The Naturals

I walked slowly back down the stairs, trying to figure out what had just happened. What was I thinking, confronting Dean? He was allowed to have secrets. He was allowed to be angry that Locke had assigned me to read those interviews, knowing that one of them was his father’s. I shouldn’t have gone up there. I should have left him alone.

“Lia or Dean?”

I looked up and saw Michael standing near the front door.

“What?”

“The look on your face,” he replied. “Lia or Dean?”

I shrugged. “Both?”

Michael nodded, as if my answer were a foregone conclusion. “You okay?”

“You’re the emotion reader,” I said. “You tell me.”

He took that as an invitation to come closer. He stopped a foot or two away and studied my face. “You’re confused. Madder at yourself than you are at either of them. Lonely. Angry. Stupid.”

“Stupid?” I sputtered.

“Hey, I just call it like I see it.” Michael was apparently in the mood to be blunt. “You feel stupid. Doesn’t mean you are.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I sat down on the bottom step, and after a few seconds, Michael sat down beside me, stretching his legs out on the hardwood floor. “Why make thinly veiled comments about The Bad Seed instead of just telling me the truth?”

“I thought about telling you.” Michael leaned back on his elbows, his casual posture contradicting the tension unmistakable in his voice. “Every time I saw the two of you hunched over one of Locke’s little puzzles, I thought about telling you. But what would you have said if I did?”

I tried to imagine hearing about Dean’s father from Michael, who could barely manage a civil word where Dean was concerned.

“Exactly.” Michael reached forward to tap the edge of my lips, like that was the precise spot that had tipped him off to what was going on inside my mind. “You wouldn’t have thanked me for telling you. You would have hated me for it.”

I swatted Michael’s hand away from my face. “I wouldn’t have hated you.”

Michael gestured in the general direction of my forehead, but refrained from actually touching my face this time. “Your mouth says one thing, but your eyebrows say another.” He paused, and his own mouth twisted into a lazy grin. “You might not realize this, Colorado, but you can be a little sanctimonious.”

This time, I didn’t bother letting my face do the talking for me. I slugged him in the shoulder—hard.

“Fine.” Michael held his palms up in surrender. “You’re not sanctimonious. You’re honorable.” He paused and trained his eyes straight ahead. “Maybe I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I’m not.”

For a split second, Michael let those words—that confession—hang in the air.

“Besides,” he continued, “if I’d told you that between Redding and myself I was the safe option, I would have lost all of that carefully built-up bad-boy cred.”

From self-loathing to sardonic in under two seconds.

“Trust me,” I said lightly, “you don’t have any cred.”

“Oh, really?” Michael said. When I nodded, he stood up and took my hand. “Let’s fix that, then, shall we?”

A wiser person would have said no. I took a deep breath. “What did you have in mind?”

— — —

Blowing stuff up was surprisingly therapeutic.

“Clear!” Michael yelled. The two of us scuttled backward. A second later, a string of fireworks went off, scorching the floor of a fake foyer.

“Somehow, I don’t think this is what Agent Briggs had in mind when he built this basement,” I said.

Michael adopted an austere look. “Simulation is one of our most powerful tools,” he said, doing a passable imitation of Agent Briggs. “How else are we to visualize the work of the infamous Boom-Boom Bandit?”

“Boom-Boom Bandit?” I repeated.

He grinned. “Too much?”

I held my index finger up an inch from my thumb. “Just a little.”

Behind us, the door to the basement opened and slammed shut. I half expected it to be Judd, asking what precisely we thought we were doing down here, but Michael had assured me the basement was soundproof.

“I didn’t know anyone was down here.” Sloane looked at the two of us suspiciously. “Why are you down here?”

Michael and I looked at each other. I opened my mouth to answer, but Sloane’s eyes widened as she took in the evidence.

“Fireworks?” she said, folding her arms over her middle. “In the foyer?”

Michael shrugged. “Cassie needed a distraction, and I needed to give Briggs a few more gray hairs.”

Sloane eyed him mutinously. Considering the amount of time she spent down here, I could see why she might take any misuse of the crime sets seriously.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You should be,” she replied sternly. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

What followed was a ten-minute lecture on pyrodynamics. And several more explosions.

“Well,” Michael said, surveying our work. “That’ll teach Briggs and Locke to leave us to our own devices for too long.”

I shoved my hair out of my face with the heel of my hand. “They’re working a case,” I said, remembering the look on Locke’s face—and the details I’d managed to glean about what she and Briggs were up to. “I think that’s a little bit of a higher priority than training us is.”

“Sloane,” Michael said suddenly, drawing out her name and narrowing his eyes.

“Nothing,” Sloane replied quickly.

“Nothing what?” I asked. Clearly, I was missing something here.

“When I said Locke’s name, Sloane looked down and to the side and her eyebrows pulled up in the center.” Michael paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer. “What did you take, Sloane?”

Sloane made a careful study of her fingernails. “Agent Locke doesn’t like me.”

I thought back to the last time I had seen Sloane and Locke together. Sloane had come into the kitchen and rattled off some statistics about serial killers. Locke hadn’t had a chance to reply when Briggs came into the room with an update on their case. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Locke say anything to Sloane, though she traded barbs easily enough with Michael and Lia.

“There was a USB drive,” Sloane admitted finally, “in Agent Locke’s briefcase.”

Michael’s eyes lit up. “Am I to infer that you have it now?”

Sloane shrugged. “That’s a distinct possibility.”

“You took a USB drive out of Locke’s briefcase?” I processed that bit of information. When Lia had helped herself to the contents of my closet, she’d said that Sloane was the kleptomaniac in the house. I’d assumed she was joking.

Apparently not.

“Let’s concentrate on the important thing here,” Michael said. “What information do you lovely ladies think Locke would be carrying on her person while working a case?”

I glanced at Sloane, then back at Michael. “You think it has something to do with their current case?” I couldn’t keep the surge of interest out of my tone.

“That is also a distinct possibility.” Sloane was sounding distinctly more chipper.

Michael threw an arm over her shoulder. “Have I ever told you that you’re my favorite?” he asked her. Then he cast a wicked glance at me. “Still in need of distraction?”