The Naturals (2 Book Series) Read online

  Detecting lies was as much about the words people used as the way they said them. If there was a pattern to the way the test makers wrote the questions, a subtle difference between the true answers and the false ones, a deception detector would find it.

  Lia shot Dean a dirty look. “You never let me have any fun,” she muttered.

  Dean ignored her and directed his next words at Agent Sterling. “You have a case? Work your case. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

  I got the feeling that what he was really saying was I’ll be fine. For all her talk about liabilities, Agent Sterling seemed to need to hear that.

  You and Briggs caught Daniel Redding, I thought, watching Agent Sterling carefully. You saved Dean. Maybe Briggs’s ex wasn’t okay with the idea that she’d saved Dean for this. We lived in a house where serial killers’ pictures dotted the walls. There was an outline of a dead body sketched on the bottom of our pool. We lived and breathed death and destruction, Dean and I even more than the others.

  If she’s got something against this program, why would the director draft her as Locke’s replacement? Something about this entire situation just didn’t add up.

  Briggs’s phone vibrated. He looked to Sterling. “If you’re done here, the local PD is contaminating our crime scene as we speak, and some idiot thought it would be a bright idea to talk to the press.”

  Agent Sterling cursed viciously under her breath, and I changed my mind about the makeup and the nail polish, the way she was dressed, the way she talked. None of it was about presenting an image of professionalism to the rest of the world. It wasn’t a protective layer to keep the rest of the world out.

  She did it, all of it, to keep the old Veronica Sterling—the one Dean had described—in.

  As I turned that thought over in my head, Briggs and Sterling took their leave. The moment the front door closed behind them, Lia, Michael, and Sloane bolted for the TV control. Sloane got there first. She flipped the television on to a local news channel. It took me a moment to realize why.

  Some idiot thought it would be a bright idea to talk to the press.

  Agent Briggs wouldn’t tell us anything about an active case. The Naturals program was only authorized to work on cold cases. But if the press had gotten wind of whatever it was that had sent Briggs’s team out on a new assignment, we wouldn’t have to rely on Briggs for information.

  “Let’s see what Mommy and Daddy are up to, shall we?” Lia said, eyeing the TV greedily and waiting for the fireworks to commence.

  “Lia, I will give you one thousand dollars to never refer to Sterling and Briggs as Mommy and Daddy again.”

  Lia gave Michael a speculative look. “Technically true,” she said, assessing his promise. “But you don’t come into your trust fund until you turn twenty-five, and I’m not much of a believer in delayed gratification.”

  I hadn’t even known that Michael had a trust fund.

  “Breaking news.” All conversation in the room ceased as a female reporter came onto the screen. She was standing in front of a building with a Gothic spire. Her hair was wind-whipped, her expression serious. There was an odd energy to the moment, something that would have made me stop and watch even if I didn’t already have some idea of what was coming.

  “I’m standing here outside of Colonial University in northern Virginia, where today, the sixty-eight hundred students who comprise the Colonial student body saw one of their own brutally murdered—and gruesomely displayed on the university president’s lawn.”

  The screen flashed to a picture of a plantation-style house.

  “Sources say that the girl was bound and tortured before being strangled with the antenna of her own car and displayed on the hood. The car and the body were found parked on Colonial president Larry Vernon’s front lawn early this morning. The police are currently investigating every lead, but a source within the police department has been quoted as saying that this man, Professor George Fogle, is a person of interest.”

  Another picture flashed briefly onto the screen: a man in his late thirties, with thick, dark hair and an intense gaze.

  “Professor Fogle’s courses include the popular Monsters or Men: The Psychology of Serial Murder, the syllabus for which promises that students will become ‘intimately familiar with the men behind the legends of the most horrific crimes ever committed.’”

  The reporter held her hand to her ear and stopped reading from the teleprompter. “I’ve gotten word that a video of the body, taken from a student phone shortly after the police arrived at the scene, has been leaked online. The footage is said to be graphic. We’re awaiting a statement from local police on both the crime itself and the lack of security that allowed such footage to be taken. This is Maria Vincent, for Channel Nine News.”

  Within seconds, the television was muted and Sloane had located the leaked footage on her laptop. She positioned the screen so that we could see it and hit play. A handheld camera zoomed in on the crime scene. Graphic was an understatement.

  Not one of the five of us looked away. For Lia and Michael, it might have been morbid curiosity. For Sloane, crime scenes were data: angles to be examined, numbers to be crunched. But for Dean and for me, it wasn’t about the scene.

  It was about the body.

  There was an intimate connection between a killer and the person they’d killed. Bodies were like messages, full of symbolic meanings that only a person who understood the needs and desires and rage that went into snuffing out another life could fully decode.

  This isn’t a language anyone should want to speak. Dean was the one who’d told me that, but beside me, I could feel his eyes locked on to the screen, the same as mine.

  The corpse had long blond hair. Whoever had taken the video hadn’t been able to get close, but even from a distance, her body looked broken, her skin lifeless. Her hands appeared to be bound behind her back, and based on the fact that her legs weren’t splayed apart, I was guessing her feet had been bound as well. The bottom half of her body was hanging off the front of the car. Her shirt was covered in blood. Even with the questionable camera work, I could make out a noose around her neck. Black rope stood out against the white car, going all the way up to the sunroof.

