The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  “Did they know each other?” I asked. “Clark and our UNSUB—I’m betting they knew about each other, but had they actually met?”

  “He’d want to keep them as separate as possible.” Dean didn’t specify who he was. Under the circumstances, he didn’t have to. “The less interaction they have with each other, the more control he has over the situation. This is his game, not theirs.”

  It wasn’t enough to profile Clark or our UNSUB. At the end of the day, this all came back to Redding. I pictured him sitting across the table from me. I heard myself asking the questions, heard his replies. I walked through them, step by step, thinking all the while that I was missing something.

  You sent Clark after Trina, I thought. Who did you send after Emerson?

  The nagging feeling that there was something I wasn’t seeing intensified. I sat very still, and then suddenly, all the inconsequential details melted away until there was only one thing left. One detail.

  One question.

  “Lia,” I said urgently, “you’re sure that Redding didn’t lie in response to any of my questions?”

  She inclined her head slightly—clearly, she didn’t think the question merited a verbal response.

  “I asked him how he chose the victims.” I looked around the room to see if anyone’s mind would take the same path mine had. “I said, how do you choose who dies, and do you remember what he said?”

  “He said I don’t.” Dean was the one who answered. I doubted he’d forgotten a single word his father had uttered in that meeting—in any of their meetings.

  “If he doesn’t choose the victims,” I said, looking from Dean to Sterling to Briggs, “who does?”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “They do.”

  I hadn’t expected the answer to come from Michael, but maybe I should have. He and Lia had met Clark, and he was the one who’d recognized the anger in the other boy.

  She wasn’t like that, Clark had said when it had come out that Emerson had been sleeping with their professor—but he hadn’t believed the words he was saying. And that meant that he had believed that Emerson was like that. That she was less and worthy of scorn. That she deserved to be degraded.

  He’d had pictures of her hidden under his bed.

  Clark had been obsessed with Emerson. He’d loved her, and he’d hated her, and she’d turned up dead. The only reason he hadn’t been a viable suspect in her murder was that he had an alibi.

  “Redding had the UNSUBs choose victims for each other.” Michael was still talking—and his thoughts were in sync with mine. “Clark chose Emerson, but someone else killed her. It’s Strangers on a Train.”

  “Alfred Hitchcock,” Sloane chimed in. “1951 film. One hour and forty-one minutes long. The movie postulates that the most foolproof way to get away with murder is for two strangers to take out each other’s targets.”

  “That way,” Briggs said softly, “each killer has an alibi when their target dies.”

  Like Clark had been in a room with hundreds of others taking a test when Emerson had been killed.

  The dominoes fell, one by one in my head.

  Like Christopher Simms was in a meeting with Briggs when someone killed his mother.

  I sat on the stairs, waiting. The FBI had been attempting to locate Christopher Simms for the past fourteen hours. Daniel Redding had promised us another body today, and all I could do was wait—to see if we were right, to see if they caught him in time. I couldn’t go up the stairs. I couldn’t go down them. I couldn’t do anything but sit there, halfway in between, obsessing over the evidence and praying that when the phone rang, it would be to tell us they had apprehended the suspect, not to inform us that we had a fifth victim.

  No matter how many times I went over the case, the details stayed the same. Clark had chosen Emerson, and someone else had killed her at a time when Clark’s alibi was ironclad. That person had then chosen a victim—Trina Simms.

  I could still see the look in Christopher’s eyes when he’d grabbed my arm and wrenched me off the couch. He was sick of being under his mother’s thumb. What better payback than to see her killed—in a roundabout way—by the man she fancied herself in love with?

  It all came back to Daniel Redding. Christopher may have chosen Trina to die, but Redding had been the one to choose Christopher as an apprentice. Dean’s father had probably used Trina to get to her son. He’d almost certainly told Clark to hold off on killing Trina until she’d received a visit from Dean.

