So the concept is appealing: a team of other people to bounce ideas off, to share misgivings, to share the load. But Emma has no sense of what such a team might look like.

And that horseshit about saving lives… Emma used to think she could’ve saved the others—the other girls—if only she’d run faster, gotten help quicker. But on her therapist’s suggestion she read the police report on Huxton, and she doesn’t believe that anymore. She’s wary of that response in herself now. She’s alert to guilt. Guilt doesn’t help anybody.

So it’s not guilt tugging at her with tiny hooks, she tells herself, but rather the idea of the research. New information is the key. If she could play a part in gathering that information, if they could spot these guys more accurately, find them more quickly… then yes, other potential victims might be spared.

Emma sits under the pendant light for some time. Then she uses the phone in the kitchen, with the long curly cord. The call picks up after two rings.

“Cooper.” His voice is raspy but he sounds alert.

“I’m in.”

“Miss Lewis?”

“I’m in,” she says. “I’ll join the project, the unit, whatever it’s called. But I won’t join the bureau. I want to go back to OSU once the interviews are done.”

She hangs up, not waiting for his reply. Immediately, she feels a sensation like her soul is flying out of her chest.

Only when she catches sight of the digital clock on the microwave does she realize it’s three thirty in the morning.

CHAPTER THREE

After some initial fretting, Emma wears jeans and a white T-shirt and running shoes for her first visit to Quantico, because that’s what she’ll feel normal in.

There are lots of oak and maple trees around the parking area on the base. She slows her car for runners, training groups of guys in black gym shorts and regulation gray sweatshirts. It’s been three days since she herself ran, and she feels it like a twitch in her thighs and the balls of her feet.

Once she’s parked, she sits in the car thinking about Robbie’s parting hug, and going through the instruction notes from the second phone call with Cooper. MPs at checkpoints have your name. Park outside Jefferson. Ask at the desk for Behavioral Science. Yesterday she drove six and a half hours to reach Virginia, and she’s still not sure she really wants to be here. She stares at the buildings until the heat gathering between the windshield and the dash forces her out.

The Jefferson building is much cooler. Lots of people in khakis and dark polo shirts in the foyer. The man at the desk directs her to a bank of elevators, and the basement offices.

The basement, she thinks. Of course it has to be in the goddamn basement.

The elevator door opens onto low ceilings with concrete coffers, pipes for heating, pipes for air-conditioning, cable chases. The corridors are disconcertingly similar and anonymous. Lots of white and gray cinder block, fluorescent lighting, like a nuclear bunker or a morgue.