The Naturals

YOU

Last night, you woke up in a cold sweat, and the only voice in your head was your father’s. The dream seemed real. It always seems real. You could feel the sticky sheets, smell the urine, hear the whistle of His hand tearing through the air. You woke up shaking, and then you realized—

The bed was wet.

No, you thought. No. No. No.

But there wasn’t anyone there to punish you. Your father’s dead, and you’re not.

You’re the one who does the punishing now.

But it’s never enough. The neighbor’s dog. The whores. Even the palm reader wasn’t enough. You open the bathroom cabinet. One by one, you run your hands over each of the tubes of lipstick, remember each of the girls.

It’s calming.

Soothing.

Exciting.

You stop when you get to the oldest tube. The first. You know what you want. What you need. You’ve always known.

All that’s left to do now is take it.

When I’d found out about Dean’s dad, I’d taken off running, but now that my mom’s photograph was staring up at me from a sea of murder victims, all I could do was sit there.

“Maybe this was a bad idea.” Coming from Michael, those words sounded completely alien.

“No,” I said. “You wanted to distract me. I’m distracted.”

“The likelihood that this UNSUB is the one who attacked your mother is extremely low.” Sloane spoke hesitantly, like she thought one more word—or one more statistic—might set me off. “This killer abducts his victims and kills them at a separate location, leaving little to no physical evidence at the site of abduction. There’s some indication that at least two of the victims may have been drugged. The women have relatively few defensive wounds, indicating that they’re likely restrained before the knife comes into play.”

Sloane was talking about this killer’s MO. With her gift, that was as far as she could go. She couldn’t see underneath it, couldn’t imagine how a killer might have refined his technique over the span of five years.

“When does Agent Briggs get back?” I asked.

“He’s never going to let you work on this,” Michael told me.

“Is that your way of telling me that you don’t want him to know we hacked a stolen jump drive?” I shot back.

Michael snorted. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind taking out an ad in the paper or hiring a skywriter to announce that he and Locke were outsmarted by three bored teenagers.”

I could think of a lot of words to describe my life right now; boring wasn’t one of them.

“Briggs is nothing if not predictable, Cassie. His job is proving that we can solve cold cases, not dragging us along on active ones. He’s probably lucky his bosses didn’t fire him when they figured out what he was doing with Dean. Even if this case does have something to do with your mother’s, he’ll never let you work on it.”

I turned to Sloane for a second opinion.

“Two hours and fifty-six minutes,” she said. “Briggs was due back in town today, but he’ll need to settle things at the office and grab a change of clothes and a shower before coming in.”

That meant I had two hours and fifty-six minutes to decide how to broach this case to Agent Briggs—or better yet, Agent Locke.

— — —

The good thing about being in cahoots with an emotion reader was that Michael could tell that I wanted to be left alone, and he obliged. Better yet, he took Sloane—and the files—with him.

If he hadn’t, I probably would still have been sitting there, staring at the crime-scene photos and wondering if my mom had died without a face. Instead, I was lying on my bed, staring at the door and trying to think of something—anything—I could offer the FBI to make them want me on this case.

Two hours and forty-two minutes later, someone knocked on my door. I thought it might be Agent Briggs, back fourteen minutes earlier than Sloane had predicted.

But it wasn’t.

“Dean?”

He hadn’t ever sought me out before he’d told me that we weren’t partners, weren’t friends, weren’t anything. I couldn’t imagine why he’d come looking for me voluntarily now.

“Can I come in?”

There was something about the way he was standing there that told me he was expecting me to say no. Maybe I should have. Instead, I nodded, not trusting my voice.

He came in and shut the door behind him. “Lia eavesdrops,” he explained, gesturing toward the closed door.

I shrugged and waited for him to say something he wouldn’t want overheard.

“I’m sorry.” He managed two words, paused, and then pushed out two more. “About before.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about.” There was no law saying he had to trust me. Outside of Locke’s lessons, we’d barely spent any time together. He hadn’t chosen to kiss me.

“Lia told me about the files you and Michael and Sloane found.”

The sudden change of subject took me by surprise. “How does Lia even know about that?”

Dean shrugged. “She eavesdrops.”

And since I wasn’t exactly Lia’s favorite person right now, she had no reason whatsoever to keep her mouth closed about whatever it was that she’d overheard.

“So, what?” I asked Dean. “We’re even now? I found out about your dad and Lia told you that I think the UNSUB Briggs and Locke are after might be the one who killed my mom and now everything’s okay?”

Dean sat down on Sloane’s bed and faced me. “Nothing’s okay.”

Why was it that I’d managed to hold on to my cool with Michael and Sloane, but now that Dean was here, I could feel myself starting to slip?

“Sloane said that she thinks it’s highly unlikely that this killer is the same one who took my mother,” I said, looking down at my lap and trying not to cry. “It’s been five years. The MO is different. I don’t even know if the signature is the same, because they never found my mother’s body.”

Dean leaned forward and angled his head up at mine. “Some killers go for years without being caught, and their MOs change as time goes on. They learn. They evolve. They need more.”

Dean was telling me that I could be right, that the time frame didn’t preclude this being the same UNSUB, but I knew from his tone of voice that he wasn’t just talking about this UNSUB.

“How long was it before they caught him?” I asked softly. I didn’t specify who him was. I didn’t have to.

Dean met my gaze and held it. “Years.”

I wondered if that one word was more than he’d told anyone else about his father.

I thought that maybe it was.

“My mother. I was the one who found …” I couldn’t say her body because there hadn’t been one. I swallowed hard, but I kept going, because it was important, somehow, to put it into words, to tell him.

“I’d gone to check out the crowd, eavesdrop, see if there was anything I could pick up on that might help my mom during the show. I was gone ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and when I got back, she was gone. The entire room had been tossed. The police say she fought. I know she fought—but there was so much blood. I don’t know how many times he stabbed her, but when I got back to the room, I could smell it. The door was partway open. The light was off. I stepped into the room and I felt something wet underneath my feet. I said her name, I think. And then I reached for the light switch. I got the wall instead, and there was blood on the wall. It was on my hands, Dean, and then I turned on the light, and it was everywhere.”

Dean didn’t say anything, but he was there, so close that I could feel the heat of his body next to mine. He was listening, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he understood.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t usually talk about this, and I don’t let it do this to me, but I remember thinking that whoever hurt my mother hated her. He knew her, and he hated her, Dean. It was there, in the room, in the spatter, in the way she’d fought—it wasn’t random. He knew her, and how could I explain that to anyone? Who would have believed me? I was just some stupid kid, but now Briggs and Locke have this case, and their UNSUB is killing people who look like my mother and people who hold a similar job, and he’s doing it with a knife. And even though the victims are scattered geographically, even though none of them knew each other, it’s personal.” I paused. “I don’t think he’s killing them. I think he’s killing her again. And I’m not just some stupid kid anymore. I’m a profiler. A Natural. But even so—who’s going to believe me?”

Dean put a hand on my neck, the way he had the first time I’d crawled into a killer’s mind. “Nobody is going to believe you,” he said. “You’re too close to it.” He ran his thumb up and down the side of my neck. “But Briggs will believe me.”

Dean was the only person in this house who shared my ability. Michael and Sloane might have been skeptical about my theory, but Dean had instincts like mine. He’d know if I was crazy, or if there was something to this. “You’ll look at the case?” I asked him.

He nodded and dropped his hand from my neck, like he’d only just realized he was touching me.

I stood. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going to get the file.”