“SHE WON’T BITE,” COLE ASSURED ME as I stiffened and stood up straight.
“Oh!” I said. “I know. I wasn’t worried about that. I mean, goldens are so gentle. Once they get out of the teething phase, they won’t hurt a fly.”
“You’ve had one?” he asked.
“No. But I spent the summer at a horse sanctuary that also rescued dogs and cats. One of the dogs was saved from a puppy mill, and her pups were little terrors, biting anything that moved, but by the end of the summer all their teeth had come in and they turned into the gentlest, most loving dogs.
“Anyway, I spent a lot of time learning from one of the animal trainers there and she taught me how to work with the mama golden, who was super-sweet but had to be taught how to walk on a leash, sit, come, fetch, and all the things that most dogs are taught while they’re still puppies.”
“You worked with abused dogs?” Cole asked, his head slightly cocked. “Wasn’t that hard?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, at times. I mean, seeing a new animal who’d been really abused come to the shelter was the worst. It was sad and it’d make me really angry, but then Rachel—that’s the trainer—would work with them and within a week that scared, pathetic animal would have a whole new personality. Animals are so forgiving; it’s really amazing.”
“Sounds like it,” Cole agreed. I could tell he wasn’t just saying that.
“I want to study veterinary medicine with a specialty in behavioral science,” I said. And then I realized I’d just blurted it out, and I blushed.
Cole smiled. “I want to go into the FBI.”
That surprised me. “You do?”
He shrugged slightly. “Yeah, I think it’d be cool.”
“Me, too,” I told him.
There was a bit of an awkward silence that followed and Cole added, “Two years ago I got to go into a program at Quantico called FAIT.”
“Fate?” I said. “Like, it was fate?”
He grinned. “No, F-A-I-T. Future Agents in Training. You gotta have a good GPA, show leadership skills, and pass some other tests to get in. It’s a little like an internship, but they don’t call it that. Anyway, it’s a four-day–long series of classes that gives you hands-on experience learning about the FBI’s mission, what the different divisions are, and we even got to work on solving cases.”
“Real cases?” I asked. “Like, you got to work on solving real FBI cases?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “And, yeah, I saw some stuff that would make most people puke, but it’s what they deal with, so you gotta suck it up, you know?”
“Whoa,” I said. “Impressive.”
Another awkward silence followed and then Cole leaned forward to pat his dog and say, “Anyway, I wanted to show you something.”
“Right,” I said. “What?”
Cole pointed to a bar stool at the kitchen’s island. “Take a seat. I’ll be right back.”
He moved through the kitchen toward the front of the house and I was left to pet Bailey, who was incredibly sweet. I didn’t have long to wait; Cole returned with a thick, somewhat beat-up folder. Taking a seat next to me, he placed the folder on the counter, resting his hand on the surface as if he was suddenly hesitating about something.
“This is kind of intense,” he said.
“Okay,” I told him. I had no idea what was in the folder, but I was pretty damn curious.
Still, Cole didn’t move his hand to open up the folder. Instead, he studied me. “I’m serious, Lily. What’s in here could be overwhelming.”
I felt myself get defensive. “Overwhelming? Cole, I’m not some delicate little flower, you know.”
Cole held up his palms in surrender. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was…given what I heard on that video, I think I have to show this to you, but it’s pretty graphic, and I don’t want it to set off another panic attack.”
“Oh,” I said, realizing he had a point. But what could be in that folder that would bring on another panic attack? “Whatever it is, I’m braced, okay?”
Cole nervously drummed his fingers on the cover of the folder. “This is a murder file.”
My eyes widened. “A murder file? Whose?”
“My uncle’s.”
My jaw dropped. “How did you get your hands on your uncle’s murder file?”
“One of my landscaping clients is a detective with the Fredericksburg PD. He’s a nice guy, and when I started asking him if he knew anything about the Ben Spencer case, he wanted to know why I wanted to know. I told him that Ben was my uncle, and that I was considering joining the FBI, and he said he could get me a copy of the file if I cut him a deal on his lawn—and if I promised never to tell anybody where I got it from.”
“So, by showing it to me, you’re breaking your pinkie swear, huh?”
Cole didn’t smile. “Lily, that video of you under hypnosis really freaked me out. There’re things that you said in that shrink’s office that nobody but the police know about Amber, and I know that because I’ve read this file.”