The Naturals

I made my way to the library to drown my sorrows in serial killer interviews. Wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor bookshelves bulged with carefully organized titles: textbooks, memoirs, biographies, academic journals, and the oddest assortment of fiction I’d ever seen: old-fashioned dime-store mysteries, romance novels, comic books, Dickens, Tolkien, and Poe.

The third shelf from the left was full of blue binders. I picked up the first one and opened it.

FRIEDMAN, THOMAS

OCTOBER 22-28, 1993

FLORIDA STATE PRISON, STARKE, FL

Thomas Friedman. Such a normal-sounding name. Gingerly, I flipped through the transcript: a bare-bones play with a limited cast of characters, no plot, and no resolution. Supervisory Special Agent Cormack Kent was the interviewer. He asked Friedman about his childhood, his parents, his fantasies, the nine women he’d strangled with high-sheen dress hose. Reading Friedman’s words—black ink typed onto the page—would have been bad enough, but the worst part was that after a few pages, I could hear the way he would have talked about the women he’d killed: excitement, nostalgia, longing—but no remorse.

“You should sit down.”

I’d been expecting someone to join me in the library. I hadn’t expected that someone to be Lia.

“Dean’s not coming,” Lia said. “He read those interviews a long time ago.”

“Have you read them?” I asked.

“Some,” Lia replied. “Mostly, I’ve heard them. Briggs gives me the audio. I play Spot the Lie. It’s a real party.”

I realized suddenly that most people my age—most people any age—wouldn’t be able to take reading these interviews. They wouldn’t want to, and they certainly wouldn’t lose themselves in it, the way I would. The way I already had. Friedman’s interview was horrible and horrifying—but I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that wanted to understand.

“What’s the deal with you and Dean?” I asked Lia, forcing myself to think about anything other than the fact that part of me wanted to keep reading. Michael might have told me that he and Lia had hooked up—more than once—but Dean was the one who could dial her back a notch just by saying her name.

“I’ve been in love with him since I was twelve.” Lia shrugged, like she hadn’t just bared her soul to me. And then I realized, she hadn’t.

“Oh, God,” she said, gasping for air between giggles. “You should see your face. Really, Cassie, I’m not a fan of incest, and Dean is the closest thing to a brother I have. If I tried to kiss him, he might actually hurl on me.”

That was comforting. But the fact that it was comforting just sent me right back into the tailspin from that morning: why should I care if there was anything between Lia and Dean, when Michael was the one who’d kissed me of his own free will?

“Look, as adorable as watching you angst is,” Lia said, “take a bit of friendly advice: there’s not a person in this house who isn’t really, truly, fundamentally screwed up to the depths of their dark and shadowy souls. Including you. Including Dean. Including Michael.”

That sounded more like an insult than advice.

“Dean would want me to tell you to stay away from him,” Lia said.

“And Michael?” I asked.

Lia shrugged. “I want to tell you to stay away from Michael.” She paused. “I won’t, but I want to.”

I waited to see if she was finished. She didn’t say anything else.

“As far as advice goes, that kind of sucked.”

Lia executed an elaborate bow. “I try.” Her eyes flitted back to the binder in my hand. “Do me a favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

Lia gestured to the binder. “If you’re going to read those,” she said, “don’t say anything about them to Dean.”

— — —

For the next four days, Locke and Briggs were away working on their case, and other than avoiding Michael and Dean and weeding the flower beds for Judd, there was nothing for me to do but read. And read. And read. A thousand pages of interviews later, I got sick of being cooped up in the library and decided to take a little field trip. I took a walk through town and ended up plopping down by the Potomac River, enjoying the view and reading interview twenty-seven, binder twelve. The 1990s had given way to the twenty-first century, and SSA Kent had been replaced by a series of other agents—among them, Agent Briggs.

“Enjoying a bit of light reading?”

I looked up to see a man around my dad’s age. He had a five-o’clock shadow and a friendly smile on his face.

I shifted so that my arm covered my reading material in case he decided to look. “Something like that.”

“You looked pretty absorbed.”

Then why did you interrupt me? I wanted to ask. Either he’d sought me out specifically, or he was the kind of person who didn’t see the contradiction in interrupting someone’s reading to tell her she looked absorbed in the text.

“You live at Judd’s place, right?” he said. “He and I go way back.”

I relaxed slightly, but still had no intention of getting sucked into a conversation about my reading material—or anything else. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said in my best waitress voice, hoping he’d sense a false note under the cheerfulness in my voice and leave me to my own devices.

“Enjoying the weather?” he asked me.

“Something like that.”

“I can’t take you anywhere.” Michael appeared on my other side and eased himself onto the ground next to me. “She’s too gregarious for her own good,” he told the man standing next to us. “Always chatting up complete strangers. Frankly, I think she over-shares. It’s embarrassing.”

I put the heel of my hand on Michael’s shoulder and shoved, but couldn’t push down the stab of gratitude I felt that I was no longer suffering through Small Town Talk Time alone.

“Well,” the man said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to say hello.”

Michael nodded austerely. “How do you do?”

I waited until our visitor was out of earshot before I turned to him. “‘How do you do’?” I repeated incredulously.

Michael shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m in a social pickle, I like to ask myself, WWJAD?” I raised an eyebrow, and he explained. “What Would Jane Austen Do?”

If Michael read Jane Austen, I was the heir to the British throne.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Rescuing you,” he answered blithely. “What are you doing here?”

I gestured to the binder. “Reading.”

“And avoiding me?” he asked.

I repositioned my body and hoped the glare from the sun would compromise his view of my face. “I’m not avoiding anyone. I just wanted to be alone.”

Michael brought his hand up to his face to shield it from the sun. “You wanted to be alone,” he repeated. “To read.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said defensively. “That’s why we’re all here. To learn.”

Not to obsess over the fact that I’ve kissed more boys in the past week than I have in my entire life, I added silently. To my surprise, Michael didn’t comment on the emotions I had to be broadcasting. He just reclined next to me and held up some reading material of his own.

“Jane Austen,” I said, disbelieving.

Michael gestured toward my binder. “Carry on.”

For fifteen or twenty minutes, the two of us read in silence. I finished interview twenty-seven and started in on number twenty-eight.

REDDING, DANIEL

JANUARY 15–18, 2007

VIRGINIA STATE PENITENTIARY, RICHMOND, VA

I almost missed it, would have missed it had the name not been printed over and over again, documenting this particular serial killer’s every word.

Redding.

Redding.

Redding.

The interviewer was Agent Briggs. The subject’s name was Redding, and he’d been incarcerated in Virginia. I stopped breathing. My mouth went suddenly dry. I flipped through the pages, faster and faster, skimming at warp speed until Daniel Redding asked Briggs a question about his son.

Dean.