Emma watches Cooper’s face as he speaks and notices the cold in her fingertips. The room itself is cold, and in its emptiness she can hear the humming echo of the air-conditioning. Her chest feels tight. She’s about to go into prisons and talk to people like Huxton. No—Huxton was forty-two. She’ll be talking to teenage versions of Huxton, then.
It occurs to her again that she has almost no understanding of her own motive in this situation. Why is she doing this?
Bell fills the silence. “We’ll do our best, sir. What time should we—”
A knock on the door before it opens. The woman from Behavioral Science—the receptionist from the foyer—walks in and hands Cooper a folded note on yellow memo paper.
Cooper scans the note, rises, re-buttoning his jacket. “Excuse me, I’ve been called away. Tomorrow’s interview is at Beckley. That’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive, and you’ll need to report here at oh eight thirty tomorrow morning and collect materials before you leave. Don’t forget to keep your receipts.”
“Wait, what?” Emma starts to lift from her chair. “My suitcase is still in the trunk of my car—”
Cooper turns to the receptionist. “Betty, would you mind, with these two?” The woman nods. She is a white woman, about sixty, her hair blue-rinsed and perfectly coiffed. Cooper glances at Emma and Bell again as he walks toward the door. “Talk to Betty about photo IDs and dorm allocations. Unpack, get settled. I’ll speak to you again tomorrow, after the interview.”
He and Betty leave. Emma stares.
Bell gathers the folders, straightens them carefully. “He’s under the gun. There’s an active case in Pennsylvania—”
“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.
A folder of paperwork lies open over her knees. She’s been reading Cooper’s summary on McMurtry out loud, and she and Bell have talked awhile. Cooper is canny, she realizes. One road trip is a better get-to-know-you than a thousand formal handshakes at Quantico.
“Living away from home is tough,” Emma notes.
“It is.” Bell takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes with his knuckle, suspends the glasses off the neck of his shirt. “But being away for LEO training is no different than being away for college, I guess.”
“I go to college in my home state, though. Wisconsin’s a long way from Texas.”
“That’s true. But Texas won’t let you start until you’re twenty.”
“How did you get recruited for this? If you don’t mind me asking,” she adds quickly. “Cooper said everyone on this detail had some kind of experience with, uh—”
“My dad was a US Marshal. He was murdered by a serial offender.” Bell keeps his face forward, eyes trained out the windshield. “It was during an arrest. There was a situation, and my father was involved, and he got stabbed.”
“Oh.” She feels a little winded. “Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. You asked—it’s all right to ask. It was two years ago.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve gotta know this stuff about each other if we’re gonna work together.”
“Right. Yeah.” She nods at the folder in her lap, closes it, and places it on the bench seat between them. Sweat in her palms at the prospect of talking about this. “Well. I’m the only survivor of the Daniel Huxton case. He was the guy in Ohio who—”
“I know,” Bell says. “You don’t have to tell me. I know about it.”
“You do?” Emma wishes her heart would stop beating so fast. “Ah, of course you do. You read the news.” She looks out the window and tries not to think about it. Tries to think of something nice: her mother and the petunias, the soft black loam in the flower boxes.
“I remember,” he says. “My dad put the newspaper in front of me at the breakfast table and said, ‘This is what real bravery looks like.’ I paid attention.” When Emma doesn’t reply, he continues. “You’d just turned sixteen. You fought off Huxton, escaped, then found help and led the police team back up the mountain to the location.”