The Naturals Read online

  “Truth or dare.” Michael’s voice cut into my thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Your turn,” Michael told me. “Truth or dare?”

  “Truth.”

  Michael reached out to push my wet hair out of my face. “If Lia had dared you to kiss me, would you have done it?”

  “Lia wouldn’t have dared me to kiss you.”

  “But if she had?”

  I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. “It was just a game, Michael.”

  Michael leaned forward and brushed his lips against mine. Then he pulled back and studied my face. Whatever he saw there, he liked.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s all I needed to know.”

  — — —

  I didn’t sleep much that night. I just kept thinking about Michael and Dean, the subtle barbs that passed between the two of them, the feel of each one’s lips. By the time the sun came up the next morning, I wanted to kill someone. Preferably Michael—but Lia was a close second.

  “We’re out of ice cream,” I said murderously.

  “True,” Lia replied. She’d swapped the silk pajamas for boxer shorts and a ratty T, and there wasn’t so much as a hint of remorse on her face.

  “I blame you,” I said.

  “Also true.” Lia studied my face. “And unless I’m mistaken, you’re not just blaming me for the ice cream. And that makes me terribly curious, Cassie. Care to share?”

  It was impossible to keep a secret in this house—let alone two. First Dean, then Michael. I hadn’t signed up for this. If Lia hadn’t dared me to kiss Dean, Michael never would have kissed me in the pool, and I wouldn’t be in this mess, unsure what I felt, what they felt, what I was supposed to do about it.

  “No,” I said out loud. I was here for one reason and one reason alone. “Forget breakfast,” I said, slamming the freezer door shut. “I have work to do.”

  I turned to leave, but not before I caught sight of Lia twirling her gleaming black ponytail around her index finger, her dark eyes watching me a little too closely for comfort.

  CHAPTER 19

  I made my way to the library to drown my sorrows in serial killer interviews. Wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor bookshelves bulged with carefully organized titles: textbooks, memoirs, biographies, academic journals, and the oddest assortment of fiction I’d ever seen: old-fashioned dime-store mysteries, romance novels, comic books, Dickens, Tolkien, and Poe.

  The third shelf from the left was full of blue binders. I picked up the first one and opened it.

  FRIEDMAN, THOMAS

  OCTOBER 22-28, 1993

  FLORIDA STATE PRISON, STARKE, FL

  Thomas Friedman. Such a normal-sounding name. Gingerly, I flipped through the transcript: a bare-bones play with a limited cast of characters, no plot, and no resolution. Supervisory Special Agent Cormack Kent was the interviewer. He asked Friedman about his childhood, his parents, his fantasies, the nine women he’d strangled with high-sheen dress hose. Reading Friedman’s words—black ink typed onto the page—would have been bad enough, but the worst part was that after a few pages, I could hear the way he would have talked about the women he’d killed: excitement, nostalgia, longing—but no remorse.

  “You should sit down.”

  I’d been expecting someone to join me in the library. I hadn’t expected that someone to be Lia.

  “Dean’s not coming,” Lia said. “He read those interviews a long time ago.”

  “Have you read them?” I asked.

  “Some,” Lia replied. “Mostly, I’ve heard them. Briggs gives me the audio. I play Spot the Lie. It’s a real party.”

  I realized suddenly that most people my age—most people any age—wouldn’t be able to take reading these interviews. They wouldn’t want to, and they certainly wouldn’t lose themselves in it, the way I would. The way I already had. Friedman’s interview was horrible and horrifying—but I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that wanted to understand.

  “What’s the deal with you and Dean?” I asked Lia, forcing myself to think about anything other than the fact that part of me wanted to keep reading. Michael might have told me that he and Lia had hooked up—more than once—but Dean was the one who could dial her back a notch just by saying her name.

  “I’ve been in love with him since I was twelve.” Lia shrugged, like she hadn’t just bared her soul to me. And then I realized, she hadn’t.

  “Oh, God,” she said, gasping for air between giggles. “You should see your face. Really, Cassie, I’m not a fan of incest, and Dean is the closest thing to a brother I have. If I tried to kiss him, he might actually hurl on me.”

  That was comforting. But the fact that it was comforting just sent me right back into the tailspin from that morning: why should I care if there was anything between Lia and Dean, when Michael was the one who’d kissed me of his own free will?

  “Look, as adorable as watching you angst is,” Lia said, “take a bit of friendly advice: there’s not a person in this house who isn’t really, truly, fundamentally screwed up to the depths of their dark and shadowy souls. Including you. Including Dean. Including Michael.”

  That sounded more like an insult than advice.

  “Dean would want me to tell you to stay away from him,” Lia said.

  “And Michael?” I asked.

  Lia shrugged. “I want to tell you to stay away from Michael.” She paused. “I won’t, but I want to.”

  I waited to see if she was finished. She didn’t say anything else.

  “As far as advice goes, that kind of sucked.”

  Lia executed an elaborate bow. “I try.” Her eyes flitted back to the binder in my hand. “Do me a favor?”

  “What kind of favor?”

  Lia gestured to the binder. “If you’re going to read those,” she said, “don’t say anything about them to Dean.”