  “Hey!” On the video, a police officer noticed the student holding the phone. The student cursed and ran, and the footage cut out.

  Sloane closed the laptop. The room went silent.

  “If it’s just one murder,” Michael said finally, “that means it’s not serial. Why call in the FBI?”

  “The person of interest teaches a class on serial killers,” I replied, thinking out loud. “If the professor’s involved, you might want someone with expertise in the field.” I looked to Dean to see if he agreed, but he was just sitting there, staring at the silent TV screen. Somehow, I doubted he was enthralled by the weather report.

  “Dean?” I said. He didn’t respond.

  “Dean.” Lia reached her foot out and shoved him with her heel. “Earth to Redding.”

  Dean looked up. Blond hair hung in his face. Brown eyes stared through us. He said something, but the words were garbled in his throat, caught halfway between a grunt and a whisper.

  “What did you say?” Sloane asked.

  “Bind them,” Dean said, his voice still rough, but louder this time. “Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.” He shut his eyes, and his hands curled into fists.

  “Hey.” Lia was beside him in a second. “Hey, Dean.” She didn’t touch him, but she stayed by his side. The look on her face was fiercely protective—and terrified.

  Do something, I thought.

  Taking my cue from Lia, I crouched by Dean’s other side. I reached a hand out to touch the back of his neck. He’d done the same for me, more than once, when I’d first started learning to climb into the minds of killers.

  The second my hand made contact, he flinched. His arm shot out, and my wrist was suddenly caught in a painfully tight grip. Michael jumped to his feet, his eyes flashing. Wit
h a jerk of my head, I told him to stay put. I could take care of myself.

  “Hey,” I said, repeating Lia’s words. “Hey, Dean.”

  Dean blinked rapidly, three or four times. I tried to concentrate on the details of his face and not the death grip he had on my wrist. His eyelashes weren’t black. They were brown, lighter than his eyes. Those eyes stared at me now, round and dark. He let go of my wrist.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “She’s fine,” Lia answered for me, her eyes narrowed to slits, daring me to disagree with her.

  Dean ignored Lia and fixed his eyes on me. “Cassie?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I was. I could feel the place where his hand had been a moment before, but it didn’t hurt anymore. My heart was pounding. I refused to let my hands shake. “Are you okay?”

  I expected Dean to shut me down, to refuse to answer, to walk away. When he responded, I saw it for what it was—penance. He’d force himself to say more than he was comfortable saying to punish himself for losing control.

  To make it up to me.

  “I’ve been better.” Dean could have stopped there, but he didn’t. Each syllable was hard-won, and my gut twisted as I realized just how much it was costing him to form these words. “The professor they’re looking for, the one who teaches the Monsters or Men class? I’d bet a lot of money that the reason he’s a person of interest is that one of the killers he lectures about in his class is my father.” Dean swallowed and stared holes into the carpet. “The reason Briggs and Sterling were called in is that they were the original agents on my father’s case.”

  I remembered what it had felt like to walk through a crime scene, knowing it had been patterned after my mother’s murder. Dean had been there with me. He’d been there for me.

  “Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them,” I said softly. “That was how your father killed his victims.” I didn’t phrase it as a question, because I knew. Just by looking at Dean, I knew.

  “Yes,” Dean said, before lifting his eyes to look at the still-muted TV. “And I’m almost certain that’s what was done to this girl.”

  YOU

  The president’s lawn was a nice touch. You could have dumped her anywhere. You didn’t have to risk being seen.

  “No one saw me.” You murmur the words with a self-satisfied hum. “But they saw her.”

  They saw the lines you carved into her body. They saw the noose you slipped around her neck. Just thinking about it, about the way her eyes bulged as the life drained out of her, fragile little arms tensing against the restraints, pale skin dyed with dainty rivulets of red…

  Your lips curve into a smile. The moment has passed, but the game—the game is long. Next time, you won’t be so eager. Next time, you’ll have nothing to prove. Next time, you’ll take it slow.

  Dean left the room right after dropping the bombshell about his father’s MO. The rest of us sat there in silence, the minutes ticking by, each more saturated than the last with all the things we weren’t saying.

  There was no point in trying to take a practice GED. The only thing I could think about was the girl in the video, her body dangling off the front of the car, black noose fitted tightly around her lifeless neck. Dean hadn’t said what it was about the video that had convinced him that the UNSUB was mimicking his father’s crimes.

  The fact that her arms and her legs were bound?

  The way she was hung from the car?

  Logically, those could have been coincidences. But Dean had sounded so sure, and he had believed me at a time when I’d had a theory that sounded just as crazy. Crazier, even.

  “You’re thinking about last summer.” Michael was the one who broke the silence as he directed those words to me. “Your whole body is hunched with the effort of holding it in.”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird?” I said, my eyes darting from Michael to the others. “Six weeks ago, Locke was reenacting my mother’s murder, and now someone’s out there playing copycat to Dean’s dad?”

