The Naturals Read online

  Agent Locke raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she works from home. Or maybe she’s between jobs. Maybe she teaches elementary school and she’s on summer vacation.”

  Those objections were perfectly valid, but somehow—to me—they still felt wrong. It was hard to explain; I thought of Michael warning me that the FBI would never stop trying to figure out how I did what I did.

  I thought about Agent Locke saying she’d learned profiling the hard way—one class at a time.

  “She’s not even looking at them.”

  To my shock, Dean was the one who came to my rescue.

  “Pardon?” Agent Locke turned her attention to him.

  “The other people here in her age range.” Dean nodded toward a couple of young moms with small children, plus several department store employees lined up for coffee. “She’s not looking at them. They aren’t her peers. She doesn’t even realize they’re the same age. She pays more attention to college students than to other adults, but she clearly doesn’t consider herself one of them, either.”

  And that was the feeling I hadn’t been able to put into words. It was like Dean could see into my head, make sense of the information bouncing around my brain—but, of course, that wasn’t it. He hadn’t needed to get into my head, because he’d been thinking the exact same thing.

  After a long moment of silence, Dean flicked his eyes over to me. “Why med school?”

  I glanced back at the girl. “Because she’s a runner.”

  Dean smiled, ever so slightly. “You mean she’s a masochist.”

  Across the room, the girl we’d been talking about rose, and I was able to make out the bags in her hand, the stores she’d shopped at. It fit. Everything fit.

  I wasn’t wrong.

  “What makes you think she has a boyfriend?” Dean asked, and under his quiet drawl I could hear curiosity—and maybe even admiration.

  I shrugged in response to his question—mainly because I didn’t want to tell him that the reason I’d been sure this girl wasn’t single was the fact that the entire time we’d been there, she hadn’t so much as glanced at Dean.

  From a distance, he would have looked older.

  Even in jeans and a faded black T-shirt, you could see the muscles tensing against the fabric of his sleeves. And the muscles not covered by his sleeves.

  His hair, his eyes, the way he stood, and the way he moved—if she’d been single, she would have looked.

  — — —

  “New game,” Agent Locke said. “I point to the car, you tell me about the person who owns it.”

  We’d been at the mall for three hours. I’d thought coming out to the parking lot had signaled the end of today’s training, but apparently I was wrong.

  “That one, Cassie. Go.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I was used to starting with people: their posture, the way they talked, their clothes, their occupations, their gender, the way they arranged a napkin on their lap—that was my language. Starting with a car was like flying blind.

  “In our line of work,” Agent Locke told me as I stared at a white Acura, debating whether it belonged to a shopper or someone who worked at the mall, “you don’t get to meet the suspect before you profile the crime. You go to the scene and you rebuild what happened. You take physical evidence, you turn it into behavior, and then you try to narrow down the range of suspects. You don’t know if you’re looking for a man or a woman, a teenager or an old man. You know how they killed, but you don’t know why. You know how they left the body, but you have to figure out how they found the victim.” She paused. “So, Cassie. Who owns this car?”

  The make and model weren’t telling me much. This car could have belonged to either a man or a woman, and it was parked in front of the food court, which meant that I had no idea what the owner’s destination inside the mall was. The parking space wasn’t a good one, but it wasn’t bad. The parking job left a little to be desired.

  “They were in a hurry,” I said. “The parking job is crooked, and they didn’t bother cruising for a better space.” That also told me that the driver didn’t have the kind of ego that would push a person to hunt for a prime spot, as if getting a great parking place at the mall was an indicator of personal worth. “No car seat, so no young children. No bumper stickers, relatively recently washed. They’re not here for food—no reason to hurry for that—but they parked at the food court, so either they don’t know where they’re going once they get inside the mall or their store of choice is close by.”

  I paused, waiting for Dean to pick up where I had left off, but he didn’t. Instead, Agent Locke gave me a single piece of advice.

  “Don’t say they.”

