The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  “I’m not,” I said.

  Sloane didn’t respond. She walked over to a bathroom set and stood just outside the shower. She stared at it, like I wasn’t even there.

  “Are we okay?” I asked her.

  Dean was furious. Michael had taken off for parts unknown. When the dust settled, Lia would probably blame this whole mess on me. I needed Sloane cheerful and spouting statistics. I needed not to be alone.

  “You’re okay, and I’m okay. It would seem to follow logically that we’re okay.” Sloane’s gaze settled on the shower drain. It took me a moment to realize she was counting—counting the holes in the drain, counting the tiles on the shower floor.

  “We didn’t mean to leave you out,” I told her.

  “I’m used to it.”

  With the way Sloane’s brain worked, she’d probably spent her whole life before the program on the outside looking in. I was her roommate, and I was a profiler—I should have known better.

  “Dean is my friend, too.” Sloane’s voice was small, but fierce. She looked up from the floor, but still didn’t turn to face me. “I’m not good at mingling, or at parties. I say the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing. I know that—but even numbers are better than odd, and if I’d been there, Lia wouldn’t have had to go off alone.” Sloane paused and bit her lip. “She didn’t even ask.” She swallowed hard. “Before you came, Lia might have asked me.” Sloane finally turned to look at me. “There’s only a seventy-nine-point-six percent chance, but she might have.”

  “Next time,” I told Sloane, “I will ask you.”

  Sloane considered my words carefully, then accepted them with a nod. “Are we going to hug now?” she asked. The question was absolutely clinical. I slipped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed.

  “Statistically,” Sloane told me, sounding more like her usual self, “the bathroom is the deadliest room in the house.”

  I found Michael working on his car. Or, more specifically, I found him holding some kind of power sander and staring at his car with a diabolical expression.

  “Judd let you play with the power tools?” I asked.

  Michael turned the sander on and off experimentally, then he smiled. “Judd is a man of discerning tastes and good sense.”

  “Meaning that Judd doesn’t know that you’re playing with the power tools,” I concluded.

  “I’m going to have to plead the Fifth on that one,” Michael told me.

  There was a beat of silence, and then I asked the question I really wanted an answer to. “Are we okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?” Michael turned the power sander on and attempted to attack the rust on the car’s front bumper, drowning out all conversation.

  I’d thought that I could keep things from changing, but they were changing anyway. With Michael and me. With Dean and me.

  “Michael,” I said, my voice soft enough that he couldn’t hear it over the sound of metal on metal.

  Michael turned the sander off. Then he turned to me. I felt naked, the way I always did when I knew my face was giving me away. Why couldn’t he just be a normal boy, one who couldn’t take one look at me and know exactly which emotions were churning around in my gut?

  “We’re fine, Cassie. It’s just that sometimes, when you’re in the business of being devastatingly handsome and admirably patient, you need an outlet. Or two. Or seven.”

  He was taking his frustrations with me out on this car.

  “Nothing happened between Dean and me,” I said.

  “I know that,” he replied.

  “Nothing is going to happen between Dean and me,” I said.

  “I know that, too.” Michael leaned back against the car. “Better than you do. You look at Redding and see all the ways the two of you are the same. I look at him, and I see someone who’s so angry and so terrified of that anger that there’s not room for anything else. Or anyone else.”

  I realized, suddenly: “That’s your problem with Dean.”

  “That he’s incapable of romancing a female?” Michael smirked. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s his best quality.”

  “No,” I said, turning the thought over in my mind. “That he’s angry and holding it in.” In Dean’s shoes, I would be angry, too. I understood why he wouldn’t let himself express it, why he’d fight tooth and nail against throwing a punch. He couldn’t risk flipping that switch and not being able to turn it off.

  But I’d never thought about the effect that being around a person like Dean would have on someone like Michael.

  Michael gave me a look. “You’re profiling me.”

  I shrugged. “You read my emotions all the time.”

