The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  Prison guards held a position of power inside these walls, and this one relished his. Webber didn’t like being reminded that Sterling was FBI. He didn’t like her. He didn’t like being talked down to.

  And he really didn’t like Dean. Or Redding. Or me.

  This was not going to end well.

  “Unless you have somewhere we can wait that is both secured and private,” Agent Sterling continued, “I suggest you call your supervisor and—”

  “Secured and private?” the guard said, congenial and polite enough to send chills down my spine. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  We ended up in an observation room. On the other side of a two-way mirror, Agent Briggs and Dean sat across from a man with dark hair and dark eyes.

  Dean’s eyes.

  I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be seeing this.

  But thanks to a prison guard with a chip on his shoulder, I was. Dean and his father sat in silence, and I couldn’t keep from wondering: how long had they been sitting there, staring at each other? What had we missed?

  Beside me, Sterling’s eyes were locked on Redding.

  Dean’s father wasn’t a big man, but sitting there, a slight smile gracing even and unremarkable features, he commanded attention. His dark hair was thick and neat. There was a slight trace of stubble on his chin and cheeks.

  “Tell me about the letters.” Dean didn’t phrase those words as a question or as a request. Whatever conversation had passed between the two of them before we’d gotten here, Dean was a man on a mission now.

  Get the information he needed and get out.

  “Which letters?” his father asked amiably. “The ones that curse me to hell and back? The ones from the families, describing their journeys toward forgiveness? The ones from women proposing marriage?”

  “The ones from the professor,” Dean countered. “The one who’s writing the book.”

  “Ah,” Redding said. “Fogle, I believe it was? Healthy mop of hair, deep, soulful eyes, overly fond of Nietzsche?”

  “So he’s been to visit.” Dean wasn’t affected by his father’s theatrics. “What did he ask you?”

  “There are only two questions, Dean. You know that.” Redding smiled fondly. “Why and how.”

  “And what kind of person was the professor?” Dean pressed. “Was he more interested in the why or the how?”

  “Little of column A, little of column B.” Redding leaned forward. “Why the sudden interest in my professorial colleague? Afraid he might not get your part right when he tells our story?”

  “We don’t have a story.”

  “My story is your story.” An odd light came into Redding’s eyes, but he managed to tamp down on it and dial the intensity in his voice back a notch. “If you want to know what the professor was writing and what he’s capable of, I suggest you ask him yourself.”

  “I will,” Dean said. “As soon as you tell me where to find him.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Dean, I don’t have the man on speed dial. We aren’t friends. He interviewed me a few times. Generally, he asked the questions and I answered them, not the other way around.”

  Dean stood to leave.

  “But,” Redding added coyly, “he did mention that he does most of his writing in a cabin in the mountains.”

  “What cabin?” Dean asked. “What mountains?”

  Redding gestured with his manacled hands toward Dean’s seat. After a long moment, Dean sat.

  “My memory may need some refreshing,” Redding said, leaning forward slightly, his eyes making a careful study of Dean’s.

  “What do you want?” Dean’s voice was completely flat. Redding either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  “You,” the man said, his eyes roving over Dean, drinking in every detail, like an artist surveying his finest work. “I want to know about you, Dean. What have those hands been doing the past five years? What sights have those eyes seen?”

  There was something disconcerting about listening to Dean’s father break his body down into parts.

  Dean is just a thing to you, I thought. He’s hands and eyes, a mouth. Something to be molded. Something to own.

  “I didn’t come here to talk about me.” Dean’s voice never wavered.

  His father shrugged. “And I can’t seem to remember if the professor’s cabin was near Catoctin or Shenandoah.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.” Dean’s eyes bore into his father’s. “There’s nothing to talk about. Is that what you want to hear? That these hands, these eyes—they’re nothing?”

  “They’re everything,” Redding replied, his voice vibrating with intensity. “And there is so much more you could do.”

