CHAPTER ONE
The kitchen smelled like garlic and olive oil, and Jack was standing in the middle of it all, mostly in charge of dinner.
Rachel stood beside him at the counter, slicing a baguette with more force than was strictly necessary, the knife coming down in short strokes.
It was a Thursday evening in late October, full dark already outside the window, and the neighborhood was quiet except for a neighbor's dog making its feelings known about something down the block.
From the living room came a man's voice, measured and serious.
“...and what the medical examiner noted in her report was that the ligature mark was consistent with a narrow cord, possibly paracord, which tells us something important about premeditation.
You don't just happen to have paracord on you. "
Rachel set the knife down, frowning. "Paige."
No answer. The voice continued, describing the timeline of a disappearance with the calm authority and cadence of what was clearly a well-produced podcast.
"Paige."
Her daughter appeared in the kitchen doorway seconds later with a composition notebook tucked under her arm.
She was thirteen, nearly fourteen, and had recently arrived at the precise height where she could look Rachel almost directly in the eye.
She was doing so now, with the sort of irritated patience that reminded Rachel of Peter, Paige’s father.
"I heard you," Paige said with a slight roll of the eyes.
"Then turn it off, please."
"I'm not even playing it that loud."
"I can hear it from here."
“It’s just on my phone…” Paige glanced at Jack, who was stirring the sauce with the focused attention of a man who knew better than to get involved. She looked back at Rachel. "It's literally just a podcast. I'm listening to it for school."
Rachel picked the knife back up. "It's not for school."
"It's for my own education."
"That's the same thing you said about the Ted Bundy documentary."
"And I learned a lot from that."
Jack made a sound that was almost a laugh and disguised it immediately as a cough. Rachel gave him a look, and he continued to stir the sauce.
"I'm not saying you can't be interested in it," Rachel said, keeping her voice even. "I'm saying I don't want it on in the background while we're making dinner."
"So I'm supposed to just sit there and do nothing?"
"You could help us cook."
Paige considered this as though Rachel had suggested she spend the evening reorganizing the attic. "I'll use headphones," she said. “Is that better?”
Rachel knew it was often wise to choose battles wisely as a parent—especially as the parent of a thirteen-year-old girl. And she also knew that Paige had picked up this morbid little interest as a direct result of her, Rachel’s, job. So instead of pushing further, she redirected.
"What's that?" she asked, pointing to the composition notebook under her arm.
Paige hesitated for just a fraction of a second. "Notes."
"Notes on the podcast."
"Yes."
Rachel opened her mouth, then closed it again.
There wasn't a rule against it. That was the frustrating thing — Paige wasn't doing anything wrong.
She was thirteen years old, sitting in her own living room, taking handwritten notes on a true crime podcast. There was no reasonable argument Rachel could make against it that didn't sound like the thing itself was the problem.
"Headphones," Rachel said.
Paige nodded and retreated to the living room before her mother could change her mind. She knew she’d won and she would take the little victory. A moment later, the man's voice disappeared, replaced by silence and the soft scratch of a pen on paper.
Rachel stood at the counter and stared at the baguette.
"She's fine," Jack said.
"I know she's fine."
"She's just curious."
"I know that, too." Rachel reached for the breadbasket and began loading the slices in. "She had a notebook, Jack. She was taking notes."
"Kids take notes." But she could hear the tone of doubt in his voice. In a day and age when all kids were glued to a screen, no…it wasn’t exactly normal for a kid to take notes like that.
"Not like that," she said. She couldn't fully articulate it, the thing that had unsettled her.
It wasn't the subject matter, exactly; Rachel had spent the better part of two decades immersed in subject matter considerably worse than anything on a podcast. It was the focus of it.
The seriousness. Paige hadn't been half-listening the way teenagers half-listened to things. She'd been working.
Jack tasted the sauce, thought about it for a moment, and reached for the salt. "She's been like this for about a year, honestly. She goes through those podcasts pretty systematically."
"Systematically."
