Maybe Lucy could play it off as relatable rather than sloppy.
Lucy pulled out the empty chair. “I’m Agent Lucy Thorne. I heard I might be able to help you.”
Silence.
“Can you tell me your name?” Lucy prodded. The girl wanted to talk. She must have. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been there.
The girl shifted, licked her lips. The first sign of nervousness Lucy had seen.
“Eliza.” The voice as pale as the rest of her. “Eliza Cook.”
It felt like a victory, though it shouldn’t. “Nice to meet you, Eliza.”
Lucy kept her tone friendly, casual like they were anywhere in the world but a stark interrogation room in the Seattle FBI office. “Can you tell me why you’re here, Eliza?”
The girl’s eyes slid to the mirrored glass and then back to Lucy’s face. “I’d like to report a murder.”
That still didn’t make her unusual enough to get this far. The Seattle office alone fielded dozens of reports like that a month—most of them false. Still, Lucy’s eyes dropped to Eliza’s hands, looking for any telltale specks of dried blood at the beds of her fingernails. They were clean. “All right. Who was the victim, Eliza?”
“You keep saying my name like that, you know?”
Lucy did know. Using someone’s name frequently was a tactic she’d often employed when there was a possibility the person was in the midst of a psychotic break. She wasn’t usually called on it. “Like what?”
“Like I’m crazy,” Eliza said. “Like you think if you say my name enough I’ll remember I’m a person.”
The chill crawled back in. “Do you not feel like a person?”
When Eliza answered, it was quiet, just an exhale really. “Sometimes.”
“Sometimes what?”
Eliza blinked, a flutter of nearly translucent lashes. “Sometimes I forget I’m a person.”
“And when’s that, Eliza?”
A corner of her mouth twitched, the barest hint of amusement. “There you go again. With my name.”
“We all need a reminder we’re human, Eliza.” Lucy shrugged, sweeping her arm out to draw attention to the hair that had dried into dirt-encrusted clumps, to the stains, the frayed jeans. Relatable. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“Are we, though?” Eliza asked.
“Are we what?”
“Human.” For a heartbeat, Eliza curled in on herself, her chin dipped, almost bowing forward beneath some invisible weight. Grief? Guilt? Something between the two? The flash of vulnerability was gone as quickly as it had come, but it left behind a reminder that this girl was a girl. Probably no older than seventeen, if Lucy had to guess.
“What else would we be?”
The composure Eliza seemed to wear so comfortably was back. “Monsters.”
The word slid like a blade between Lucy’s ribs. Lucy sat back, shaken as if Eliza’s damning assessment had stripped bare all the terrible darkness that lived inside her own body. Monsters.
“His name is Noah Dawson,” Eliza said when Lucy just sat there, that soft voice almost disappearing beneath the nearly inaudible hiss of the overhead lights. “He is twelve years old.”
There was a pause, and Eliza looked away. “Was.”
Lucy made a note of that tense change for later. “Can you tell us anything else?”
“You’ll find him here.” Eliza reached into her pocket, pulled out a small piece of paper, and then slid it across the table toward Lucy. “Near the rocks is the knife that killed him. The one that carved a Bible verse into his skin.”
The specificity of the last bit had Lucy leaning forward, the anticipation that had been an almost-lazy hum before notching up into a hot throb in the recesses of her gut.
When Lucy looked up, it was to find those eyes, those dark blue eyes, watching her without blinking.
“Say it,” Eliza said. “There’s a verse cut into the skin. Say it.”
The demand was desperate, more a plea than anything else. Closer to manic than Lucy had yet to see from the girl.
This was something important. Why? Why did Eliza need Lucy to acknowledge it when there was no chance she’d forget such a detail?
“There’s a verse,” Lucy repeated, obedient because the very fact that Eliza was focused on it was more important than Lucy’s need to assert control over the interrogation. “Carved into his skin.”
Eliza’s shoulders slumped once the words were out between them, as if Lucy had sworn an oath, a blood oath that couldn’t be broken.
Lucy glanced back down at the slanted scrawl that told of the location of the body.
There was a question Lucy had to ask. She knew the answer, she knew it, yet she had to give voice to the words that for some reason she was reluctant to actually form.
“How do you know all this, Eliza?”
There was an electricity in the air like before a summer storm’s first lightning strike, the promise of thunder and wind lurking behind it.
Eliza met Lucy’s eyes. Only a thin ring of dark blue remained, the black of her dilated pupils consuming the rest.
“Because I killed him.”
CHAPTER TWO
ELIZA COOK
Four weeks earlier
Eliza Cook didn’t think God would notice that she wasn’t singing.
Aunt Rachel would tell her different; so would everyone Eliza knew, really. Maybe not Hicks, but she wasn’t supposed to talk to the sheriff anyway.
The voices rose around her—the chorus of “Amazing Grace.” It was haunting in its beauty in the specific way only a song sung by dozens of people could sound. It rubbed against the seams of the church, against the walls, the ceiling, the windows, not to escape but to fill every possible empty space before the devil could get there.
If Eliza didn’t sing, would the music press into her next? Her lungs, her belly, her womb. Filling every empty space.
Her fingers trembled around the Bible that she hugged close to her chest, but she dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come. God wouldn’t notice if she wasn’t singing, just like he didn’t notice anything else around here.
It had taken a long time for Eliza to realize that there was something wrong about the way their Church practiced faith, had taken a while to realize it was extremism and not religion that thrived beneath this particular roof. Holy words were twisted by corrupt mortal men into steel bars that caged their community.
Eliza let her eyes sweep the small room, trail over the achingly familiar faces of the parishioners whom she saw every single day, her attention lingering on Molly and her parents for a beat before continuing on to the rest of the pews. So many people Eliza loved, so many people who were kind and generous and everything good in a world they were told to hate.
She wondered how many of them had doubts about their Church like she did.
Most of the men didn’t seem to, their voices booming when they sang, their heads nodding along to the sermon no matter how incendiary it was. No matter how they themselves might hesitate to say those words in daily life, they would go along with them for the sake of protecting the Church.
Liam Dawson sat across the aisle from Eliza, and she’d catch him sometimes watching Uncle Josiah with the reverence of a man who’d been kicked and beaten down his whole life and was finally being told that he was right, that he mattered, that he was home.