The Naturals

“This encryption is pathetic,” Sloane said. “It’s like they want me to hack their files.”

She was sitting cross-legged on the end of her bed, her laptop balanced on her knees. Her fingers flew across the keys as she worked on breaking through the protection on the pilfered USB drive. A stray piece of blond hair drifted into her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Done!”

Sloane turned the laptop around so the two of us could see it. “Seven files,” she said. The smile fell from her face. “Seven victims.”

Locke’s lecture on victimology came flooding back to me. Was that why my mentor had been carrying around a digital copy of these files? Had she been attempting to get inside the victims’ heads?

“What if this is important?” I asked, unable to push back a stab of guilt. “What if Locke and Briggs need this information for their case?” I’d come to the program to help, not to get in the way of the FBI’s efforts.

“Cassie,” Michael said, taking a seat against the foot of the bed and stretching his legs out in front of him. “Is Briggs the type to keep backups?”

Agent Briggs was the type to keep backups of his backups. He and Locke had been gone for three days. If they’d needed this drive, they would have come back for it.

“Should I print out the files?” Sloane asked.

Michael looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Your call, Colorado.”

I should have said no. I should have told Sloane that the case Locke and Briggs were working on was none of our business, but I’d come here to help, and Locke had said that she and Briggs had hit a brick wall.

“Print it.”

A second later, the printer on Sloane’s desk started spitting out pages. After fifty or so sheets, it stopped. Michael leaned over and grabbed the pages. He separated them by case and helped himself to three case files before handing the others to Sloane and me. All seven were homicides. Four in DC in the past two weeks and another three cases, all within the past year, from other jurisdictions.

“First DC victim disappeared from the street she was working ten days ago and showed up the next morning with her face half carved off.” Michael looked up from leafing through the file.

“This one’s dated three days later,” I said. “Facial mutilation, numerous superficial cuts to the rest of the body—she died of blood loss.”

“This would take time,” Sloane said, her face pale. “Hours, not minutes, and according to the autopsy reports, the tissue damage is—severe.”

“He’s playing with them.” Michael finished with his second file and started in on the third. “He takes them. He cuts them. He watches them suffer. And then he cuts off their faces.”

“Don’t say he,” I corrected absentmindedly. “Say I or you.”

Michael and Sloane both stared at me, and I realized the obvious: their lessons were very different from mine.

“I mean, say UNSUB,” I told them. “Unknown Subject.”

“I can think of some better names for this guy,” Michael murmured, looking through the last case file in his hands. “Who has the file for the last victim?”

“I do.” Sloane’s voice was quiet, and suddenly, she looked very young. “She was a palm reader in Dupont Circle.” For a second, I thought Sloane might actually put the file down, but then her features went suddenly calm. “A person is ten times more likely to become a professional athlete than to make a living reading palms,” she said, taking refuge in the numbers.

Most killers have a type, I thought, falling back on my own lessons. “Do any of the other victims have ties to the psychic community, astrology, or the occult?”

Michael turned back to the two reports in his hand. “Lady of the Evening,” he said, “another Lady of the Evening, and a telemarketer … who worked at a psychic hotline.”

I glanced down at the two files in my hand. “I’ve got a nineteen-year-old runaway and a medium working out of Los Angeles.”

“Two different kinds of victims,” Michael observed. “Prostitutes, drifters, and runaways in column A. People with a tie to the occult in column B.”

I fished Before photos of the victims out of my files and gestured for the others to do the same.

You pick them for a reason, I thought, looking at the women one by one. You cut their faces, slice your knife down through skin and tissue, until you hit the bone. This is personal.

“They’re all young,” I said, studying them and searching for commonalities. “Between eighteen and thirty-five.”

“Those three have red hair.” Michael separated out the victims with no ties to the psychic community.

“The palm reader had red hair, too,” Sloane interjected.

I was staring directly at the palm reader’s Before picture. “The palm reader was a blonde.”

“No,” Sloane said slowly. “She was a natural blonde. But when they found her, she looked like this.”

Sloane slid a second, gruesome picture toward us. True to Sloane’s words, the corpse’s hair was a deep, unmistakable red.

A recent dye job, I thought. So did she dye her hair … or did you?

“Two classes of victims,” Michael said again, lining the redheads up in one column and the psychics in another, with the palm reader from Dupont Circle between the two. “You think we’re looking for two different killers?”

“No,” I said. “We’re only looking for one killer.”

My companions could make observations. Sloane could generate relevant statistics. If there’d been witness testimony, Michael could have told us who was exhibiting signs of guilt. But here, now, looking at the pictures, this was my domain. I would have had to backtrack to explain how I knew, to figure out how I knew—but I was certain. The pictures, what had been done to these women, it was the same. Not just the details, but the anger, the urges …

All of these women had been killed by the same person.

You’re escalating, I thought. Something happened, and now you need more, faster.

I stared at the photos, my mind whirring, picking up each detail of the pictures, the files, until only three things stood out.

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

That was the moment that the ground disappeared from underneath me. I lost the ability to blink. My eyes got very dry. My throat was worse. My vision blurred, and all of the photographs got very fuzzy except for one.

The nineteen-year-old runaway.

The hair, the facial structure, the freckles. Through blurred vision, she looked like …

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

“Cassie?” Michael took my hands in his. “You’re freezing.”

“The UNSUB is killing redheads,” I said, “and he’s killing psychics.”

“That’s not a pattern,” Sloane said peevishly. “That’s two patterns.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not. I think …”

Knife. Redhead. Psychic.

I couldn’t say the words. “My mother …” I took a short breath and brutally expelled it. “I don’t know what my mother’s body looked like,” I said finally, “but I do know that she was attacked with a knife.”

Michael and Sloane stared at me. I got up and walked over to my dresser. I opened the top drawer and found what I was looking for.

A picture.

Don’t look at it, I thought.

Directing my gaze at anything but the picture in my hand, I stooped and tapped my fingers on the palm reader’s photograph. “I don’t think she dyed her hair red,” I said. “I think the killer did.”

You kill psychics. You kill redheads. But one or the other isn’t enough anymore. It’s never enough.

Glancing up at Michael and Sloane, I laid my mother’s picture down between the two columns.

Sloane studied it. “She looks like the other victims,” she said, nodding to the column of redheads.

“No,” I said. “They look like her.”

These women had all been killed in the past nine months. My mother had been missing for five years.

“Cassie, who is that?” Michael had to have known the answer to that question, but he asked it anyway.

“That’s my mother.” I still couldn’t let myself look at the picture. “She was attacked with a knife. Her body was never found.” I paused, just for a second. “My mother made her living by convincing people she was psychic.”

Michael looked at me—and into me. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

I was saying that Briggs and Locke were tracking an UNSUB who killed women with red hair and people who claimed to be psychic. It could have been a coincidence. I should have assumed it was a coincidence.

But I didn’t.

“I’m saying this killer has a very specific type: people who resemble my mother.”