  How long has he been planning this? How many moving parts did he set in motion before Emerson’s body was found on that lawn? I turned to my left and glanced at the wall. The stairway was lined with portraits—serial killers decorating our walls like they were family.

  The irony did not escape me.

  In my hand, I held the Rose Red lipstick. I took the cap off and turned the bottom of the tube until the dark red color peeked over the edge of the plastic casing.

  You will never find the man who murdered your mother. Redding’s words were there in the back of my mind, mocking me.

  “Mind if I keep you company while we wait?”

  I glanced back over my shoulder at Dean, who was standing near the top of the stairs.

  “Grab a seat,” I told him. Instead of sitting on one of the steps above me, he walked until he reached my step and lowered himself down next to me. The staircase was wide enough that there was still space between us, but narrow enough that there wasn’t much. His eyes fell on the tube of lipstick in my hands.

  He knows, I thought. He knows this was Locke’s, and he knows why I kept it.

  “I can’t stop thinking about them,” Dean said after a moment. “Gary Clarkson. Christopher Simms. They were never my father’s endgame.”

  I lowered the lipstick back into the tube and capped it. “You were,” I said, knowing it was true, knowing that somehow, this had always been about Dean.

  Dean closed his eyes. I could feel him next to me, feel each breath in and each breath out. “I can’t decide if my father engineered this whole thing just so I’d be forced to go see him, or if he was banking on one of his students eventually trying to prove himself the better man by killing me.”

  Dean’s eyelids lifted, and I thought through his words. Emerson’s murderer had killed Clark. That was the work of an UNSUB who wanted to be Redding’s only apprentice. His only heir. His only son.

  “Your father doesn’t want you dead,” I told Dean. For Redding, that would be a last resort. He’d kill Dean only if he believed he’d truly lost him—and Daniel Redding was incapable of ever believing he’d truly lost.

  “No,” Dean agreed, “he doesn’t want me dead, but if one of the UNSUBs had escalated, if one of them had come here to kill me, I would have defended myself.”

  Maybe, in Redding’s mind, that was the way this was supposed to end, with Dean killing the others. Redding saw Dean as an extension of himself. Of course he thought Dean would win—and if Dean didn’t, well, then maybe Daniel Redding believed that he deserved to die. For being weak.

  For not being his father’s son.

  The phone rang. My muscles tensed. I was frozen, unable to move, unable to breathe. Two seconds later, the phone stopped ringing. Someone had answered.

  Please let them have found him in time. Please let them have found him in time.

  “Dean.” I managed to force his name out of my suddenly dry mouth. He sat, just as immobile, beside me. “Last summer, after everything that happened, Michael told me to figure out how I felt. About you.”

  I didn’t know why I was saying this now—but I needed to. Any second, someone would come in with news. Any second, things could change. I felt like a train hurtling toward a tunnel.

  Please don’t let there be another body.

  “Townsend, he means something to you,” Dean said, his own voice as hoarse as mine. “He makes you smile.” And you deserve to smile. I could practically hear him thinking it, could feel him fighting agai
nst the words he said next, unable to keep them back. “What did you figure out?”

  He was asking. And if he was asking, that meant that he wanted to know, that the answer mattered to him. I swallowed. “Do you—Dean, I need to know what you feel. For me.”

  Any second, things could change.

  “I feel…something.” Dean’s words came unevenly. He turned toward me, his leg brushing against mine. “But I don’t know if I can—I don’t know if it’s enough.” He closed my hand around the tube of lipstick I was holding, his hand covering mine. “I don’t know if I can….”

  Can what? Open up? Let go? Risk letting something matter so much that losing it could push you off the edge?

  Michael appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Dean let go of my hand.

  “They found him,” Michael said, coming to a standstill and looking up at us. “Briggs’s team found Christopher Simms.”

  They apprehended Christopher Simms outside of a coffee shop, waiting for a girl. In his truck, they’d found zip ties, a hunting knife, a cattle brand, and black nylon rope.

