything else about him. Just that he was sad and had a sister. I know I didn’t write about him; for a while after Chavi died, I escaped into compulsively reading my last weeks with her. I still reread that journal more than any other.

“Priya!” Mum yells up the stairs. “Archer’s here!”

He’d probably just gotten to Denver when we texted Finney, and he had to turn around and drive all the way back.

When I get downstairs, he’s on the step with the tissue-wrapped stalks of hyacinth. He glances up at me with a grimace. “Sterling says to let her know if I make you uncomfortable, and she’ll do something painful to me the next time we spar in the gym.”

“I like Sterling.”

“I’m sorry I made that kind of protection necessary.”

“Why did you?”

He doesn’t answer immediately, still crouching down to take pictures of the untouched flowers. “The FBI uses cold cases in academy training to teach us that we can’t solve every case,” he says finally. “It’s supposed to teach us pragmatism.”

“What did it teach you instead?”

“You know, I honestly used to think that cases only went unsolved because investigators got lazy.” He transfers the flowers to an evidence bag, then seals and signs it. When he straightens, he leans against the wall like he’s settling in for conversation. “I was an idiot, and arrogant. My academy friends and I used to brag that we’d have flawless case records.”

“Then you learned that life is messy?”

“I grew up black in small-town South Carolina, where my high school mascot was a Confederate general; I thought I knew all there was about life being messy. People look at me now with a suit and a badge and think I don’t belong.”

“And you want to prove them wrong.”

“I do. But . . . I can’t use other people to do it. And seeing the strain you’re under . . . I was incredibly stupid to suggest you should make yourself bait. I was ignorant and out of line, and I sincerely apologize.”

“Accepted.”

He blinks at me.

“If you really want to grovel, I can hand you over to Mum; she’s much better at demanding that sort of thing.”

Chuckling, Archer peels off the neoprene gloves and shoves them in his pocket. “You really are something.”

After he leaves, I text Sterling. No need for unmanning; he even made a very good apology.

Good, I get back, but I’ll probably try anyway. Really make the lesson stick.

When the shipping container is finally in place, Mum heads up to Denver to put a few hours into the office. The move is less than three weeks away, so they’re piling a lot of work on her to make sure she’s ready. To do my part in making sure I’m ready for the move, I settle in with the schoolwork that it was too loud to do this morning.

Around four, there’s a knock on the door.

I freeze, staring down the hall at the door like if I just look hard enough, I can see through it. I almost call out “Who is it?” but don’t.

Easing off the couch, I reach for Chavi’s softball bat, which now lives in whatever room I’m spending time in. We had to pack the knives. The bat is heavy and solid, the grip comfortingly rough in my hands.

“Miss Priya?” a male voice calls. “Miss Priya, you home?”

Is that . . . is that Officer Clare?

I switch my screen over to the camera feed, and yes, that’s Officer Clare standing on the porch, his hat in hand. His voice is unmistakably Texas. With absolutely no intention of answering him, I take the time to study him. He’s probably in his forties, his face worn but otherwise unremarkable. I try to place it against my admittedly spotty memory of the cops around Chavi’s murder.

He looks vaguely familiar, but not in any meaningful way. He’s not overwhelmingly bland like Landon is—was—he just doesn’t spark specific recognition.

“If you’re home, Miss Priya,” he calls through the door, “I just swung by to apologize for the other day. I’ll try you another time.”

It seems to be the day for apologies.

Mum has the contact info for Officer Hamilton; I text her with the news of Clare’s visit so she can let Hamilton know.

Why would Clare come, without his partner, to a residence where he expects a minor to be home on her own? It’s different when Eddison does it; he’s family, and it was years before he’d hang out just the two of us. Maybe I’m paranoid, given everything else going on, but I don’t like Clare showing up here.

Mum texts back three rows of flame emojis.

Her name is Chavi Sravasti, and she’s extraordinary.

She’s painting faces at a spring festival when you first see her, and rage fills you. It’s been years, but you still remember Leigh Clark’s duplicity, her evil. How sweet and demure the preacher’s daughter appeared at the same tasks, but it was only a mask for her true behavior.

But there’s something different about Chavi. She laughs and jokes with the children, chivvying the adults into getting their faces painted as well. She’s talented, too, branching out beyond the school carnival symbols into masks and detailed works. Like most of the girls—and many of the boys—she wears a ribbon crown of tiny fabric roses over her dark hair.

You’re not sure what to make of her. She’s friendly without flirting, even when the oldest boys and younger men try their best to get more of her attention. Her behavior suggests a good girl, but her appearance . . . bright red streaks spill through her hair, her makeup bright white and gold and heavy black liner, her lips bold and red. Gold and crystal glitters at her nose and between her eyes.

Then her sister comes up, a gawky, too-thin child with a bright smile and a brighter laugh, and despite her youth, she also has streaks in her hair, royal blue, and her makeup is softer, her lips a delicate shade of pink. Appropriate for someone the age she looks. Curious, you look around for their parents. They aren’t hard to find; their brown skin makes them stand out in this neighborhood. The mother’s hair is unadorned, but even from a distance you can see her dark red lips, the loop of gold through the center of the lower lip, and the spark of crystal at her nose and between her eyes.

Family tradition, then.

A boy comes up to take Chavi’s place with the paints, and the girls run off hand in hand, laughing and dancing into each other, never tangling, never tripping. You follow them from a distance, charmed at the sight. Even when their breaks are over and they return to their booths, they’re aware of each other, frequently looking up to exchange smiles.

Chavi is such a good sister. You watch them for two weeks, the way Priya—you’ve finally learned the younger girl’s name—takes pictures of everything, the way Chavi draws constantly. They each have their own circles of friends, but you’ve never seen sisters who delight in spending time together the way these two do.

Priya never sees you, but Chavi . . .

Chavi does, and you’re not sure what to do with that. You’re used to not being noticed, but she glares at you whenever she sees your attention on her or her sister. And that’s really quite extraordinary. Chavi truly has an artist’s soul, able to see what others overlook.

So you make it a habit to let her see you at the small stone building that used to be a church, or will be again. Church in limbo, and there’s something rather entertaining about that, isn’t there?

