The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  You brought me here to look at this, I thought, slipping back into profiling mode without even thinking about it. Why?

  Because this wasn’t about processing evidence. It was about me and what I’d been through out in the woods. I would always have questions about Locke, the way that Dean would always have questions about his father, but this UNSUB—this man who’d tried to snuff out my life—didn’t have to be some larger-than-life figure, another ghost to haunt my dreams.

  Hospital corners and hunting rifles.

  Briggs had brought me here so that I could understand—and move on, as much as a person could move on after something like this.

  It took me hours to go through it all. There was a picture of Emerson Cole tucked into the side of a journal. Webber’s writing—all capital letters, angled to one side—marked the pages, telling me his story in horrific, nauseating detail. I read it, sifting through those details, absorbing them and building a profile.

  Six months ago, you transferred onto Redding’s cell block. You were fascinated with him, mesmerized by the way he played the other prisoners, the guards. The prison was the only place you had any power, any control, and when another rejection came in from the police academy, that wasn’t enough anymore.

  You wanted a different kind of power. Intangible. Undeniable. Eternal.

  Webber had become obsessed with Redding. He’d thought he was successfully hiding that obsession until Redding had offered him a very special job.

  He recognized your potential. You needed to prove yourself—to prove that you were smarter and better and more than everyone who looked down on you, rejected you, and shoved you to the side.

  Redding had asked Webber to do two things: keep tabs on Agent Briggs and find Dean. Webber had proven himself on both fronts. He’d followed Agent Briggs. He’d found the house where Dean was living. He’d reported back.

  That was the turning point. That was the moment when you knew that to eclipse that mewling little brat in Redding’s eyes, you’d have to do more.

  There was a newspaper article folded up and stuck between two of the pages in the journal—an article Webber had given Daniel Redding to read, then hidden away in his work room.

  An article about FBI Special Agent Lacey Locke. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A killer who was one of the Bureau’s own.

  Shortly after that, Redding had said that you were ready. You were his student. He was your master. And if there were others competing for your role, well, you’d take care of them in time.

  I flipped from one page to the next and back again, rereading, building a time line in my mind. Redding had begun laying the groundwork for this series of “tests” for his apprentices—or, as Webber liked to refer to it, what would be—the day after he’d read the article about the Locke murders.

  Don’t you think it’s weird? I’d asked what seemed like an eternity ago. Six weeks ago, Locke was reenacting my mother’s murder, and now someone’s out there playing copycat to Dean’s dad?

  Sitting there, re-creating the series of events that had led to the murder of Emerson Cole, I realized that it wasn’t weird. It wasn’t a coincidence.

  Daniel Redding had started this after reading about the Locke murders. Dean understood killers because of his father; it went without saying that Daniel Redding understood them, too. And if he understood Locke—what drove her, what motivated her, what she wanted—if he’d had Webber keeping tabs on Dean, if he knew who I was and what had happened to my mother…

  Locke killed those women for me, and Redding stepped up to the challenge.

  There were still so many questions: how Redding had known who I was; how he’d drawn the connections he must have drawn to figure out what had happened with Locke; what—if anything—he knew about my mother’s murder. But Webber’s journal didn’t hold those answers.

  Once the test started, Webber’s writing became less focused on Redding.

  You worshipped him—but then you became him. No, you became something better. Something new.

  Five people were dead. By his own confession in these pages, Webber had killed four of them: Emerson, the professor, and both of his competitors. The original plan—laid out by Redding to each of the three, with Webber enabling the communication—had been for each of the three to choose one victim and kill one of the others’.

  In your mind, there was never room for any others.

  There were pages in this journal describing Webber’s fantasies of what it would have been like if he’d been the one to kill Trina Simms. He’d pictured it, he’d imagined it, and Clark had died for the sin of not doing it right. Christopher’s days were numbered the second he got caught.

  And then there was one.

  “Cassie?” Briggs said my name, and I looked up at him from my spot on the floor. “You okay?”

  I’d been here for hours. Briggs had achieved his objective: when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t caught back up in the horror of being hunted like an animal. I didn’t feel Webber looming over me, or his arm cutting off the air in my throat. Those memories weren’t gone. They would never be gone. But for minutes, hours, maybe even days at a time, I could forget.

  “Yeah,” I said, closing the journal and tearing the gloves off first one hand and then the other. “I’m good.”

  By the time we got back to the house, it was almost dark. Lia, Dean, and Sloane were sitting on the front porch, waiting for me. Michael was taking a sledgehammer to the cracked windows of the junkyard car.

  Every time he took a swing, every piece of glass he shattered, I felt something shattering inside me.

  He knew.

  From the moment Dean had come back to the house, from the moment Michael had laid eyes on him, he knew.

  I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t plan it.

  Michael looked up and caught sight of me, as if my thoughts had somehow made their way from my mind to his. He studied me, the way he had the first day we’d met, before I’d known what he could do.

  “That’s it, then?” he asked me.

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My eyes darted toward the porch. Toward Dean.

  Michael gave me a careless smile. “You win some, you lose some,” he said with a shrug. Like I’d never been anything more than a game. Like I didn’t matter.

