A Familiar Sight (Dr. Gretchen White, #1)

by Brianna Labuskes

His lungs collapsed, his heart ripping at every vulnerable seam as he thought of the ways his life had led him to this exact moment. Every mistake. Every love. Every tragedy. Every bruise, every laugh, every hesitation, every time he’d turned left instead of right.

“Why am I not surprised to see you standing over a dead body?” came a Boston-drenched rumble from behind Gretchen. “Because you think I’m a killer you just can’t seem to catch,”

Gretchen bit back the cutting sarcasm that was her initial reaction. She’d long become an expert at swallowing her first response, and sometimes her second and third. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last person with whom she didn’t have to watch her words to some degree.

“‘Consultant’ is shorthand for ‘doing his job for him,’” Gretchen said in her own aside to Marconi. If Shaughnessy wanted to be petty this morning, she wouldn’t hesitate to sink to his level. “I’m called in when the boys in blue here can’t navigate out of whatever dead end they’ve driven themselves down.”

The cases helped her scratch an itch, the dead bodies took care of that morbid fascination she could never quite shake.

Six months ago, nearly to the day, thirteen-year-old Viola Kent had stabbed her sleeping mother, Claire Kent, to death. When pressed, her father, Reed Kent, had admitted that Viola had violent tendencies and was regularly seeing a psychiatrist. It didn’t take long for the gossipmongers to uncover the stories of animal bones found on the property, to dig up pictures of the brothers’ broken little bodies, bruised and covered in scar tissue.

She’d learned when she was young that the normal people—the “empaths,” as she’d learned to call them after they’d gleefully labeled her a “sociopath”—had an innate ability to recognize an outsider, a pretender, an empty void wearing the mask civilized society demanded of her.

It didn’t matter how many times she explained to him that there was a subset of those with antisocial personality disorders who were nonviolent; to him she’d always be the girl with blank eyes who couldn’t look away from her aunt’s mutilated body.

There had been no handbook given out at birth on what to do when your daughter was a monster. No guidance offered other than psychiatrist after psychiatrist rubbing the space between their eyes as they doled out empty words and platitudes.

There was no fixing Viola. There was only waiting—waiting until she did something so heinous as to be locked away.

It was a shame that no one could truly appreciate the restraint she employed. Nonviolent didn’t mean she didn’t have urges, ones that could so easily be let loose on an unsuspecting audience.

“We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are,” Gretchen said, and she could tell Marconi liked the poetic phrasing that made the sentiment seem prettier than it was. “The benefit I get from that is worth the cost of maintaining friendships.”

“She doesn’t need a motive. Well, beyond the fact that she wanted to see what her mother’s blood looked like. Maybe her organs, too.”

“Why did you do that?” he’d asked later. Viola had pouted. “I wanted to see if his skin would turn blue.” She’d been eight years old.

Nothing was more important to Claire than maintaining the carefully constructed facade she’d worked so hard to build. That need to control what others thought about them had blinded her to the fact that their friends and acquaintances already avoided their house so as not to have to look into Viola’s empty eyes.

“Did you know a high percentage of serial killers were abused as children?” He did know that. The fact that he had pored over research on violent antisocial personality disorders was no secret to anyone in this house. And it was true. Genetics loaded the gun, environment pulled the trigger.

“You empaths and your stereotypes,” Gretchen chided. “You think there’s one rigid moral code—usually squarely centered around your own belief system. If someone follows it, she’s ‘good.’ If she doesn’t, she’s ‘bad.’ As if that actually means anything at all, as if humans can be slotted into two permanent, unforgiving categories.”

“The Hare spectrum is a twenty-item checklist. The top score is forty. For reference, Ted Bundy scored thirty-nine.”

“We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are”

Gretchen didn’t have to flip through the dates to know she was right. “So whatever it was payment for . . .” Marconi finished the thought. “Lena didn’t hold up her end of the deal.”

Viola sat back again. “I know you can recognize evil. Like looking in a mirror, perhaps?” Gretchen snorted. “If you think my belief system in any way incorporates a good-versus-evil duality, you are not as smart as you look. You didn’t answer the question.”

Psychopaths read power the way empaths could read body language. Instinctually.

Lena always claimed you could be good for only so long before you had to be a little bad. Otherwise, once you got a taste of something other than perfection, you’d never want to go back.

“There are brains that are more prone to illusory pattern perception,” Gretchen said instead of acknowledging it. “More prone to finding connections in unrelated data. They’re simply wired that way.” “All right, so what brains are prone?” “People who have an excess of dopamine pumping through their gray matter,” Gretchen said, popping a slice of decadent duck into her mouth. “It’s the reverse of low dopamine in addicts. That deficit makes them think that nothing matters. For someone with high dopamine levels, they think everything matters.”

“Pareidolia,” Gretchen said easily, snagging the last pierogi without shame. “That’s a fancy word for humans’ tendency to find significance in something where there is none. Like kids finding shapes in clouds. We do that a lot. And that technically is a subset of apophenia, which is the tendency to find connections where they don’t exist.”