  “I didn’t mean they as in plural,” I said hastily. “I just haven’t decided yet if it’s a man or a woman.”

  Dean glanced at the mall entrance and then back at me. “That’s not what she means. They keeps you on the outside. So do he and she.”

  “So what word am I supposed to use?”

  “Officially,” Agent Locke said, “we use the term Unknown Subject—or UNSUB.”

  “And unofficially?” I asked.

  Dean shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “If you want to climb inside someone’s head,” he said roughly, “you use the word I.”

  The night before, I’d imagined myself in Lia’s body, imagined what it was like to be her. I could imagine driving this car, parking it like this, climbing out—but this wasn’t about cars. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be profiling shoppers.

  I’d be profiling killers.

  “What if I don’t want to be them?” I asked. I knew that if I closed my eyes, if I so much as blinked, I would be right back in my mother’s dressing room. I’d be able to see the blood. I’d be able to smell it. “What if I can’t?”

  “Then you’re lucky.” Dean’s voice was quiet, but his eyes were hard. “And you’d be better off at home.”

  My stomach twisted. He didn’t think I belonged here. Suddenly, it was all too easy to remember that when we’d met the day before and he’d said “nice to meet you,” it had been a lie.

  Agent Locke set a hand on my shoulder. “If you want to get close to an UNSUB, but you don’t want to put yourself in their shoes, there’s another word you can use.”

  I turned my back on Dean and focused my full attention on Agent Locke. “And what word is that?” I asked.

  Locke met my gaze. “You.”

  CHAPTER 12

  That night, I dreamed that I was walking through a narrow hallway. The floor was tiled. The walls were white. The only sound in the entire room was my sneaker-clad feet scuffing against the freshly mopped floor.

  This isn’t right. Something about this isn’t right.

  Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and on the ground, my shadow flickered, too. At the end of the hallway, there was a metal door, painted to match the walls. It was slightly ajar, and I wondered if I’d left it that way or if my mother had cracked the door open to keep an eye out for me.

  Don’t go in there. Stop. You have to stop.

  I smiled and kept right on walking. One step, two steps, three steps, four. On some level, I knew that this was a dream, knew what I would find when I opened that door—but I couldn’t stop. My body felt numb from the waist down. My smile hurt.

  I laid my hand flat against the metal door and pushed.

  “Cassie?”

  My mother was standing there, dressed in blue. A breath caught in my throat—not because she was beautiful, though she was, and not because she was on the verge of scolding me for taking so long to report back on the crowd.

  A vise closed in around my lungs, because this was wrong. This hadn’t happened, and I wished to God it had.

  Please don’t be a dream. Just this once, let it be real. Don’t let it—

  “Cassie?” My mom stumbled backward. She fell. Blood turned blue silk red. It splattered against the walls. There was so much of it—too much.

  She’s craw
ling in it, slipping, but everywhere she goes, the knife is there.

  Hands grabbed at her ankles. I turned, trying to see her attacker’s face, and just like that, my mother was gone and I was back outside the door. My hand pushed it open.

  This is how it happened, I thought dully. This is real.

  I stepped into the darkness. I felt something wet and squishy beneath my feet, and the smell—oh, God, the smell. I scrambled for the light switch.

  Don’t. Don’t turn it on, don’t—

  I woke with a start.

  In the bed beside me, Sloane was dead to the world. I’d had the dream often enough to know that there was no point in closing my eyes again. I crept quietly out of bed and went to the window. I needed to do something—to take my cue from the woman I’d profiled that morning and run until my body hurt, or to follow in Dean’s footsteps and take it out on some weights. Then I caught sight of the backyard—and more specifically, the pool.

  The yard was dimly lit, the water gleaming black in the moonlight. Silently, I grabbed a swimsuit and slipped out of the room without waking Sloane. Minutes later, I was sitting at the edge of the pool. Even in the dead of night, the air was hot. I dangled my legs over the edge.

