The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  It shouldn’t have been me behind that glass, I thought. It should have been Lia watching the interrogation. I didn’t care about the difference between active cases and cold cases. I cared about Dean.

  Agent Sterling turned around in her seat. I expected to see the gentleness with which she’d just reproved Briggs, but instead, her eyes were glittering, hard as diamonds, as she addressed Dean. “Don’t,” she told him, jabbing a finger in his direction.

  “Don’t what?” Dean shot back. I’d never heard him so angry.

  “You really want to play this game with me?” Sterling asked him, her eyebrows nearly disappearing into her hairline. “You think I don’t know what it was like for you in there? You think I don’t know what he said, what you’re thinking? I am telling you, Dean, don’t. Don’t go there.”

  As Briggs drove back past the gate and off prison grounds, the three of them settled into a tense silence. I put my hand on the seat, palm up. Dean turned toward the window, his fingers curling into fists.

  I looked down at my hand, open and waiting, but couldn’t move it. I felt utterly out of place and useless. I’d accompanied them on this trip for Dean’s sake, but I didn’t need to be a profiler to know that he didn’t want me here now. With a single conversation, his father had jammed a wedge between Dean and the rest of the world, cutting him off as effectively as a blade severing a ruined limb. The unspoken closeness that had been building between Dean and me was a casualty of that blow—gone, as if it had never existed at all.

  I’m in you, boy. In your blood, in your mind, in every breath you take.

  In the front seat, Briggs pulled out his cell phone. Seconds after he dialed the number, he was barking out orders. “Redding gave us a location on the professor’s writing cabin. Catoctin.” Briggs paused. “No, I don’t know whose name the deed to the cabin is under. Try the professor’s parents, ex-wife, college roommates.…Try everyone and their damned dog, but find it.”

  Briggs ended the call and tossed his phone down. Sterling caught it. “If I remember correctly,” she said dryly, “throwing phones was more my area than yours.”

  Agent Sterling was the one who had been tortured by Daniel Redding, but she was the only one of the three of them holding it together in the wake of this visit.

  “Did Redding say anything about the professor being involved with Emerson Cole?” Agent Sterling’s question snapped both Dean and Briggs out of it, if only for a second.

  “Care to share your source on that one?” Briggs asked tightly. I could practically hear him thinking that Sterling was following leads behind his back.

  “Why don’t you ask Cassie?” Sterling suggested. “Apparently, she’s been doing some extracurricular digging.”

  “Excuse me?” Briggs spat out.

  Dean turned his head slowly away from the window to face me. “What kind of extracurricular digging?” he asked me, his voice low and haggard. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Just you?” Dean asked. I didn’t reply. He closed his eyes, his entire face taut. “Of course it’s not just you. You wouldn’t be lying to me about it if it were. I’m assuming Lia’s involved. Sloane? Townsend?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “This gives us motive,” Agent Sterling told Briggs in the front seat. “The professor might have killed the girl to keep the truth from coming out.”

  “Emerson,” Dean said, his voice tight. “Her name was Emerson.”

  “Yes,” Agent Sterling said, ignoring the fury in Dean’s voice. “It was. And whether you believe it or not, Dean, the information you got out of your father today, no matter how insignificant it seems, will help us find Emerson’s killer. Now you just have to let us do our job.” She paused. “You both do. No more digging. No more field trips.”

  At the phrase field trips, Briggs pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and killed the engine. “You,” he said, turning around and pinning me with a look. “Out of the car.” With those words, Briggs got out of the car himself.

  I tried not to flinch as I joined him. Briggs might have been willing to take calculated risks, like bringing Dean to see his father, but he was only okay with those risks if the calculations were his.

  “Am I to understand that you left the house, went on some kind of field trip, and directly interfered with an ongoing FBI investigation?” Briggs never raised his voice, but he put so much force behind each word that he might as well have been yelling.

  “Yes?”

  Briggs ran his hands through his hair. “Who went with you?”

  That, I couldn’t tell him.

  “I know you want to help,” he told me through clenched teeth. “What this case is doing to Dean isn’t fair. Bringing him here to talk to his father—that wasn’t fair of me. But I didn’t have a choice. Dean didn’t really have a choice, but you do. You can choose to trust me. You can choose not to give Agent Sterling any more ammunition against this program. You can choose not to behave like an irresponsible, shortsighted teenager who can’t be trusted to follow rules put in place for her own safety!”

  Now, he was yelling.

  Dean opened his car door. He didn’t get out. He didn’t even look at me. Briggs exhaled. I could practically see him counting to ten in his head. “I’m not going to ask where you went,” he told me, each word measured and full of warning. “I’m not going to tell you that it was stupid and reckless, although I am certain that it undoubtedly was. I’m going to ask you—once and only once, Cassandra—who told you about the professor and the girl?”

  I swallowed, hard. “My source’s name was Derek. He was working on a group project with Emerson in Professor Fogle’s class. There were two other students in the group—a girl named Bryce and a boy named Clark.”

  Briggs’s gaze shifted briefly to Dean.