You’re there for the birthday party that includes most of the neighborhood, a less formal repetition of the spring festival only two weeks ago. There are flowers everywhere, real ones blooming around the little grey church and in lovingly tended beds, silk and plastic versions on the heads of most. You see the Sravasti ladies, all in sundresses and open sweaters, bare feet running through the spring grass.

Sweet Priya, with white roses against her dark hair.

Fierce Chavi, with yellow chrysanthemums almost as bright as her smile.

The party is on the Saturday, but you watch them on the Sunday, too, as the family celebrates together. They go out and come back, Priya touching the new piercing at her nose, and normally you would never approve, but her family went with her, this means something to them, and that changes it somehow.

On Monday, as you’re following them to school, you hear Chavi remind her sister of a study group, that she won’t be there to walk her home. So you’re there, following at a discreet distance, making sure Priya gets there safely. They live in a safe neighborhood, an affluent suburb where people know each other well enough to look out for each other, but still. You know better than anyone how evil can hide in plain sight. Priya goes straight home after her club meeting, stopping now and then to talk to neighbors but not leaving her path.

You’re proud of her. She’s such a good daughter.

Such a good little sister.

Chavi comes to the church that night, full of fire and fury and love, so much love for her sister. You almost don’t want to kill her, don’t want to take that away from Priya, but Chavi will be leaving for college in the fall, and you’ve seen what that can do to people, how it can devour good girls and leave husks behind.

But you believe in angels, and guardians, and you know this is for the best. Chavi will always be good, and she’ll always be there to watch over her sister.

And Priya will listen, because Priya is a good girl.

When you place the chrysanthemums in her hair, they look like suns in space, and that’s fitting, you think. Chavi does burn so bright.

“Eat.”

Starting violently at the unexpected sound, Eddison’s reflexive grip on the table is the only thing that keeps his ass on the chair, rather than falling to the floor. “Jesus, Ramirez, wear a bell.”

“Or you could practice some situational awareness.” She pushes a large white paper sack closer to him, then sits a few chairs away where she can see him without being all the way on the other side of the conference table. “Now, eat.”

With a grumble, Eddison opens the bag and pulls out a warm container of beef and broccoli. “What time is it?”

“Almost three.”

“Jesus. What are you even doing here?”

“Bringing you food from the only Chinese place in Quantico open past midnight.”

He always seems to forget how the off-duty Ramirez is simultaneously softer and fiercer than her on-duty persona. Softer, because the sharp suits and heels and I-dare-you makeup is swapped for jeans, an overlarge sweater, and a bushy ponytail, making her altogether more approachable. But the fierceness is still there, or maybe even more present, because when the makeup comes off, there’s nothing hiding her scars, the long, pale lines tracking from her left eye down her cheek to under her jaw. Those scars are a reminder that she’s a survivor in her own right, one with a badge and a gun and an absolute willingness to fuck shit up if it will save a child.

He couldn’t ask for any more in a partner.

“So you’re not even going to pretend to be surprised I’m here?”

She flaps a hand dismissively. “Priya got camellias yesterday and amaranth today; there’s only one flower left. Given that there’s nothing productive you can do there, where else would you be but here?”

“I hate you a little.”

“Keep telling yourself that, mijo; one day you’ll believe it. Now. What are you looking at?”

“Postal records,” he answers around a mouthful of vegetables. “If he’s watching his victims, it’s unlikely he’s just passing through, so I’m running forwarding addresses.”

She starts to nod, then frowns. “I can see at least two problems with that.”

“What if he doesn’t bother forwarding his mail?”

“Okay, three.”

He laughs and shrugs. “So what are your other two?”

“What if he doesn’t live in the cities? If he lives in a town nearby and drives in . . .”

“Smaller towns notice short-term tenants; the communities are more familiar with each other, which would make it risky for him. Besides, I’m looking at states, not cities.”

“That is a lot to sort through.”

“Yvonne showed me how to let the computer do most of it.”

“Showed you?”

He points at the whiteboard wall, most of which is covered in step-by-step instructions on how to set and refine search parameters in the Bureau intranet. As the team’s preferred technical analyst, Yvonne is well aware of their individual strengths and weaknesses when it comes to computers.

Turn computer on is taking it rather too far, in his opinion, but to be fair, he did catch her on her way out the door.

“What’s the second problem?” he asks.

“What if he’s not going directly from point A to point B? Priya and Deshani were only in Birmingham for four months. They were in Chicago for less than three. They’re not the only people who live that way.”

Eddison drops the takeout container on the table with a wet plop. “How do we find him, then? How do we find him if he’s a fucking ghost?”

“If I knew that, would we still be sitting here?”

Fury claws under his skin, making his muscles clench and twitch. Fury, and fear. Deshani called Vic this afternoon, asking if there was anything Priya should do if the bastard approaches her. Vic didn’t know what to tell her beyond stay calm, try to keep him talking, and try to call for help. They know this bastard wants Priya, but for what?

He killed to keep her safe, but he’s her biggest threat.

“Come on,” Ramirez says abruptly, getting to her feet.

“I have to—”

“The computer does not need you staring at it while it does its thing. I will let you come back, I promise, but for now, come on.” When he doesn’t move fast enough to suit her, she grabs his chair and pushes him at the door. He stumbles up just in time to avoid crashing into the frame.

“I’m up and I’m coming, now will you stop?” he demands.

In response, she grabs his elbow and hauls him after her to the elevator.

They end up in one of the sparring gyms, thick mats covering the floor around raised rings. One wall has lines of rhythm bags and heavy bags. Ramirez points to the heavy bags. “Go.”

“Ramirez.”

“Eddison.” She drops his elbow so she can cross her arms under her chest. “You are exhausted. You are so angry, so afraid, so tangled up in your own head that you’re not able to think straight. You’re missing the obvious, and digging yourself in deeper is not going to help. Now. Keyed up as you are, you’re not going to sleep, so go punch the shit out of the bag.”

“Ramirez—”

“Go. Punch. The bag.”

Muttering about bossy, interfering women only makes her snicker, so he gives in and walks to the bags. He rolls up his sleeves, sets his feet . . . and stares.

“For shit’s sake, Eddison, punch the bag!”

So he does, and with the first thump of impact, that taut coil twisting his gut snaps. He rains blows on the bag, heedless of form or efficiency, messy and powerful and relentless in his rage. His muscles protest the sudden activity but he ignores the pain, focused on nothing but the movement of the hanging bag and where his fist needs to be to meet it.