Couldn’t find another viable suspect, so it must have been the eight-year-old. Never mind that the assumption had burdened said eight-year-old with a lifetime of suspicion and a reputation that she had never been quite able to shake no matter how upstanding a citizen she’d proven herself to be.

“If you try to follow me, I’ll slash your tires,” Gretchen sang out cheerily as she sailed out the door. She heard Shaughnessy sigh behind her. “Don’t test her. She’s done it before.”

He didn’t want Lena hitting on him, and he couldn’t say exactly why. It wasn’t that he was faithful to Claire—that ship had sailed a long time ago. But his memories of Lena Booker were tinged with innocence, with friendship. For some reason, he found himself reluctant to taint them.

Gretchen found his complete lack of giving a shit endearing, and he found her brutal honesty hilarious. A match made in heaven, practically.

Instead, he gathered her in his arms, in an embrace that was far more familiar and casual than warranted from two childhood friends who hadn’t seen each other since they were teenagers. But he couldn’t resist pressing in close, as if she could offer a blessed port in a storm—right in the middle of this crowded Starbucks.

There were words he could pull out, empty and meaningless; expressions he could don, practiced and shallow. Most people bought them, didn’t bother to look any further to the darkness beneath. But Lena had always been able to see his darkness. Maybe because it matched her own.

His lips twisted, his tongue heavy. He hadn’t done anything but weave false stories for years now. What did honesty taste like?

When he met her eyes, he almost let it spill out, every terrible thing that pressed into his skin like bruises, that dug into his flesh and scraped at his bones. But he’d been careful, so careful, for too long to risk it now.

He knew better. He knew Claire had been the wrong choice. But he’d made it with eyes wide-open. And Ainsley couldn’t take that away from him. Life wasn’t always about making the right choices. Sometimes it was about making the wrong ones just to see what would happen.

But he wasn’t lying. From that first time he and Claire had met, Reed had known this one, this one—well, they would burn each other to the ground.

“You have this impeccable control over yourself, over your desire to self-destruct, over your impulses. You have to loosen the reins in areas of your life where it doesn’t matter.”

“Play it.” “Oh, thank you for the direction,” Gretchen drawled. “I was going to stare at it, hoping it transcribed itself.” Marconi waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, you’re quite biting and clever. Now play the damn thing.”

“And he’s like the sun, you know?” Claire’s voice had gone a little dreamy, nostalgic. “When he shines on you, it’s the most beautiful summer day.” “And when the clouds come?” Lena prodded, clearly knowing the answer. “It’s so cold it hurts,” Claire said.

The first animal bones hadn’t come as a shock. Not because Reed had been expecting to see them, but because his brain hadn’t realized why they were there. What they meant.

He would think about it. If he could convince himself to stop being so selfish. One more day. He was allowed this for one more day. Reed ignored the fact that he’d had that very same thought many times before.

“That would have been helpful,” Marconi noted dryly. “Right now I just have more questions than before.” “What a slacker, our Lena,” Gretchen said, amused. “Dying before she could finish the job.”

With nothing else to do Gretchen slid Marconi a look. “Want to go to my favorite place?” “Oh God,” Marconi muttered. “Why do I feel like you’re about to drive me to a body farm?” Gretchen laughed. “Close enough.”

Conversations with Dr. Chen often proved to be the highlight of her week, as he never shied away from such questions as, What does a spleen actually feel like in your hands?

“It was overkill, certainly,” Dr. Chen said. “The number of times the knife went into the body . . . I would say anger was likely driving the attack. Or a strong emotion.” “Like?” Dr. Chen considered that for longer than she would have expected. “Fear. Possibly.”

Motive, she understood. Greed, power, revenge, money. At the core of a motive was human psychology, and Gretchen was a well-studied expert on that. But emotions, those were different. They were sticky and confusing, and she was never sure if they didn’t make sense to just her or if they didn’t make sense to the killers themselves.

“Where you gonna go?” Reed finally asked, still tense, still caught somewhere between sitting and standing, between friend and ex-boyfriend. Tess lifted one shoulder, and when she looked up, she grinned. “That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? I don’t have to know.”

Nothing holding me here, she’d said then, her head on his shoulder, her leg tossed over his thighs. Neither of them mentioned that he might be a reason for her to stay. Her words were mean and they were meant to be, and Reed hoped he hadn’t twisted something in her irreparably.

“Our justice system is a funny thing, isn’t it?” Gretchen said, idly flipping through the papers once more. “It’s set up to prevent biases, and yet every step of the process relies on human judgment in all of its flawed glory.”

She glanced at the clock on her phone: 4:17 a.m. Too late to bother sleeping, too early to be productive. There were years in Gretchen’s early twenties that she’d loved this time of day. The in-between hours.

Fred’s full name was Winnifred James, but she had told Gretchen once that she’d stab a sharpened pencil into Gretchen’s carotid artery if Gretchen ever called her that. Fred fell high enough on the antisocial spectrum that Gretchen knew the threat was legitimate.