The Naturals (2 Book Series)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “I found out what he was doing, and he made me watch.”

  What were we doing, trading secrets? Trading guilt? What he’d just told me was so much bigger than anything I could have told him. He was drowning, and I didn’t know how to pull him out. The two of us sat there in silence, him on the workout bench, me on the floor. I wanted to touch him, but I didn’t. I wanted to tell him it would be okay, but I didn’t. I pictured the girl we’d seen on the news.

  The dead girl.

  Dean could whale away on a punching bag until the skin on his knuckles was gone. We could trade confessions that no one should ever have to make. But none of that could change the fact that Dean wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep until this case was closed—and neither would I.

  The next morning, after tossing and turning most of the night, I woke to find a face hovering three inches above my own. I jerked backward in bed, and Sloane blinked at me.

  “Hypothetically speaking,” she said, as if it were perfectly normal to bend over a bed and stare at someone until they woke up, “would constructing a model of the crime scene we saw on the video yesterday qualify as intruding on Dean’s space?”

  I opened my mouth to tell Sloane that she was intruding on my space, but then processed her question. “Hypothetically speaking,” I said, stifling a yawn and sitting up in bed, “have you already reconstructed the crime scene in question?”

  “That is a definite possibility.” Her hair was tousled and sticking up at odd angles. There were dark circles under her eyes.

  “Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked her.

  “I was trying to figure out how the killer managed to pose the girl’s body without being seen,” Sloane said, which both was and wasn’t an answer to my question. When Sloane got absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist. “I have a theory.”

  She tugged on the ends of her white-blond hair. I could practically see her waiting for me to snap at her, to tell her that she was handling the situation with Dean wrong. She knew she was different from other people, and I was realizing, bit by bit, that somewhere along the line, someone—or maybe multiple someones—had conditioned her to believe that different, her kind of different, was wrong.

  “Let me get dressed,” I told her. “Then you can tell me your theory.”

  When Dean was upset, he went to the garage. When Sloane was upset, she went to the basement. I wasn’t sure she had another way of coping.

  And besides, I thought as I pulled on a T-shirt, I’m clearly the last person who should be lecturing anyone about giving Dean space.

  The basement ran the length of our Victorian-style house and extended out underneath the front and back yards. Walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling divided the space into distinct sets, each missing a fourth wall.

  “I had to make some modifications to the car specs,” Sloane said, pulling her hair into a tight ponytail as she stopped in front of a battered car parked on the lawn of a set designed to look like a park. “Briggs had a two-door brought down a couple of weeks ago for a simulation I was running. The hood was two inches too long, and the slope wasn’t quite steep enough, but it was nothing a carefully wielded sledgehammer couldn’t fix.”

  Sloane had a willowy build and relatively little regard for recommended safety measures. The idea of her wielding a sledgehammer of any kind was terrifying.

  “Cassie, focus,” Sloane ordered. “We were somewhat limited on outdoor sets, so I went with the neighborhood park scene. The grass is one and one-quarter inch tall, slightly less uniform than the crime scene lawn. We had a nice arrangement of crash dummies to choose from, so I was able to match the victim’s height within two centimeters. The rope is the wrong color, but it’s nylon, and the thickness should be a match.”

  It was easy to forget sometimes that Sloane’s gift went far beyond the index of statistics stored in her brain. The video we’d seen of the crime scene had been taken from a distance and lasted less than forty-five seconds, but she’d encoded every last numerical detail: the length and width of the rope tied around the victim’s neck; the exact positioning of the body; the height of the grass; the make, model, and specs of the car.

  As a result, I was looking at a nearly exact replica of what we’d seen on the film. A faceless, naked dummy was draped across the hood of the car. The dummy’s lower extremities dangled over the front; a rope was knotted around its neck. The body was tilted slightly to one side. On the video, we’d only viewed it from the front, but now, I could actually walk around and take in the three-sixty view. The hands were bound at the wrists, unevenly, twisting the upper body slightly to the left. I closed my eyes and pictured the girl.