Eventually he slows, then stops, leaning against the bag and panting. His arms throb, and he’s a little afraid to check his untaped fists. He does feel more centered, though.

Ramirez gently takes his left hand and inspects his knuckles. “Nothing looks broken,” she tells him softly. “You’ll have some lovely bruises and swelling, and I think you left most of your skin on the bag.”

“Why didn’t you tell me to tape up?”

She reaches for his other hand, looking up at him from under her lashes. It’s not something she does to be coy, but rather, when she’s not sure if her face is showing what she’s thinking. “You seemed like you needed the pain.”

He doesn’t have an answer for that.

“Come on. Let’s get these cleaned and bandaged. Do you have things at home to change dressings tomorrow?”

“Mostly. I’ll have to stop and buy . . .” He trails off, almost too tired to chase the fragment of an idea. Ramirez just waits, watching him thoughtfully. “How many places in a reasonable distance of Huntington do you suppose sell dahlias?”

“Say what?”

“Dahlias. They’re not exactly easy to find. When Julie McCarthy was murdered last year, it took us over a week to find where her dahlias came from, but we did find the specific store, which we usually don’t. A lot of florists don’t stock dahlias.”

“Okay . . .”

“We’ve been trying to play catch-up this entire time; why not try to get ahead of him? If he wants to finish out the list, he has to find dahlias somewhere. If we can get word to all the florists—”

“In the state? Eddison, that’s—”

“A big list, yes, so we create a master list and borrow techs or agents or, hell, academy trainees, and get them calling. The flowers are always fresh when they’re delivered, so even if he has them already, it would only be in the past day or two. The sale of a less-common flower would be memorable. We might even be able to get a photo or sketch from whoever sold or sells the dahlias to him.”

“That’s . . . actually not a bad idea,” she admits. “It’s going to have to be Yvonne, though.”

“What?”

“Even with her instructions, that kind of search is not something we know how to do. Not on this big a scale.”

“Okay, so we—”

“We are not calling her in at four in the morning,” she says firmly. “We are going to take care of your hands. Then we will go upstairs and write all of this down, so at a reasonable hour, we can update Vic and get approval to send Yvonne into overtime. Then we will call in Yvonne. Do you know what you’re going to do between taking notes and calling Vic?”

“Whatever you tell me to do or you’ll make me regret it?”

“You see, mijo?” She hooks her arm through his and pulls him toward the door. “You’re thinking better already.”

Her name is Aimée Browder, and she just might be a gift from God.

You’ve been worried about Priya. You’d already left Boston—you never spend more than six months in one place—but when you went back to visit, Priya wasn’t there. It took a long time to find her; finally you saw her name and city listed in a magazine as a finalist for a photo contest. You moved to San Diego immediately. You needed to make sure she was okay.

And she isn’t, you realize. She’s still the good girl you remember, but her brightness is gone, her warmth. She’s brittle and fragile and so very lonely.

And then she finds Aimée.

You watch, entranced, as Aimée patiently lures Priya out of her pain, chattering in French and dancing around her as they walk. Sometimes literally—she’s so graceful, Aimée, and spends so much time at lessons and practice; even when she walks out of the studio late at night looking weary down to the bone, she still looks so in love with her dancing you can’t look away. And you see Priya start to bloom, smiling, sometimes laughing even, and talking about French cinema and opera and ballet houses.

It’s Aimée who introduces Priya to the boy she tutors, and you see right away that the boy is falling for her. You don’t blame him, but you watch, carefully, in case you have to step in. You never do, though. Priya knows her worth, knows what it means to be good, and she never encourages the boy, never sits closer to him than she has to, never accepts any of his invitations out.

Aimée’s mother cooks with the amaranth that grows on their porch roof. You’ve never really thought about it, that flowers can have more of a purpose than to look pretty and feed bees or whatever it is they do, but you can hear the Browders teasing each other about the plants in the kitchen and the blooms around Aimée’s bun, the women in a lazy, easy mix of French and Spanish, the father in the occasional booming German no one else understands but that always makes the women laugh.

They take to Priya nearly as well as Aimée does, and you’re grateful for that, grateful she has people to give her back that brightness.

You send Priya flowers, trying to show your appreciation for her goodness, your love for her, and your heart warms when you see her laughing over the baby’s breath, pinning it in place around her friend’s hair like a bristling fairy crown for the stage.

And then one day, Priya is gone. You were away for a few days, tracking down the flowers you needed from nearby towns so no one would link the bouquets to each other, or to you. You haven’t done this for so many years by being careless. Just a few days, but you missed the moving truck and the goodbyes and the departure. It took you too long to find her this time, and now . . .

Aimée misses Priya too, you can see it even before she mentions it to her mother. You see it in the way she twirls a cluster of amaranth in her hand, looking at it with a sad little smile, before she reaches up to pin it in place around her hair.

So you gather the amaranth, as much of it as you can find without completely denuding her mother’s garden, and you wait, because you’ve watched her long enough to know that when she can’t sleep, she doesn’t bother her parents, or her brother and sister. She slips out of the house and down three streets to the church with a door that’s always open, and she dances. She used to go two streets the other direction first, to see if Priya wanted to join her, and they’d pass the dark hours in a church, Aimée dancing, Priya taking photos of stained glass and grace in moonlight.

You make it painless for Aimée, as much as you can. You do it for her sake as much as for Priya’s. She really is such a good girl, a good friend when Priya needed one most. You surround her with the dark pink bunches of amaranth, and you sit with her for a while, looking up at the windows, thinking of Priya.

She was such a good little sister, so worthy of protection. She isn’t anything like Darla Jean; she’ll stay good. She’ll be grateful, when she knows how much you love her.

You’ll find her again, and this time you won’t stop until she knows how you feel. You can’t wait to hear her say she loves you.

The dahlias arrive on Tuesday, three blossoms each as big as my hand, so deep a purple they’re just shy of black. It was not quite a year ago that fourteen-year-old Julie McCarthy was found raped and murdered in a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, three dahlias in a line over her mouth, chest, and crotch like a demented chakra map.

