I want to make one thing clear,” Kaely said in a voice so low Noah almost didn’t hear her. “I don’t talk about my father. I mean, if I bring him up it’s all right. But it’s not okay for you to mention his name. Understand?”
Noah hesitated a moment before saying, “Unless it has something to do with the three questions you gave me? You said . . . no limits.”
“You’re right.” She shook her head and mumbled something he didn’t catch. “The whole thing started in my head. Where most of the things we do begin. Think about something long enough and you’ll find yourself acting it out.” She grabbed her water bottle. After taking a drink, she said, “For example, you’re getting ready for bed and suddenly you think about that chocolate almond ice cream in the freezer.”
Noah almost jumped out of his chair. How did she know chocolate almond ice cream was his favorite? And that he had some in his freezer right now? He tried not to react. Not give her the satisfaction of letting her know she had guessed his favorite dessert. Obviously, it was a fluke. He struggled to calm his jangled emotions. He needed to stay focused.
“If you keep thinking about it, you’ll get a bowl,” she continued. “Even though you shouldn’t eat before bed. It’s because the thought becomes real in your mind. It translates into action. Exactly the way serial killers think. Every single one of them. They fantasize about their kills first. Until they feel compelled to carry them out.”
“That’s interesting,” Noah said, “but how does that relate to my question?”
Kaely slapped her hand on the table. “If you interrupt me, I’ll count it as a question. I mean it.”
The tone of her voice made it clear she was serious. Even though it angered him slightly, he really wanted to hear her response, so he just nodded. Obviously talking about this was difficult for her. She could shut down if challenged.
Kaely straightened up in her chair, her body taut with tension. “My father wasn’t the kind of man you could have a conversation with, but at supper, my brother and I were expected to talk. To share what had happened during the day. It was the only time my father really spoke to us. Frankly, it was the one time we really communicated as a family. Later, when I was introduced to the methods of behavioral analysis, I started evaluating those supper conversations. What had I missed? What did he say that could have revealed the truth? I was just a kid, so I wasn’t looking for clues to prove he was a monster. But I ran those conversations over and over in my mind.
“Then, in my thoughts, I started having conversations with my father. Asking him about things he’d said. Trying to make him admit the truth. After a while, I started doing the same thing with the UNSUBs we were chasing. Of course, at Quantico, something like that didn’t fly, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d sit down at home and pretend to share a meal with an UNSUB. Just like I had with my dad. It started working. I began to see the UNSUBs. They began to take shape.
“Then I made a mistake. I told someone at Quantico about it. Someone I thought was a friend. She pretended to be, anyway. Instead of keeping my secret, she told other agents in our training group. It got back to my instructors. To Reinhardt. It was humiliating. Then someone leaked the story to Jerry Acosta, a local reporter. An article appeared in a small local paper where Acosta worked at the time. The story grew legs, spread on social media, and made the Bureau uncomfortable. That’s what got me transferred here. After I arrived, at Solomon’s insistence, I shared the technique with him. He didn’t make me feel crazy. He actually saw value in it.”
She sighed, and all the tension seemed to drain out of her body. “To be honest, I don’t use it as much now as I used to. It seems to be something that helped me link my experiences with my father to my training. The training side has grown stronger, so I don’t need the process like I did when I first started profiling.”
“Now that you explained it, it doesn’t sound nuts at all.”
Kaely wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold. “I had a lapse in public last night. I was having dinner at Restaurant d’Andre. Not long after I arrived in St. Louis, the owner approached me when he found out I was with the FBI. His son had died in a fire in New Orleans. Authorities said he started it himself. Called it suicide.”
Noah frowned. “Not many people commit suicide by fire. It’s a terrible way to die.”
Kaely nodded. “Louis asked me to look into it, and I did. The NOPD allowed me to look at their evidence. I found a pattern that pointed to a serial arsonist. Andre didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”
“That’s great work. But you said you had a lapse?”
“Louis insists I come to his restaurant at least once a month for a free meal, you know, out of gratitude for finding out the truth about Andre’s death. I went there last night, and I made the mistake of taking along a file Solomon gave me. Somehow, I forgot I was in public. Started talking to my UNSUB. Caused quite a stir in the restaurant.”
Noah fought back a grin but lost the battle.
