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I’m going to be late.

And unfortunately enough, my next course is his class. I grab my bag, shoving notes and notebooks inside, and jog down the hall, trying not to slam into anyone.

My mind races over the missing file, the patterns, the victims. I barely notice the crowded corridor. I’m three minutes late. The digital clock above the door says 09:03 when I slip inside, and he’s already talking.

“—baseline behavior,” he says. “You identify deception by understanding what normal looks like first.” I slide into the room quietly, but he looks up. “Take a seat, Miss Vitelli,” he lets out.

I drop into the seat next to Hayzel, and she pushes her notebook toward me without looking. “We’re on behavioral leakage,” she whispers. “You missed the fun part.”

“Tragic,” I murmur, flipping my notebook open.

“I sent you texts… and I was shocked that my insane best friend was late to her favorite course with her favorite teacher.”

I gasp quietly and she laughs before nodding back to him.

At the front, he uncaps a marker and writes on the board:

BASELINE, DEVIATION, AND MOTIVE.

“Profiling is mostly creating the perfect suspect without enough information,” he continues. “It’s in the speech cadence, and gesture clusters. Context.”

My pencil moves automatically, notes at first, then arrows, circles and dates. My brain drifts, and the case slips in sideways, the missing footage, the repeated witness language, the man in the car. Same baseline, same deviation.

I don’t notice when my notes stop being words. A small cat appears in the margin, curled around a list of dates.

Hayzel glances over. “Is that… Blue?”

“Hey,” I whisper. “I’m profiling.”

She stifles a laugh.

“Behavior doesn’t lie,” he says, moving through the rows. “People do.”

He stops beside my desk. His shadow falls across the page of my notebook as he leans just enough to look. His eyes skim the notes first, the circled names, the arrows. Then at the cat and finally me. “Creative coping mechanism?” he says quietly.

I don’t look up but keep adding details on my drawing. “Exactly, Mister Caldwell.”

“Hmm,” he says. “Effective.” Then, softer he adds, “Try not to let it replace your analysis, Miss Vitelli.”

He taps the page once, right next to the cat, and moves on.

Hayzel’s eyes widened, and the second he’s out of range, she leaned in. “Did he just comment on your doodle?”

“He commented on my coping mechanism,” I whisper. “That’s very different.”

She shrugs her shoulders and grins at me. “Could have fooled me, he was looking at you.”

“He was looking at my notes.”

“Sure,” she says. “Your notes are interesting to him, then.”

I shake my head, but I’m smiling despite myself.

He turns back to the class and speaks again, “Pair up. You’ll get a transcript and a short clip. Identify baseline behavior and flag deviations.”

Groans ripple through the room as people start pairing up, and obviously I have my partner next to me already. “Imagine if I picked someone else to work with,” Hayzel says, shaking her head.

I nod before opening a new page and reply, “that would be blasphemy…”