My first call isn’t to Eddison, or to Mum or Finney; it’s to Hannah Randolph, Gunny’s granddaughter. Since we learned about Landon’s murder—or rather, since the men learned about all the circumstances surrounding his murder—the vets have very emphatically requested that I not walk to and from chess on my own. Hannah offered to give me rides, considering that she waits in the car the entire time anyway. With all the other vets there to watch Gunny, she can easily swing the mile and a half to my house.

They were clearly prepared to argue with me about it, or so I gathered from their shock when I said yes and thank you. It makes sense, though, and I am grateful for it. Around the time I would normally leave for chess, I call Hannah to let her know if I’m coming.

Or in the case of this morning, not coming.

“Do you mind if I come sit with you?” she asks immediately. “At least until the agents arrive? I don’t like the thought of you being alone right now.”

“Gunny—”

“Will be just fine with Pierce. If something happens, I am less than five minutes away.”

“It would make me feel better,” I admit. “Thank you.”

“I’m on my way. Call your agents.”

I text Eddison, then make some hot chocolate as I call Finney. When Hannah arrives, she steps carefully around the flowers to avoid disturbing anything and accepts the mug with a smile, nodding to the phone at my ear. As I pull up the camera feed, she settles into the armchair with her knitting.

I should learn how to knit. It seems very calming.

“What’s the camera show?” Finney asks wearily.

“It blanks out at nine thirty-eight,” I answer. “After that there’s nothing.”

“Snow?”

“Nothing. Like it’s not getting a signal but the network is fine.”

“Back camera?”

“Happily recording the movements of the fattest squirrel I have ever seen.”

“Do you feel safe enough till we get there? I can ask the local PD to send someone out.”

I think of Officer Clare and shudder. “Hannah is here with me.”

“All right. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

For about ten minutes, Hannah and I sit in a silence as comfortable as it can be, given the circumstances. Her needles clack sedately, and there’s a soothing, almost meditative quality to it.

Then there’s a knock on the door.

It’s definitely not my agents, not this quickly. Not even with the way they drive.

Oh, God, it’s probably—

“Miss Priya? The boys said you had a mite of trouble?”

Officer Clare. He’s taken to swinging by the chess pavilion without his partner, checking up on me, he says. He’s been told not to, by both Lou and their captain, but it hasn’t stopped him. He just claims it’s on his way to the store, or to lunch, and we happen to run into each other.

“Miss Priya, I know you’re home. I can see Miss Randolph’s car. I just want to make sure you’re all right till the feds get here.”

Hannah carefully sets her knitting aside. “I’ll send him off, shall I?”

“Please,” I whisper.

She heads down the hall to the door and opens it just enough to be seen, her body blocking me from view. “We’re just fine, Officer,” she tells him politely. “If you don’t mind stepping away from the evidence?”

“I can stay with y’all—”

“The thought is appreciated, but it isn’t necessary.”

“I was there, you know, when she lost her sister. Poor kid. When I think of my own sister . . . little sisters need protecting.”

“Officer Clare. Your assistance is not needed at this time. Please leave.”

He raises his voice. “Now, Miss Priya—”

Pulling up my call log, I find the number for his captain and tap on it. The man answers with his last name and no greeting. “Captain, this is Priya Sravasti, and—”

“Please tell me Clare is not bothering you again,” he growls.

“He’s at my door and refusing to leave.”

“My apologies, Miss Sravasti. I’ll take care of it.” As he hangs up, I catch a grumble that sounds a bit like “fire his sorry ass” and wonder if that’s what will happen.

Hannah eventually shuts the door in Clare’s face, twisting both locks. After a moment, she hooks in the chain for good measure. “That man is not quite right,” she says, taking her knitting back up. “There’s no reason for him to be so focused on you.”

“Apparently it’s something about this type of case,” I sigh. “Mercedes explained the psychology of it once. Sometimes, an emergency responder can get a little stuck on a case that disturbs them, especially if something else is going on in their lives. Some get obsessed with solving the crime, but others latch on to checking up on the family.”

“Did he do that in Boston?”

“Not that I recall, but if he was back in Boston, he could have been a lot more subtle about it.”

“If?” she echoes.

“It wouldn’t be the weirdest way a fan has pushed into a case, according to Mercedes. She’s doing a full background check on him.”

Hannah shakes her head. “I know humans are complicated creatures, but this seems a bit excessive.”

Finney and Sterling arrive not very long after. Finney looks a little green as he steps out of the car. On the driver’s side, Sterling manages to look both sheepish and proud.

“Having fun with the lights and sirens?” I ask dryly.

Sterling grins at me before tucking it back behind a more professional expression. “We lost time behind an accident; I didn’t want to leave you waiting.”

Rolling his eyes, Finney turns to Hannah and offers his hand. “Thank you for staying with her, Miss Randolph.”

She shakes his hand. “Do you need me to stay? For after you go, I mean.”

“Actually . . .” He glances up at me. “Your mother asked us to bring you up to Denver, if you don’t mind. I think she’ll feel better if she can keep sight of you.”

“That’s fine. Thank you so much, Hannah.”

“Anytime,” she says, giving me a brief hug. “Be safe, Priya.” It’s the same thing her grandfather tells me instead of goodbye, only he calls me Miss Priya, and somehow Officer Clare hasn’t ruined that.

Speaking of whom . . . I tell Finney about Officer Clare, then head upstairs to change and toss some things in a bag to take with me. I don’t know if Mum’s office has general Wi-Fi, so schoolwork might not be an option.

“Knocked out the camera with the EMP, then cut the wires again,” Sterling announces once I’m back downstairs.

“So what now?”

“Now we get you to your mother,” answers Finney. “Then we’ll discuss your protection detail.”

Protection detail, in this case, means Archer is going to stay with me during the day, Sterling is going to stay at the house each night, and everyone is going to pray that Section Chief Ward doesn’t find out. It’s technically off the books—a personal favor—which is its own can of worms. If anything does happen, the agents could face hell for it. We move in a little over a week but it feels like forever, especially with that rotation in place. Mum arranges a rendezvous time with Sterling, because we’re probably safe enough at her office, and the agents head out.

I settle into a corner of Mum’s rather sterile office with my laptop. I should do homework—she gave me the network key—but instead I pull up the photos from Gunny and Hannah’s church. It was a lovely afternoon with them, and interesting windows were a definite bonus. The scenes were painted onto clear panes, rather than being a mosaic of stained glass, and even with the semi-translucent paint, it changed the way the light filtered through.

