Special Agent Veronica Sterling didn’t show even the slightest inclination to smile. Turning back to the rest of us, she finished her introduction. “This program has a vacancy for a supervisor. I’m here to fill it.”
“True,” Lia said, drawing out the word, “but not the whole story.” When Agent Sterling didn’t rise to the bait, Lia continued. “It’s been six weeks since Locke went off the deep end. We were starting to wonder if the FBI would ever send a replacement.” She raked her eyes over Agent Sterling. “Where did they find you, central casting? One young female agent swapped in for another?”
Trust Lia to cut through the niceties.
“Let’s just say I’m uniquely qualified for the position,” Agent Sterling replied. Her no-nonsense tone reminded me of something. Of someone. For the first time, her last name sank in, and I realized where I’d heard it before.
“Agent Sterling,” I said. “As in Director Sterling?”
I’d only met the FBI director once. He’d gotten involved when the serial killer Locke and Briggs were hunting had kidnapped a senator’s daughter. At the time, none of us had known that the UNSUB—or Unknown Subject—was Locke.
“Director Sterling is my father.” Agent Sterling’s voice was neutral—too neutral, and I wondered what daddy issues she had. “He sent me here to do damage control.”
Director Sterling had chosen his own daughter as Locke’s replacement. She’d arrived when Agent Briggs was out of town on a case. I doubted the timing was accidental.
“Briggs told me you left the FBI,” Dean said quietly, addressing the words to Agent Sterling. “I heard you transferred to Homeland Security.”
“I did.”
I tried to pinpoint the expression on Agent Sterling’s face, the tone of her voice. She and Dean knew each other—that much was clear, both from Dean’s earlier statement and from the way her face softened, almost imperceptibly, when she looked at him.
A maternal streak? I wondered. That didn’t fit with the way she was dressed, her super-erect posture, the way she talked about the rest of us rather than to us. My first impression of Agent Sterling was that she was hypercontrolled, professional, and kept other people at a distance. She either didn’t like teenagers, or she disliked us specifically.
But the way she’d looked at Dean, even if it was only for a second…
You weren’t always this way, I thought, slipping into her head. Tying your hair back in French knots, keeping your every statement clinical and detached. Something happened to send you into hyperprofessional mode.
“Is there something you’d care to share with the class, Cassandra?”
Whatever sliver of softness had crept into Agent Sterling’s expression disappeared now. She’d caught me profiling her and called me out. That told me two things. First, based on the way she’d chosen to do so, I sensed a hint of sarcasm buried beneath her humorless exterior. At some point in her life, she would have said those words with a grin instead of a grimace.
And second…
“You’re a profiler,” I said out loud. She’d caught me profiling her, and I couldn’t keep from thinking, It takes one to know one.
“What makes you think that?”
“They sent you here to replace Agent Locke.” Saying those words—seeing her as a replacement—hurt more than it should have.
“And?” Agent Sterling’s voice was high and clear, but her eyes were hard. This was a challenge, as clear as the earlier subtext between Michael and Dean.
“Profilers put people in boxes,” I said, meeting Agent Sterling’s eyes and refusing to look away first. “We take in an assortment of random details, and we use those details to construct the big picture, to figure out what kind of person we’re dealing with. It’s there in the way you talk: Michael’s ‘the emotion reader with the attitude problem,’ you didn’t ‘peg me’ for being the type to play strip poker.”