“Are you apologizing for him?” When Bell doesn’t reply, Emma sits back in her chair. “How do you know about active cases?”

“It’s been in the news. Don’t you read the news?”

“No.”

“You need to get out more.”

She turns to shoot back, before realizing his eyes are amused, his lips twitching. A sense of humor. Maybe this guy isn’t a zero-personality FBI cipher after all. “I just drove four hundred miles to interview a bunch of teenage crazy folk. You don’t think that qualifies?”

He looks at the folders and smiles. “Sounds like you’re just getting warmed up.”

He is one of those people whose entire face and demeanor are transformed by smiling, Emma discovers. Then he sobers and taps the folders.

“You thought we’d be eased into this,” he says, “but that’s not how it works. I’ve got a law enforcement background, I know the life—they throw you into the deep end. And I’d lay fifty dollars on Cooper wanting to get these interviews done before this Pennsylvania thing blows up, and the manpower and budget are transferred.”

She sighs. “So he’s not being an asshole on purpose, he’s just under pressure.”

“In the FBI, always,” he says gravely.

She collects the folder with McMurtry’s summary off the desk. “Okay, then.”

Bell stands. “Okay, then. Now I guess we go see Betty.”

Later that night, after she has been photographed, allocated, processed, after she’s unpacked her small suitcase in her gray-carpeted dorm room in the Jefferson building, after she’s eaten a cafeteria dinner, filled out more paperwork, lain down at last on the polyester comforter on her new single bed, Emma wonders how two men, Cooper and Bell, find their purpose in hunting serial murderers.

Cooper likes the challenge, the puzzle, she decides. With his alert stillness and fastidious manners, he reminds her of a fox.

Bell is different—he relates to her differently. She thinks he might have sisters. Tomorrow she’ll find out. Tomorrow she’ll see if they can make this “unit” thing work, and that is her last thought before exhaustion claims her.

CHAPTER FOUR

They take Bell’s car to Beckley. Emma doesn’t trust her Rabbit—she loves it, but she has realistic expectations, and driving to Virginia seems to have overtaxed the engine somehow.

Bell’s driving a Dodge pickup; it’s in good shape and it has air-conditioning. They’ve had the radio tuned to some local station, and now Bell has switched to the news. They’re fast approaching Lexington, where Emma is hoping for coffee and pie and a clean women’s bathroom.

“So you’ve been in pre-US Marshal training for a year?”

“Ten months.” Bell shrugs. “My birthday’s in August. I basically started the program the day after I turned eighteen.”

Bell has brown-tinted aviator sunglasses on and the driver’s side window rolled down. Sunlight dashes itself against the white of his shirt. His suit trousers still look neat after three hours on the road and his jacket is on a hanger behind them. At least he’s left off the tie until they get to the prison. Emma thinks he drives like she expected, staying exactly at the speed limit.