The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  “There’s no white noise,” Sloane commented, sidling up behind me. “Whoever taped the narration has decent equipment. The video, on the other hand, was taken by some kind of smartphone. At least 1080p resolution, maybe higher.”

  The video cut from the auditorium scene to familiar footage—the clip of Emerson’s body. The narration continued, but I tuned it out.

  “I’d ask if this kid was serious,” Michael said, coming to join us, “but I can tell that he is. He thinks this is cutting-edge journalism. On his profile page.”

  “He didn’t kill Emerson,” I said tiredly. Conrad didn’t fit the profile. Our killer didn’t have a snarky blog. He didn’t have a girlfriend like Bryce—even if it was complicated. And the person who’d killed Emerson, who’d displayed her like a dog dropping a dead bird at the feet of his master, would never have started his “video coverage” of the event with footage of the class.

  For the UNSUB, the rest of the class would have been beside the point.

  “Play it again,” Sloane ordered. “From the beginning.”

  I did. Sloane shoved me gently out of the way and took over, using keyboard shortcuts to pause the video, play it, pause it. Her eyes flitted back and forth over the screen. “The voice-over was right,” she said finally. “There are three hundred and seven students in that classroom taking that test. Including your suspect,” she told me, pointing to an unmistakable face—round, with dull eyes—in the third row. Clark. He was sitting two seats away from Bryce, a row behind Derek.

  “Who’s filming the test?” I asked. “And why?”

  “I don’t know.” Sloane’s tongue darted out in between her lips in a look of intense concentration. “The news report said that Emerson’s body was discovered early that morning,” she said finally. “The question is how early?”

  I followed her line of thought. According to the time stamp, this footage was taken at 7:34 A.M.

  “Time of death.” I said the obvious out loud. “We need the time of death.”

  Sloane grabbed my phone and dialed a number from memory. When no one answered, she called again. And again. And again.

  “What?” Irritation made Briggs’s voice loud enough that I could hear it from a distance.

  “It’s considered impolite to talk above seventy-five decibels,” Sloane sniffed. “I believe it’s called shouting.”

  I couldn’t hear Briggs’s reply.

  “Is the autopsy in on Emerson Cole?” Sloane held the phone to her ear with her shoulder and used her free hands to pull her hair out of its ponytail and refasten it. “We need time of death. Cause of death would also be helpful.”

  I was fairly certain Briggs wouldn’t want to part with that information. There was quite a bit of distance between profiling college students on social media and being read in to the nitty-gritty of a classified autopsy.

  “You’re at seventy-eight decibels,” Sloane said, unfazed by Briggs’s objections. “And we still need time of death.” She paused again. “Because,” Sloane said, drawing out the word as if she were talking to a very small, very slow child, “we’re sitting here looking at a video that was taken at 7:34 that morning. If I’m remembering the campus maps correctly—and you know I am—Davies Auditorium is a twenty-five-minute walk and a ten-minute drive from the president’s house. Which means that if the death of Emerson Cole (a) required the UNSUB’s presence and (b) took place after 7:25 A.M. and before the end of that test, then every single student in that class has an alibi.”

  Sloane was quiet for longer this time. Then she hung up the phone.

  “What did he say?” Michael asked her.

  Sloane closed her laptop and pushed it away. “He said that the body was found at 8:15 that morning. Time of death was estimated at 7:55.”

  The time stamp on the video was verified. It was official: Emerson Cole had been strangled to death while the students in Professor Fogle’s class were in Davies Auditorium, taking their midterm.

  The FBI tracked the video back to our good friend TA Geoff, who explained that it was Professor Fogle’s policy to have a video record of tests to discourage ringers from taking it on another student’s behalf. The full-length video also included close-ups of each student as they turned in their tests. Each and every one of our 307 potential suspects—308 if you counted Geoffrey—was present and accounted for.

  As far as alibis went, this one was ironclad.

