The Naturals Read online

  Maybe he wasn’t the special agent.

  So that makes him what? The messenger?

  I didn’t have an answer, but the words scrawled across the bottom of the card stood out to me, every bit as much as Special Agent Tanner Briggs’s PLEASE CALL.

  If I were you, I wouldn’t.

  YOU

  You’re good at waiting. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for the right girl. You have her now, and still, you’re waiting. Waiting for her to wake up. Waiting for her to open those eyes and see you.

  Waiting for her to scream.

  And scream.

  And scream.

  And realize that no one can hear her but you.

  You know how this will go, how she’ll be angry, then scared, then swear up and down that if you let her go, she won’t tell a soul. She’ll lie to you, and she’ll try to manipulate you, and you’ll have to show her—the way you’ve showed so many others—how that just won’t do.

  But not yet. Right now, she’s still sleeping. Beautiful—but not as beautiful as she will be when you’re done.

  CHAPTER 3

  It took me two days, but I called the number. Of course I did, because even though there was a 99 percent chance this was some kind of hoax, there was a 1 percent chance that it wasn’t.

  I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until someone picked up.

  “This is Briggs.”

  I couldn’t pinpoint what was more disarming—the fact that this “Agent Briggs” had apparently given me the number to his direct line or the way he answered the phone, like saying “hello” would have been a waste of breath.

  “Hello?” As if he could read my mind, Special Agent Tanner Briggs spoke again. “Anyone there?”

  “This is Cassandra Hobbes,” I said. “Cassie.”

  “Cassie.” Something about the way Agent Briggs said my name made me think that he’d known before I’d said a single word that I didn’t go by my full name. “I’m glad you called.”

  He waited for me to say something else, but I stayed silent. Everything you said or did was a data point you put out there in the world, and I didn’t want to give this man any more information than I had to—not until I knew what he wanted from me.

  “I’m sure you must be wondering why I contacted you—why I had Michael contact you.”

  Michael. So now the boy from the diner had a name.

  “I have an offer I’d like you to consider.”

  “An offer?” It amazed me that my voice stayed every bit as calm and even as his.

  “I believe this is a conversation best had in person, Ms. Hobbes. Is there somewhere you would be comfortable meeting?”

  He knew what he was doing—letting me pick the location, because if he’d specified one, I might not have gone. I probably should have refused to meet with him anyway, but I couldn’t, for the same reason that I’d had to pick up the phone and call.

  Five years was a long time to go without a body. Without answers.

  “Do you have an office?” I asked.

  The slight pause on the other end of the phone told me that wasn’t what he’d expected me to say. I could have asked him to meet me at the diner or a coffee shop near the high school or anywhere that I would have had the home court advantage, but I’d been taught to believe that there was no home court advantage.

  You could tell more about a stranger by seeing their house than you ever would by inviting them to yours.

  Besides, if this guy wasn’t really an FBI agent, if he was some kind of pervert and this was some kind of game, I figured he’d probably have a heck of a time arranging a meeting at the local FBI office.

  “I don’t actually work out of Denver,” he said finally. “But I’m sure I can set something up.”

  Probably not a pervert, then.

  He gave me an address. I gave him a time.

  “And Cassandra?”

  I wondered what Agent Briggs hoped to accomplish by using my full first name. “Yes?”

  “This isn’t about your mother.”

  — — —

  I went to the meeting anyway. Of course I did. Special Agent Tanner Briggs knew enough about me to know that my mother’s case was the reason I’d followed the instructions on the card and called. I wanted to know how he’d come by that information, if he’d looked at her police file, if he would look at her file, provided I gave him whatever it was he wanted from me.

  I wanted to know why Special Agent Tanner Briggs had made it his business to know about me, the same way a man shopping for a new computer might have memorized the specs of the model that had caught his eye.

  “What floor?” The woman beside me in the elevator was in her early sixties. Her silvery blond hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck, and the suit she was wearing was perfectly tailored.

  All business, just like Special Agent Tanner Briggs.

  “Fifth floor,” I said. “Please.”

  With nervous energy to burn, I snuck another glance at the woman and started piecing my way through her life story, as told by the way she was standing, her clothes, the faint accent in her speech, the clear coat of polish on her nails.

  She was married.

  No kids.

  When she’d started in the FBI, it had been a boy’s club.

  Behavior. Personality. Environment. I could practically hear my mother coaching me through this impromptu analysis.

  “Fifth floor.” The woman’s words were brisk, and I added another entry to my mental column—impatient.

  Obligingly, I stepped out of the elevator. The door closed behind me, and I appraised my surroundings. It looked so … normal. If it hadn’t been for the security checkpoint out front and the visitor’s badge pinned to my faded black sundress, I never would have pegged this for a place devoted to fighting federal crime.

  “So, what? You were expecting a dog-and-pony show?”

  I recognized the voice instantly. The boy from the diner. Michael. He sounded amused, and when I turned to face him, there was a familiar smirk dancing its way through his features, one that he probably could have suppressed if he’d had the least inclination to try.