  “News flash, Cassie.” Lia stood up, her eyes flashing. “Not everything is about you.” I was taken aback by the venom in her voice. Lia and I might not have been friends—exactly—but she didn’t usually see me as the enemy, either.

  “Lia—”

  “This. Is. Not. About. You.” She turned on her heels and stalked toward the door. Halfway there, she stopped and turned back, her eyes boring through mine. “You think you know what this is doing to Dean? You think you relate? You don’t have any idea what he’s going through. None.”

  “You’re not angry at Cassie, Lia,” Michael cut in. “You’re angry at the situation and the fact that Dean’s off somewhere, dealing with this alone.”

  “Screw you, Michael,” Lia spat back. She let the words hang in the air, her fury a palpable thing, and then she left. A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and slam shut. Sloane, Michael, and I stared at one another in stunned silence.

  “It’s possible I was mistaken,” Michael said finally. “Maybe she’s not just angry at the situation.”

  Michael could diagnose the precise mix of emotions a person was feeling. He could pinpoint the difference between annoyance and simmering fury and fight-or-flight rage. But the whys of emotions…That fell somewhere in between his skill and mine. The things that mattered to people, the things that hurt them, the things that made them the people they were—that was all me.

  “Lia’s known Dean longer than any of us,” I said, mentally going through the details of the situation and the personalities involved. “No matter how many people come into this house, to Lia, they’ll always be a unit of two. But Dean…”

  “Unit of one,” Michael finished for me. “He’s Mr. Lone Wolf.”

  When things got bad, Dean’s impulse was to put up walls, to push other people away. But I’d never seen him shut Lia out before. She was his family. And this time, he’d left her on the outside—with us.

  “Dean likes Cassie,” Sloane announced, completely oblivious to the fact that perhaps now was not the time for a conversation about any fondness Dean might feel for me. Michael, ever a master of masking his own emotions, didn’t show any discernable reaction as she continued. “Lia knows Dean likes Cassie. I don’t think she minds. Mostly, I think she just thinks it’s funny. But right now…it’s not funny.”

  Sloane’s grasp of human psychology was tenuous at best, but at the same time, I could see the kernel of truth in what she was saying. Lia had zero romantic interest in Dean. That didn’t mean she liked that when he’d dealt us in on the situation, he’d been answering my questions. I’d been the one to break through to him. Lia wasn’t okay with that. She was supposed to be the person he leaned on, not me. Then I’d gone and compounded my sins by highlighting the similarities—such as they were—between Dean’s situation and what I’d gone through with Locke.

  “I wasn’t trying to say that I know exactly how he feels.” I felt like I had to justify myself, even though Sloane and Michael probably weren’t expecting me to. “I just meant that it seems like this truly horrific twist of fate that we were all brought here to solve cold cases, and yet Briggs’s active cases keep tying back to us.” I glanced from Michael to Sloane. “Seriously, what are the chances?”

  Sloane pressed her lips together.

  “You want to tell us what the chances are, don’t you?” Michael asked her.

  “It’s not that simple.” Sloane shook her head, then pushed white-blond hair out of her face with the heel of her palm. “You’re not dealing with separate variables. Dean is a part of the program because he understands killers, and Dean understands killers because his father is a killer.” Sloane gestured with her hands out in front of her, like she was trying to grab hold of something that wasn’t there. “It’s all connected. Our families. The things that have happened to us. The things we can do.”

  I glanced over at Michael. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Being a Natural isn’t just about being born with an
incredible aptitude for something. You have to hone it. Your whole life has to hone it.” Sloane’s voice got softer. “Did you know they’ve done studies about people like Lia? I’ve read them. All of them.”

  I understood, the way I always did, without even having to think about it, that Sloane reading articles about lie detection was her way of trying to connect with Lia. The rest of us inherently understood people. Sloane was better with objects. With numbers. With facts.

  “For adults, an enhanced ability to detect lies mostly seems dependent on a combination of innate ability and explicit training. But with kids, it’s different.” She swallowed hard. “There’s a specific subset who excel at spotting lies.”

  “And what subset is that?” I asked.

  Sloane’s fingertips worried at the edge of her sleeve. “The subset that have been exposed to highs and lows. Changing environments. Abuse.” Sloane paused, and when she started talking again, the words came out faster. “There’s an interaction effect—statistically, the best deception detectors are the kids who aren’t submissive, the ones who grow up in abusive environments, but somehow fight to maintain some sense of control.”

  When Briggs talked about what it meant to be a Natural, he tended to use words like potential or gift. But Sloane was saying that raw talent alone wasn’t enough. We hadn’t been born Naturals. Something about Lia’s childhood had turned her into the kind of person who could lie effortlessly, the kind who knew when someone else was lying to her.

  Something had made Michael zero in on emotions.

  My mother had taught me to read people so I could help her con them out of money. We were constantly on the move, sometimes a new city every week. I hadn’t had a home. Or friends. Getting inside people’s heads, understanding them, even if they didn’t know I was alive—growing up, that was the closest to friendship I’d been able to come.

  “None of us had normal childhoods,” Sloane said quietly. “If we had, we wouldn’t be Naturals.”