"She keeps a list of the ones she's finished. Did you know that?”
“Yeah, I knew that, too.”
They shared a look that had weight to it, knowing that at some point, maybe a decision would have to be made.
Was there any actual harm in Paige listening to those podcasts?
No. Probably not. But given Rachel’s history with such cases, the situation had its own unique set of moral issues, she supposed.
Rachel had been home more this past year.
That was the real reason for her concern over the podcast, if she was being honest with herself.
She was noticing things she'd missed when the cases were consuming her, or when the Cody Austin situation had been at its worst, or during the long gray stretch before that when she'd been sick and then slowly not sick and then slowly learning to be a person again.
Paige had grown up inside all of that. The girl in the living room with her notebook and bloody podcasts was the product of years Rachel hadn't been fully present for.
And now maybe she was overcompensating a bit.
The past four years had been quieter from a professional standpoint.
Not uneventful, by any means, though. She was still with the Bureau, still catching cases with Novak, still putting in the hours.
But nothing had come at her the way the old cases had.
The closest thing to dangerous in recent memory was a terrorism arrest eight months ago that had gone sideways when the suspect pulled a weapon during transport, and even that had resolved in minutes, three agents unhurt and one very surprised man in handcuffs on the sidewalk.
She'd filed the report and gone home for dinner.
She still volunteered at the hospice twice a week.
That had started as something she'd needed and had become something she simply did, a part of the week she didn't question.
She had a patient now, Eleanor, eighty-three years old and sharper than most people half her age.
They had become fast friends, and Rachel loved speaking to Eleanor as she worked her way methodically through a stack of novels she'd always meant to read.
They talked about books and Eleanor's late husband, and whether the hospital cafeteria's food had truly always been as bad as it currently was.
It was the part of her week that felt the most like herself.
“Okay,” Jack said from behind her. “Dinner’s ready.”
Jack served the pasta and called Paige in from the living room. She came without argument, notebook closed and earbuds tucked into her hoodie pocket. She sat down across from Rachel with the manner of someone who had graciously agreed to table the hostilities.
As they ate, Paige talked about a history project she was struggling with at school.
Her talkative nature had never left her, so about half of the conversation at the dinner table most nights was covered by her.
Jack talked about a training exercise at the field office that had apparently involved more paperwork than anyone had anticipated.
Rachel listened to both of them and was glad for the noise of it, the ordinary percussion of a family at dinner.
At one point Paige said, "Did you know that in most domestic homicide cases, the delay between the last known contact and the discovery of the body is typically twenty-two to thirty hours?"
Jack looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at Paige.
"Where did you read that?" Rachel asked. She chose this over the first response that came to her mind. Of course I knew that. You know what I do for a living, right?
"The podcast,” Paige said. “Well, the study they cited. I looked it up."
"You looked up the study."
"I wanted to see their methodology." Paige speared a piece of pasta. "Their sample size was kind of small, actually. I'm not sure the finding is that generalizable."
Rachel set her fork down, trying her best not to look impressed. She looked over to Jack and saw that he was wrestling with something very similar.
Later, after Paige had gone upstairs, Rachel stood at the sink rinsing dishes and Jack leaned against the counter beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched.
She handed him plates and he loaded the dishwasher in the slightly incorrect way he always did.
Rachel had decided years ago not to comment on it anymore.
"She's going to be you," he said. “You know that, right?”
"Don't say that."
"I mean it as a compliment."
Rachel handed him the pasta pot. "I know you do. But…I don’t know how to feel about that. I mean…she gets that morbid curiosity streak from me, one hundred percent."
She knew this was true, and it did something to her that she wouldn't have been able to explain cleanly to Jack. It was a strange, warm blade that cut in two directions at once. She didn’t like the thought of Paige with that focus and relentlessness Rachel had lived with herself for forty-three years.
She knew it could be a blessing in other areas of life. The focus and attentiveness could get Paige far in whatever she chose to do.
But for Rachel, she simply hadn't decided yet whether it was a gift or a warning.