Beneath a portrait of the women and the empty tomb, Gunny ran his gnarled fingers over a tiny brass plaque with his wife’s name on it.

The church secretary was even older than Gunny, and she knew the history of each window and who had sponsored it. When I mentioned my love of windows, she gave me an info card for a small chapel about an hour away. “Some say God gave us the ability to create art so we could glorify Him,” she said with a smile. “The windows at Shiloh Chapel make that easy to believe.”

I very much doubt I’ll get to find out.

I snap the laptop shut with a frustrated sigh. I’d hoped looking at the pictures would cheer me up, but they just depressed me. Reaching down into my bag, I pull out the envelope that was sitting in our mailbox, Inara’s neat handwriting across the front.

Dear Priya,

Desmond MacIntosh is dead, has been dead almost a month now, and I’m still not sure how to feel about it. Everyone expects me to be sad, because we were “star-crossed lovers” or whatever bullshit gets spouted by people with insufficient understanding of what star-crossed actually means. Or they think I should be happy, because hey, look, one of my tormentors killed himself, as if seeing suicide among the girls should make me glad to see it in him.

Mostly, though, I’m just relieved, and what the hell kind of reaction is that?

I’m relieved that I don’t have to see him across the courtroom, that I don’t have to feel his eyes on me as I testify against him and his father. I’m relieved that I won’t have to spend hours upon hours seeing his kicked-puppy expression. I’m relieved that his fate is resolved, so I don’t have to stress about it anymore.

I’ve always known I was a generally terrible person, but this drives it home in a way I didn’t expect.

Especially when I consider this: I would be so grateful if the Gardener would get his shit together and die of his injuries, or something of that nature. I don’t feel the need to kill him, or even for him to kill himself. I just really want him to be dead.

The trial probably won’t start until the fall, and while I’m not pessimistic enough to think he’ll be found innocent, there are still a lot of suboptimal outcomes. I don’t want him taken care of in a psychiatric hospital or nursing home. I want him caged, stripped to nothing like we were and forcibly remade into something horribly fragile.

But even more than that, I just want him dead. The cage is appealing, but he still has enough money to make it comfortable, or as comfortable as it can be given his injuries. I don’t want him comfortable.

I want him dead, but people keep looking at me like I should be better than that, like I should rise above, and goddamn it, I don’t want to rise above. He hasn’t earned that kind of grace.

If you ever get the chance, Priya, just kill him if you can. Self-defense, and then it’s done.

Well.

Now I’m all kinds of cheered up, thank you, Inara.

As long as I’m going to wallow, though, I might as well do it right, so I open my computer back up. All of my bastard’s victims have memorial Facebook pages, even the ones who didn’t have Facebook when they were alive. They’re most active in the spring, people posting memories or prayers as the anniversaries roll around, though birthday messages pop up too. The various mods are pretty quick to remove comments by assholes.

I start with Julie McCarthy and work backward, reading the new stories. There are new photos, too, put up by friends and family and classmates reminiscing. I skip Chavi’s.

I’ve never looked at Chavi’s since she died. I don’t begrudge the people who post there, many of them genuinely her friends. Josephine moderates it, so I know it’s respectful. If it helps them mourn and move on, more blessings to them. I just don’t want to let other people’s memories of Chavi intrude on my own.

When I get to Darla Jean’s—the first victim—there’s a post from her mother, Eudora Carmichael, dated on this year’s anniversary of Darla Jean’s death. Eudora talks about missing her daughter’s light and laughter, how Darla Jean was all the joy in the family. She talks about missing her son, who never got over his sister’s death. After a prayer for justice, she concludes with a picture, a family portrait from that last Easter.

Darla Jean is all blonde prettiness in white lace, and beside her, Eudora is plump and pleasant with the kind eyes she gave to her daughter. Her son stands behind them, and holy shit, seventeen years later I know that face.

I know that face.

“Mum!” I croak.

She looks up sharply from her computer. “Priya? Are you okay?”

“Come look at this.”

“Priya?”

“Mum, please. Come look at this.”

She slowly gets up and crosses the room, sitting next to me on the rock-hard couch. She glances from me to the screen. “Your face says this is important, but I don’t follow.”

I pull up one of the folders of pictures I’ve taken this spring, clicking through until I find the one I want. I crop the window so I can place it next to the picture of the Carmichaels.

She stares at the picture for a moment, a muscle jumping in her jaw. This is him, she knows it, too, this is the man who killed Chavi, almost certainly the one who’s been leaving me gifts.

She swallows hard, blinking away the sheen of unshed tears, then looks back at me. “You don’t have your phone in hand. Are you just in shock, or are you hesitating?”

My mother knows me entirely too well. “I’m hesitating.”

“Why?” She sounds curious, not accusing. She’s also not reaching for a phone to report it herself.

I hand her Inara’s letter and watch her eyes scan back and forth over the page.

“I think I might like Inara,” she notes when she’s done.

“I think you’ve just described Eddison’s personal hell.”

“This is Inara’s view, though; what’s yours?”

I take a deep breath, give myself the time to truly think it through. There are moments I realize just how unconventional my relationship with Mum is. Moments I have to admit that she probably has sociopathic tendencies and simply chooses not to use her powers for excessive evil.

And I am my mother’s daughter.

“How much proof do you suppose there is?” I ask eventually. “Seventeen years without getting caught, he’s clearly not an idiot. We give this name to the FBI, how much do you think they’ll find that isn’t circumstantial? If he had any interest in confessing, he’d have done it years ago.”

“You think if there’s enough to go to trial, there won’t be enough to convict.”

“If they try him for it and he gets acquitted, that’s it. They can’t try him for the same murders again. No justice for Darla Jean straight through Julie McCarthy. No justice for Chavi.”

“Landon,” she murmurs thoughtfully.

“Landon was a pedophile; I’m not interested in justice for Landon.”

Her lips twitch in a proud smile.

“What stops him from following us to France?” I ask.

“So you want to what? Trap him into confessing his past sins so you can record it? Make a conviction more likely?”

“No.”

It takes a moment for it to sink in. I’ve never really been the savage one. “You’re serious,” she says.

“I want this done,” I tell her softly, little more than a whisper. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder or wondering who else he’s killed. I don’t want to move with this still hanging over us. I just want all of this to be over.”