  “I told Briggs he should have let me watch the interview with Daniel Redding.” Lia slammed the door to the freezer and then took her frustration out on the silverware drawer. She banged it open, sending the contents rattling. “We’ve been chasing a nonexistent lead because nobody will let me tell them when that soulless, Machiavellian piece of…”

  Lia had several colorful ways of describing Dean’s father. I didn’t disagree with any of them. I slid in front of her and withdrew two spoons from the silverware drawer. I held one out to her. After a long moment, she took it. Then she eyed the spoon in my hand suspiciously.

  “You’re sharing the ice cream,” I told her. She twirled the spoon back and forth in her fingers, and I wondered if she was planning my demise.

  “Dean’s not talking to me, either,” I told her. “And I’m just as frustrated as you are. Everything we’ve done—everything we tried to do—it was for nothing. The UNSUB isn’t in that class. It doesn’t matter that Geoffrey has minimal empathy and a fascination with the dark side, or that Clark had a thing for Emerson and a lot of pent-up rage. None of it matters, because neither of them killed Emerson.”

  The one thing the FBI had allowed us to do was a wild-goose chase, courtesy of Dean’s psychotic father. And I couldn’t help feeling so stupid for thinking that we could just waltz onto a college campus or look at some internet profiles and find a killer. Dean was still furious with us, and we had nothing to show for it.

  “Lia—”

  “All right, already,” Lia said, cutting me off. “Enough with the bonding, Cassie. I’ll share the ice cream, but we’re eating it somewhere else. I’m not in the mood to play well with others, and the next person who asks me to share something dies a slow, painful death.”

  “Fair enough.” I cast a glance around the kitchen. “You have someplace in mind?”

  At first, I thought Lia was leading me to her bedroom, but once she shut the door behind us, I realized that wasn’t her endgame. She shoved open her window and, with one last wicked glance over her shoulder, climbed out onto the roof.

  Great, I thought. I stuck my head out the window just in time to see her disappear around a corner. I hesitated for a split second, then climbed carefully out the window myself. The roof’s slope was gentle outside of Lia’s room, but I kept a hand on the side of the house anyway. I edged my way toward the corner I’d seen Lia take. When I’d made the turn, I let out a heavy breath.

  The roof flattened out. Lia was sitting with her back up against the siding, her mile-long legs stretched out nearly to the edge of the gutter. Watching my step, I made my way toward her and slid into a sitting position myself. Wordlessly, Lia tilted the carton of rocky road toward me.

  I dug my spoon into the ice cream and gouged out a hefty spoonful.

  Lia delicately arched one brow. “Someone’s courting an ice cream headache.”

  I nibbled a bite off the end of my spoon. “We should have brought bowls.”

  “There’re a lot of things we should have done.” Lia sat perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the horizon. The sun was just now setting, but I got the distinct feeling that if I hadn’t been with her, she would have stayed out here all night, two stories off the ground, her feet brushing up against the edge. She was a person who hated being boxed in. She hated being trapped. She always had an exit strategy.

  She just hadn’t needed one in a very long time.

  “Dean will get over it.” I said that instead of the other things I was thinking—about exit strategies and Lia’s childhood and the way that she had, in all likelihood, learned
to lie. “He can’t stay mad at us forever,” I continued. “We were just trying to help.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Lia finally turned her head toward mine, her dark eyes gleaming with tears she would never let herself shed. “Dean doesn’t get mad. He doesn’t let himself. So if we went to talk to him right now, he wouldn’t be angry with us. He wouldn’t be anything. That’s what he does. He shuts down, and he shuts people out, and that’s fine. I get it. Of all people, I do.” Lia closed her eyes and clamped her lips together. She took several ragged breaths and then opened them again. “But he doesn’t shut me out.”

  Dean knew Lia better than any of us, and that meant that he knew exactly what shutting her out would do. He knew that he was the one person she trusted, that their relationship was the one thing that kept her from feeling trapped all the time. Michael’s defense mechanism growing up had been to recognize anger, and if he couldn’t defuse it, to provoke it. Lia’s had been to bury herself away under so many layers of deception that whatever anyone else did to her, they couldn’t really hurt her, because they couldn’t touch the real girl.

