“You don’t have to do that alone,” Kate said automatically.
“I know,” he said.“But given that every time you look away from that screen you look like you’re going to chew through the nearest wall, I’m going to call this an efficient use of Bureau resources.”
She huffed out a breath that was almost — almost — a laugh.“Shut up.”
“Text me if you think of any specific questions for Maya beyond the obvious.”
Kate hesitated, then nodded.“Ask her… ask her how their parents were with them.Not just ‘good’ or ‘strict’.Stories.Patterns.And if there was anything—” She lifted the pen, searching for the right phrase.“Anything unfinished between Sarah and them.”
“I’ll put my best bedside manner on,” Marcus said.“See what I can do.”
He moved toward the door, then paused.
“Hey,” he said.
She looked up.
“Remember that you’re not responsible for what this guy does,” he said.He tapped his forehead and pointed at her.“You’ve been good about that.This time round.So keep it up.”
She held his gaze for a heartbeat too long.
“I know it intellectually,” she said at last.“I’m working on the rest.”
“That’s all any of us are doing,” he said.“Working on the rest.”
He left her there, in the quiet of the dining room that was no longer quite a dining room, with the low hum of the crime scene beyond and the black bird staring up at her from the page.
As the door clicked shut, Kate drew the crow’s eye again, smaller this time, almost abstract: a dot of white in a sea of black oil.
It watched her patiently.
And somewhere out there, she thought, maybe someone else was doing the same.Watching the next victim.
Or watching her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kate stepped into the small room she’d more or less claimed since this nightmare began — noticing as if for the first time the corkboard with pinholes like freckles, and the blinds that never fully closed.Her coat hung over the back of the chair where she’d dropped it hours ago.Her laptop sat open on the main desk, its screen still glowing with the last images she’d been studying before Sullivan called her out to Brennan’s garden at dawn.
She closed the door behind her and the noise of the precinct softened to a dull, distant wash.
She uploaded the final crow drawing, enlarged it, arranged it alongside the others so that they sat like cartoon birds on a telegraph wire.Seeing them this large made them feel almost confrontational.The birds seemed to lean forward, waiting.
She moved the mouse, clicking between them, zooming in, zooming out, trying to re-interrogate the details she’d already interrogated to exhaustion.
The final crow's head still bothered her.The angle is just slightly off.The eye — darker, sharper, more insistent.The berries — swollen and overworked, as if the artist was stuck on a point.
Her eyes stung.She’d stared at pixels too long this morning, then stared at a corpse posed like a prayer, and now stared at these again until the distinctions between what she knew and what she imagined blurred.
Something Gabe had said that night when he'd called her half-high and too honest kept tugging."You might be being premature…" "I mean, think about it.Commandment killings one to four, all referencing your past, glancingly or comprehensively.And now, what?Bubkes?”
She’d brushed him off at the time.She still wanted to brush it off.Onlysomethingwasn’t letting her.
She exhaled and pressed the heels of her hands briefly into her eyes, grounding herself.
A gentle tap sounded on the open door.
“Valentine?”