  — — —

  For the next four days, Locke and Briggs were away working on their case, and other than avoiding Michael and Dean and weeding the flower beds for Judd, there was nothing for me to do but read. And read. And read. A thousand pages of interviews later, I got sick of being cooped up in the library and decided to take a little field trip. I took a walk through town and ended up plopping down by the Potomac River, enjoying the view and reading interview twenty-seven, binder twelve. The 1990s had given way to the twenty-first century, and SSA Kent had been replaced by a series of other agents—among them, Agent Briggs.

  “Enjoying a bit of light reading?”

  I looked up to see a man around my dad’s age. He had a five-o’clock shadow and a friendly smile on his face.

  I shifted so that my arm covered my reading material in case he decided to look. “Something like that.”

  “You looked pretty absorbed.”

  Then why did you interrupt me? I wanted to ask. Either he’d sought me out specifically, or he was the kind of person who didn’t see the contradiction in interrupting someone’s reading to tell her she looked absorbed in the text.

  “You live at Judd’s place, right?” he said. “He and I go way back.”

  I relaxed slightly, but still had no intention of getting sucked into a conversation about my reading material—or anything else. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said in my best waitress voice, hoping he’d sense a false note under the cheerfulness in my voice and leave me to my own devices.

  “Enjoying the weather?” he asked me.

  “Something like that.”

  “I can’t take you anywhere.” Michael appeared on my other side and eased himself onto the ground next to me. “She’s too gregarious for her own good,” he told the man standing next to us. “Always chatting up complete strangers. Frankly, I think she over-shares. It’s embarrassing.”

  I put the heel of my hand on Michael’s shoulder and shoved, but couldn’t push down the stab of gratitude I felt that I was no longer suffering through Small Town Talk Time alone.

  “Well,” the man said. “I didn’t mean to interrup
t. I just wanted to say hello.”

  Michael nodded austerely. “How do you do?”

  I waited until our visitor was out of earshot before I turned to him. “‘How do you do’?” I repeated incredulously.

  Michael shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m in a social pickle, I like to ask myself, WWJAD?” I raised an eyebrow, and he explained. “What Would Jane Austen Do?”

  If Michael read Jane Austen, I was the heir to the British throne.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “Rescuing you,” he answered blithely. “What are you doing here?”

  I gestured to the binder. “Reading.”

  “And avoiding me?” he asked.

  I repositioned my body and hoped the glare from the sun would compromise his view of my face. “I’m not avoiding anyone. I just wanted to be alone.”

  Michael brought his hand up to his face to shield it from the sun. “You wanted to be alone,” he repeated. “To read.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said defensively. “That’s why we’re all here. To learn.”

  Not to obsess over the fact that I’ve kissed more boys in the past week than I have in my entire life, I added silently. To my surprise, Michael didn’t comment on the emotions I had to be broadcasting. He just reclined next to me and held up some reading material of his own.

  “Jane Austen,” I said, disbelieving.

  Michael gestured toward my binder. “Carry on.”

  For fifteen or twenty minutes, the two of us read in silence. I finished interview twenty-seven and started in on number twenty-eight.

  REDDING, DANIEL

  JANUARY 15–18, 2007

  VIRGINIA STATE PENITENTIARY, RICHMOND, VA

  I almost missed it, would have missed it had the name not been printed over and over again, documenting this particular serial killer’s every word.

  Redding.

  Redding.

  Redding.

  The interviewer was Agent Briggs. The subject’s name was Redding, and he’d been incarcerated in Virginia. I stopped breathing. My mouth went suddenly dry. I flipped through the pages, faster and faster, skimming at warp speed until Daniel Redding asked Briggs a question about his son.

  Dean.

  CHAPTER 20

  Dean’s father was a serial killer. While I was traveling the country with my mom, Dean had been living twenty yards away from the shack where his father tortured and killed at least a dozen women.

  And Dean had never said a word to me: not when we were working our way through Locke’s puzzles and bouncing ideas off each other; not when he caught me swimming in the pool that first time; not after we’d kissed. He’d told me that spending time inside the minds of killers would ruin me, but hadn’t breathed a word about his past.

  Suddenly, everything fell into place. The tone in Lia’s voice when she’d said the pictures on the stairwell were there for Dean’s benefit. The fact that Agent Briggs had gone to Dean for help on a case when he was twelve. Michael introducing Dean by telling me that he knew more about the ways that killers thought than just about anyone. Lia asking me, as a favor, not to say anything about these interviews to Dean. The Bad Seed.

  I stood up and shoved the binder back into my bag. Michael said my name, but I ignored him. I was halfway back to the house before I’d even registered the fact that I was running.

  What was I doing?

  I didn’t have an answer to that question. And yet, I couldn’t turn around. I kept going until I reached the house. I climbed the stairs, heading for my room, but Dean was waiting for me at the top, like he’d known today would be the day.

  “You’ve been reading the interviews,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I replied softly. “I have.

  “Did you start with Friedman?” Dean asked.

  I nodded, waiting for him to name the awful unspoken something that hung in the air between us.