  Dean was the exception.

  “When I came here, it was just Dean and Judd and me.” Lia abandoned her spoon in the carton and leaned back on the heels of her hands. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this, but for once, I knew in my gut that everything she was telling me was true. “I was ready to hate him. I’m good at hating people, but Dean never pressed. He never asked me a single question that I didn’t want to answer. One night after I’d been here a couple of months, I went to sneak out. Running away is something I’m good at.”

  I filed that away under the growing list of things I knew about Lia’s past.

  “Dean caught me. He said that if I was going, he was going with me. I called his bluff, but it turned out, he wasn’t bluffing. I ran away. He followed. We were gone for three days. I’d lived on the streets before, but he hadn’t. He stayed up nights so I could sleep. Sometimes I’d wake up and I’d see him keeping watch. He never looked at me the way most guys look at me. He was watching out for me, not watching me.” She paused. “He never asked for a thing in return.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  Lia’s smile was brittle. “No,” she agreed. “He wouldn’t. The last day before we came back, he told me about his dad, about how he’d come to be here, about Briggs. Dean is the only person I’ve ever known who’s never lied to me.”

  And now he wasn’t talking to her at all.

  “Agent Sterling was one of his father’s victims,” I said softly. Lia’s eyes flew to mine. From the sharp intake of breath that followed, I knew that she’d recognized my words as the truth and didn’t know how to handle it.

  Telling Lia didn’t feel like betraying Dean. She was his family. She’d opened up to me in a way that Lia didn’t open up to people, and that told me how badly she needed to know that he wasn’t shutting her out just because she’d screwed up. Dean’s life was a minefield right now.

  “Sterling has a brand, right here.” I held my fingertips to my chest. “She got away somehow. I think Dean helped her escape.”

  Lia digested that information, her face unreadable. “And now, she’s back,” she said finally, her eyes fixed on a place in the distance. “And all Dean can think is that he didn’t help her enough.”

  I nodded. “Then Emerson Cole turns up dead, and Dean ends up in an interrogation room with his father.” I leaned back, allowing my head to clunk lightly against the side of the house. “Going into that room, listening to what Daniel Redding had to say, that’s what made Dean shut down. It was like someone had drained his soul from his body. Then Agent Sterling lets him know that we went digging on our own—”

  “Which you let slip,” Lia interjected.

  “Sterling already knew that I’d snuck out,” I told her. “And besides, I didn’t tell her what we did. I didn’t even tell her you were there. I just told her what we learned.”

  “None of which even matters,” Lia cut in, “because every student in that class—not to mention the TA—has an ironclad alibi. And instead of using us, the way they should, the FBI, in all their glorious wisdom, leaves us locked up here, where we can’t do anything to solve the case or to help Dean.” Lia wound a thick strand of jet-black hair around her finger. “And here’s our favorite person now.”

  I followed Lia’s gaze. A dark car had pulled into the driveway. Agent Sterling got out.

  “Where do you suppose she’s been?” Lia asked me.

  Sterling had stopped by the house earlier, just long enough to pick up the students’ files, then she’d left. I’d assumed she’d gone back to meet Briggs, but he wasn’t with her now.

  The passenger side of Sterling’s car opened, and the director climbed out. The two of them had the look of people who had just endured a very tense, very silent car ride.

  “Think he’s back to see us?” I asked, lowering my voice, even though they were far enough away that I wasn’t sure I needed to.

  Lia clapped a hand over my mouth and pulled me back so that we were partially obscured from view. Her eyes narrowed. I nodded, to show that I understood, and a moment later, I discovered why Lia was so fond of the roof.

  The acoustics were excellent.

  “You’re welcome to borrow the car to see yourself home,” Agent Sterling said. She was using her interrogator’s voice, implacable and even-keeled.

