The trouble arrived in the final semester. First, in the dining hall, esophageal spasms choked her until she ran to the toilet to throw up. Then she heard noises in the dark, imagined fingers on the latch outside her dorm window. Once, at three in the morning, when she was in the shower at the end of the hall, a girl coming home from a party accidentally turned out the overhead bathroom light. Eden screamed until a campus safety officer arrived. During finals week, the dead women from the Highway 60 murders crawled into bed beside her, hollow-eyed from the loneliness of their deaths, dirt sucked to the back of their throats. Eden woke tangled in the covers, knees jammed to her chest, shaking.

After graduation, Professor Hiatt pulled some strings with a former student working at the FBI. Just like that, Eden became the youngest analyst hired in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, or BAU, sitting in seminars beside gray-haired men with lifetimes of experience staring at human remains. She got used to photos on the conference room’s large-screen TV of throats cut open, and casual lunch-table conversations on blood coagulation, entry-wound angles, and why serial killers always have three names.

She started on a murder in Baltimore, then a drive-by in Miami, and later a string of prostitute disappearances in Phoenix. At the end of her first year, Kinsella called her into his office and assigned her to a re-examination of the Highway 60 killings. “Take advantage of the BAU resources. This could be your big one, your Bundy.” Two months later, she was sleeping with a gun. Six months after that, she was back in Kinsella’s office with her resignation, watching the shy man struggle as embarrassed disappointment spread across his face. Later she learned the FBI, which had a name for everything, called it a flameout.

Now in the police department restroom, Eden leaned against the sink and closed her eyes. Why does this keep happening? Why do I think I can do this work? She feared the look on Mahler’s face when she quit, the exasperation over his wasted time. Just like Kinsella. But she needed to leave. She decided to finish reviewing the files and then resign.

In the Violent Crime room, Eden made a mug of mint tea and picked up the victim binders. Start again. Look at the data. She reread the information on Michelle Foss: crime-scene report, medical examiner’s report. Then she noticed a handwritten note in the margin of the medical examiner’s report—one of the notes Rivas told her were made by the now-retired investigator Tom Woodhouse. She remembered Rivas saying Woodhouse was “old-school.”