“It really wasn’t funny,” Kaely said grimly.
“It kind of is.”
She glared at him. “You have a strange sense of humor. You may not think what I do is professional, but to me, being professional means you get results, no matter what you have to do to get them. Even pretending to talk to people who aren’t there.” She sighed heavily. “A lot of people use the same technique. Attorneys will pretend to argue a case with an opposing attorney just to prepare themselves for any possibility in court. Politicians do the same thing before a public debate. They try to anticipate their opponent’s arguments before they’re presented. How many men rehearse a proposal before they actually pop the question? My technique isn’t really that unusual. People just make a big deal out of it because of the people I pretend to talk to.”
Before he could ask his next question, Kaely suddenly picked up the stack of pictures she’d had him look at earlier. She quickly shuffled through them and then pulled one out. A photograph of a thirty-something balding man in a blue shirt.
“This is the picture you chose earlier,” she said. “Is it your father or your brother who had cancer?”
Noah could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “My father had cancer,” he said softly. “But he made it. He’s okay. How did you know? And that’s not one of my three questions.”
“Okay. I accept that. After seeing these pictures, you touched your hair twice . . . as if you needed to assure yourself you weren’t going bald. I can clearly see there’s no sign of male-pattern baldness, therefore someone you know is having a problem with his hair. Has to be someone in your family or you wouldn’t be worried about it. I suspected your brother or father had cancer. Either it took a long time for his hair to get back to normal, or perhaps it never did. You’re concerned you might lose your hair too. What if it wasn’t the chemo that caused your dad’s hair loss? What if there’s a family trait that causes some of the men to go bald?”
“That’s incredible,” Noah said softly.
Kaely shrugged it off. “Like I told you, being able to read people helps us sort out the lies from the truth.” She waved a hand toward him. “Next question?”
Noah was convinced she had not intended to bring up the picture now but had grabbed it because she needed a way to change the subject. Things had gotten too personal for her, made her uncomfortable. But it was okay. He had gotten the answer he wanted. He glanced at his watch. “I’ll save it, thanks. It’s after nine. I think we need to wrap it up for tonight.”
Kaely’s eyes widened, and she glanced up at the clock on the wall. “I had no idea. . . .”
Noah could tell he was going to have many long days working with Kaely Quinn. “Hey, one other quick question—not a special question. Your name? I mean, Kaely is kind of unusual.”
“Not a big mystery. I changed my name when I turned eighteen. Picked Jessie Rogers. Kept a version of my first name and used my mother’s maiden name as a surname. After Jerry Acosta wrote his article, I changed it again. For all the good it did me.” She leaned back in her chair. “I got into genealogy while I was at Quantico. I wanted . . .” She swallowed hard. “I wanted to know if my father’s traits had shown up anywhere else in my family. You know, if . . .”
“If you could turn out to be a serial killer?” Noah said, astonished she would worry about something like that.
“Don’t look so shocked,” she said. “We don’t understand everything about genetics.”
He shook his head and chuckled. “Well, I know you’ll never be a serial killer, so I guess that puts me ahead in the game.”
Her eyes crinkled around the edges and the sides of her mouth turned up. “Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Anyway, as I looked through our family tree, I found my great-great-grandmother, Kaely Quinn. My mother had some old papers and family journals packed away in storage, and I found a diary Kaely had kept. She was quite a woman. Seems people would come to her with problems because they thought she had second sight.”
“You mean like ESP?”
“I don’t believe in ESP, and she didn’t either. She believed God gave her a gift. A gift of discernment.”
“So you decided you two were alike and took her name?”
“Yeah, but I also looked up the meaning of Kaely. It means keeper of the keys.”
“Keeper of the keys,” Noah repeated softly. “I like that. You hold the keys to the minds of monsters.”
“Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but I like to think of it that way.”
“It’s hard to look into the heart of evil every day.” Noah was not just talking about Kaely. It was an observation he had made at Quantico as they taught agents about the kind of real monsters that roamed the earth. It was hard for him to deal with at first. Truth was, he still had problems handling the depths of depravity people were capable of sinking into.
“‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you,’” Kaely said softly.
“Friedrich Nietzsche.”
Kaely nodded.
As Noah looked down at the silver cross Kaely wore around her neck, he knew what his next question would be.
But that would have to wait for another day.