Lia gave me a look and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “If the FBI doesn’t have an official dating policy, I doubt they have one for divorce. Besides, we’re talking about Director Sterling here. The man who basically bought Michael from his father by promising to make the IRS look the other way.” She paused. “The man who had the FBI haul me in off the streets and told me my other option was juvie.”
This was the first time I’d ever heard Lia mention her past before the program. Juvie?
“Briggs and Sterling both worked my father’s case.” Dean volunteered that information, using his own past to change the subject from Lia’s, which told me that she’d been telling the truth and he wanted to protect her from questions. “Briggs was the strategist,” Dean continued. “He was driven, competitive—not with her, but with any UNSUB they hunted. Briggs didn’t just want to catch killers. He wanted to win.”
It was easy to forget, when Dean said the word UNSUB, that his father had never been an Unknown Subject to him. Dean had lived with a killer—a true psychopath—day in, day out, for years.
“Sterling was impulsive.” Dean stuck to describing the agents. I doubted he would mention his father again. “Fearless. She had a hot temper, and she followed her gut, even when that wasn’t the smart thing to do.”
I’d suspected that Agent Sterling’s personality had undergone some major changes in the past five years, but even so, it was hard to see the connection between the short-tempered, instinct-driven woman Dean was describing and the Agent Sterling in the kitchen now. The additional data sent my brain into overdrive, connecting the dots, looking at the trajectory between past and present.
“Briggs has a case.” Michael liked to make an entrance. “He just got the call.”
“But his team just got back.” Sloane loaded her catapult again. “The FBI has fifty-six field offices, and the DC field office is the second-largest in the country. There are dozens of teams who could take this case. Why assign it to Briggs?”
“Because I’m the most qualified for the job,” Briggs said, coming into the room. “And,” he added under his breath, “because somewhere along the way, the universe decided I needed to suffer.”
I wondered if that last bit was about the case—or about the fact that Agent Sterling was on his heels. Now that I knew they’d been married, I doubted his irritation with her when he’d sent me out of the room had been entirely professional. She was playing in his sandbox—and they clearly had issues.
“I’m going with Agent Briggs.” Sterling pointedly ignored her ex-husband and addressed those words to us. “If any of you hope to come within ten feet of a training exercise or cold case this month, you’ll have those practice GEDs finished when I get back.”
Lia threw her head back and laughed.
“You think I’m joking, Ms. Zhang?” Agent Sterling asked. It was the first time I’d ever heard Lia’s last name, but Lia didn’t bat an eye.
“I don’t think anything,” Lia said. “I know that you’re telling the truth. But I also know that the FBI brass isn’t going to let you ground their secret assets from doing their jobs. They didn’t bring us here to take the GED. They brought us here because we’re useful. I’ve met your daddy dearest, Agent Sterling. He only plays by the rules when it’s useful for him to do so, and he definitely didn’t go to the trouble of blackmailing me into this program to let you clip my wings.” Lia leaned back against the sofa and stretched out her legs. “If you think otherwise,” she added, her lips parting in a slow, deliberate smile, “you’re lying to yourself.”
Agent Sterling waited to reply until she was certain she had Lia’s full attention. “You’re only useful as long as you aren’t a liability,” she said calmly. “And given your individual histories—some of them criminal—it wouldn’t take much for me to convince the director that one or two of you might be a bigger risk than you’re worth.”
Dean was the son of a serial killer. Michael had anger management issues and a father who’d traded him to the FBI for immunity from prosecution on white-collar crimes. Lia was a compulsive liar—and apparently had some kind of juvie record. Sloane had her catapult aimed at Agent Sterling’s head.
And then there was me.
“Lia, just humor her and take the test.” Agent Briggs sounded very much like someone whose head was beginning to pound.
“Humor me?” Agent Sterling repeated. “You’re telling her to humor me?” Sterling’s voice went up a decibel.
“Lia already took the test.” Dean spoke up before Agent Briggs had a chance to reply. Everyone in the room turned to look at him. “She’s a human lie detector. She can do multiple choice questions in her sleep.”
Detecting lies was as much about the words people used as the way they said them. If there was a pattern to the way the test makers wrote the questions, a subtle difference between the true answers and the false ones, a deception detector would find it.
Lia shot Dean a dirty look. “You never let me have any fun,” she muttered.