  He paused for a moment. “What do you see?”

  That was as close to permission to poke around inside his head as I was going to get. “You grew up in a house where everything seemed perfect—you had every advantage that money could buy. But it wasn’t perfect.” Michael had told me that much, but I pushed forward, tiptoeing into more dangerous waters. “You learned to read emotions because your father was hard to read, and you needed to be able to tell when he was angry.”

  No response.

  “Even if there was a smile on his face, even if he was laughing, if he was angry, you needed to see it.” I swallowed the ball of emotion rising in my throat. “You needed to avoid it.”

  To avoid getting hit.

  “Dean said pretty much the same thing to me once.” Michael crossed his arms, his eyes on mine. “Only he wasn’t nearly as nice about it.”

  When I’d met Michael, he’d had an ingrained distrust of profilers—and a strong personal dislike of Dean. It had never occurred to me that Dean might have done something to Michael to justify those feelings.

  “What did he say to you?” I asked, my throat going suddenly dry.

  “Does it matter?” Michael glanced over at the house. “He’s got dibs on the screwed-up childhood, right? He’s the one with the get-out-of-jail-free card.” Michael smiled, but there was an edge to it. “No pun intended.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Michael took a casual stroll around the car, examining it from all angles. When he spoke, it wasn’t to answer my question. “Anger,” he said offhandedly. “This might come as a surprise, Cassie, but I don’t always react well to it.” An edge crept into his voice. “In fact, I tend to have a very particular reaction.”

  I thought about Michael making veiled comments about The Bad Seed in Dean’s hearing. Michael letting Lia use him to get a rise out of Dean.

  “You’re the guy who waves the red flag in front of the bull.”

  “If you can’t keep them from hitting you,” Michael said, “you make them hit you. At least that way, you’re ready. At least that way, it’s not a surprise.”

  It was easy to see now, what it must have been like when Michael was drafted to join the program. He wasn’t happy about coming here, but at least he’d escaped living with a ticking time bomb. And then he’d arrived to find Dean, who had every reason in the world to be angry and was fighting that rage every step of the way.

  “One night, Lia and I stayed out until sunrise.” Michael never hid the fact that he had a history with Lia. I was so focused on the picture he was painting for me that I barely noticed. “Believe me when I say that had nothing to do with Dean. But when we got back that morning, he was waiting for us, practically vibrating, holding it in check, but just barely.”

  I could see it: Michael being Michael, and Lia being Lia, both of them self-destructive with a taste for chaos and a desire to cause the FBI a little trouble. And I could see Dean, worrying about Lia out all night with an unknown entity that neither one of them had a reason to trust.

  “So you said something to push Dean that much closer to the edge.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Michael had said.

  “I took a metaphorical swing,” Michael told me. “Redding hit back.”

  “But not with his fists,” I clarified. Dean’s gift was like mine. We knew ex
actly what to say to hurt someone the most. We knew what people’s weak spots were. And Michael’s was his father. The idea that Dean might have used that to get at Michael made my stomach twist sharply.

  “I punched him,” Michael added in the kind of casual tone most people reserved for chatting about the weather. He took a step toward me, giving me that patented Michael smile. “I get it, you know.”

  “Get what?”

  “You. Redding. I get it. I get that he’s going through something, and I get that you need to be there. That’s who you are, Cassie. You care about people. You need to help. Believe me when I say that I am trying to step back and let you do whatever it is you need to do. But it’s not easy.” Michael tore his eyes from mine and picked the power sander back up. “I haven’t had a lot of practice at being a decent person. It’s not something at which I particularly excel.”

  Before I could reply, Michael turned the sander on, drowning out the sounds of the night. I stood there for a couple of minutes watching him. Agent Sterling’s car eventually pulled into the driveway. It was getting dark enough that I couldn’t make out much of her posture or the look on her face, but as she cut across the lawn, Michael tilted his head to the side. He turned the sander back off.

  “What?” I said.