  “That’s the guy with the panty hose, right? Did you get to the part where he talks about watching his older sister get dressed? Or what about that bit with the neighbor’s dog?”

  I’d never heard Dean sound like this—so flippant and cruel.

  “I don’t want to talk about Friedman,” I said.

  “Right,” Dean replied. “You want to talk about my father. Did you read the whole interview? On day three, Briggs bribed him to talk about his childhood. You know what he bribed him with? Pictures of me. And when that didn’t work, pictures of them. The women he killed.”

  “Dean—”

  “What? Isn’t this what you wanted? To talk about it?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to talk about you.”

  “Me?” Dean couldn’t have sounded more incredulous if he’d tried. “What else is there to say?”

  What was there to say?

  “I don’t care.” My breath was still ragged from running. I was saying this wrong. “Your father—it doesn’t change who you are.”

  “What I am,” he corrected. “And yes, it does. Why don’t you go ask Sloane what the statistics say about psychopathy and heredity? And then why don’t you ask her what they say about growing up in an environment where it’s the only thing you know.”

  “I don’t care about the statistics,” I said. “We’re partners. We work together. You knew I was going to find out. You could have told me.”

  “We’re not partners.”

  The words hurt me—and he meant for them to.

  “We won’t ever be partners,” Dean said, his voice razor-sharp and unrepentant. “And do you want to know why? Because as good as you are at getting inside normal people’s heads, I don’t even have to work to get inside a killer’s. Doesn’t that bother you? Didn’t you ever notice how easy it was for me to be the monster when we were ‘working’ together?”

  I’d noticed—but I’d attributed it to the fact that Dean had more experience at profiling killers. I hadn’t realized that that experience was firsthand.

  “Did you know about your father?” I regretted the question the moment I asked it, but Dean didn’t bat an eye.

  “No,” he said. “Not at first, but I should have.”

  Not at first?

  “I told you, Cassie. By the time Briggs started coming by with questions on cases, there was nothing left to ruin.”

  “That’s not true, Dean.”

  “My father was in prison. I was in foster care, and even back then, I knew that I wasn’t like the other kids. The way my mind worked, the things that made sense to me …” He turned his back on me. “I think you should go.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “I. Don’t. Care.” He let out a shuddery breath. “Just leave me alone.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone.” And there it was, something I hadn’t even let myself think since Truth or Dare.

  “How exactly was I supposed to tell you?” Dean asked, still facing away from me. “‘Hey, guess what? Your mom was murdered, and my dad is a killer.’”

  “This isn’t about my mom.”

  “What do you want me to say, Cassie?” Dean finally turned back around to face me. “Just tell me, and I’ll say it.”

  “I just want you to talk to me.”

  Dean’s fingers curled into fists at his sides. I could barely see his eyes behind the hair that fell in his face. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he said. “You’re better off with Michael.”

  “Dean—”

  A hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. Hard.

  “He said he didn’t want to talk to you, Cassie.” Lia’s face was a mask of calm. Her tone was anything but. “Don’t turn back to look at him. Don’t say another word to him. Just go. And one more thing?” She leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “Remind me never to ask you for a favor again.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I walked slowly back down the stairs, trying to figure out what had just happened. What was I thinking, confronting Dean? He was allowed to have secrets. He was allowed to be angry
that Locke had assigned me to read those interviews, knowing that one of them was his father’s. I shouldn’t have gone up there. I should have left him alone.

  “Lia or Dean?”

  I looked up and saw Michael standing near the front door.

  “What?”

  “The look on your face,” he replied. “Lia or Dean?”

  I shrugged. “Both?”

  Michael nodded, as if my answer were a foregone conclusion. “You okay?”

  “You’re the emotion reader,” I said. “You tell me.”

  He took that as an invitation to come closer. He stopped a foot or two away and studied my face. “You’re confused. Madder at yourself than you are at either of them. Lonely. Angry. Stupid.”

  “Stupid?” I sputtered.

  “Hey, I just call it like I see it.” Michael was apparently in the mood to be blunt. “You feel stupid. Doesn’t mean you are.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I sat down on the bottom step, and after a few seconds, Michael sat down beside me, stretching his legs out on the hardwood floor. “Why make thinly veiled comments about The Bad Seed instead of just telling me the truth?”

  “I thought about telling you.” Michael leaned back on his elbows, his casual posture contradicting the tension unmistakable in his voice. “Every time I saw the two of you hunched over one of Locke’s little puzzles, I thought about telling you. But what would you have said if I did?”

  I tried to imagine hearing about Dean’s father from Michael, who could barely manage a civil word where Dean was concerned.

  “Exactly.” Michael reached forward to tap the edge of my lips, like that was the precise spot that had tipped him off to what was going on inside my mind. “You wouldn’t have thanked me for telling you. You would have hated me for it.”

  I swatted Michael’s hand away from my face. “I wouldn’t have hated you.”

  Michael gestured in the general direction of my forehead, but refrained from actually touching my face this time. “Your mouth says one thing, but your eyebrows say another.” He paused, and his own mouth twisted into a lazy grin. “You might not realize this, Colorado, but you can be a little sanctimonious.”