She takes a deep breath, clasping her hands in her lap. Her knuckles are white with the strength of her grip. “So how do we do it?”

The laptop slides to the floor with a thunk as I wrap my arms around my mother. “I love you.”

“But?”

“But that part has to be me, not we.”

One eyebrow tilts dangerously. “You are going to explain that.”

“If I do it, it’s self-defense. If you do it, you’re a vigilante, Mum. Maybe you get a sympathy acquittal, but not without losing your job and rendering yourself basically unhireable. If you’re there, the Quantico Three will never believe it’s accidental.”

“You think they’ll believe you?”

“If I’m completely alone? No, that’s an obvious trap.” From my bag, I pull out the postcard for Shiloh Chapel. “But if Agent Archer is with me and happens to leave me alone?”

“You’re going to let him use you as bait after all.”

“Yes.”

“You trust him not to tell the others?”

“Shit no, that’s why I’m not telling him.” I smile in spite of myself at her laugh. “His apology was sincere; that means he feels guilty.”

“And when a good man feels guilty, he wants to make up for it, not just apologize.”

“So I’ll ask Archer to take me to the chapel. If you’re still playing paperwork catch-up from the days you took off for me, you can’t drive me down. And Saturday’s my birthday. This bastard has run through all the flowers now, which means whatever he’s got planned for me is next; he just needs an opportunity. We can give him that.”

“Good Lord, I have taught you well, haven’t I?”

“You’re up here, safely away from suspicion, and if he is watching me as closely as we think he is, he’ll follow.”

“And our young, enthusiastic Archer will see a chance to catch a serial killer making the attempt, solve the case, and prove himself. He’ll leave you alone, but he won’t go far.”

“Which gives me backup if I chicken out or something goes wrong. It minimizes the risk.”

We sit in silence, both digesting the possibilities.

“You know if anything happens to you, it will shatter Brandon.”

I give her an incredulous look. “You never call him Brandon. No one calls him Brandon.”

“It would destroy him. You have to know that, Priya.”

“I do. That’s why I think Archer is a good idea.”

It wouldn’t destroy Mum, though neither of us says it. It would shred her, maybe even shatter her, but the pieces would come back together sharper and stronger, made of purer steel, because if there’s one thing Deshani Sravasti will never be, it’s defeated. No matter what happens, she will never let the world break her permanently.

Brandon Eddison, though, has something Mum does not: a gaping, bleeding wound named Faith. He may look for her in the face of every blonde almost-thirty he comes across, but he still thinks of her as that little girl with pigtails and a gap-toothed grin, the adorable little geek who never saw a difference between princesses and superheroes. Until—unless—they find her, that wound will never heal.

That’s where I live, I think, all the bits of me wrapped around that terribly fragile heart. I protect the rest of him from that ulcer, but I make it bleed, too, close and not close enough. A hard enough hit against me will shatter what’s left of Faith.

I wouldn’t hurt Eddison for anything, but I can’t live the life Inara’s showing me. I need justice, not the hope of it, but more than that, I need all of this to just finally be done.

“So you’ll talk to Archer in the morning?”

I nod.

“Be sure about this, Priya-love,” Mum says gravely. “If at any point you’re unsure, back away. We can still give him to the FBI.”

“I know.”

Late the next morning, when I come downstairs after getting the day’s schoolwork out of the way, Archer is sitting on the couch with the components of one of the cameras spread over the coffee table. “Morning, sleepyhead,” he greets.

“School, not sleep.” I head into the kitchen to throw together a smoothie for a belated breakfast.

He follows me in. “You have any plans for the day?”

I pretend to consider it. “Is it okay to go to chess?”

“As long as you don’t go off without me.”

Pouring the smoothie into a pair of travel mugs, I hand him one and toast him with the other. “I’ll get my purse.”

His eyes move constantly as we walk. His car is in the driveway, but I miss the walk and he gives in. The extra time to gather my thoughts certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s interesting to see Archer note and catalogue everything around us.

“How much freedom of movement is implied in this protection thing?” I ask once we pass the gas station. “Like, as long as I have you or Sterling with me, are field trips okay?”

He gives me a sideways look, reassuringly curious. “Got something in mind?”

I pull the Shiloh Chapel postcard from my purse and hold it out for him. “I have a thing for windows. Or, more accurately, my sister had a thing for windows, and I have a thing for Chavi having a thing for windows.”

“Convoluted much?”

“Eh. Anyway, Saturday is my birthday, and Mum and I were going to go.”

“Were?”

“She has to work. Now that the transition is finally approaching, the branch HR director in Paris is getting nervous. I really want to get pictures of the chapel before we leave, and under normal circumstances I’d just take Mum to work and drive down on my own.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

“That’s why I said the under-normal-circumstances bit. Keep up, Archer.”

He barks a laugh, his shoulders relaxing a bit. “So you want me to drive you an hour away so you can take pictures of windows.”

Reaching back into my purse, I bring out my secret weapon: my favorite photos from the box under my bed labeled simply Chavi at Church. On top is the one I love more than anything. It was taken in one of the bigger Catholic churches in Boston, with soaring ceilings that gave the impression of weightlessness, like everything inside it was just floating in the vastness of space. Chavi had already been sitting for a couple of hours in the main aisle, sketching intently, and I’d taken dozens of pictures of her and the interior and the windows from nearly every angle.

But I went up to the choir loft, leaning over the edge of the front protrusion where the choir leader was supposed to stand, and got her standing in silhouette in front of the blazing window, dust sparking gold like a halo around her. If the senior picture was Chavi’s personality, this one was her soul, bright and full of wonder.

“Chavi was always trying to capture it on paper,” I say quietly, a little pained at using her memory to manipulate. Soldier on, Priya. “That sense of color, you know, the saturation and the way the light filtered through. Sometimes I feel like if I keep taking pictures of amazing windows, she gets to see them too.”

He flips through the rest of the photos, a wonderfully complicated look on his face. Complicated is good. Complicated means his thoughts are going exactly where I’d hoped they’d go. We’re in sight of the chess pavilion before he finally answers. “Sure, we can go. I mean, it’s your birthday.”

“Really?”

“Well, that is what you just told me,” he deflects, and laughs when I swat his arm. “It’s for your sister.”