  I lowered myself into the pool. Slowly, the tension left my body. My brain shut off. For a few minutes, I just treaded water, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood at nighttime: crickets and the wind and my hands moving through the water. Then I stopped—stopped treading water, stopped fighting the pull of gravity—and let myself sink.

  I opened my eyes underwater, but couldn’t see anything. There was darkness all around me, and then suddenly, there was a flicker of light at the pool’s surface.

  I wasn’t alone.

  You don’t know that, I told myself, but I saw the faintest blur of motion, and that protest died a quick and brutal death. There was someone up there—and I couldn’t stay underwater indefinitely.

  Just like that, I felt like I was back in the narrow hallway of my dreams, walking slowly toward something awful.

  It’s nothing.

  Still, I fought the need for air. I wanted—irrationally—to stay underwater, where it was safe. But I couldn’t. Water plugged my ears, and as my lungs screamed for air, the sound of my own heartbeat surrounded me.

  I came up slowly, breaking the surface as quietly as I could. Treading water, I turned in a circle, my eyes scanning the yard for an intruder. At first, I saw nothing. And then I saw a pair of eyes, the moonlight caught in them just so.

  Looking at me.

  “I didn’t know you were out here,” the owner of those eyes said. “I should go.”

  My heart kept right on pounding, even once I realized the voice belonged to Dean. Now that my brain had identified him, I could make out a few more of his features. His hair hung in his face. His eyes—which I’d seen as a predator’s a moment before—now just looked surprised.

  Clearly, he hadn’t expected anyone to be swimming at three in the morning.

  “No,” I said, my voice traveling along the surface of the water. “It’s your yard, too. Stay.”

  I felt ridiculous for being so jumpy. This was a quiet, sleepy little town. The yard was fenced. No one knew what the FBI was training us to do. We weren’t targets. This wasn’t my dream.

  I wasn’t my mother.

  For an elongated moment, I thought Dean would turn and walk away, but instead, he sat a few inches away from the edge of the pool. “What are you doing out here?”

  For some reason, I felt compelled to tell him the truth. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  Dean gazed out at the yard. “I stopped sleeping a long time ago. Most nights, I get three good hours, maybe four.”

  I’d given him a truth, and he’d given me one. We fell into silence then, him at the edge of the pool and me treading water at the center.

  “It wasn’t real, you know.” He spoke to his hands, not to me.

  “What wasn’t real?”

  “Today.” Dean paused. “At the mall with Locke. Playing games in parking lots. That’s not what this is.”

  In the scant light of the moon, his eyes looked so dark they were nearly black, and something about the way he was looking at me made me realize—he wasn’t criticizing me.

  He was trying to protect me.

  “I know what this is,” I said. I knew better than anyone. Turning away from him, I stared up at the sky, all too aware of the fact that he was staring at me.

  “Briggs shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said finally. “This place will ruin you.”

  “Did it ruin Lia?” I asked. “Or Sloane?”

  “They’re not profilers.”

  “Did this place ruin you?”

  Dean didn’t pause, not even for a second. “There was nothing to ruin.”

  I swam over to the edge, right next to him. “You don’t know me,” I said, pulling myself out of the water. “I’m not scared of this place. I’m not afraid to learn how to think like a killer, and I am not afraid of you”

  I wasn’t even sure why I’d added on those last six words, but they were the ones that made his eyes flash. I was halfway to the house when I heard him stand up. I heard him walk across the grass to the tiny, shacklike pool house. I heard him throw a switch.

  Suddenly, the yard wasn’t dark anymore. It took me a moment to realize where the light was coming from. The pool was glowing. There was no other word for it. It looked like someone had splattered glow-in-the-dark paint across the edge. There was a drop of fluorescent color here, a drop there. Long streaks of it. Blobs. Four parallel smears across the tile on the side of the pool.

  I glanced at Dean.

  “Black light,” he said, as if that were all the explanation I’d need.