  “What?” I said. I caught the significance of the look that passed between the two of them, but couldn’t figure out its meaning.

  Dean was the one who answered, as Briggs headed back for the car.

  “My father said that if we were looking for a copycat, we were wasting our time with the professor.” Dean ran a hand roughly through his hair, closing his fingers into a fist and pulling at his roots. “He said that the only truly remarkable letters he’d received were from a student in that class.”

  By the time Briggs pulled up to the house, the silence in the car was clawing at me. Dean hadn’t said a word since he’d told us about the letters.

  We wanted to protect you, I thought, willing him to profile me and see that. But it was like someone had flipped a switch, and Dean had gone into lockdown mode. He wouldn’t even look at me. And the worst part was that I knew he was sitting there thinking about the day the two of us had spent together and what a mistake it had been for him to have believed, even for a second, that he could let someone in.

  “Dean—”

  “Don’t.” He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t sound anything.

  I was the first one out of the car once Briggs put it into park. I started toward the house, then slowed when I saw a heap of junk in the driveway. Calling the mound of metal a car would have been generous. It had three wheels, no paint, and a spattering of rust along the bumper. The hood—if you could call it a hood—was popped. I couldn’t make out the person inspecting the engine, but I could make out his jeans. His well-worn, formfitting, oil-smudged jeans.

  Michael?

  When I’d first met Michael, he’d changed his clothing style every day to keep me guessing. But this Michael—wearing jeans and a ratty old T-shirt, buried elbow-deep in a junkyard car—was new.

  He stood up, wiping a hand across his brow. He saw me looking at him, and for a split second, his expression hardened.

  Not you, too, I thought. I couldn’t deal with Michael being mad at me, too.

  “I’ve decided to take up restoring cars,” he called out, answering the question I hadn’t asked and giving me some hope that I’d
imagined the look on his face a moment before. “In case something happens to my Porsche.”

  The reference to my proposed threat did not go unnoticed.

  You saw Dean and me in the kitchen, I thought, slipping into his perspective. You got sick of watching us together. You left.…

  “I’m a man of many mysteries,” Michael said, disrupting my thoughts. He always knew when I was profiling him and never let me get away with it for long. “And you,” he added, his gaze flitting over my face, “are…not happy.”

  “All of you, inside!” Briggs snapped.

  Dean headed for the house, hunched, his eyes locked straight ahead as he brushed by us. Michael tracked Dean’s movements, then glanced back at me.

  I looked down and started walking. I made it halfway to the front door before Michael caught up with me. He put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hey,” he said softly. I stopped, but still didn’t look at him. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.” The hand on my shoulder traced the edge of a tensed muscle, then turned me to face him. “What did Dean do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Dean had a right to be angry. He had a right to want nothing to do with me.

  Putting two fingers below my chin, Michael angled my face toward his. “He did something, if you’re looking like that.”

  “It’s not his fault,” I insisted.

  Michael dropped his hand to his side. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Colorado, but I’m getting really tired of watching you make excuses for him.”

  “Enough.” Briggs put one hand on Michael’s shoulder and one on mine and steered the two of us into the house. “Get Lia,” he said. “And Sloane. I want all of you in the living room in five minutes.”

  “Or else,” Michael intoned in a whisper.

  “Move!” Agent Briggs’s voice edged up on a yell. Michael and I moved.

  Five minutes later, we were gathered in the living room—Michael, Lia, Sloane, and I on the coach, Dean seated on the edge of the fireplace. Briggs loomed over us. Sterling stood back and watched.

  “Tell me something: in the history of this program, have any of you ever been authorized to approach witnesses?” Briggs’s voice had become deceptively pleasant.

  Lia processed that question, then turned to me. “Seriously, Cassie, are you the single least stealthy person on the face of the planet, or do you just habitually want to get caught?”

  “Lia!” Briggs said sharply. “Answer the question.”

  “Fine,” Lia said, her voice silky. “No, we’ve never been authorized to approach witnesses. We’ve never been authorized to do anything of interest. We stay locked in the metaphorical tower while you run out and catch the bad guys. Satisfied?”

  “Do I look satisfied to you?” A vein in Briggs’s forehead throbbed. “Dean went to see his father today.”

  Nothing Briggs could have said would have had a bigger impact on Lia. Her eyes flickered over to Dean’s. She sat there, frozen.

  “Dean went through hell because I asked him to,” Briggs continued mercilessly. “Because it was crucial for this case. I want this solved as badly as any of you, but unlike you, I’m not playing games here.”

  “We weren’t—” I started to say.

  Briggs cut off my objection. “Every second I have to spend policing you, making sure that you’re not taking matters into your own hands and compromising this entire investigation, is a second that I could be spending catching this killer. Right now, I should be following up a lead on the professor’s writing cabin, but instead I’m here, because you seem to need a reminder about what this program is and what it isn’t.”

  Lia finally managed to look away from Dean. She turned to Briggs, her eyes flashing, her fingers curled into fists. “You’re reading us the riot act for trying to put our abilities to use, but letting that SOB play with Dean’s head in exchange for whatever table scraps of information you can get your hands on, that’s okay?”

