This woman had died watching him, and he’d posed her, propped her head up on a pillow, fanning her brown hair out around her death-still face.

Suddenly, I was nauseous. It wasn’t just what had been done to these women. It was that for a moment, I’d connected with the person who’d done it. I’d understood.

I felt a hand, warm and steady, on the back of my neck. Dean.

“You’re fine,” he said. “It’ll pass.”

This from the boy who’d never wanted me to go to the place I’d just gone.

“Just breathe,” he told me, dark eyes making a careful study of mine. I returned the favor, concentrating on his face—here, now, this moment, nothing else.

“You okay, Cass?” Agent Locke sounded worried in spite of herself. I could practically see her wondering if she’d pushed me too far, too fast.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Liar.” Lia strolled into the kitchen like a model on a catwalk, but for once, I was glad for the distraction.

“Okay,” I said, amending my previous statement. “I’m not fine, but I will be.” I turned around and met Lia’s eyes. “Satisfied?”

She smiled. “Delighted.”

Agent Locke cleared her throat and adopted a stern expression that reminded me of Agent Briggs. “We’re still working here, Lia.”

Lia looked at me, then at Dean, who dropped his hands to his side. “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

I wasn’t sure if Lia was calling Locke out on a lie or telling the agent to back off. I also wasn’t sure whether she was doing it for me—or for Dean.

“Fine,” Agent Locke capitulated. “My brilliant lecture on the difference between organized and disorganized killers can wait until tomorrow.” Her phone vibrated. She picked it up, glanced at the screen for a few seconds, and then corrected herself. “And by ‘tomorrow,’” she said, “I mean Monday. Have a good weekend.”

“Somebody has a case,” Lia said, her eyes lighting up.

“Somebody has to jet,” Agent Locke replied. “No rest for the wicked, and as much as I’d love to take a human lie detector with me to a crime scene, Lia, that’s not what this program is. You know that.”

I’d gotten nauseous over pictures, long-dead women, and a killer who’d already been convicted. Locke was talking about an active crime scene.

A fresh body.

“You’re right,” Dean said, stepping in between Lia and Locke. “That’s not what this program is,” he told the agent, and even from behind, I could picture the look in his eyes—intense and full of warning. “Not anymore.”

You’re getting sloppy, killing so close to home, leaving the bodies spread throughout the back streets of the capital, like Hansel and Gretel dropping more and more bread crumbs the farther into the forest they go.

But from the moment you first laid eyes on her, it’s been harder to push back the desire to kill, harder to remember why you make it a point not to play in your own backyard.

Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s fate.

Time to finish what you started.

Time to get their attention.

Time to come home.

I woke up on Saturday at noon to two sounds: the shuffling of cards and the faint, high-pitched whir of metal on metal. I opened my eyes and turned over onto my side. Sloane was sitting cross-legged on her bed, a mug in one hand and the other dealing out cards: seven columns, a different number of cards in each one, all of them facedown.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Sloane stared at the backs of the cards for a moment and then picked one up and moved it. “Solitaire,” she said.

“But all of the cards are facedown.”

“Yes.” Sloane took a sip from her mug.

“How can you play Solitaire if all of the cards are facedown?”

Sloane shrugged. “How can you play with some of them faceup?”

“Sloane is something of a card shark. Briggs found her in Vegas.” Lia stuck her head out of the closet. “If she skims the deck once, she can more or less track the cards, even once they’re shuffled.”

I registered the fact that Lia was in our closet. Metal on metal, I thought. Metal hangers sliding across a metal rack.

“Hey,” I said, taking a better look at Lia’s current attire. “That’s my dress.”

“Mine now.” Lia smiled. “Didn’t the FBI warn you that I have sticky fingers? Kleptomania, pathological lying—it’s all the same, really.”

I thought Lia was joking, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Kidding,” she confirmed after a few seconds. “About the kleptomania, not about the fact that I have no intention of giving this dress back. Honestly, Sloane is the klepto in this house, but this really is more my color than yours.”

I turned to Sloane, who’d ratcheted the speed of her game up a notch—or three.

“Sloane,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Why is Lia poking around in our closet?”

Sloane looked up, but didn’t stop playing. “Motivation is really more your domain than mine. I find most people somewhat bewildering.”

I rephrased the question. “Why would you let Lia poke around in our closet?”

“Oh,” Sloane said, once she took my meaning. “She brought a bribe.”

“Bribe?” I asked. And that was when I realized what, exactly, was in Sloane’s mug.

“You brought her coffee?”

Lia smoothed a hand over the front of my dress. “Guilty as charged.”

Sloane on coffee was a bit like an auctioneer on speed. The numbers poured out of her mouth rapid-fire, a statistic for every occasion. For eight hours.

“Sixteen percent of American men have blue eyes,” she informed me blithely. “But over forty percent of male TV doctors do.”

Watching TV with a hyped-up statistician would have been challenging enough, but Sloane wasn’t the only one who’d followed me to the media room after dinner.

“Her mouth says, I love you, Darren, but her posture says, I can’t believe the writers are doing this to my character—she would never get involved with this schmuck!” Michael popped a piece of popcorn into his mouth.

“Do you mind?” I asked him, gesturing toward the screen.

He grinned. “Not at all.”

I tried to tune the two of them out, but the effort was futile. I couldn’t get lost in the medical melodrama any more than they could, because all I could think—over and over again—was that Dr. Darren the Schmuck’s BPE simply did not add up.

“We could switch to reality TV,” Michael suggested.

“Roughly one percent of the population are considered to be psychopaths,” Sloane announced. “Recent estimates suggest that over fourteen percent of reality television stars are.”

“Whose estimates?” Michael asked.

Sloane smiled like a Cheshire cat. “Mine.”

Michael put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Forget studying killers. Let’s arrest fourteen percent of all reality television stars and call it a day.”

Sloane slouched in her chair and toyed with the end of her ponytail. “Being a psychopath isn’t a crime,” she said.

“Are you defending psychopaths?” Michael asked, arching one eyebrow to ridiculous heights. “This is why we don’t give you coffee.”

“Hey,” Sloane said defensively, “I’m just saying that statistically, a psychopath is more likely to end up as a CEO than a serial killer.”

“Ahem.” Lia was the only person I knew who would actually say the word ahem to announce her presence. Once she had our attention, she looked at each one of us in turn. “Judd just left for a night on the town with an old friend. We have the house to ourselves.” She clasped her hands together in front of her body. “Living room. Fifteen minutes. Come prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” I asked, but before the question had fully exited my mouth, she was gone.