The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  “I didn’t see any guns.”

  Agent Sterling’s phone buzzed, and she held up her hand, effectively putting me on hold.

  “Sterling.” She answered the phone with her name. Whatever the person on the other end of the phone had to say, it wasn’t good news. She was like a spring that had been coiled tight, every muscle tense. “You’re kidding me. When?” Sterling was silent for long enough to make me think that “when” wasn’t the only question being answered. “I can be on the road in five.”

  She ended the call abruptly.

  “Bad news?” I asked.

  “Dead body.”

  Those words were probably meant as a conversation ender, but I had to ask. “Our UNSUB?”

  Sterling tightened her hand around her phone.

  “Is this the point where you tell me to stay out of it?” I asked.

  Sterling closed her eyes and took a deep breath before opening them again. “The victim is Trina Simms, and neighbors heard screaming and called 911 while her son Christopher was at the police station with Briggs.” Sterling ran a hand through her hair. “So, yes, this is where I tell you to stay out of it.”

  Whether she’d wanted to or not, she’d listened to what I had to say about Christopher. Hearing from Briggs had been like a splash of cold water in her face.

  I was wrong, I thought. The bits and pieces I’d picked up from my visit to Broken Springs—none of that mattered now. Trina was dead, and Christopher had been with Briggs when it happened.

  He’s just a guy. A guy with a dark truck and a mother who is a real piece of work. Who was a piece of work.

  I pictured Trina, who thought my shoes were precious and that Daniel Redding would be released from prison on an appeal.

  “Does Dean’s dad have any open appeals?” I asked.

  Agent Sterling didn’t bat an eye at the change of subject. “None.” She walked over to Briggs’s desk and pulled something out of one of the drawers. She shut the drawer and walked back to me. “Put your foot on the couch,” she ordered.

  That was when I remembered. 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.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?” Sterling asked. She looked like Judd had when we’d arrived back at the house. “I made you a promise,” she told me, “and I always keep my promises.” I didn’t move, and she knelt down and clipped the tracker in place. “If you leave the yard, I’ll know it. If you try to remove the tracker, I’ll know it. If you violate the perimeter set into this anklet, a silent alarm will go off, sending a text directly to my phone and directly to Briggs’s. The GPS in this anklet will allow us to pinpoint your location, and I will drag you back here kicking and screaming.”

  She stood back up. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t force out an objection.

  “You have good instincts,” Sterling told me. “You have a good eye. Someday, you could be a very good agent.”

  The tracker was lighter than it looked, but the added weight, however slight, made my entire body feel heavy. Knowing I couldn’t leave, knowing that I couldn’t do anything—I hated it. I felt useless and weak and very, very young.

  Sterling stood up. “But that day, Cassandra, is not today.”

  YOU

  You can picture Trina Simms’s last moments perfectly in your mind. In fact, now that the deed is done, you can’t stop picturing it, over and over again.

  Hands bound together. Plastic biting into fleshy wrists. Knife. Blood.

  Your brain re-creates the moment in bright, Technicolor detail. Her skin isn’t unblemished. It isn’t smooth. The brand sinks in, in, in….

  Burning flesh smells the same whether or not it’s supple, whether or not it’s young. Just thinking about the brand sinking in, you can smell it. With each breath, you picture—

  Rope around her neck. Dull, lifeless eyes.

  Trina Simms was always shrill, deluded, demanding. She’s not so demanding now.

  Every lead we’d managed to turn up in this case had ended with a brick wall. We’d discovered that Emerson was having an affair with her professor, and then he’d turned up just as dead as she was. We’d sifted through the students’ internet profiles only to find that every single one of them had an alibi. Michael, Dean, and I had gone to talk to Trina Simms. We’d been able to rule her out as a suspect, but hadn’t realized that the killer had her in his sights.

  If my instincts are so good, I wondered, then why didn’t I see this coming? Why was I so focused on Christopher Simms?