  Body after body after body, Redding had promised. Because you aren’t smart enough. Because you’re weak.

  But we weren’t, and this time, we’d won. That hunting knife wouldn’t slice into another girl’s skin. Her hands wouldn’t be bound behind her back. She wouldn’t feel burning metal melting through her flesh.

  We’d saved that girl at the coffee shop, the same way we’d saved little Mackenzie McBride. Another victim would be dead right now if I hadn’t sat down across the table from Daniel Redding. If Sterling hadn’t wound him up enough to bait him into torturing us with the truth. If Lia hadn’t been there behind the mirror, reading Redding for deception and finding none. If Sloane hadn’t realized that Lia’s ability wasn’t on the fritz.

  If Michael and I had never met Clark, if Dean hadn’t gone out to visit Trina, how would this have played out?

  Dean was off dealing with the news in his own way. Michael had retreated to working on his car. I was standing in the backyard, eyeing the trash can, the Rose Red lipstick in my hand.

  I’d joined the Naturals program in hopes that I might be able to save some other little girl from coming back to a blood-drenched room. That was what we were doing. We were saving people. And still, I couldn’t throw away the lipstick, I couldn’t shut the door on my past.

  You will never find the man who murdered your mother. How could Redding possibly know that? He couldn’t. But still, I couldn’t push down the part of my brain that thought, Prisoners chat. How had Dean’s father even known that I had a dead mother?

  “Don’t.” Michael came up behind me. I closed my fingers around the lipstick and slipped it into the front pocket of my jeans.

  “Don’t what?” I asked.

  “Don’t think about something that makes you feel small and scared and like you’re stuck in a tunnel with no light at the end.”

  “You’re standing behind me,” I said without turning around. “How could you possibly get a read on my emotions from there?”

  Michael crossed to stand in front of me. “I could tell you,” he intoned, “but then I’d have to kill you.” He paused. “Too soon?”

  “To be making jokes about killing me?” I asked dryly. “Never.”

  Michael reached out and brushed a strand of hair out of my face. I froze.

  “I know,” he said. “I know that you care about him. I know that you’re attracted to him. I know that when he hurts, it hurts you. I know that he never looks at you the way he looks at Lia, that you’re not a sister to him. I know that he wants you. He’s in over his head with you. But I also know that half the time, he hates that he wants you.”

  I thought of Dean on the stairs, telling me that he felt something, but unsure that it was enough.

  “That’s the difference between the two of us,” Michael told me. “I don’t just want you.” Now both of his hands were on my face. “I want to want you.”

  Michael wasn’t a person who let himself want things. He certainly didn’t admit to wanting them. He didn’t let anything under his skin. He expected to be disappointed.

  “I’m here, Cassie. I know what I feel, and I know that when you let your guard down, when you let yourself, you feel it, too.” He ran his fingers lightly over the back of my neck. “I know that you’re scared.”

  My heart pounded so hard, I could feel it in my stomach. A mishmash of memories rushed through my head, like water exploding out of a broken faucet.

  Michael walking into the diner where I’d worked in Colorado. Michael in the swimming pool, bringing his lips to meet mine during a midnight swim. Michael easing himself down next to me on the couch. Michael dancing with me on the lawn. Michael working on that death trap of a car.

  Michael taking a step back and trying to be the good guy. For me.

  But it wasn’t just Michael in my head; it was also Dean.

  Dean sitting next to me on the steps, his knee brushing against mine. My hand, bathing his bloody knuckles. The secrets we’d traded. Kneeling in the dirt next to the beat-up picket fence at his old house.

  Michael was right. I was scared. I was scared of my own emotions, scared of wanting and longing and loving. Scared of hurting either one of them.

  Scared of losing someone I cared about when I’d already lost so much.

  But Michael was there, telling me how he felt. He was leveling the playing field. He was asking me to choose.

  He was saying Pick me.

