Emma presses her lips. “I think we’re the unit.”

Cooper has already breached the door.

“Miss Lewis, Mr. Bell.” He shifts the folders he’s carrying and shakes their hands in turn. Emma finds it easier to take his hand here, in a formal setting. “You’ve already been introduced? Thank you both for coming. There’s a place for us to talk—please follow me.”

He leads them, not toward the offices as Emma had anticipated, but back out to the hallway. Cooper’s walk is brisk, military; otherwise, he is just a slight, Caucasian man in a regulation suit who looks more like an accountant than an FBI agent. He steers their course farther along and then around a corner into another corridor.

“Why aren’t we talking in your office about this?” Emma asks.

Cooper stops at the door to a room. He unlocks it, opens it, gestures for them to enter. “Because my office—like every office in Behavioral Science—is covered in paperwork about active cases, which is something you’re not allowed to see.”

The room they’ve entered is large, gray, and dim. There’s a wooden desk, four folded metal chairs with cushioned seats, an office lamp on the desk, two large filing cabinets. More than a dozen cardboard file boxes are stacked on the floor and against two walls.

“We can only see information on cold cases,” Bell says. It’s not a question. Emma notices how straight his posture is and wonders if upright translates to uptight.

Cooper nods. “This unit is not concerned with active cases. That’s a bureau directive, by the way. You’re only researching perpetrators who’ve been convicted and are serving sentences.”

“And we’re the unit, aren’t we?” Emma wants to know for sure.

“Yes,” Cooper confirms.

Bell, Travis J., turns his head and looks at Emma, and Emma finds something she wasn’t expecting in that look. You were right, his eyes say. Unusual to meet a guy who’ll admit that.

“Okay.” Cooper points to the groupings of file boxes. “Subject one, Clarence McMurtry. Subject two, Michael Gesak. Subjects three, four, five… I’ve made up a summary for each subject so you won’t need to review all these files, although they’re here for extra research. But I think it’s better if you relate to the subjects as teenagers. I’d like you to go in with an open mind.”

“When do we go in?” Bell asks.

“Your first interview is scheduled for tomorrow.”

Fuck, Emma thinks, but what she says is “That’s soon.”

“Yes.” Cooper makes no apology for it, and Emma liked him better when he was pussyfooting around her during his first approach at OSU. “Grab a chair, that’s it, any of those chairs is fine. Here’s the summary for McMurtry. These folders have the questionnaires—the pink one is for the interviewer, the blue one is for the subject, if he consents to fill it out.”

Bell hunkers forward on his chair, lifts the cover on the folder holding the pink pages. “So we go to the facility, follow the admission processes, and we get, what, an interview room?”