  Beside me, Agent Sterling stood. She took a step closer to the glass. Closer to Redding.

  “Come now, Dean-o, there must be something worth talking about in your life.” Redding was perfectly at ease, immune—maybe even unaware—of the enmity rolling off Dean. “Music. Sports. A motorcycle. A girl.” Redding cocked his head to the side. “Ah,” he said. “So there is a girl.”

  “There’s no one,” Dean bit out.

  “Methinks you doth protest too much, son.”

  “I am not your son.”

  Redding’s hands shot out. In a flash, he was on his feet. Dean must have been leaning forward, because somehow, Redding managed to get hold of his shirt. Father jerked son to his feet. “You are my son, more than you were ever your whore mother’s. I’m in you, boy. In your blood, in your mind, in every breath you take.” Redding’s face was close to Dean’s now, close enough that Dean would have felt the heat from his breath with each word. “You know it. You fear it.”

  One second Dean was just standing there, and the next, his hands were fisted in his father’s orange jumpsuit, and Daniel Redding was being pulled bodily across the table.

  “Hey!” Briggs came between the two of them. Redding let go of Dean first. He held his hands up in submission.

  You never really submit, I thought. You never give in. You get what you want—and you want Dean.

  Agent Sterling’s hand clamped around my elbow. “We’re going,” she told me. The guard tried to stop her, but she turned the full force of her glare on him. “One more word, one more step, and I swear to God, I will have your job.”

  I looked back at Dean. Briggs put a hand on his chest and pushed, hard. Like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened, Dean jerked backward, dropping his hold on his father. He looked at the two-way mirror, and I would have sworn that he could see me standing there.

  “Cassandra,” Agent Sterling snapped. “We’re going. Now.”

  The last thing I heard before I left was Dean’s voice, empty and hard. “Tell me about the professor’s cabin.”

  “This was a mistake.” Sterling waited until the two of us were ensconced in the car before saying those words.

  “Going with the guard?” I asked.

  “Bringing you here. Bringing Dean here. Staying in that room, watching that. All of it.” When Sterling said all of it, I got the sense that she wasn’t just talking about the way that Briggs and the director had chosen to handle this case. She meant the life Dean was living. The Naturals program. All of it.

  “It isn’t the same,” I told her. “What we do as a team, and what they’re having Dean do in there with his father—it’s not the same.” Putting Dean in a room with Daniel Redding ripped open all the old scars, every wound that man had inflicted on Dean’s psyche.

  That wasn’t what this program was. That wasn’t what we did.

  “You should have seen Dean when we got the call that the FBI had recovered Mackenzie McBride,” I said, thinking of that Dean. Our Dean. “He didn’t just smile. He beamed. Did you know he has dimples?”

  Agent Sterling didn’t reply.

  “Dean was never going to have a normal childhood.” I wasn’t sure why it felt so important to make her understand that. “There are things you don’t come back from. Normal’s not an option, for any of us.” I
thought of what Sloane had said. “If we’d had normal childhoods, we wouldn’t be Naturals.”

  Agent Sterling finally turned to look at me. “Are we talking about Dean’s father or your mother?” She let that question sink in. “I’ve read your file, Cassie.”

  “I’m Cassie now?” I asked. She wrinkled her forehead. I elaborated. “You’ve called me Cassandra since you showed up.”

  “Do you want me to keep calling you by your full name?”

  “No.” I paused. “But you want to keep calling me by it. You don’t like nicknames. They bring you closer to people.”

  Sterling sucked in a breath. “You’re going to have to learn to stop that,” she said.

  “Stop what?”

  “Most people don’t like being profiled. Some things are better left unsaid.” She paused. “Where were you last night?”

  My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. The question came out of nowhere.

  I played dumb. “What do you mean?” She’d threatened the program when all Sloane had done was make use of the basement crime sets. If she knew what Lia, Michael, and I had done the night before, there was no telling what she might do.

