Page 66 of See How They Hide

But it was months later when the snow cleared before Riley found a red poppy on her bed. She stayed up all night, ran to her grandma’s grave before the sun came up. She had a bag packed and she couldn’t wait to leave. She missed her daddy Robert so much.

Thalia came to her an hour later. She looked at her bag and said, “No, not you, not now. Riley, I need you here helping me. My eyes and ears. You are the only one who knows who we can trust, those who will leave and not return. Starting with Chris. Give him this letter. And in the fall, I’ll return for him.”

“I miss Daddy Robert. Please, Aunt Thalia! I want to go. I miss Grandma. Nothing is the same.”

“Do you know what happened to Grandma?”

Riley bit her lip. She had uneasy feelings about that whole week, but it was still so fuzzy in her head.

“Calliope killed her,” Thalia said. “And the only way you can help now is if you stay here and help me get people out.”

“What about me?” She was crying. She didn’t want to cry, but she couldn’t stop herself.

“You’re safer here for now. If I take you, I’ll have to hide forever. Calliope’s people will hunt me down to get you back. I can’t risk it.”

“Take me to Daddy Robert.”

“No. You have to trust me, Riley. You’re only twelve.”

So Riley trusted her. For years, she trusted her until she couldn’t live in Havenwood a minute longer. She faked her death and walked away and Thalia couldn’t stop her.

24

Quantico,Virginia

Present Day

Assistant director of Quantico Dean Montero had started his career as a cop in San Antonio, Texas. He’d been young and idealistic, had a cop for a father, a pediatrician for a mother, a childhood filled with love, discipline, and family.

His third year on the job, he was first on-scene at a suspected domestic situation. When he arrived, he heard gunshots, called for backup, pulled on his vest, and waited.

Then he heard a wailing baby. Nothing but the crying child in the silence of that house in the north San Antonio hills.

He went inside. Against all protocol and safety regulations, he went inside that house because a baby cried.

Five people were dead. Mother, three children, and the bastard ex-husband who had killed them, then himself. The oldest boy had shielded the baby who, miraculously, was unharmed.

Dean pulled the baby from under her brother’s dead body and cradled her until his own mother arrived. He didn’t remember much. A cop, with hundreds of hours of training and thousands of hours on patrol, who had seen the dead, had seen violence, had dealt with killers and sexual predators and violent addicts, refused to give up the sleeping baby until his mother came to the scene and said she would personally take care of the child.

The entire scene had shaken Dean in a way he didn’t understand at the time. It wasn’t the most gruesome crime scene he’d witnessed, but it changed him. He left the force and went to college at twenty-one, hoping to learn something—anything—to help prevent such tragedies. He studied everything he could, graduating in four years with two degrees, in education and criminal justice, and a minor in theology. He did a one-year master’s program in psychology where he wrote his thesis on cults, pulling in his experience as a cop and his studies to try to identify the types of personalities that gravitate to cults, both physical (communes) and in cyberspace, and what makes them safe or dangerous.

It was that paper that caught the attention of the FBI, who recruited him. He spent fourteen years in the field traveling all over the country identifying and exposing cults. For the last two years, he’d served as second-in-command at Quantico.

“What do you think?” Dr. Catherine Jones asked Dean after he listened to Riley Pierce’s story. “Have you heard of this place?”

He shook his head. “There are communities all over the country that have a back-to-nature foundation, as Havenwood appears to have, but few rise to the level of cult. It seems quite incredible that after more than thirty years, no one has discovered it and they have never been investigated by law enforcement.”

“Do you believe her?”

“Yes. What she said she believes as truth. Whether itisthe truth, I can’t say, but she wasn’t attempting to deceive Quinn and Harris.”

“I’m sorry that Quinn took over the interview,” Catherine said. “Michael tried to steer her back to what we needed, but clearly she wasn’t listening to our advice.”

“She did well,” Dean said. “She developed a rapport with Riley, gave her permission, in a sense, to speak freely. Is it true, about her parents?”

“Yes,” Catherine said.

He sensed underlying tension between Catherine and Kara, but dismissed it. Teams that worked closely together often had members who clashed over time. With two strong personalities—like Catherine, who he had known for years and respected, and Kara, who he had yet to meet in person but now had a sense of her style—conflict was to be expected.

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