Do not let them tell you I am gone, for I am always here.

Fair Lily

Grace signed the name of her sister’s imaginary friend with a relish, using the same loopy scrawl she’d employed when they were younger. Her fingers trailed over the paper, reluctant to fold up and enclose it with Falsteed’s so quickly. That Alice’s small fingers might touch the same place as hers sometime soon left a happiness in Grace’s heart so fragile she refused to examine it more closely.

Falsteed might deem it too dangerous for her to contact Alice. Reed might refuse the delivery. Rain and sun might ruin the letter before her sister happened upon it. But there was still a chance that she would receive it and find solace from the same hand that had given it so many times before, though she would not know the source. Grace pressed the letter to her heart before folding it, hoping that somehow her unspoken emotions would seep into the paper and flow back out to Alice, even if it was the only reunion the two could ever know.

SEVENTEEN

“We got our man. Or rather, they were competent enough to. And it was a woman, after all. So ignore my first statement.” Thornhollow sat on the arm of a chair in his office, staring moodily at the floor by his feet.

“You don’t seem particularly happy about it,” Grace said, welcoming the freedom to speak after another day of feigned inability. Having Nell beside her made talking unnecessary and walking with Elizabeth usually consisted of companionable silence, both enjoyable in their own ways. But Grace’s voice grew in power every day as she discovered the joys of speaking her mind, and she never missed an evening in Thornhollow’s office to share her opinions.

“I’m not,” Thornhollow admitted. “How can I teach you anything without a more complex crime than a jealous wife?”

“Careful what you wish for,” Grace said, thinking of her words to Falsteed in her letter. “That opportunity means someone’s death.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “But we didn’t even get to use the blackboard.”

“What would you write on it if we had?” Grace asked, carefully handling him as if he were Alice in a fit of pique.

“Oh, the basics,” he said, lackadaisically rising from his seat, approaching the board, and drawing a neat line down the center of it. “I suppose we can have a lesson even if there is no object at the moment.” On the left-hand side of the board he wrote Planned; on the other, Impulsive.

“A killer may be able to remove evidence from a crime scene, hide the murder weapon, clean up spilled blood, and take any number of steps necessary to cover their tracks. Yet even by doing this they are giving us clues as to who they are—or rather, who they were.”

“What do you mean by that? Who they were? Aren’t we more interested in who they are?” Grace asked.

“We are, all of us, the sum total of our life experience, Grace. Everything that happened to you as a child, from the geography of your birthplace to the social status of your family, even the order of your birth, can be read in your actions today.” Thornhollow tossed the chalk from hand to hand as he warmed up to his topic.

“If I told you we had a victim who had been stabbed multiple times and there was little blood on the scene or under the body, what would you learn from that?”

Grace closed her eyes, picturing a faceless body in a dark street, cold hands lying still on the cobblestones that remained clean despite the fact there should be blood spreading. “The body was moved,” she said, opening her eyes.

“Very good,” Thornhollow said. “But what else?”

“I . . .” She pictured the scene again but could see no more.

“Let me rephrase the question—what does the fact that our fictitious body was moved tell you about the killer?”

Grace again imagined the clean street beneath the hand, so different from the bricks reddening with blood under the man whose wife had killed him. That killer had been in a rage, her passions driving her to murder, and the panic that followed her action chasing her from the scene, unable to hide anything about her identity as she fled.

“They knew they had to protect themselves,” Grace said slowly. “For someone to move a body indicates a clear head at the time of the crime.”

“Yes, because the crime itself had been . . .” He pointed at the board, eyebrows raised as he silently asked her to finish his sentence.

“Planned,” Grace said.

“And the very fact that it was planned speaks volumes of our killer,” Thornhollow continued. “Years of talking with killers has not only been for conversational purposes, I assure you—although in one or two cases it really was quite pleasant. In speaking with other researchers like myself we’ve all discovered certain patterns that arise so consistently it is hard to explain away.”

The chalk flashed out words in a column on the left side of the board as he went on. “An organized killer is usually intelligent, has a skilled job, is socially competent—indeed, most of their acquaintances deny it could be them based on how normal they are.”

“Yet these are all things in their present,” Grace said. “What of your claim that the past has defined them?”

“It has. As I said, certain themes arise when experiences are compiled. And I can tell you with some certainty that a killer who plans and executes their crime with control of their emotions is an older sibling or only child whose father had a stable job throughout their childhood.”

“And how does that help you catch them?”

“In so many ways, Grace. The simple fact of identifying whether the crime was planned or impulsive informs us that we are looking for an intelligent person with a steady job—and by the way, since our fake killer dumped the body it also tells us he is probably familiar with that area. These seemingly small facts narrow the populace of an entire city down to a neighborhood.”

“And then you can use the assumption that they are an only child to narrow it down still further?”

Thornhollow clapped his hands together, producing a cloud of chalk dust. “Exactly. Much of what we do can be described as exactly that—a narrowing of the possibilities.”

“Until we are down to one,” Grace said.

“Yes. And that process begins with deciding whether our killer is a planner or impulsive. The meticulous nature of the planner can be misleading. If you have a killer who, say, drains the blood from all their victims, or removes the left hand consistently, the untrained want to say they are insane. But the definition of insanity—an inability to use rational thought—immediately precludes that they must, in fact, be sane.”

“Not an easy thing for the average person to accept,” Grace said. “Most would want to believe that a fellow human being would have to be out of their mind to do such a thing.”

“But they’re not. Far from it, in fact. Simply using the words sane and insane is a way for the population to draw a safe line through humanity, and then place themselves squarely on the side of the healthy.”

Grace’s hands went to her temples, where her scars shined brightly. Thornhollow had taken the wrappings off a few days earlier, and the nakedness of her skin against the air had been a relief as well as a shock when she glanced in the mirror. The scars were a price she was willing to pay, but the evidence of the payment had set her back when she first saw them.

“They will fade,” Thornhollow had said quietly.

But she knew she would always carry them, and her fingers traced the thin webbing of smooth skin on her temples that would forever mark her as one on the wrong side of that line.

“So are we really that different? The healthy and the ill?” Grace asked.