  “You think that I dislike you.” Sterling was using her profiler voice, getting into my head. “You see me as the enemy, but I am not your enemy, Cassie.”

  “You have a problem with this program.” I paused. “I don’t know why you even took this job. You have a problem with what Briggs is doing here, and you have a problem with me.”

  I expected her to deny it. She surprised me. “My problem with you,” she said, enunciating each word, “is that you don’t do what you’re told. All the instincts in the world are worthless if you can’t work within the system. Briggs never understood that, and neither do you.”

  “You’re talking about what happened last summer.” I didn’t want to be having this conversation, but there was no way out. I couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t get away from her assessing stare. “I get it. Dean got hurt. Michael got hurt. Because of me.”

  “Where were you last night?” Agent Sterling asked again. I didn’t answer her. “Last summer, you and your friends hacked a secured drive and read through the case files for no reason, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that you were bored. Even after Briggs warned you to back off, you had no intention of doing it. Eventually, the killer made contact.” She didn’t give me time to recover from that brutal recitation of events. “You wanted in on the case. Your Agent Locke obliged.”

  “So it’s my fault,” I said, angry, trying not to cry, terrified that she was right. “The people Locke killed, just to send me their hair in boxes. The girl she kidnapped. The fact that she shot Michael. That’s all on me.”

  “No.” Sterling’s voice was low and uncompromising. “None of that was your fault, Cassie, but for the rest of your life, you will wonder if it was. It will keep you up late at night. It will haunt you. It will never leave. I know that sometimes you wonder if I look at you and see your aunt, but that’s not it. Dean’s not his father. I’m not mine. If I thought you were anything like the woman who called herself Lacey Locke, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “Then why are you having this conversation with me?” I asked. “You say that I don’t know how to work within the system, but don’t try to tell me that the others do. Lia? Michael? Even Sloane. You don’t look at them the way you look at me.”

  “Because they’re not me.” Agent Sterling’s words seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the car. “I didn’t read your file and see your aunt, Cassie.” She clamped her jaw shut. By the time she finally continued, I’d almost convinced myself that I’d misheard her. “When you break the rules, when you start telling yourself that the end justifies the means, people get hurt. Protocol saves lives.” She ran a hand over the back of her neck. Midday, with no air-conditioning, the temperature in the car was approaching stifling.

  “You want to know why you, in particular, concern me, Cassie? You’re the one who really feels things. Michael, Lia, Dean—they learned very early in life to shut down their emotions like that. They’re not used to letting people in. They won’t feel the need to put their own necks on the line every single time. Sloane cares, but she deals in facts, not emotions. But you? You won’t ever be able to stop caring. For you, it will always be about the victims and their families. It will always be personal.”

  I wanted to tell her that she was wrong. But then I thought of Mackenzie McBride, and I knew that Agent Sterling was right. Every case I worked would be personal. I would always want justice for the victims. I would do whatever it took to save just one life, the way that I wished that someone had saved my mother’s.

  “I’m glad you were able to be here for Dean today, Cassie. He needs someone, especially now—but if you’re serious about doing what we do, what I do, emotions are a luxury you cannot afford. Guilt, anger, empathy, being willing to do anything to save a life—that’s a recipe for getting someone killed.”

  At some point before she’d left the FBI, she’d lost someone. Because she’d gotten emotionally involved in a case. Because in the heat of battle, she’d broken the rules.

  “I need to know where you were last night.” She was like a broken record. “I’m giving you a chance to make a good decision here. I suggest you take it.”

  Part of me wanted to tell her, but this wasn’t just my secret. It was also Michael’s and Lia’s.

  “Briggs doesn’t know you snuck out. Neither does Judd.” Sterling let the implied threat hang in the air. “I’m betting you’ve never seen Judd really angry. I have. I don’t recommend it.”

  When I didn’t reply, Agent Sterling went silent. The temperature in the car was becoming unbearable. “You’re making a bad decision here, Cassie.” I said nothing, and her eyes narrowed. “Just tell me this,” she said. “Is there anything I should know?”

