The Naturals Read online

  “I don’t get jealous,” Michael said. “I get even.”

  No one was surprised when Michael aimed the next round at Dean.

  “Truth or dare, Dean?”

  “Truth.” Dean’s eyes narrowed, and I remembered Lia saying that if Dean had a temper, Michael would have been dead by now. I waited, my stomach heavy and my throat dry, for Michael to ask Dean something horrible.

  But he didn’t.

  “Have you ever seen The Bad Seed?” he inquired politely. “The movie.”

  A muscle in Dean’s jaw twitched. “No.”

  Michael grinned. “I have.”

  Dean stood up. “I’m done here.”

  “Dean—” Lia’s tone was halfway between mulish and wheedling, but he silenced her with a look. Two seconds later, he was stalking out of the room, and a few seconds after that, I heard the front door open, then slam.

  Dean was gone—and a person didn’t have to be an emotion reader to see the look of satisfaction on Michael’s face.

  YOU

  Every hour, every day, you think about The Girl. But it’s not time for the grand finale. Not yet. Instead, you find another toy at a little shop in Dupont Circle. You’ve had your eye on her for a while, but resisted the urge to add her to your collection. She was too close to home, in an area that was too densely populated.

  But right now, the so-called Madame Selene is just what you need. Bodies are bodies, but a palm reader—there’s a certain poetry to that. A message you want—need—have to send. It would be simpler to kill her in the shop, to drive a knife through each palm and leave her body on display, but you’ve worked so hard this week.

  You deserve a little treat.

  Taking her is easy. You’re a ghost. A stranger with candy. A sympathetic ear. When Madame Selene wakes up in the warehouse, she won’t believe that you’re the one who’s done this to her.

  Not at first.

  But eventually, she’ll see.

  You smile, thinking about the inevitability of it all. You touch the tips of her brown hair and pick up the handy box of Red Dye Number 12. You hum under your breath, a children’s song that takes you back to the beginning, back to the first.

  The palm reader’s eyes flicker open. Her hands are bound. She sees you. Then she sees the hair dye, the knife in your left hand, and she realizes.—

  You are the monster.

  And this time, you deserve to take things slow.

  CHAPTER 17

  When Agent Locke showed up Monday morning, she had dark circles under her eyes. Belatedly, I remembered that while we’d been watching TV and playing Truth or Dare, she and Briggs had been out working a case. A real case, with real stakes.

  A real killer.

  For a long time, Locke didn’t say anything. “Briggs and I hit a brick wall this weekend,” she said finally. “We’ve got three bodies, and the killer is escalating.” She ran a hand through hair that looked like it had been only haphazardly brushed. “That’s not your problem. It’s mine, but this case has reminded me that the UNSUB is only half the story. Dean, what can you tell Cassie about victimology?”

  Dean stared holes in the countertop. I hadn’t seen him since Truth or Dare, but it was like nothing had changed between us, like we’d never kissed.

  “Most killers have a type,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s a physical type. For others, it may be a matter of convenience—maybe you focus on hikers, because no one reports them missing for a few days, or students, because it’s easy to get ahold of their class schedules.”

  Agent Locke nodded. “Occasionally the victims may be serving as a substitute for someone in the UNSUB’s life. Some killers kill their first girlfriend or their wife or their mother, over and over again.”

  “The other thing victimology tells us,” Dean continued, flicking his eyes over to Agent Locke, “is how the victim would have reacted to being abducted or attacked. If you’re a killer …” He paused, searching for the right words. “There’s a give-and-take between you and the people you kill. You choose them. You trap them. Maybe they fight. Maybe they run. Some try to reason with you, some say things that set you off. Either way, you react.”

  “We don’t have the luxury of knowing every last detail about the UNSUB’s personality,” Agent Locke cut in, “but the victim’s personality and behavior account for half of the crime scene.”

  The moment I heard the phrase crime scene, I flashed back to opening the door to my mother’s dressing room. I’d always thought that I knew so little about what had happened that day. By the time I’d gotten back to the dressing room, the killer was gone. My mother was gone. There was so much blood.…

  Victimology, I reminded myself. I knew my mother. She would have fought—nail-scratching, breaking-lamps-over-his-head, struggling-for-the-knife fought. And there were only two things that could have stopped her: dying or the realization that I was due back in the room at any second.

  What if she went with him? The police had assumed she was dead—or at the very least unconscious—when the UNSUB had removed her from the room. But my mother wasn’t a small woman, and the dressing room was on the second floor of the theater. Under normal circumstance, my mother wouldn’t have just let a killer waltz her out the door—but she might have done anything to keep her assailant away from me.

  “Cassie?” Agent Locke said, snapping me back to the present.

  “Right,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Right what?”

  “Sorry,” I told Locke. “Could you repeat what you just said?”

  She gave me a long, appraising look, then repeated herself. “I said that walking through a crime scene from a victim’s perspective can tell you a lot about the killer. Say you go into a victim’s house and you find out that she compulsively writes to-do lists, color-codes her clothes, and has a pet fish. This woman is the third victim, but she’s the only one of the three who doesn’t have defensive wounds. The killer normally keeps his victims alive for days, but this woman was killed by a strong blow to the head on the day she was taken. Her blouse was buttoned crookedly when they found her.”