  “Enough.” Dean didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. Lia turned to him. For five or six seconds, they just sat there, staring at each other.

  “No, Dean. It’s not enough.” Her voice was soft, until she turned back to Briggs. “You need to let me watch the tape of your interview with Redding. Don’t even try to tell me you didn’t tape it. You tape every conversation you have with the man. The question isn’t if he’s lying—it’s what he’s lying about, and we both know that I’m your best chance at answering that question.”

  “You’re not helping,” Briggs told Lia. He held her gaze, and I realized that he wasn’t just denying her request. He was telling her that we really weren’t helping the situation, that everything we’d done up until this point had hurt Dean.

  Maybe he was right, but I couldn’t help thinking that Lia was right, too. What if she could see something in the interview that the rest of us had missed?

  Briggs’s phone rang. He answered it, turning his back on the rest of us. Agent Sterling stepped forward.

  Dean preempted whatever she was going to say. “I’ll stay out of it.” His tone was expressionless, but there was something bitter in his eyes. “That’s what I excel at, isn’t it? Staying out of things until it’s too late.”

  I thought of the R burned into Agent Sterling’s chest.

  Briggs pocketed his phone and turned back to Sterling. “We’ve got a possible address for the professor’s cabin.”

  “Go on, then.” Judd spoke up from behind us. I wondered how long he’d been there. “You two, get out of here,” he said to Briggs and Sterling. “I may be old, but I’m still capable of making sure none of these miscreants leave the house.”

  We miscreants didn’t leave the house. We convened in the basement.

  “I want to know exactly where Cassie got the information she gave Briggs,” Dean said. The fact that he was talking about me and not to me cut deeper than it should have.

  “Well, I want to know why you thought that being in the same room with your father was anything but the worst idea ever,” Lia retorted.

  “He knew something,” Dean told her.

  “Or he wanted you to think he knew something. You shouldn’t have gone. And if you had to go, you should have taken me with you.” Lia turned her back on Dean, but not before I realized that she wasn’t just angry. She was hurt. Dean had gone to see his father for the first time in five years. I’d gone with him. She hadn’t.

  “Lia,” Dean said softly.

  “No,” she snapped without turning back around. “I watch your back. You watch mine. He’s hard to read, but he’s not impossible, Dean. I could have listened in. I could have helped.”

  “You can’t help,” Dean told her. He turned the topic back to his original question. “You know how Cassie got the information, don’t you, Lia?”

  “Of course I know,” Lia said. “It was my idea! And it was our risk to take, Dean.”

  “Risk?” Dean repeated, his voice silky and low. “Lia, what did you do?”

  “They snuck out,” Sloane piped up from beside me. All of us turned to look at her. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet since Briggs had called all of us downstairs. “According to my calculations, Cassie was gone for two hours, forty-three minutes, and seventeen seconds. And she was only wearing two-fifths of a dress.”

  “Sloane!” I said.

  “What?” she shot back. “If you wanted me to keep my mouth shut, you should have taken me with you.”

  We hurt her feelings, I realized suddenly. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask her.

  “Next time,” Lia told her.

  “There’s not going to be a next time!” Dean exploded. He took a deep breath, calming himself. “Tell me you didn’t go to Colonial.”

  “We didn’t go to Colonial,” Lia replied without missing a beat.

  Dean stared at her for a few seconds, then turned to me. Clearly, I was easier prey. “You went to a college campus knowing that a murder had just been commi
tted there, wearing two-fifths of a dress and looking for people who might be connected to the killer?”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Michael told Dean, “I went along for the ride.”

  Dean went very still. For a second, I thought he might actually hit Michael. “Why in the world would that be a consolation?”

  “Because,” Michael replied, a glint in his eyes, “if I hadn’t been there, Cassie would have gone off alone with a college senior who has an unhealthy fascination with your dad’s case.”

  “Michael!” I said.

  “Cassie!” Dean turned a thunderous look on me.

  I threw Lia under the bus. “At least I didn’t actually go off by myself with two strange guys in Fogle’s class.”

  Dean turned back to Lia.

  “I have no idea what she’s talking about.” Lia’s innocent act was as good as they came. Dean threw his hands up in the air.

  “Do you all have a death wish?” he asked.

  “No!” I couldn’t hold the objection back. “We all wanted to help you.”

  Those were the very last words I should have said. The whole point of not telling Dean had been to keep him from feeling responsible for our actions. From the moment he’d come back from the interview with his father, he’d been pulling away, and I’d just given him the final shove.

  He left. When Lia tried to follow him, he said something to her, his voice so low that I couldn’t make out the words. She blanched, the blood draining completely from her face, and stood there, frozen in place as Dean stalked off. After several seconds of shocked silence, Lia fled, too.

  Michael looked at Sloane and then at me. He strolled toward the door. “I think that went well.”

  Sloane and I were the only ones left in the basement. “I thought you weren’t supposed to be down here,” she said abruptly. Her terseness surprised me, until I remembered the look on her face when she’d mentioned us sneaking out without her.