  Michael didn’t pull me toward him. He didn’t lean forward. This was my decision, but he was so close, and slowly, my hands found their way to his shoulders.

  His face.

  And still, he waited—for me to say the words, or for me to close the space between my mouth and his. I shut my eyes.

  The next time my lips touch yours, I thought, remembering his words, the only person you’re going to be thinking about is me.

  The rush in my head went silent. I opened my eyes, and—

  Mariachi music started blaring all around us. I jumped a foot and a half in the air, and Michael nearly lost his balance on his bad leg. We turned in unison to see Lia toying with a set of speakers.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she called over the sound of the music.

  “‘Feliz Navidad’?” Michael said. “Really, Lia? Really?”

  “You’re right,” she said, sounding as sedate and chastened as a person could while yelling to be heard over the sounds of an extremely inappropriately timed Christmas carol. “It’s barely even October. I’ll change the song.”

  Sloane stuck her head out of the back door. “Hey, guys,” she said, sounding more chipper than she had in days. “Did you know that a power saw produces noise at one hundred and ten decibels?”

  There was murder on Michael’s face, but even he didn’t have the heart to glare at Sloane. “No,” he said, sighing. “I didn’t.”

  “A motorcycle is closer to a hundred,” Sloane prattled on happily at high volume. “I’m betting this music is at one hundred and three. And a half. One hundred and three and a half.”

  Lia finally switched the song to one of her dance tracks. “Come on,” she said, chancing coming within throttling range to take me by one hand and Sloane by another. “We caught the bad guy.” She pulled the two of us out onto the lawn, her hips swaying to the beat of the music, her eyes daring me to object. “I think this calls for a celebration. Don’t you?”

  I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I should have expected the nightmares. They’d plagued me on and off for five years. Of course Redding’s mind games had brought them back.

  It’s not just that, I thought in a moment of brutal honesty with myself. They come back when I’m stressed. When things are changing.

  This wasn’t just about Redding. It was about Michael and Dean, but most of all, it was about me. Sloane had asked me once, in a game of Truth or Dare, how many people I loved. Not just romantic love—any
kind of love. At the time, I’d wondered if growing up with only my mother for company—and then losing her the way I had—had cut my ability to love other people off at the knees.

  My answer had been one.

  But now…

  You want to know why you, in particular, concern me, Cassie? Agent Sterling’s words rang in my ears. You’re the one who really feels things. You won’t ever be able to stop caring. It will always be personal.

  I cared about the victims we fought for—the Mackenzie McBrides and the nameless girls at coffee shops. I cared about the people in this house—not just Michael and Dean, but Sloane and Lia. Lia, who would have thrown herself on an open flame for Dean.

  Lia, who’d flung herself in the middle of my moment with Michael with that same determination.

  I tried to lull my mind into silence and myself back to sleep.

  Mackenzie McBride. The girl in the coffee shop. My thoughts circled back. Why? I turned my head to the side on my pillow. My chest rose and fell with steady, even breaths.

  The FBI had gotten Mackenzie McBride’s case wrong. They’d missed the villain hiding in plain sight. But we hadn’t missed anything on this case. Christopher Simms was the villain. They’d caught him in the act. He’d had supplies in his truck—bindings for the girl’s ankles and wrists, a knife, the brand.

  The girl in the coffee shop. That was what I kept coming back to. Who was Christopher’s intended victim? Redding had known that someone was scheduled to die. He’d told us to expect it.

  How do you choose who dies?

  I don’t.

  Clark had chosen Emerson.

  Christopher had chosen his mother.

  Fogle had been nothing but a complication that needed to be dealt with.

  So who chose the girl?

  There was no getting away from that question. Maybe it was nothing, but I slipped out of my bed, out of the room. The house was silent, but for the sound of my own light footsteps as I made my way down the stairs. The door to the study—Agent Sterling’s temporary lodging—was open a crack. The faint glow of lamplight from inside the room told me that she wasn’t asleep, either.