  Putting myself into the killer’s head, I could imagine him taking women. Playing with them. So why would he let this one off easy? Why end his game early, when she showed no signs of fighting back?

  Because she showed no signs of fighting back.

  I switched perspectives, imagining myself as the victim. I’m organized, orderly, and type A in the extreme. I want a pet, but can’t bring myself to get one that would actually disrupt my life, so I settle for a fish instead. Maybe I’ve read about the previous murders in the paper. Maybe I know how things end for the women who fought back.

  So maybe I don’t fight back. Not physically.

  The things Locke had told me about the victim said that she was a woman who liked to stay in control. She would have tried reasoning with her killer. She would have resisted his attempts to control her. She might have even tried to manipulate him. And if she’d succeeded, even for an instant …

  “The UNSUB killed the others for fun,” I said, “but he killed her in a fit of rage.”

  Their interaction would have been a game of control for him, too—and she was just enough of a control freak to disrupt that.

  “And?” Agent Locke prompted.

  I drew a blank.

  “He buttoned her shirt,” Dean said. “If she’d buttoned it, it wouldn’t have been crooked.”

  That observation sent my mind whirring. If he’d killed her in a rage, why would he have dressed her afterward? If he’d undressed her, I could understand it—the final humiliation, the final assertion of control.

  You know her, I thought.

  “The UNSUB’s first two victims were chosen randomly.” Agent Locke met my eyes, and for a second, it felt like she was reading my mind. “We assumed the third victim was as well. We were wrong.” Locke rocked back on her heels. “That’s why you need both sides of the coin. Checks and balances, victims and UNSUBs—b
ecause you’ll always be wrong about something. You’ll always miss something. What if there’s a personal connection? What if the UNSUB is older than you thought? What if he is a she? What if there are two UNSUBs working as a pair? What if the killer is just a kid himself?”

  I knew suddenly that we weren’t talking about the type A woman and the man who’d killed her anymore. We were talking about the doubts plaguing Locke right now, the assumptions she’d made on her current case. We were talking about an UNSUB that Locke and Briggs hadn’t been able to catch.

  “Ninety percent of all serial killers are male.” Sloane announced her presence, then walked up to join us. “Seventy-six percent are American, with a substantial percentage of serial murders concentrated in California, Texas, New York, and Illinois. The vast majority of serial killers are Caucasian, and over eighty-nine percent of victims of serial crimes are Caucasian as well.”

  I could not help noticing that she spoke significantly slower when not under the influence of caffeine.

  Briggs followed Sloane into the room. “Lacey.” He got Agent Locke’s attention. “I just got a call from Starmans. We have body number four.”

  Thinking about those words—and what they meant—felt like eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help myself. Another body. Another person, dead.

  Locke clenched her jaw. “Same profile?” she asked Briggs.

  Briggs gave a brisk, slight nod. “A palm reader in Dupont Circle. And the national database search we ran came back with more than one match for our killer’s MO.”

  What MO? I couldn’t shake the question, any more than I could stop wondering who this new victim was, if she’d had a family, who had told them that she was dead.

  “That bad?” Locke asked, reading Briggs’s face. I wished Michael were there to help me do the same. This case was none of my business—but I wanted to know.

  “We should talk elsewhere,” Briggs said.

  Elsewhere. As in somewhere that Sloane, Dean, and I weren’t.

  “You didn’t have trouble coming to Dean for advice when he was twelve,” I said, unable to stop myself. “Why stop now?”

  Briggs’s eyes darted over to Dean, who met his gaze without blinking. Clearly, that wasn’t information Dean was supposed to share with the rest of us—but just as clearly, Dean wasn’t going to look away first.

  “The flower beds could use some weeding.” Judd broke the tension, coming into the room to stand between Briggs and Dean. “If you’re done with the kids for a bit, I can put them to work. Might be good for them to get their hands dirty, get some sun.”

  Judd directed those words at Agent Briggs, but Locke was the one who replied. “It’s fine, Judd.” She glanced first at Dean, then at me. “They can stay. Briggs, you were saying the database turned up more than one case with the same MO?”

  For a moment, Briggs looked like he might argue with Locke about letting us stay, but she just stood there, stubbornly waiting him out.

  Briggs gave in first. “Our database search returned three cases consistent with our killer’s MO in the past nine months,” he said, clipping each word. “New Orleans, Los Angeles, and American Falls.”

  “Illinois?” Locke asked.

  Briggs shook his head. “Idaho.”

  I processed that information. If the cases Briggs was talking about were related, we were dealing with a killer who’d crossed state lines and had been killing for the better part of a year.

  “My go bag is in the car,” Locke said, and suddenly, I remembered—we weren’t dealing with anything. Locke hadn’t let Briggs shuffle the three of us out of the room, but at the end of the day, this wasn’t a training exercise, and it wasn’t my case, or even ours.

  It was theirs.

  “We leave at sixteen hundred hours.” Briggs straightened his tie. “I left work for Lia, Michael, and Sloane. Locke, do you have anything for Cassie and Dean—besides weeding the flower beds?” he added with a glance at Judd.