  I caught my bottom lip in my teeth and thought of Dean and the lengths he was going to, to get even the smallest bit of information out of his father.

  “Emerson was involved with her professor,” I said finally. I owed it to Dean to share that information. “The one who was writing a book about Dean’s dad.”

  Agent Sterling slipped off her jacket. Clearly, the heat was getting to her, too. “Thank you,” she said, turning in her seat to face me. “But listen and listen well: when I told you to stay away from this case, I meant it. The next time you take so much as a step out of Quantico without my permission, I’ll have you fitted for an ankle tracker.”

  I barely heard the threat. I didn’t reply. I couldn’t form words. I couldn’t even think them.

  When Agent Sterling had removed her jacket, she’d dislodged her shirt slightly. It gapped in the front, giving me a view of the skin underneath. There was a scar just under her collarbone.

  A brand, in the shape of the letter R.

  Sterling looked down. Her face absolutely expressionless, she righted her shirt. The scar was covered now, but I couldn’t stop staring.

  Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.

  The entire time we’d been in the observation room, she hadn’t taken her eyes off of Daniel Redding.

  “My team was investigating the case,” Sterling said calmly. “I got a little too close, and I got sloppy. Redding had me for two days before I escaped.”

  “That’s how you know Dean.” I’d wondered how they’d developed a relationship based only on the fact that she’d arrested his father. But if she’d been one of Redding’s victims…

  “I’m not a victim,” Sterling said, following my line of thought so closely it was eerie. “I’m a survivor, and Dean is the reason that I survived.”

  “Was this the case you were talking about before?” I couldn’t seem to find my voice. It came out cracked and hushed. “When you said that getting emotionally involved was a recipe for getting someone killed, were you talking about someone Daniel Redding murdered?”

  “No, Cassie, I wasn’t. And
that’s the last question I’m going to answer about Daniel Redding, my past, or the brand on my chest. Are we clear on that?” Sterling’s voice was so even, so utterly matter-of-fact, that I couldn’t do anything but nod.

  The door to the prison opened, and Briggs and Dean exited. They were only accompanied by one guard, the older one. I watched as the guard handed something to Agent Briggs—a file. Beside them, Dean stood perfectly, unnaturally still. His shoulders were hunched. His head was down. His arms hung listlessly by his sides.

  “Don’t ask Dean about any of this.” Agent Sterling issued those words as a command, desperate and fierce. “Don’t even tell him you saw the brand.”

  “I won’t. Ask him. I won’t ask him anything.” I struggled to form sentences and fell silent as Dean and Briggs walked toward the car. Dean opened the car door and climbed in. He shut the door, but didn’t look at me. I forced myself not to reach for him. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the seat in front of me.

  Briggs handed the file to Agent Sterling, slapping it down into her hand. “Visitor logs,” he said. “Redding wasn’t supposed to have visitors. The warden is out of his mind. I wouldn’t even bet on the logs being complete.”

  Agent Sterling flipped open the file. She ran down the list of names. “Conjugal visits?” she asked.

  Briggs spat out the answer. “Several.”

  “You think our UNSUB is on this list?” Sterling asked.

  “That would make sense,” Briggs replied tersely. “It would make our lives easy, so, no, Ronnie, I don’t think our UNSUB is on that list, because I don’t think this is going to make sense. It’s not going to be easy. We’re just not that lucky.”

  I expected Sterling to snap back at him, but instead, she reached out and touched his forearm lightly with the tips of her fingers. “Don’t let him get to you,” she said quietly. Briggs relaxed slightly under her touch. “If you let him in,” she continued, “if you let him under your skin, he wins.”

  “This is stupid.” Dean shook his head, his upper lip curling in disgust. “We knew what would happen if I came here. He promised he’d talk. Well, he talked, and now we have no way of knowing how much of what he said was true and how much is just him leading us around, like dogs on ropes.”