  “She’s not happy,” he told me. “Brisk pace, no bounce to her step, hands glued to her sides. I’m guessing the exploration of the professor’s writing cabin did not go particularly well.”

  My stomach dropped. I could suddenly hear the sound of my own breathing, my own heartbeat.

  Now it was Michael’s turn to ask: “What?”

  I’d been so focused on Dean when I’d been on the other side of that observation glass that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about his father. I hadn’t let myself really dissect him or the things he’d said. But now, all I could think was that Redding had—at great cost to Dean—finally given the FBI a tip about where the professor might be hiding.

  As an organized killer, Daniel Redding was a man who thrived on mind games. On misdirection. On power. If Redding had thought, even for a moment, that the professor was the killer, he wouldn’t have told Briggs where to find him. The only way Redding would have really told Briggs where to find the professor was if Redding suspected, based on the letters he’d received, that finding the professor would remind Briggs—and Sterling and everyone else at the FBI—that they weren’t nearly as smart as they thought they were.

  The only truly remarkable letters were from students.

  When I didn’t respond, Michael called after Agent Sterling. “Professor’s cabin a bust?”

  She didn’t answer him. She went into the house and shut the door behind her. And that, as much as anything else, told me that I was right.

  “It wasn’t a bust,” I told Michael. “I think they found the professor.” I swallowed. “We should have seen this coming.”

  “Seen what coming?”

  “I think they found the professor,” I said again, “but our UNSUB found him first.”

  YOU

  The professor was a problem. You’re a problem solver. It was quick and clean—a single bullet to the back of his skull. And if there was no artistry to it, no method, at least you were showing initiative. At least you were ready, willing, and able to do what needed to be done.

  It makes you feel powerful, and that makes you wonder, just for an instant, if this isn’t the better way. Guns and neat little bullet holes and the glory of being the one to pull the trigger. You could knock the next girl out, tie her up, take her to the middle of nowhere. You could let her loose deep in the forest. You could track her, catch her in your sights.

  You could pull the trigger.

  Just thinking about it sets your heart to pounding. Take them. Free them. Track them. Kill them.

  No. You force yourself to stop thinking about it, to stop imagining the sound of bare feet running through the brush—running away from you. There is a plan. An order. A bigger picture.

  You will abide by it. For now.

  Sterling didn’t say a thing about the professor. Dean didn’t say a word to any of us. Living in the house with the two of them—and a vulnerable, seething Lia—was like trying to tap dance through a minefield. I felt like any second, everything would explode.

  And then Director Sterling showed up.

  The last time the FBI director had put in an appearance at our house, a senator’s daughter had just been kidnapped.

  This did not bode well.

  The director, Sterling, and Briggs locked themselves in Briggs’s office. From the kitchen, I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but every few minutes, voices were raised.

  First Sterling’s.

  Then the director’s.

  Briggs’s.

  Finally, there was silence. And then they came for us.

  The past twenty-four hours hadn’t been kind to either Sterling or Briggs. Briggs looked like he’d slept in his clothes. Beside him, Agent Sterling’s jaw was clenched. Her shirt was buttoned all the way up. So was her suit jacket. Since she was the kind of person who used clothes as armor, the subtle changes told me that she’d gotten dressed today expecting a fight.

  “Three hundred and seven,” the director said grimly, looking at each of us in turn. “That’s how many students are enrolled in Fogle’s serial killer class. One hundred and twenty-seven females, a hundred and eighty males.” Director Sterling paused. The first time I’d met him, he’d reminded me of a grandfather. Today, there was nothing grandfatherly about him. “That’s a lot of suspects, and I’m a man who believes in utilizing all of his resources.”

  Director Sterling was whatever kind of man he had to be to stay on top. When confronted with a problem, he analyzed all possible solutions: costs versus benefits, risks balanced out against rewards. In this case, the risks and likelihood of compromising the investigation and exposing the Naturals program compared to the potential benefits of utilizing all of his “resources” to catch this killer.