  “I wasn’t expecting anything,” I told him. “I have no expectations.”

  He gave me a knowing look. “No expectations, no disappointments.”

  I couldn’t tell if that was his appraisal of my current mental state or the motto by which he lived his own life. In fact, I was having trouble getting any handle on his personality at all. He’d traded his striped polo for a formfitting black T-shirt and his jeans for khaki slacks. He looked as out of place here as he had at the diner, like maybe that was the point.

  “You know,” he said conversationally, “I knew you’d come.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “Even though you told me not to?”

  He shrugged. “My inner Boy Scout had to try.”

  If this guy had an inner Boy Scout, I had an inner flamingo.

  “So, are you here to take me to Special Agent Tanner Briggs?” I asked. The words came out curtly, but at least I didn’t sound fascinated, infatuated, or even the least bit drawn to the sound of his voice.

  “Hmmmmm.” In response to my question, Michael made a noncommittal noise under his breath and inclined his head—as close to a yes as I was going to get. He led me around the bull pen and down a hallway. Neutral carpet, neutral walls, a neutral expression on his criminally handsome face.

  “So what does Briggs have on you?” Michael asked. I could feel him watching me, looking for a surge of emotion—any emotion—to tell him if his question had hit a nerve.

  It hadn’t.

  “You want me to be nervous about this,” I told him, because that much was clear from his words. “And you told me not to come.”

  He smiled, but there was a hard glint to it, an edge. “I guess you could say I’m contrary.”

  I snorted. That was one word for it.

  “Are you going to give me even a hint of w
hat’s going on here?” I asked as we neared the end of the hall.

  He shrugged. “That depends. Are you going to stop playing Who’s Got the Best Poker Face with me?”

  That surprised a laugh out of me, and I realized that it had been a long time since I’d laughed because I couldn’t help it and not because someone else was laughing, too.

  Michael’s smile lost its edge, and for a second, the expression utterly changed his face. If he’d been handsome before, he was beautiful now—but it didn’t last. As quickly as the lightness had come, it faded.

  “I meant what I wrote on that card,” he said softly. He nodded to a closed office door to our right. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go in there.”

  I knew then—the way I always knew things—that Michael had been in my shoes once and that he had opened the door. His warning was genuine, but I opened it, too.

  “Ms. Hobbes. Please, come in.”

  With one last glance at Michael, I stepped into the room.

  “Au revoir,” the boy with the excellent poker face said, punctuating the words with an exaggerated flick of his fingers.

  Special Agent Tanner Briggs cleared his throat. The door closed behind me. For better or worse, I was here to meet with an FBI agent. Alone.

  “I’m glad you came, Cassie. Take a seat.”

  Agent Briggs was younger than I’d expected based on his phone voice. The gears in my brain turned slowly, incorporating his age into what I knew. An older man who took pains to appear businesslike was guarded. A twenty-nine-year-old who did the same wanted to be taken seriously.

  There was a difference.

  Obediently, I took a seat. Agent Briggs stayed in his chair, but leaned forward. The desk between us was clean, but for a stack of papers and two pens, one of which was missing its cap.

  He wasn’t naturally neat, then. For some reason, I found that comforting. He was ambitious, but not inflexible.

  “Are you finished?” he asked me. His voice wasn’t curt. If anything, he sounded genuinely curious.

  “Finished with what?” I asked him.

  “Analyzing me,” he said. “I’ve only been in this office for two hours. I couldn’t even guess what it is that has caught your attention, but I figured something would. With Naturals, something almost always does.”

  Naturals. He said the word like he was expecting me to repeat it with a question mark in my tone. I didn’t say anything. The less I gave him, the more he’d show me.

  “You’re good at reading people, at taking little details and figuring out the big picture: who they are, what they want, how they operate.” He smiled. “What kind of eggs they like.”

  “You invited me here because I’m good at guessing what kind of eggs people like?” I asked, unable to keep the incredulousness out of my voice.

  He drummed his fingers over the desktop. “I asked you here because you have a natural aptitude for something that most people could spend a lifetime trying to learn.”

  I wondered if when he said most people he was referring at least in part to himself.

  He took my continued silence as some kind of argument. “Are you telling me that you don’t read people? That you can’t tell me right now whether I’d rather play basketball or golf?”

  Basketball. But he’d want people to think the answer was golf.

  “You could try to explain to me how you figure things out, how you figure people out, Cassie, but the difference between you and the rest of the world is that to explain how you just figured out that I’d rather get a bloody nose on the basketball court than tee off with the boss, you’d have to backtrack. You’d have to sort out what the clues were and how you’d made sense of them, because you just do it. You don’t even have to think about it, not the way that I would, not the way that my team would. You probably couldn’t stop yourself if you tried.”