  “I’m not leaving them a cold case.” Locke turned to me, almost apologetically. “You have an incredible amount of raw talent, Cass, but you’ve spent too much time in the real world and not enough in ours. Not yet.”

  “She can handle anything you throw at her.”

  I looked at Dean, surprised. He was the last person I expected to be making this argument on my behalf.

  “Thank you for that glowing endorsement, Dean,” Locke said, “but I’m not going to rush this. Not with her.” She paused. “Library,” she told me. “Third shelf from the left. There’s a series of blue binders. Prison interviews. Make your way through those, and we’ll talk about getting you started on cold cases when I get back.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Dean’s voice was curiously flat. Locke shrugged.

  “You’re the one who said she was ready.”

  CHAPTER 18

  That night, when I snuck out to the pool for a midnight swim, Dean wasn’t the one who joined me.

  “I would have pegged you for a no-nonsense one-piece,” Michael said as I came up for air after swimming laps. He dangled his legs over the side of the pool. “Something sporty.”

  I was wearing a two-piece bathing suit—halfway between sporty and a bikini.

  “Should I be insulted?” I asked, swimming to the opposite side of the pool and pulling myself up onto the ledge.

  “No,” Michael replied. “But you are.”

  He was right, of course. In the dim light of the moon, I wondered how he could even see my face, let alone read an emotion I was trying to hide.

  “You like it here.” Michael lowered himself into the pool, and for the first time, I registered the fact that his chest was bare. “You like Agent Locke. You like all of her little lessons. And you like the idea of helping out with real cases even more.”

  I didn’t say anything. Clearly, Michael was capable of having this conversation all by himself.

  “What? You aren’t even going to try to profile me?” Michael flicked water at my knees. “Where’s the girl from the diner?” he asked me. “Tit for tat.”

  “You don’t want to be profiled,” I told him. “You don’t want people to know you.” I paused. “You don’t want me to know you.”

  He was silent for one second, two, three—and then, “Truth.”

  “Yeah,” I said wryly. “I speak the truth.”

  “No,” Michael replied. “Truth. Isn’t that what you wanted me to say last night, instead of dare?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him, grinning. “I wouldn’t trade the memory of your ballet man-dance for anything.”

  Michael pushed off from the ledge and started treading water. “I also excel at synchronized swimming.” I laughed, and he made his way over to my ledge. “I mean it, Cassie. Truth.” He paused, two feet away from me. “You ask. I’ll tell you. Anything.”

  I waited for the catch, but there wasn’t one.

  “Fine,” I said, considering my questions carefully. “Why don’t you want to be profiled? What is it you’re so afraid that people are going to find out?”

  “I got into a fight once,” Michael said, sounding oddly at ease. “Right before I came here. Put the other guy in the hospital. I just kept hitting him, over and over again, even once he was down. I don’t lose it often, but when I do, it’s bad. I take after the old man in that. We Townsends don’t do anything halfway.” Michael paused. He’d answered my second question, but not my first. “Maybe I don’t want to be profiled because I don’t want to know what you’d see. What little box I fit in. Who I really am.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.

  He gave me a lazy smile. “That’s a matter of some debate.”

  I’d been planning on asking about his father, but now I couldn’t bring myself to ask if the old man had ever lost it with him. “Your family’s wealthy?”

  “As sin,” Michael replied. “My past is a long string of boarding schools, excess, and the finest fill-in-the-blank that money can buy.”
r />   “Does your family know you’re here?”

  Michael pushed off the side and started treading water again. I couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but I didn’t need to see him to know that his trademark smirk held more than a hint of self-loathing. “A better question might be if they care.”

  Three questions. Three honest answers. Just because he’d offered to show me his scars didn’t mean I had to tear them open. “You and Lia?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Yes,” Michael replied, catching me off guard, because I hadn’t considered it a yes-or-no question. “On again, off again. Never for very long, and it was never a good call—for either of us.”

  If I didn’t want to know the answer, I shouldn’t have asked. I stood up and cannonballed back into the pool, sending a small tsunami of water Michael’s way. The moment I came back up, he flicked water at my face.

  “You know, of course,” he said solemnly, “that this means war.”

  One second, there was a good three feet of space between us, and the next, we were wrestling, each trying to outdunk and outsplash the other, neither of us fully aware of just how close together our bodies were.

  I got a mouthful of water. I sputtered. Michael dunked me, and I came up gasping for air—and saw Dean standing on the patio. He was standing perfectly, horribly still.

  Michael dunked me again before he realized I’d stopped fighting. He turned around and saw Dean.

  “You got a problem, Redding?” Michael asked.

  “No,” Dean replied. “No problem.”

  I gave Michael a sharp look and trusted that he’d be able to read me well enough for it to be effective, even in the dark.

  Michael got the message. “Care to join us?” he asked Dean, overly politely.

  “No,” Dean replied, just as politely. “Thank you.” He paused, and the silence swelled around us. “You two have a good night.”

  As Dean disappeared back into the house, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d taken something from him—the place he came to think, the moment we’d shared the night he’d shown me the black lights.