  I was supposed to be a Natural. I was supposed to be good at this. Yeah, right. So good that I hadn’t realized Locke was a killer. So good that for all I knew, while I’d been profiling Christopher and talking myself into suspicions, the UNSUB might have been lurking nearby, just waiting for us to leave.

  Nothing we’d done on this case had turned out the way it was supposed to, and now I’d been put on an electronic leash. Like a criminal.

  “As far as accessories go, it leaves something to be desired.” Lia’s response to the tracker secured around my ankle was predictably blasé. “Although that exact shade of black plastic does bring out the color of your eyes.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Cranky, cranky.” Lia waggled a finger at me. I smacked her hand away. “You have to admit that it’s deliciously ironic,” she said, stowing her waggling finger safely away.

  I didn’t have to admit anything.

  “Of all of us,” Lia continued, “you’re the least likely to be arrested. In fact, you might be the only one of us who hasn’t been arrested. And yet…” She gestured toward my ankle.

  “Yuk it up,” I told her. “You might be next. Agent Sterling probably orders these things in bulk.”

  “Bit of a double standard, don’t you think? The boys sneak out and get sentenced to each other’s company. You sneak out, and—”

  “Enough,” I told Lia. “Sitting around and talking about it isn’t going to change anything. Besides, this isn’t our biggest problem.”

  Somebody still had to tell Dean what had happened to Trina Simms.

  “We went to see her, and now she’s dead.” Dean summarized the entire situation in a single sentence.

  “Temporal proximity doesn’t imply causation,” Sloane said, patting him on the shoulder—the Sloane version of a comforting there, there.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Michael cut in. The five of us were gathered in the room the boys were now—apparently—sharing. Michael leaned back against the doorjamb and crossed one ankle over the other. “Was Trina already in the killer’s sights, or did our visit somehow set the UNSUB off?”

  Dean considered the question. “Emerson’s murder was fairly well-planned.” Flipping into profiler mode kept him from getting dragged back under to the dark place, but even when Dean was trying to distance himself from what had happened, he never stopped referring to Emerson by name. “The presentation of her corpse was precise. Based on our interactions with Sterling and Briggs over the last few days, I’m guessing they don’t have much in the way of physical evidence. We’re looking at someone with a high level of attention to detail—all of which suggests that our killer would be methodical in selecting his victims.”

  I closed my eyes and willed the tangled mass of thoughts in my mind to sort themselves out. “If the UNSUB is doing this because he identifies with Daniel Redding,” I said, working through the logic as I spoke, “it makes sense that he would seek out someone who actually knows Redding for victim number two.”

  “Victim number three,” Sloane reminded me. “You forgot the professor.”

  She was right. I’d left out the professor, because even though Briggs and Sterling hadn’t said a single thing about how he’d died, my gut didn’t believe that the UNSUB had tortured the professor the way he’d tortured the females. Daniel Redding’s original victims had all been female. Binding the women,
branding them—that was about ownership. An UNSUB who identified with the method and brutality of this particular MO wouldn’t relish the death of an older male the same way. The women were the main event; Fogle was just in the way.

  Some things you do because you want to, I thought, and some things you do because you need to.

  Dean didn’t say anything about my omission of the professor from the victim list. He had tunnel vision of his own. “Emerson was twenty years old, blond, friendly, and well-liked by her classmates. Trina was in her late forties, brunette, neurotic, and based on her reaction to having visitors, socially isolated, except for two people: my father and her son.”

  Most killers had a type. What did Trina Simms and Emerson Cole have in common?

  “Emerson’s young. She’s pretty.” Dean’s voice took on an odd hum. “She’s sleeping with a man who fancies himself an expert on Daniel Redding. Maybe that’s why I chose her.”

  When I profiled an UNSUB, I used the word you. When Dean profiled killers, he said I.