“Thank you so, so much.” I take the stack of photos back and put them away in the outer pocket of the purse. “I promise to stay at chess if you’d rather wait in the café.” At his hesitation, I cock an eyebrow. “Whoever this bastard is, he’s not about to jump out at me in the middle of a group.”

“Fine, but you have one of them walk you inside to meet me when you’re done.”

“Deal.”

He is going to get in so much trouble when he leaves me alone at the chapel. I hope he learns from it, that he lets it make him a better agent. Maybe then I won’t have to feel so guilty.

Gunny’s awake when I step onto the chess island, smiling at me across his game with Jorge. I smile back, something soft and warm that may only be for Gunny, really, because it doesn’t feel like there are any sharp edges to it.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the work functions Mum occasionally takes me to, it’s how to look for the transitions in conversations and gently nudge them in a direction I want them to go. Mum is disgustingly brilliant at it. So while I play a shaky-eyed Yelp, letting him take as much time as he needs to make a decision about each move because his ghosts make him second- and third- and fourth-guess himself, I listen to the idle chatter about doctor appointments and movies and goddamn idiots who don’t know how to fucking drive, and then Pierce mentions that his sister wants him to come celebrate May Day with the family.

“One of her grandkids hoards these stupid little fireworks, those poppers, you know? Make a lot of noise but not a lot of flash? Even when I go in expecting it, I just . . .” He trails off, staring morosely at his board with Corgi.

“Take this one with you,” Happy suggests, nudging Corgi with an elbow. Liquid splashes up against the side of his foam cup, and I think we’re all politely pretending we don’t know there’s almost as much whiskey as coffee in there. “His ugly mug will give you more nightmares than the noise.”

“You don’t even know how ugly you are, you stupid bastard, you can’t keep a mirror whole,” Corgi replies contentedly.

Male friendship is so strange.

“Anyone else have plans for the weekend?” I ask, moving my rook out of immediate danger.

Yelp has a visit with his daughters. He only gets to see them once a month, because the custody agreement was made when he was having a very difficult time and he doesn’t feel he’s at the point to safely change it yet. His face softens when he talks about them, and the trembling in his hand eases a little. They could help him a great deal, I think, but he won’t ever put the burden on them of seeing his bad days.

Steven, it turns out, has a date, and most of the table starts ribbing him about it. He accepts it all with a goofy smile. “She’s a Marine widow,” he explains. “She knows what it’s like.”

Gunny is going up to Denver for a great-grandson’s ballet recital, with Hannah driving him as always. “Just hope I can stay awake through it,” he sighs. “Harder and harder these days.”

“Just have Hannah wake you up before the boy’s songs,” Phillip tells him. “Don’t much matter that you sleep through the rest, long as you see him up there.”

Gunny nods, takes Jorge’s queen with a pawn, and looks across to me. “And you, Miss Priya? Do you have plans?”

“Mum has to go into work on Saturday to take care of some things.” Yelp takes one of my bishops. He’s going to whomp me solidly in a few moves. “Agent Archer agreed to take me down to Rosemont.”

“What’s in Rosemont?” asks Jorge.

“A really pretty little chapel with amazing windows. The secretary at Gunny’s church told me about it. I like to take pictures of stained glass.”

“That’s almost an hour’s drive,” Steven points out. “For windows?”

“My sister was the one to really love the glass,” I say quietly. The men all shift and settle, like birds on a power line. “Maybe it’s a way of saying goodbye, before we leave.”

“Lots of pretty windows in Paris, last I heard.” Corgi scratches at his nose, tiny red dots blooming around a broken vein from the pressure. “That’s where Notre Dame is, ain’t it?”

I stifle a grin at the way he says it: No-tree. “It is,” I agree. “It’s hard to put into words. I guess it’s more like . . . well, Chavi’s seen those windows. We went to Paris a few times when we were younger, back when we still lived in London.”

“You lived in London?”

“Till I was five. I was born there.” I shrug at their startled looks. “Mum got a really great job offer in Boston.” And she really, really wanted to put an ocean between us and the families, but I can’t say that to men who miss their families more than anything but are a little too broken to be with them day to day. Not all of them, but enough of them.

“You don’t sound it.”

“You’ve never seen me after a BBC marathon.” And there goes my rook. “I lost most of the accent in elementary school because kids made fun of me, and Mum helped me smooth the rest out. It comes across more when I’m tired.”

“My daughter-in-law’s like that with Minnesota,” Jorge laughs. “She gets so pink about it, too.”

Happy takes the conversation into a diatribe about customer-service lines, and I let it go. It’s a beautiful day, clear and breezy and nearly warm, and it’s tempting to stay all afternoon, but Archer’s waiting, and I really do feel safer at home. I can see Officer Clare across the parking lot near the deli, dressed in civvies. Watching. I have no doubt he’ll be by the tables to ask after me.

Hannah walks me up to the grocery store, staying with me until Archer looks up from his tablet and sees us. She heads back outside with a kiss on my cheek.

“What’ll you have?” I ask the agent. “My treat.”

“Black coffee with a triple shot, and thanks.”

“Not planning to sleep for the next week, are you?” I step back so I can turn and join the line, and slam into someone. My purse drops to the floor, the postcard, photos, and my wallet spilling out. “Aww, purse, no.” I crouch down to pick them up, but another set of hands beats me to it.

I look up to see Joshua kneeling in front of me, my photos and the postcard held out. His tea and a hardcover book sit next to his knee. There’s a pair of slim reading glasses hooked onto the neck of his light sweater, the fisherman sweaters probably put away until the fall.

“Thanks. Sorry for running into you.”

“That’s quite all right. I’m just glad your photos weren’t ruined.” He nods at Archer, a vague sort of acknowledgment the agent returns.

I drop the pics and card to the table. “Seems safer that way. Oh, and Archer? As thank-you for the ride, I’ll get your caffeine fix on Saturday. I want to be down in Rosemont before the sun rises.”

His startled cursing follows me to the line.

When I get back with my hot chocolate and his nervous twitch in a cup, Archer’s alone at the table. “Before dawn?” he asks sourly.

“Or as close to it as possible. Have you ever seen the sunrise through stained glass, Agent Archer?”

“No,” he says morosely. “I’m okay with that not changing.”