  I hadn’t ever talked about this, not even with Mom, who’d taught me the parts of it that could be taught. People were people, but for better or worse, most days, they were just puzzles to me. Easy puzzles, hard puzzles, crosswords, mind-benders, sudoku. There was always an answer, and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing until I found it.

  “How do you know any of this?” I asked the man in front of me. “And even if it’s true, even if I do have really good instincts about people, what’s it to you?”

  He leaned forward. “I know because I make it my business to know. Because I’m the one who convinced the FBI that they need to be looking for people like you.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  He eased back in his chair. “What do you think I want with you, Cassie?”

  My mouth went dry. “I’m seventeen.”

  “Natural aptitudes, like yours, peak in the teen years. Formal education, college, the wrong influences, could all interfere with the incredible raw potential you have now.” He folded his hands neatly in front of him. “I want to see to it that you have the right influences, that your gift is molded into something extraordinary, something that you can use to do an incredible amount of good in this world.”

  Part of me wanted to laugh at him, to walk out of the room, to forget that any of this had ever happened, but the other part just kept thinking that for five years, I’d been living in limbo, like I was waiting for something without knowing what that something was.

  “You can take as much time as you need to think about it, Cassie, but what I’m offering you is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Our program is one of a kind, and it has the potential to turn Naturals—people like you—into something truly extraordinary.”

  “People like me,” I repeated, my mind going ninety miles an hour. “And Michael.”

  The second part was a guess, but not much of one. In the two minutes we’d spent walking to this office, Michael had come closer to figuring out what was going on inside my head than anyone I’d ever met.

  “And Michael.” As he spoke, Agent Briggs’s face became more animated. Gone was the hardened professional. This was personal. This program was something he believed in.

  And he had something to prove.

  “What would becoming a part of this program entail?” I asked, measuring his response. The enthusiasm on his face morphed into something far more intense. His eyes bored into mine.

  “How would you feel about moving to Washington, DC?”

  CHAPTER 4

  How would I feel about moving to DC?

  “I’m seventeen,” I reiterated. “A better question might be how my legal guardians would feel about it.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first minor I’ve recruited, Cassie. There are work-arounds.”

  Clearly, he had not met my Nonna.

  “Five years ago, custody of Cassandra Hobbes was remitted to her biological father, one Vincent Battaglia, United States Air Force.” Agent Briggs paused. “Fourteen months after your appearance in his life, your father was transferred overseas. You chose to remain here, with your paternal grandmother.”

  I didn’t ask how Agent Briggs had come by that information. He was FBI. He probably knew what color toothbrush I used.

  “My point, Cassie, is that legally, your father still has custody, and I have every confidence that if you want this to happen, I can make it happen.” Briggs paused again. “As far as the outside world is concerned, we’re a gifted program. Very selective, with endorsements from some very important people. Your father is career military. He worries about the way you isolate yourself. That will make him easier to persuade than most.”

  I started to open my mouth to ask how exactly he’d determined that my father worried, but Briggs held up a hand.

  “I don’t walk into a situation like this blind, Cassie. Once you were flagged in the system as a potential recruit, I did my homework.”

  “Flagged?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t the one who flagged you, and quite frankly, the details of your recruitment are moot unless you’re interested in my offer. Say
the word if you’re not, and I’ll leave Denver tonight.”

  I couldn’t do that—and Agent Briggs probably knew it before he asked.

  He picked up the capless pen and scrawled some notes on the edge of one of his papers. “If you have questions, you can ask Michael. I have no doubt he’ll be painfully honest with you about his experience in the program so far.” Briggs rolled his eyes heavenward in a gesture of exasperation so universal that I almost forgot about the badge and the suit. “And if there are any questions that I could answer for you …”

  He trailed off and waited. I took the bait and started pressing him for details. Fifteen minutes later, my mind was reeling. The program—that was how he referred to it, again and again—was small, still in its trial stages. Their agenda was twofold: first, to educate those of us selected to participate and hone our natural skills, and second, to use those skills to aid the FBI from behind the scenes. I was free to leave the program at any time. I would be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

  “There’s one question you haven’t asked, Cassie.” Agent Briggs folded his hands in front of him again. “So I’ll answer it for you. I know about your personal history. About your mother’s case. And while I have no new information for you, I can say that after what you’ve been through, you have more reasons than most to want to do what we do.”

  “And what is that?” I asked, my throat tightening at the mere mention of the m-word. “You said that you’ll provide training, and that in exchange I’ll be consulting for you. Consulting on what, exactly? Training for what?”

  He paused, but whether he was assessing me or adding emphasis to his answer, I wasn’t sure.

  “You’ll be helping on cold cases. Ones the Bureau hasn’t been able to close.”

  I thought of my mother—the blood on the mirror and the sirens and the way I used to sleep with a phone, hoping so desperately that it would ring. I had to force myself to keep breathing normally, to keep from closing my eyes and picturing my mom’s impish, smiling face.

  “What kind of cold cases?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat. My lips felt suddenly dry; my eyes felt wet.