  “Or maybe,” Dean said, his lids heavy, his eyes nearly closed, “I chose a girl who wouldn’t sleep with me, and then one who was sleeping with the man I’m emulating.” Dean’s voice was eerily reflective. I could feel him sinking deeper and deeper into the possibilities. “If Redding weren’t in prison, he would have killed Trina Simms himself. He would have sliced her up and strung her up and laughed every time she screamed.”

  Dean opened his eyes. For a few seconds, I wasn’t sure if he was seeing us—any of us. I had no idea what he was thinking, but I knew somehow that something had changed—the air in the room, the look on his face.

  “Dean?” I said.

  He reached for the phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Lia asked.

  Dean barely looked up. “Briggs.”

  By the time Briggs answered the phone, Dean was pacing. “It’s me,” he said. Briggs started to say something back, but Dean cut him off. “I know you’re at a crime scene. That’s why I’m calling. I need you to look for something. I don’t know what, not exactly.” Dean sat down. It was the only way he could stop pacing. “Yell at me later, Briggs. Right now, I need to know if there’s anything other than doilies and porcelain figures on the end tables or the coffee table at the Simms house.” Dean rested his forearm on his knees and pressed his head into his arm. “Just look and tell me what you see.”

  Silence fell over the room for a minute, maybe more. Lia sent me a questioning look, but I shook my head. I was just as clueless about what was going on as she was. One second, he was profiling our UNSUB, and the next, he was on the phone, barking out orders.

  “Nothing?” Dean said. He exhaled and sat up. “No baseball cards or Matchbox cars or fishing lures.” Dean seemed to be trying to convince himself, more than anything else. “No books. No games.” Dean nodded in response to some query the rest of us couldn’t hear, then seemed to realize that Briggs wouldn’t be able to see the nod. “No. I’m fine. I just had a thought. It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.” I could see Dean trying to stop there, trying not to say anything else. He failed. “Can you look in her pockets?”

  Another long silence. But this time, I saw the exact moment when Briggs replied. Dean’s body went rigid. No more nervous energy. No more questions.

  “Well, that’s not good,” Michael murmured beside me.

  “We have a problem.” Dean’s voice was stiff, his posture the same. “I don’t think our UNSUB is a copycat.” He paused, then forced out a clarification. “I think my father has a partner.”

  Briggs and Sterling arrived back at the house late that night. None of us were asleep. We’d gathered in the kitchen, first to eat and then to wait. Around midnight, Judd had come in to chase us all to bed, but he’d ended up putting on a pot of coffee instead. By the time Agents Briggs and Sterling pushed open the door to the kitchen to see us crowded around the table, Sloane was just starting to wind down. The rest of us were silent—and had been for most of the night.

  “Contents of Trina Simms’s pockets.” Briggs threw a clear plastic bag lightly down onto the table in front of us. Inside the bag was a single playing card—the king of spades.

  “I wanted to be wrong.” That was all Dean said at first. He slid the evidence bag to the edge of the table, but didn’t pick it up. “I should have been wrong.”

  “What put the idea in your head?” Agent Sterling sounded hoarse. I wondered if she and Briggs had spent the evening yelling orders at people, or if finding out that the man who had kidnapped and tortured her now had a partner on the outside had taken a toll.

  “I was profiling our UNSUB.” Dean wasn’t hoarse. He spoke in slow, even tones, his fingers playing with the edge of the card through the plastic. “I thought our guy might have targeted Trina Simms because if my father weren’t in prison, he would have killed her himself. It made sense, the UNSUB’s believing that killing Trina was a step toward becoming my father. But then”—Dean pulled his hand back from the card—”I thought about the fact that we’d gone to see her, Cassie and Michael and me.”

  I wasn’t sure why that made a difference, why our visit had taken Dean from thinking that this was a copycat to thinking his father was involved, but he spelled it out for us, in brutal, uncompromising terms.

  “I met her. I didn’t like her. She died.”

  Like Gloria, the woman that Daniel Redding had introduced to his young son. I told him I didn’t want a new mother. And he looked at Gloria and said, “That’s a shame.”

