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portrait.
    I glanced at Judd, wondering if these were his relatives, or if they belonged to someone else in this house.
    “They’re killers.” An Asian girl about my age stepped around the corner. She moved like a cat—and smiled like she’d just eaten a canary.
    “The people in the pictures,” she clarified. “They’re serial killers.” She twirled her shiny black ponytail around her index finger, clearly enjoying my discomfort. “It’s the program’s cheery way of reminding Dean why he’s here.”
    Dean? Who was Dean?
    “Personally, I think it’s a little macabre, but then again, I’m not a profiler.” The girl flicked her ponytail. “You are, though. Aren’t you?”
    She took a step forward, and my eyes were drawn to her footwear: black leather boots with heels high enough to make my feet shudder in spasms of sympathy. She was wearing skintight black pants and a high-necked sleeveless sweater, electric blue to match the streaks in her black hair.
    As I took in her clothing, the girl closed the space between us until she was standing so close to me that I thought she might reach out and start twirling my hair instead of her own.
    “Lia,” Judd said, absolutely unfazed, “this is Cassie. If you’re finished trying to scare her, I’m betting she’d really like to set that bag down.”
    Lia shrugged. “
Mi casa es su casa
. Your room is through there.”
    “Your” room
, I thought.
Not “our” room
.
    “Cassie’s really broken up about not rooming with you, Lia,” Michael said, interpreting my facial expression with a wink. Lia pivoted to face him, and her lips twisted upward in a slow, sizzling grin.
    “Miss me?” she asked.
    “Like a thorn in my paw,” Michael replied.
    Coming up the stairs behind us, Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “Lia,” he said. “Nice to see you.”
    Lia gave him a look. “Now, Agent Briggs,” she replied, “that’s simply not true.”
    Agent Locke rolled her eyes. “Lia’s specialty is deception,” she told me. “She has an uncanny knack for being able to tell when people are lying. And,” Agent Locke added, meeting Lia’s eyes, “she’s a very good liar.”
    Lia didn’t seem to take offense at the agent’s words. “I’m also bilingual,” she said. “And very, very flexible.”
    The second
very
was aimed directly at Michael.
    “So,” I said, my duffel bag digging into my shoulder as I tried to process the fact that Lia was a Natural liar, “the pictures on the wall
aren’t
serial killers?”
    That question was answered with silence. Silence from Michael. Silence from Judd. Silence from Agent Locke, who looked a bit abashed.
    Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “No,” he said finally. “That’s true.”
    My eyes were drawn to the portrait of the elderly couple.
    Smiling serial killers, five-inch heels, and a girl with a gift for lying? This was going to be interesting.

CHAPTER 8
    B riggs and Locke left shortly after Judd showed me to my room. They promised to return the next day for training, but for now, all that was expected of me was to settle in. My roommate—whoever she was—had yet to make an appearance, so for the moment, I had the room to myself.
    Twin beds sat at opposite ends of the room. A bay window overlooked the backyard. Tentatively, I opened what I assumed to be the closet door. The closet was exactly half full: half of each rack, half of the floor space, half of the shelves. My roommate favored patterns to solids, bright colors to pastels, and had a healthy amount of black and white in her wardrobe, but no gray.
    All of her shoes were flats.
    “Dial it back a notch, Cassie,” I told myself. I’d have months to analyze my roommate’s personality—
without
creepily stalking her half of the closet. Quickly and efficiently, I emptied my own bag. I’d lived in Colorado for five years, but before that, the longest I’d ever lived in one place was four months. My mother was always off to the next show, the next town,