  You fought, didn’t you? Fought so hard that the bindings cut into your arms.

  “One end of the rope was tied around her neck. The other ran up to the sunroof, down, and was anchored to something inside the car.” Sloane’s voice brought me back to the present. I stared at the car.

  “The UNSUB didn’t do all that on the front lawn of the university president’s house,” I said.

  “Correct!” Sloane beamed at me. “Which means that he strung her up and then placed the car there. I looked up the topography of the streets surrounding the house. There’s a road directly west that curves, but if you don’t take the curve, you go off-road and down a forested slope.”

  “A forest could have provided cover,” I said, nibbling at my bottom lip as I tried to picture the UNSUB moving, quickly and quietly, still shrouded in the partial darkness of very early morning. “Assuming he killed her in the car, he could have strung her up in the forest…”

  Sloane picked up where I left off. “…pushed her to the edge of the woods, and the slope of the hill would have done the rest. The only question is how he kept the body from bouncing around on the way down.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but someone else beat me to it.

  “It was weighted.”

  Sloane and I turned in unison. Agent Sterling came striding toward us, her long legs making quick work of the space. She’d traded the gray suit for a black one and the pink shirt for a light, silvery gray, a near-perfect match for her eyes. Her hair was in a French braid, and her face was taut, like she’d fixed the braid in place so firmly it pulled her skin tight across her skull.

  She stopped, a few feet away from the scene Sloane had rigged up.

  “That’s an impressive likeness,” she said, her clipped words making it clear that the statement wasn’t a compliment. “What source material were you using?”

  Sloane, completely oblivious to the steely tone in Agent Sterling’s voice, replied with a smile. “There was a cell phone video leaked online.”

  Agent Sterling closed her eyes, bowed her head slightly, and inhaled. I could practically hear her counting silently to ten. When she opened her eyes, they zeroed in on me. “And what was your involvement in all of this, Cassandra?”

  I could have told her that Sloane had built the replica completely on her own, but I wasn’t about to throw my own roommate to the wolves. Stepping in between Sloane and Sterling, I drew the agent’s ire to me.

  “My involvement?” I repeated, channeling Lia—or possibly Michael. “Let’s go with moral support.”

  Sterling pursed her lips, then turned back to Sloane. “Was there a particular reason you wanted to rebuild this crime scene?” she asked, gentling her voice slightly.

  I tried to catch Sloane’s eye, telegraphing that she should not, under any circumstances, tell her what Dean had told us about his father.

  Sloane met my eyes and nodded. I relaxed slightly, then Sloane turned back to Agent Sterling. “Dean told us this case looks a lot like his father’s,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Clearly, Sloane had misinterpreted my look to mean the exact opposite of what I’d been trying to communicate.

  “So you rebuilt the scene to figure out if Dean was right about the similarities?” Agent Sterling asked.

  “I rebuilt the scene so
Cassie could look at it,” Sloane said helpfully. “She said that Dean needed space, so we’re giving him space.”

  “You call this giving him space?” Agent Sterling asked, flicking a hand toward the car. “I could kill the kid who leaked that video. Seeing that—it was the very last thing Dean needed. But you know what the second-to-last thing he needs is? Someone re-creating that scene in his basement. Did you learn nothing this summer?”

  That question was aimed directly at me. Agent Sterling’s tone wasn’t angry or accusatory. It was incredulous.

  “When the director discovered what Briggs was doing with Dean, using him to solve cases, it almost got Briggs fired. It should have gotten him fired. But somehow, my father and Briggs reached a compromise. The Bureau would provide Dean with a home, a guardian, and training, and Dean would help them with cold cases. Not active cases. Your lives were never supposed to be on the line.” Agent Sterling paused, the look in her eye caught somewhere between anger and betrayal. “I looked the other way. Until this summer.”