  “I wanted that to be a coincidence,” Dean continued. His hands folded themselves into fists in his lap, his fingernails digging into the palms of his hands. “But then I thought about the fact that when I was in the interrogation room with my father, he knew where to look for the professor.” Dean shrugged. “That made sense. The professor had interviewed him multiple times. He was writing a book. Of course he might have mentioned his writing cabin.” Dean turned to address the next words to Agent Briggs. “We should have known.”

  Lia picked up Dean’s train of thought. “He told you the truth about the professor’s location, but not the whole truth. That’s what he does. He deals in technicalities and half-truths and seemingly white lies.”

  Dean didn’t turn to look at Lia, but underneath the table, I saw his hand find its way briefly to hers. She grabbed hold of his and squeezed, hard enough that I wasn’t sure she’d ever let go.

  “I always knew that he was messing with our minds,” Dean said. “I knew that he was manipulating us, but I should have at least considered the possibility that he was pulling our UNSUB’s strings as well. People are just puppets to him, players on his stage.”

  “You told Briggs to look in the victim’s pocket.” I tried to get Dean to focus on specifics. Talking about concrete details was the only thing I could think of to help him keep the big picture at bay. “How did you know there would be something there?”

  “I didn’t.” Dean lifted his eyes to mine. “But I did know that if my father was involved, if Trina died because I went to see her, he’d want me to know.”

  He’d want to send a message. That Dean was his. That Dean had always been his. He wasn’t his mother’s. He didn’t belong to the FBI. He didn’t even belong to himself. That was the message that Daniel Redding had sent his son, all with one little card.

  “It’s not just for you, Dean.” Agent Sterling had been remarkably quiet this whole time. “It’s for us, too—Briggs and me. He wants us to know that we’re playing his game.” Her lips pulled back, halfway between a grimace and a hard-edged smile. “He wants us to know that he’s winning.”

  She pressed her lips together, then bared her teeth. “We should have seen it.” The words that Agent Sterling had been holding back this entire conversation burst out of her mouth. “I should have seen it. The first murder showed all the hallmarks of an organized killer—the planning, the lack of physical evidence, the supplies the UNSUB brought to the scene. But there were things th
at didn’t fit. The use of the car antenna to strangle the girl. The fact that the UNSUB attacked from behind. Dumping the body in a public location. That’s impulsiveness, deviation from a set plan, and signs of self-confidence issues.” Sterling blew out a long breath, willing her temper to dispel. “Organized. Disorganized. When a crime scene has the hallmarks of both, you’re either dealing with an inexperienced UNSUB who’s refining his technique—or you’re dealing with two UNSUBs.”

  Dean let out a breath of his own. “A dominant, who makes the plans, and a subordinate, who helps carry it out.”

  Agent Sterling had put the UNSUB’s age between twenty-three and twenty-eight, but she’d worked those numbers out based on the assumption that the UNSUB was acting alone. Factoring Redding into the equation changed things. It was still a safe bet that our UNSUB idolized Redding, that he longed for power and authority and control. The lack of a father figure in the UNSUB’s adolescent years was still probably right on target. But if that was the role Redding was playing for the UNSUB, what was Dean’s father looking to get out of it?

  The same thing Locke wanted from me.

  Suddenly, I was back at the safe house. Dean was lying unconscious on the floor. Michael had been shot. And Locke wanted—desperately, madly—for me to take the knife. She’d wanted me to be like her. She’d wanted me to be hers. At least she’d seen me as a person. To Daniel Redding, Dean was a thing. A marvelous creation, purely his, body and soul.

  Maybe Redding was looking to re-create that with our UNSUB. Or maybe this whole case had just been a way to remind his wayward son who was in charge, to force Dean to come and see him, face-to-face.

  “We should adjust the lower end of the age range for our UNSUB.” I sounded calm, the way I always did when this part of my brain took over, converting even the most horrifying and personal situations into a puzzle to be solved. “To seventeen.”