  I couldn’t help myself. I moved closer. I squatted to get a better look. And that was when I saw the glow-in-the-dark outline of a body at the bottom of the pool.

  “Her name was Amanda,” Dean said.

  I realized then what the smears and streaks of paint on the concrete and the side of the pool were supposed to be.

  Blood.

  The color had fooled me, even though the pattern was all too familiar.

  “She was stabbed three times.” Dean wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t even look at the pool. “She cracked her head on the cement when she slipped in her own blood. And then he wrapped her fingers around her throat. He forced her upper body over the side of the pool.”

  I could see it happening, see the killer standing over a girl’s body. She would have kicked. She would have clawed at his hands, tried to use the side of the pool for leverage.

  “He held her under.” Dean knelt next to the pool and demonstrated, acting out the motion. “He drowned her. And then he set her free.” He let go of his imaginary prey and sent her off toward the center of the pool.

  “This is a crime scene,” I said finally. “One of the fake crime scenes that they use to test us, like the sets in the basement.”

  Dean stared out at the center of the pool, where the victim’s body would have been. “It’s not fake,” he said finally. “It really happened. It just didn’t happen here.”

  I reached out to touch Dean’s shoulder. He shrugged off my touch, turning to face me, his body close to mine. “Everything about this place—the house, the yard, the pool—was constructed with one thing in mind.”

  “Full immersion,” I said, holding his gaze. “Like those schools where they only speak French.”

  Dean jerked his head toward the pool. “This isn’t a language people should want to learn.”

  Normal people—that was what Dean meant. But I wasn’t normal. I was a Natural. And this mock crime scene wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen.

  I turned to walk back to the house. I heard Dean walk across the lawn. I heard him flip the switch. And when I glanced back over my shoulder, the pool was just a pool. The yard was just a yard. And the outline of the body was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  I oversl
ept the next morning and woke up to the feeling that I was being watched.

  “Knock, knock.”

  Based on the greeting—and the fact that the person speaking had opened my door, knocked on it, and said those words at the exact same time—I expected Lia. Instead, I opened my eyes to find Agent Locke standing in my doorway, a cup from Starbucks in one hand and car keys in the other.

  I glanced over at Sloane’s bed, but it was empty.

  “Late night?” my newly acquired mentor asked, eyebrows arched. I thought of Dean and the pool and decided that was not an area of discussion I wanted to pursue.

  “Really?” Agent Locke said, eyeing the look on my face. “I was just kidding, but you’ve got I-was-up-late-with-a-boy-last-night face. Maybe we should have some girl talk.”

  I didn’t know what was worse, the fact that Locke thought my late night had something to do with a stupid teenage crush or the fact that she sounded suspiciously like my female cousins.

  “No girl talk,” I said. “As a general rule, ever.”

  Agent Locke nodded. “So noted.” She eyed my pajamas, and then jerked her head toward the closet. “Get up. Get dressed.” She tossed me the car keys. “I’ll get Dean. You’re driving.”

  — — —

  I wasn’t exactly happy when Agent Locke’s directions ended up taking us right back to the mall—and specifically to Mrs. Fields cookies. After seeing the mocked-up blood spatter on the pool’s edge the night before, profiling shoppers seemed senseless. It seemed silly.

  If she makes us guess what kind of cookies people are going to order …

  “Three and a half years ago, Sandy Harrison was here with her husband and their three children. Her husband took their eight-year-old son to the bookstore, and she was left with the two younger girls.” Agent Locke said all of this in a perfectly normal voice. Not a single shopper turned to look at us, but her words froze me to the spot. “Sandy and the girls were in line for lemonade. Three-year-old Madelyn made a beeline for the cookies, and Sandy had to pull her back. It was Christmastime, and the mall was crammed full of people. Madelyn was desperately in need of a nap and on the verge of a meltdown. The line was moving. Sandy made it to the counter and turned to ask her older daughter, Annabelle, whether she wanted regular lemonade or pink.”