  This summer—when we’d been authorized to work on an active case, because the killer had zeroed in on me.

  Sloane jumped to my defense. “The killer contacted Cassie, not the other way around.”

  Sterling’s expression softened when she looked at Sloane. “This isn’t about what happened this summer. This is about the fact that no one has authorized you to work on this case. I need your word the two of you will leave it alone. No modeling it, no profiling it, no hacking.”

  “No hacking,” Sloane agreed. She held out her hand to shake on it, and before Agent Sterling could comment on her selective hearing, she added, “If the entire population of the town of Quantico shook hands with one another, there would be a total of 157,080 possible handshake combinations.”

  Agent Sterling smiled slightly as she took Sloane’s proffered hand. “No hacking and no more simulations.”

  Sloane took her hand back. The dark circles under her eyes made her look younger somehow, fragile—or maybe brittle. “I have to run simulations. It’s what I do.”

  As a profiler, Agent Sterling should have been able to hear what Sloane wasn’t saying—that building this model was the only thing she could do for Dean. It was also her way of working through her own emotions. It was what she did.

  “Not on this case,” Agent Sterling repeated. She turned from Sloane to me. “No exceptions. No excuses. This program only works if the rules are followed and enforced.” Agent Sterling had clearly cast herself in the role of enforcer. “You work on cold cases, and you do so only with the approval of myself and Agent Briggs. If you can’t follow these simple instructions, you’re not just a liability. This whole program is.” Agent Sterling met my eyes, and there was no question in my mind that she’d meant me to hear those words as a threat. “Am I clear?”

  The only thing clearer was the fact that my earlier impressions of the woman had been right on target. This wasn’t just a job to her. This was personal.

  “She more or less threatened to shut down the entire program.”

  Michael leaned back in his chair. “She’s a profiler. She knows exactly what threats to issue to keep people in line. She’s got your number, Colorado. You’re a team player, so she didn’t just threaten you. She threatened the rest of us, too.”

  Michael and I were in the living room. Sloane, Lia, and Dean had passed their practice GEDs the day before with flying colors. Neither Michael nor I had actually taken one, but somehow, answer sheets had been turned in with our names on them. Apparently, Lia had been feeling generous—but not generous enough to ensure that we passed, too. As a result, Michael and I were under strict orders to study.

  I was better at following orders than Michael was.

  “If you were the one issuing threats,” he said, a wicked grin working its way onto his face, “how would you threaten me?”

  I looked up from my work. I was going over the test Lia had filled out for me, correcting the wrong answers. “You want me to threaten you?”

  “I want to know how you would threaten me,” Michael corrected. “Obviously, threatening the program wouldn’t be the way to go. I don’t exactly have the warm fuzzies for the FBI.”

  I tapped the edge of my pencil against the practice test. Michael’s challenge was a welcome distraction. “I’d start with your Porsche,” I said.

  “If I’m a bad boy, you’ll take away my keys?” Michael wiggled his eyebrows in a way that was both suggestive and ridiculous.

  “No,” I replied without even thinking about it. “If you’re a bad boy, I’ll give your car to Dean.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Michael put a hand over his heart, like he’d been shot—a gesture that would have been funnier before he’d taken an actual bullet to the chest.

  “You’re the one who asked,” I said. Michael should have known by now not to throw down the gauntlet unless he wanted me picking it up.

  “The depravity of you, Cassie Hobbes.” He was clearly impressed.

  I shrugged. “You and Dean have some kind of pseudo-sworn-enemy, pseudo-sibling-rivalry thing going on. You’d rather I set your car on fire than give it to Dean. It’s the perfect threat.”

  Michael didn’t contradict my logic. Instead, he shook his head and smiled. “Anyone ever tell you that you have a sadistic streak?”

  I felt the breath whoosh out of my lungs. He couldn’t have known the effect those words would have on me. I turned back to the practice test, allowing my hair to fall into my face, but it was too late. Michael had already seen the split second of horror—loathing—fear—disgust on my face.