  I thought of Judd and his talk of slippery slopes.

  “We were told to stay away from this case on pain of death.” Lia smiled like a predator toying with its prey. She didn’t like that we’d gotten caught, she didn’t like that she’d been told to back off, and she hated that Dean wouldn’t even look at her. “Am I to take it that certain parties have been overruled?”

  Lia let her gaze roam to Briggs when she said certain parties, but my eyes were on Agent Sterling. There was a reason she had dressed for battle this morning. Whatever the director was about to ask us to do, his daughter had argued against it.

  “The risks are minimal to nonexistent,” the director said firmly. “And given recent events, it’s my understanding that giving you something useful to do might actually keep you out of trouble.”

  I took that to mean that the director knew about our little trip to Colonial.

  “The five of you won’t be interviewing witnesses.” Briggs stood with his hands loose by his sides, eyeing us one by one. “You will not be going to crime scenes.” Briggs’s gaze flicked over to Lia. “You won’t be analyzing any of our interviews with Daniel Redding.”

  I wasn’t sure what that left.

  “Your involvement on this case begins and ends with social media.” Briggs turned to Sterling and waited. For a moment, I thought she’d turn on her heels and march out the door, but she didn’t.

  “Our preliminary profile says the UNSUB is male.” Sterling’s voice was perfectly even and perfectly calm in a way that told me that she was on the verge of snapping. The closer she was to losing it, the more viciously she reeled it in. “Redding suggested we might be dealing with a college student. I would have put the UNSUB’s age between twenty-three and twenty-eight. Above-average intelligence, but not necessarily educated. But what do I know?” An edge crept into her voice.

  “Thank you, Agent Sterling,” the director cut in. He turned to the rest of us. “With the university’s cooperation, we’ve obtain
ed copies of the class schedules and transcripts for every student in that class. What that doesn’t tell us is who they are, what they’re capable of. That’s where you come in.”

  “Social media,” Sloane interjected, picking up on what Briggs had said earlier. “Upwards of three hundred million photos are uploaded to leading social media sites every day. Among smartphone owners in our UNSUB’s demographic, somewhere between sixty and eighty percent of time spent using that device will be spent on social networks, rather than direct communication.”

  “Exactly,” Director Sterling told her. “We don’t have the manpower to search through every post, and even if we did, your eyes might catch something that Briggs’s team wouldn’t. We’re not asking you to do anything that adolescents all over the country don’t do every day.” Director Sterling wasn’t looking at us when he said those words. He was looking at his daughter. “You’re teenagers. This internet stuff is practically your native language.”

  “And you’re okay with this?” Michael asked Agent Sterling, arching one eyebrow. To me, there was no noticeable change in her expression, but Michael must have seen something. “Not okay with it,” Michael interpreted, “but also not as convinced that it’s a bad idea as you’d like to be.” He gave her his most beatific smile. “We’re growing on you.”

  “Enough, Michael.” Briggs turned the focus away from Agent Sterling and back to the case. “If the UNSUB is enrolled in Fogle’s class, the profile predicts that he would be an older student—he may not have the credits to be a junior or senior, but he would be in that age range. He probably comes from a working-class family and may live at home and commute to campus.”

  Agent Sterling threaded her fingers together in front of her. Her profile had put the younger end of the age range at twenty-three. Briggs had just expanded that downward by at least a year or two.

  “Veronica?” the director prompted.

  “We’re looking for someone who gets pleasure out of dominating others, but who may not be fully confident in his ability to do so,” Agent Sterling said after a sizable silence. “His father was present, but volatile, and likely left the family around the time our UNSUB entered puberty. His mother may have dated a string of men, but she did not remarry until the UNSUB was at least eighteen. This UNSUB is comfortable around firearms. He will not have a girlfriend or spouse. It’s likely that he drives a dark-colored truck or SUV, and if he has a dog, expect it to be a larger breed, such as a German shepherd.”