  Because he wouldn’t let me matter anymore.

  “It’s just as well,” he continued, each word a calculated shot to my heart. “Maybe if Redding’s getting some, he’ll finally loosen up.”

  I knew, objectively, what this was. If you can’t keep them from hitting you, you make them hit you. That didn’t stop his words from cutting into me. The bruises and scrapes, the pounding in my head—it all faded away under Michael’s casual cruelty, his utter indifference.

  I’d known that choosing would mean losing one of them. I just hadn’t imagined losing Michael like this.

  I turned back to the house, willing myself not to cry. Dean stood. His eyes met mine, and I allowed myself to go back to the moment in the woods—and all of the moments that had led up to it. Holding his hand, tracing my fingertips along his jawline. The secrets we’d traded. The things that no one else—Natural or not, profiler or not—would ever understand.

  If I’d chosen Michael, Dean would have understood.

  I started walking toward the porch, toward Dean, my pace gaining with each step. Michael’s voice called after me.

  “Cassie?”

  There was a hint of genuine emotion in his voice—just a hint of something, but I couldn’t tell what. I looked back over my shoulder, but didn’t turn around.

  “Yes?”

  Michael stared at me, his hazel eyes holding a mixture of emotions I couldn’t quite parse. “If it had been me in the woods, if I’d been the one to go with Briggs, if I’d been the one you saw at the exact second…”

  Would it have been me? He didn’t finish the question, and I didn’t answer it. As I turned back toward the house, he went back to knocking the windows out of that b
roken, battered car.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice carrying on the wind. “That’s what I thought.”

  The day the last of my bruises disappeared was the day that we took the GED. It was also the day that Agent Sterling moved back into the house.

  When the five of us arrived back from taking the exam, she was directing movers, her own arms loaded down with a large box. Her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the base of her neck, stray hairs plastered to her forehead with sweat. She was wearing jeans.

  I took in the changes in her appearance and the fact that Briggs’s possessions were being carted out of his study. Something had shifted. Whatever soul-searching she’d been doing, whatever memories our captivity had stirred up, she’d reached some kind of resolution. Something she could live with.

  Beside me, Dean stared after Sterling as she disappeared into her room. I wondered if he was thinking about the woman he’d known five years ago. I wondered what relationship she bore to the woman in front of us now.

  “Think it’s therapeutic to have all her ex-husband’s stuff hauled out of this house?” Michael asked as a pair of movers walked by with Briggs’s desk.

  “One way to find out.” Lia strolled in the direction Sterling had gone. A split second later, the rest of us followed.

  Almost all traces of Briggs had been removed from the room, which now boasted an actual bed in place of the fold-out couch. Sterling’s back was to us as she placed the box on the bed and began opening it. “How did the test go?” she asked without turning around.

  “Splendidly,” Lia replied. She twirled a strand of dark hair around her index finger. “How was federally mandated psychological evaluation?”

  “So-so.” Sterling turned to face us. “How are you doing, Cassie?” she asked. Something in her tone told me that she knew the answer.

  Some people said that broken bones grew back stronger. On the good days, I told myself that was true, that each time the world tried to break me, I became a little less breakable. On the bad days, I suspected that I would always be broken, that parts of me would never be quite right—and that those were the parts that made me good at the job.

  Those were the parts that made this house and the people in it home.

  “I’m okay,” I said. Lia refrained from commenting on my answer to Agent Sterling’s question. Beside us, Sloane tilted her head to one side, staring at Sterling with a perplexed look on her face.

  “You came back,” Sloane told the agent, her forehead crinkling. “The probability of your return was quite low.”

  Agent Sterling turned back to the boxes on her bed. “When the odds are bad,” she said, removing something from one of them, “you change the rules.”

  The look on Sloane’s face left very little doubt that she found that statement to be somewhat dubious. I was too busy wondering what Sterling meant when she referenced changing the rules to spare a moment’s thought to probabilities or odds.

  You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin with a sleeping cobra on your chest. I thought of the game Sterling had played with Scarlett Hawkins. Impossible situations required impossible solutions. Veronica Sterling had come here largely intending to disband this program, and now she was moving in.

  What was I missing?

  “This mean you’re done running?”

  I turned to see Judd standing in the doorway behind us. I wondered how long he’d been there and turned the question over in my mind. He’d watched Agent Sterling grow up. When she’d left the FBI and turned her back on this program, she’d put distance between them, too.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Sterling told him. She walked over to her nightstand and unwrapped the object in her hand, discarding the tissue paper.

  A picture frame.

  I knew, before attempting to get a closer look, what I would see in the frame.

  Two little girls, one dark-haired, one light. Both of them beamed at the camera. The smaller one—Scarlett—was missing her two front teeth.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Sterling said a second time.

  I glanced at Dean, knowing instinctively, even before our eyes met, that his thoughts would be operating in tandem with mine. Sterling had spent a long time keeping her emotions on lockdown. She’d spent a long time trying not to care, trying to keep the person she used to be in check.