“But it’s my birthday.”

He sighs and sips his coffee.

“Agent Hanoverian, sir? You have a delivery.”

Eddison blinks at his papers and looks up at the door of the conference room. Vic and Ramirez seem equally startled, judging from how long it takes Vic to get to his feet.

Then Vic starts laughing. “Ma sent us dinner.”

“Bless your mother,” groans Ramirez.

Shoving his notes to one side, Eddison accepts the Tupperware bowl of beef stew, still warm, and the tinfoil twist of the buttered dinner rolls. “She is an angel,” he agrees.

For a time, they all focus on eating. It’s been a very long time since lunch. Once Vic passes out the wedges of pecan pie, they turn back to their task.

“These girls become important to him,” Vic says. “Whether he’s preserving their perceived purity or punishing their wickedness, it’s personal to him.”

“So what was it about Darla Jean?” Ramirez starts pleating her tinfoil into a fan. “She wasn’t just the first murder; she shaped his motive.”

“All the interviews say she was a good girl. Her boyfriend said they’d only just kissed for the first time before she was killed. Everyone in town knew her, everyone in town loved her.”

“But she was raped,” she replies. “His pathology means he saw something he considered sinful. Maybe even that kiss.”

Grabbing Darla Jean’s file, Vic skims through the collected statements. “Boyfriend didn’t notice anyone around until the pastor came out of his office. After the boy left to go home, the pastor didn’t see anyone but Darla Jean, then he left to walk into town. As far as he knew, Darla Jean was alone.”

“She didn’t try to run,” Eddison points out. “She didn’t try to fight until it was too late. This isn’t just someone she knew, this was someone she trusted.”

“Even considering the rape, our first assumption would normally be family,” Ramirez says. “Father, brother, cousin, someone sees the kiss, decides her sinful ways make her unworthy of being family.”

“Father died two years before Darla Jean from a heart attack, and her male cousins were all either too young or not in town. She did have an older brother, though.” Vic flips a few pages in the folder. “Jameson Carmichael; he was twenty-one at the time. Graduated at twenty from the University of Texas with a degree in Web design. Got a job with a small marketing firm in the city, commuted in from the family home in Holyrood.”

“Is he on our list?”

Eddison shakes his head, but double-checks anyway. Tapping the name into his tablet, he starts sifting through search results. “It doesn’t look like he’s been on anyone’s list recently. He quit his job and left the Holyrood/San Antonio area a few months after his sister died. He’s mentioned in a few memorials and articles, but there’s nothing else coming up.”

“Well that sounds ominous.”

Grabbing his phone, Eddison punches in a number and sends the call to the speaker in the middle of the table.

“What do you need?” asks Yvonne, skipping the small talk.

“Your wisdom and guidance,” he answers. “Your mad computer skills, at least. Is there any chance you can come in tonight?”

“I’m alone with the baby, but I brought a secure laptop home, so I do have access to all my systems. Who loves me?”

“We do,” laughs Ramirez. “We’re looking for Jameson Carmichael; he’s Darla Jean’s brother.”

“And can you hook us up with the most recent spreadsheet from the florist calls?” Eddison asks.

“Do you have any idea how many analysts loathe you right now?” They can already hear the swift tapping of keys in the background, as well as a baby’s contented burbling.

“I know it’s mind-numbing, but is calling florists really the worst thing we could ask everyone to do?”

“I know roughly the number of flower shops in the state of Colorado. Do you think this is something I ever wanted to know?”

“I’m sure there are any number of husbands in Colorado who would be very grateful for that spreadsheet.”

“Cute, but it’s called Google. Your man Carmichael, though—any chance he’s a dead John Doe somewhere? Because he just disappeared when he left home. Closed out his bank account but doesn’t look to have started another. Texas driver’s license is expired, never renewed, but he didn’t apply for one anywhere else. No bills, no tickets, no leases or titles, no passport, no hospital admissions in his name. He’s not languishing in prison, either, unless it’s as a John Doe or under a very convincing other identity. Your boy’s probably either dead, suffering from amnesia, or he built himself a life under a new name.”

“What about the car that was registered to him? You could track the VIN if he transferred the title or registered it elsewhere, couldn’t you?” asks Vic.

“I could indeed, sir, but he did not. Car was totaled a few weeks after his sister died. Police and insurance both report that he hit a pair of deer.”

“Deer totaled a car?”

“They do it all the time,” Yvonne answers. “Bambi and his girlfriend can absolutely destroy your front end. Carmichael deposited the insurance payout about two weeks before closing account.”

Eddison shakes his head. “You can get all that in seconds but it takes forever to find out if anyone has sold dahlias recently.”

“Well, this time you gave me a name, sugar, not hundreds of businesses and owners who don’t always pick up their phone or return calls.”

“I deserved that,” he says with a wince.

“Yes, yes, you did.”

“I’m sorry, Yvonne.”

“Hey, I know this case is important,” she says gently. “If I could give the world a kick and a curse and make it go ten times as fast, I would.”

“I know.”

“Carmichael should have fingerprints on record from that investigation; can you run them, see if they pop up anywhere else?”

Ramirez glances at Vic, her curls falling out of her pencil arrangement. “We don’t have the killer’s fingerprints at any of the crime scenes.”

“No, but maybe he’s been printed under a different name. Names can change, prints not so much.”

“Nada, sir.”

“It was worth asking,” he sighs. “Thanks, Yvonne, and please send us the updated spreadsheet.”

“Will do, agents. Please try to get some sleep.” She hangs up, and Eddison clicks off the speaker.

“She’s right. Go home, both of you.”

“Vic—”

“We are all exhausted,” the senior agent reminds them, getting to his feet. “Go home. Sleep. Come to my place in the morning. Ma will love the chance to feed you, and we can check in with Finney.”

Eddison hesitates, looking at the stacks of papers and folders on the table. He can hear Vic and Ramirez murmuring to each other, and then the door closes. A large hand grips his shoulder. “Vic . . .”

“Brandon.”

He looks up. Vic only uses his first name when he wants to be very sure he’s got Eddison’s attention.

“It’s Priya’s birthday tomorrow,” Vic says quietly. “You know it’s a rough day for her. She’s going to need you at your best.”

“What if my best isn’t enough?”

Rather than answer, Vic squeezes his shoulder and lets go.