When she opened her eyes, she saw a woman slowly walking along the edge of the crowd, filming people’s faces with a digital video camera small enough to fit into her palm. Scanning the rest of the gathering, Allison picked out two men dressed in plainclothes, filming the faces that glowed in the light of candles. A uniformed police officer approached one, indicating a part of the crowd with a jerk of his chin. The cameraman turned. Allison tried to figure out who they were looking at, but she couldn’t tell. She suddenly remembered the man in the navy blue parka, but when she looked around the crowd, she couldn’t see him anymore.
She did spot Nicole, who acknowledged her with a nod and then went back to watching the crowd, her expression fierce and alert. Nicole was here for professional reasons, while Allison’s were more complicated, personal as well as professional. She thought about the fragility of life, about Katie and Lindsay and the new life inside her.
The crowd began to sing “How Great Thou Art.” In the flickering, golden light of the candles, their faces looked serene and ghostly. Their voices raised gooseflesh on Allison’s arms, despite her warm coat. Without a piano or even a pitch pipe, they were perfectly in tune. Without a director, they still found the same rhythm, still started and stopped each line at the same time.
In their unrehearsed and implausible perfection, Allison felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.
But when she looked out at the blackness that surrounded them, she felt something else. Evil. Waiting.
NORTHWEST PORTLAND
December 18
As she drove to the Converses’ house,Nic felt exhausted. She had stayed at the vigil until every last person had gone, paying particularly close attention to those who lingered, those who wept until they could barely stand—and those who caught a glimpse of one of the cameras filming the crowd and quickly turned their backs.
And she knew this was only the beginning. Today was a Saturday, but for the time being, weekends were only a theory. You worked this kind of case until it was finished, and until then there weren’t any days off. This could eat her life up—bones and all—before it was over. She had already made arrangements for Makayla to temporarily stay with her own parents. She hadn’t seen her daughter since the day before yesterday. Nic was giving up time with her own precious child to help another family find theirs.
At least she had been in the FBI long enough that she was no longer considered a rookie. When you were the newest agent, you got handed a stack of cases no one else wanted to work, took the territory no one else wanted to drive, and drove it using the oldest car in the fleet. When every-one else went to lunch, you stayed behind to answer the phones. When they executed a search warrant, you were assigned the spot the bad guy was least likely to exit through.
Being asked to be a liaison to the Converses was a sign that someone in the Bureau wanted her to go further up the ladder. The thing was—Nic wasn’t sure she wanted to go. Not when Makayla was so young and she saw her so little as it was. The next step would be being named a field supervisor, but the Bureau had recently gotten serious about its five and out policy. Supervisors at a field office could only be there for five years before they were required to take an assignment at headquarters. If they didn’t, they had to step back down in rank or quit. There was no way Nic would take Makayla to DC. She couldn’t afford private schools, not on what the FBI paid, and she would never put her daughter in public school there.
As a black woman in the Bureau, Nic was in a double minority. They liked to trot her out as an example, but everything she did was also scrutinized. Nic’s achievements didn’t seem to add up as fast as a guy’s. At the same time, she sometimes thought that if she made a mistake, it would be broadcast on a loudspeaker all over the office.
Sometimes it felt like she had to be twice as good as a man to even compete—like Ginger Rogers, who had done everything Fred Astaire had, only backward and in high heels. Take the 2.5-minute shooting drills. Agents had to shoot while lying prone, from behind barricades, on their knees, reloading, switching hands, moving ever closer to the target. They were expected to get a score of 80, which meant they had to put 80 percent of their bullets in the kill zone.
Nicole’s last score had been a 97.
She pulled up to the Converses’ house. Now there were four camera crews out front. She parked in the narrow driveway behind Valerie’s red Volvo station wagon—she didn’t see Wayne’s blue BMW sedan—and ignored the shouted questions as she went up the walk.
Nic was here to interview Whitney before Valerie drove her to school. At first she had thought it was strange that the Converses wanted Whitney to continue attending her middle school, even if they were now driving her instead of having her take the bus. In the last day, though, Nic had begun to see the wisdom of it. If she stayed home, Whitney would be reminded of her sister’s absence every second. She would probably over-hear speculation that would crush whatever innocent conceptions she still harbored about the world and the way it worked. These hours spent at school might be her last chance to still be a child.