  “Not to interrupt a touching moment,” Michael said, his voice lined with enough bite to make me think he wasn’t talking just about the moment between Sterling and Judd—he was referring to the synchrony between Dean and me. “But I detect a hint of tension in your jaw, Agent.” Michael’s eyes flitted left and right, up and down, cataloging everything about Sterling’s posture and expression. “Not stress so much as…anticipation.”

  The doorbell rang then, and Sterling straightened, looking slightly more formidable than she had a moment before. “Visitors,” she told Judd briefly. “Plural.”

  Briggs arrived first, followed by Director Sterling. I’d assumed that was it, but it quickly became clear that they were waiting for someone else.

  Someone important.

  Minutes later, a dark-colored sedan pulled up. A man exited the car. He was wearing an expensive suit and a red tie. He walked with purpose, like each step was an integral part of a greater plan.

  Once we were all settled in the living room, Agent Sterling introduced him as the director of National Intelligence.

  “Principle advisor of the National Security Council,” Sloane rattled off. “Reports directly to the president. Head of the Intelligence Community, which encompasses seventeen elements, including the CIA, the NSA, the DEA—”

  “And the FBI?” Lia suggested dryly before Sloane could list off all seventeen agencies the man in front of us oversaw.

  “Until last week,” the man in the red tie said, “I had no idea this program existed.”

  The purpose of this meeting soon became clear. When the odds are bad, you change the rules. Agent Sterling had blown the whistle on the Naturals program.

  “I’ve given a great deal of thought to your report,” the director of National Intelligence told Agent Sterling. “The pros and cons of this program. Its strengths. Its weaknesses.”

  He lingered on the word weaknesses. Director Sterling’s face was still. This man was his boss. He could disband the program. From the FBI director’s perspective, the director of National Intelligence could probably do worse. How many laws had Agent Sterling’s father broken, keeping this program off the books?

  Agent Sterling is moving in. I clung to that fact. Surely that meant that her father’s boss wasn’t here to pull the plug. Surely.

  Sensing that Director Sterling wasn’t the only one discomfited by his words, the man at the head of National Intelligence addressed the rest of us. “Agent Sterling seems to believe that this program saves lives—and that if you were allowed to participate in active investigations, you could save many more.” The intelligence director paused. “She also believes that you can’t be trusted to watch out for yourselves, and that no agent involved in an active case, no matter how well-intentioned, can be counted on to put your physical and psychological well-being first.”

  I glanced at Agent Sterling. That wasn’t just an indictment of the program—it was an indictment of what she’d allowed us to do.

  What if they’re letting us stay, but won’t let us near real cases? Before I’d come here, training to profile people might have been enough, but it wasn’t, not now. I needed what I had been through to mean something, I needed a purpose. I needed to help.

  “Based on Agent Sterling’s assessment of the risks inherent in this program,” the director of National Intelligence continued, “it is her recommendation that this program be restructured, that one Judd Hawkins be appointed as an advocate in your stead, and that any and all deviations from protocol be approved by said advocate, irrespective of the potential benefit to the case.”

  Restructured. I processed that word. Across from me, Dire
ctor Sterling’s jaw clenched slightly, but the rest of his face remained impassive. If his daughter’s recommendation was accepted, that would make Judd the final authority on what we could and could not do.

  Judd, not Director Sterling.

  “You’ll all turn eighteen within the year?” the man who’d come here to decide our future asked. Coming from someone who reported directly to the president, it sounded more like an order than a question.

  “Two hundred and forty-three days to go,” Sloane confirmed. The rest of us settled for nods.

  “They stay behind the scenes.” He fixed his casually weighty stare on the director. “Those are the rules.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Agents Sterling and Briggs will supervise their participation on all cases, subject to the approval of Major Hawkins. When it comes to what does and does not fall within the purview of this program, his word is final—even for you.”

  The director stiffened, but didn’t hesitate in his reply. “Agreed.”

  “And the next time you decide to fund an innovative program off the books—don’t.”

  The director of National Intelligence didn’t give Director Sterling the chance to respond. He just nodded once at us and left.

  “I believe I speak for everyone,” Michael said, “when I ask what just happened here?”

  The rules just changed, I thought.

  “The Naturals program just got some oversight,” Agent Sterling replied. “There are going to be some new regulations. New protocols. And they’ll mean something. No more special exceptions—not even from me.” Her expression was stern, but Michael must have seen something I didn’t, because he broke into a grin. Agent Sterling smiled, too—directly at me.

  “We’re going to need those regulations,” she added, “because as of tomorrow, the five of you are cleared to consult on active cases.”

  They weren’t shutting us out. They were letting us in. Instead of taking away my purpose, they’d given it new life.

  This was a whole new world.

  Much like catching a killer, writing a book is a team effort, and I feel incredibly lucky to work with such wonderful people. Thanks go first and foremost to the two lovely editors who shepherded this book from its first stages to its last: Catherine Onder and Lisa Yoskowitz. I cannot begin to express how fortunate I feel to be in such good hands or how much better this book is because of their insights and dedication. I would also like to thank Niamh Mulvey, who has been my Naturals champion in the UK, as well as the wonderful teams at Hyperion and Quercus, for helping this series find its readers. So much of what goes into a book is done behind the scenes, and I am grateful for all of the work that has gone into this one!