Brielle was at home when the police arrived, planning Jessica’s funeral with her parents and little brother. We weren’t there for the arrest, obviously, but we were back in the station by the time they brought her in. They were surprisingly gentle with her. I’d always heard that cops got really rough with people who kill other cops, but I guess they hated traitorous cop pedophiles more, just like Marci had said. They practically treated her like royalty.
Not that this made Brielle any less arrested.
“She looks sad,” said Nobody. I glanced at her warily, studying her face; those kind of dreamy, semilucid statements often marked a change in personality. Had the sight of Brielle brought this one on? Did the nature of the trigger affect which new girl would take over? I looked back at the closed door of the interrogation room, wondering who would be sitting beside me in a moment. Marci again? One of the others? Or someone completely new?
Agent Mills sat down beside us. “The chief’s assistant swears she changed the food rotation at the last minute, precisely because she didn’t want the Butler family making food for the Glassmans—not that she thought they were capable of poisoning anyone, obviously, but because she didn’t want to torture them with the association. Swears up and down she canceled the meal completely. Brielle and her parents insist the same thing.”
I glanced at Nobody again. She was staring intently at her hands. “So who made the food last night?”
“The community volunteer in charge of the food rotation was, you guessed it, Sara Glassman. So we don’t know who she picked in the last-minute switch. We can search her house for a written record as soon as the forensics team is done with it, but barring that, our only chance of tracing the food is if someone can identify the casserole dish.” He leaned back in his chair, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I miss the days of BTK.”
“You look too young to have worked BTK,” I said. “He was caught years ago.”
“True,” said Mills, “and thank you. But I was in college during that whole final thing, when he came out of retirement and sent new letters and all that stuff with the floppy disk and the DNA. That’s why I went into serial killers in the first place—because that investigation was brilliant. Start to finish. The people involved, the procedures they used, the combination of new technology and old school legwork; that’s what I wanted to do. And so I studied and I graduated and I joined the FBI—and it’s gross and full of dead bodies and sick minds, but it’s awesome, you know? I’ve read your file, I know that’s what got you hooked, too. Looking at a crime and using all those pieces to crawl into someone’s head. Like you did with the Glassmans.”
“And then they saddled you with me,” I said.
Mills smiled thinly. “And nothing ever made sense again.” He pointed at the closed interrogation room, where Brielle was waiting in hopeless terror. “She would have made sense: angry sister wreaks horrible vengeance. The narrative works. You know what they found when they picked her up? That cop with the mustache, right there by the desk, he told me the whole story. She kept saying ‘How did you read my journal? How did you read my journal?’ So they found the journal, and there was the whole plan: she hated Glassman and she wanted to kill him. She even laid out the poisoning thing, all right there in ink on paper. And yet the chief’s assistant canceled the meal, and the family spent the entire afternoon and evening at the church cleanup with dozens of witnesses. She has the perfect motive but the perfect alibi.” He sighed. “And not a speck of curry powder in the kitchen. We have a tiny town with five murders in under a week, and none of them make sense, and the best suspects end up as victims, and nothing makes sense. I’m literally starting to wonder if there’s a gas leak in town, because everyone’s crazy.”
“No, I’m not,” said Brooke’s body. She looked mostly asleep.
“Everybody move,” said a voice, and we looked up at the crowd of cops and detectives and secretaries, which were no longer milling or arguing, but moving in a single direction. Mills and I stood up.
“What’s going on?” asked Mills.
“Town meeting,” said the cop with the mustache. “Davis wants to talk to everyone again, tell ’em to stop taking matters into their own hands and let us work.”
I pointed at the interrogation room. “What about Brielle?”
“Released to her home,” said the cop. “Too much evidence in her favor.”
I watched him turn and walk out the door, then looked back at Brooke. “You awake?”
“Huh?” she looked up.
I took one of her cuffed hands, both to help her to her feet and to help her feel at ease for my next question. “Who are you?”
“The one and only,” she smiled. “Original flavor.”
“Welcome back,” I said, pulling her up. I was relieved to have Brooke again, but couldn’t help but feel a pang of loss that she wasn’t Marci. Would Marci ever come back? Or had I finally lost her for good? The thought made me feel awful, like I’d just killed a puppy. It was Brooke’s body, and it should be Brooke in charge of it. I was a horrible person for even thinking about anything else, let alone wishing for it. I kept my voice even and changed the subject. “Do you remember Agent Mills?”
Brooke looked at him, pursing her lips. “Iowa?”
“One license plate,” said Mills. “Come on, I’ll drive us to the meeting.”
“Take off her cuffs first,” I said. “No more demon, no more cuffs.”
Mills stared at us a moment, then sighed and pulled out his little silver key. “Just three days, you said. Just give us three days.” He pulled the cuffs away and slipped them in his pocket. “Now I’m screwing with crime scenes and untying a demon.”
“I’m not a demon,” said Brooke, rubbing her wrists. She stopped suddenly, cocking her head to the side. “Was I Nobody again?”
“You’re always yourself,” I said calmly, leading her to the door. “Deep inside, you’re always you.”