  “Cassie—”

  “I’m fine.”

  Locke had been a sadist. Part of the pleasure she’d gotten out of killing had been imagining what her victims were going through. I had no desire to hurt anyone. Ever. But being a Natural profiler meant that I instinctively knew other people’s weaknesses. Knowing what people wanted and knowing what they feared were two sides of the same coin.

  Michael wasn’t really calling me sadistic. I knew that, and he knew that I’d never intentionally hurt anyone. But sometimes, knowing that you could do something was almost as bad as having actually done it.

  “Hey.” Michael tilted his head upside down to get a good look at my face. “I was kidding. No Sad Cassie face, okay?”

  “This isn’t my sad face,” I told him. There was a point in time when he would have pushed the hair out of my face and let his hand linger on my jaw. Not anymore.

  The unspoken rules said it had to be my choice. I could feel him, watching me, waiting for me to say something. He stayed there, staring at me upside down, his face just a few inches away from mine.

  His mouth just a few inches away from mine.

  “I know a Sad Cassie face when I see one,” he said. “Even upside down.”

  I brushed my hair over my shoulders and leaned back. Trying to hide what I was feeling from Michael was impossible. I shouldn’t have even tried.

  “You and Lia back on speaking terms?” he asked me.

  I was grateful for the subject change. “Lia and I are…whatever Lia and I normally are. I don’t think she’s plotting my immediate demise.”

  Michael nodded sagely. “So she’s not going to go for your throat the moment she figures out you broke the holy commandment of Thou shalt give Dean his space?”

  I’d thought my visit to Dean last night had gone unnoticed. Apparently, I’d thought wrong.

  “I wanted to see how he was doing.” I felt like I had to explain, even though Michael hadn’t asked for an explanation. “I didn’t want him to be alone.”

  Reading emotions made Michael an expert at concealing them, so when I saw a flicker of something in his eyes, I knew that he’d chosen not to hide it from me. He liked that I was the kind of person who cared about the people in this house. He just wished that the person I’d spent last night caring about wasn’t Dean.

  “And how goes Sir Broods-A-Lot’s f
amilial angst?” Michael did a good imitation of someone who didn’t really care about the answer to that question. He might have even been able to fool another emotion reader—but my ability wasn’t just about posture or facial expressions or what a person was feeling at any given moment.

  Behavior. Personality. Environment.

  Michael was snarking to hide the fact that he did care about the answer to that question.

  “If you want to know how Dean’s holding up, you can just ask.”

  Michael shrugged noncommittally. He wasn’t going to admit that Lia, Sloane, and I weren’t the only ones worried about Dean. A noncommittal shrug was as close to an expression of concern as I was going to get.

  “He’s not okay,” I said. “He won’t be okay until Briggs and Sterling close this case. If they’d just tell him what’s going on, it might help, but that’s not going to happen. Sterling won’t let it.”

  Michael shot me a sideways glance. “You really don’t like Agent Sterling.”

  I didn’t think that statement merited a reply.

  “Cassie, you don’t dislike anyone. The only time I’ve ever seen you get persnickety with someone was when Briggs assigned agents to dog your every move. But you disliked Agent Sterling from the moment she showed up.”

  I had no intention of replying to that statement, either, but Michael didn’t need verbal replies. He was perfectly capable of carrying on conversations completely on his own, reading my responses in my body language and the tiniest hints of expressions on my face.

  “She doesn’t like this program,” I said, just to get him to stop reading me so intently. “She doesn’t like us. And she really doesn’t like me.”

  “She doesn’t dislike you as much as you think she does.” Michael’s voice was quiet. I found myself leaning toward him, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear more. “Agent Sterling isn’t fond of me, because I’m not fond of rules. She’s afraid to spend more than a few seconds looking at Dean, but she’s not scared of him. She actually likes Lia, even though Lia’s not any fonder of rules than I am. And Sloane reminds her of someone.”