  “I asked you to drive me here,” the director returned. His voice was baritone, just as unruffled as hers. “I’d like to talk to the boy.”

  “You don’t need to talk to Dean.”

  “I think you’re forgetting which one of us is the director here, Agent.”

  “And I think you’re forgetting that after the Locke debacle, I wasn’t the only one asking questions.” She paused, waiting for those words to hit their target. “I have contacts at National Intelligence. People in Washington are talking. What do you think would happen if it got out that the FBI was consulting with Redding’s teenage son on this case?”

  “This is the one case for which exposure isn’t a concern.” The director’s tone never changed. “The FBI would be talking to the boy on this case whether he was working for us or not. If the director of National Intelligence asks—and he won’t—it would be easy enough to explain. Redding’s son was there the first time around. He knows the ins and outs of Redding’s psyche better than anyone—including you.”

  “I agreed to come here and evaluate this program because you said that reporting the Naturals program to Washington would be a mistake.” A tiny hint of emotion crept into Agent Sterling’s voice, though whether it was frustration or something else, I couldn’t tell. “You told me that I needed to see it myself to understand exactly what I would be shutting down.”

  I’d wondered why the director would send his daughter here, knowing she thought this program was a mistake, and now I knew.

  “You listened to me then,” the director countered calmly. “You could have filed that report, and you didn’t.”

  “Like you left me any choice!”

  “I did nothing but tell you the truth.” The director looked down at his watch, as if to mark exactly how much time he was wasting on this conversation. “This program is the only thing keeping that boy from the edge. You think he’d fare better in foster care? Or maybe you’d like me to send Lia Zhang back onto the streets? She’d get caught again eventually, and this time, I guarantee you she’d end up getting tried as an adult.”

  I felt Lia stiffen beside me.

  “You wanted me to come here,” Sterling said, gritting out the words. “I came here. But when I did, you promised that you would listen to my recommendations.”

  “If you were being reasonable, I would listen. But keeping Dean Redding away from this case isn’t reasonable.” The director gave her a moment to reply to that, and when she didn’t, he continued. “You can stand there and tell me how wrong this program is, but inside, you want to shut down this killer j
ust as badly as I do. It’s everything you can do not to use the Naturals to do it, and sooner or later, you’ll forget all about your principles. You’ll be the one telling me we need to cross that line.”

  I expected Sterling to tell him he was wrong. She didn’t. “Of course I want to use them!” she shot back. “But this isn’t about me. Or you. Or the Bureau. This is about the five teenagers who live in that house. Five actual people whose only protection is rules that you put in place and then break, again and again. You’re the one who let Cassie Hobbes work on the Locke case. You’re the one who insisted we bring Dean to talk to Redding. You’re making rules and breaking them, sending mixed messages—”

  “That’s not what this is about,” the director broke in. Unlike his daughter’s voice, his remained completely impassive. “You’re not upset about whatever messages you think I’m sending. Five years later, you’re still upset that I sided with your husband on this program instead of with you.”

  “Ex-husband.”

  “You left him. You left the FBI.”

  “Go ahead and say it, Dad. I left you.”

  “Do you know what kind of position that put me in, Veronica? How am I supposed to command the loyalty of the entire Bureau when my own daughter couldn’t be bothered to stick around? After the incident with the Hawkins girl on the Nightshade case, morale was low. We needed to present a united front.”

  Agent Sterling turned her back on her father, and when she turned back around, the words shot out of her like bullets from a gun. “Her name was Scarlett, and it wasn’t an incident. A psychopath snuck into our labs and murdered one of our people. Tanner and I both had something to prove—” She cut herself off, breathing in raggedly. “I left the Bureau because I didn’t belong there.”

  “But you came back,” the director said. “Not for me. You came back for the boy. What Redding did to you, what happened to Scarlett on the Nightshade case—it’s all tied up in your mind. You couldn’t save her, so you’ve decided to save him.”