Flash Point by Colby Marshall

directly
to
the witness or not. Rookie cops might discover this nugget and think it a goldmine, but Jenna knew better.
    Quite an oversight for a precise attack executed without so much as a hiccup, bank alarm, or errant cell phone call made by one of the twenty-two people inside the bank as it was being overtaken. Nope. It wasn’t an oversight. Leaving Ashlee Haynie alive was deliberate.
    And so was anything they allowed her to hear.
    â€˜OK,’ Jenna said, her voice light and soothing. ‘Now, I want you to think about the moments inside the bank after you heard the woman scream. It’s going to be hard, but remember, you’re physically OK. As you’re imagining those minutes that your mind is fighting so hard to forget, in the back of your mind, I want you to let yourself know that it’s safe to remember those things. Not comfortable. Not
OK
by any definition of the word, because no one should have to remember what I’m asking you to. But you are safe. The events are physically in the past.’
    Ashlee nodded, eyes wide. She wrung her hands in her lap. ‘I’ll try.’
    â€˜That’s all I can ask for,’ Jenna said. ‘OK. I want you to close your eyes and go to the moment inside the bank when you heard the woman near the door scream. Can you hear her?’
    Ashlee winced. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.
    The ache in the woman’s voice stung Jenna to her core. Before she’d come back to the BAU last year, she’d spent years helping patients cope after unfathomable traumatic events, coaching them on how to control reliving their nightmares at a speed that wouldn’t overwhelm them. These days, it was commonplace to consider talking through experiences healing, but in truth, for some people, calling to mind memories of the incident that had catapulted them into therapy in the first place actually exacerbated all kinds of symptoms. And, in that setting, she had a chance to develop a rapport with the patient, establish herself as an ally.
    Here, Jenna knew good and well her intentions weren’t first and foremost to preserve Ashlee Haynie’s mental health. Her job as an investigator was to extract the damned memories inside the woman’s head at whatever cost and use them to protect future lives. Never mind the life right in front of her that still needed saving.
    Ashlee might’ve survived the attack inside the bank, but really, she wasn’t so different from Jenna. The screams. The blood. They’d formed a single, defining moment of her existence. One she couldn’t return from, couldn’t erase.
    Bloody handprints … the door, so close.
    Ashlee Haynie might be alive, but a part of her had died inside that bank just like the others. Jenna knew it all too well.
    After all, Jenna was a survivor, too.
    â€˜OK. Where are you when you hear her scream?’
    A sharp intake of breath as if Ashlee was being pierced with a needle. ‘Right inside the door of the drive-through teller room. I turn and see the people coming in, and I back up to the wall. I crouch down. Before I chicken out, I crawl as fast as I can out the door and across the carpet until I’m under the teller counter.’
    â€˜And what’s the next thing you hear?’
    Ashlee bit her lip, her face contorting in a pained expression. ‘Grunts. More screams.’
    â€˜All right,’ Jenna said fast, cutting off the stream of consciousness. If Ashlee got lost in the terror of the moment, she would miss any pertinent information that she might have locked in her memory. ‘Try to think about the very first
singular
noise you can separate from the rest. The next thing to hit your ears that doesn’t just muddle together with the other sounds in the building—’
    â€˜I can’t!’
    â€˜You
can
. You’re physically safe in this room, and a dozen or more FBI agents are surrounding the outside of the building now in addition to