The Naturals (2 Book Series)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  The difference between Michael’s gift and mine was as obvious as it had been playing poker. He saw so much that Sterling was trying to hide. But why she was hiding it—that was a question for me.

  “How’s the studying coming along?”

  I glanced up at Judd, who stood in the doorway. He was a Marine, not a den mother. The question sounded completely foreign coming out of his mouth.

  “Haven’t started,” Michael replied flippantly at the exact same time that I said, “Almost done.”

  Judd arched an eyebrow at Michael, but didn’t push the issue. “You mind giving us a moment?” he asked instead.

  Michael cocked his head slightly to one side, taking in the expression on Judd’s face. “Do I have a choice?”

  Judd almost smiled. “That would be a no.”

  As Michael made his way out of the room, Judd crossed it and lowered himself onto the sofa next to me. He watched Michael go. Something about the way he tracked Michael’s progress made me think he was forcing himself to take in the way Michael favored his injured leg.

  “You know why this program is restricted to cold cases?” Judd asked me once Michael was gone.

  “Because Dean was twelve when this program was started?” I suggested. “And because Director Sterling wants to minimize the chances of anyone finding out the program exists?” Those were the easy answers. Judd’s silence pushed me into giving the hard one. “Because on active cases,” I said softly, “people get hurt.”

  “On active cases, people cross lines.” Judd took his time with the words. “Everything is urgent, everything is life-and-death.” He rubbed his thumb across the pads of his fingers. “In the heat of battle, you do what needs to be done. You make sacrifices.”

  Judd was military. He didn’t use the word battle lightly.

  “You’re not talking about us crossing the lines,” I said, sorting through what I was hearing—and what I knew. “You’re talking about the FBI.”

  “Could be I am,” Judd allowed.

  I tried to parse my way through Judd’s logic. Reading interviews, going through witness statements, looking at crime scene photos—those were all things we already did. What did it matter if the files were a year old versus a day? Theoretically, the risks were the same—minimal. But with active cases, the stakes were higher.

  This UNSUB that Locke and Briggs were hunting, he was out there now. He might be planning his next kill now. It was easy enough to keep us out of the field on cold cases. But with lives on the line, if bringing us along could make a difference…

  “It’s a slippery slope.” Judd rubbed the back of his hand over his jaw. “I trust Briggs. Mostly.”

  “You trust Agent Sterling,” I said. He didn’t contradict me. “What about the director?”

  Judd met my eyes. “What about him?”

  The director was the one who’d caved to political pressure and trotted me out as bait on the Locke case. I’d wanted to help. He was the one who’d let me.

  “I heard you and Ronnie butted heads,” Judd said, closing the door on further discussion. He put his palms on his knees, pushed off, and stood. “I think it would do you some good to stay out of the basement.” He let that sink in. “For a few weeks.”

  Weeks? It took me a second to figure out what was going on here. Had Agent Sterling tattled on me? “You’re grounding me from the basement?” I said sharply.

  “You’re a profiler,” Judd said mildly. “You don’t need to be down there. And,” he added, his voice hardening slightly, “you don’t need to be poking your nose into this case.”

  In all the time I’d been here, Judd had never told any of us what we needed to do. This had Agent Sterling’s fingerprints all over it.

  “She’s a good agent, Cassie.” Judd seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. “If you let her, there’s a lot she could teach you.”

  Locke was my teacher. “Agent Sterling doesn’t have to teach me anything,” I said sharply. “If she can catch whoever killed that girl, we’ll call it even.”

  Judd gave me a look. “She’s a good agent,” he repeated. “So is Briggs.” He started for the door. His back to me, he kept talking, his voice so low I almost couldn’t hear him.

  For a long time after he left, I wondered over the words I’d barely heard. He’d said that Sterling was a good agent. That Briggs was a good agent. And then, as if he couldn’t stop himself, as if he didn’t even realize he was saying the words out loud, he’d said one last thing.

  “There was only ever one case they couldn’t solve.”

  YOU

  At first, it felt good. Watching the life go out of her eyes. Running your thumb across the bloodstained knife. Standing over her, your heartbeat accelerating, pounding out a glorious rhythm: I did that. I did that. I did that.

  But now—now, the doubts are starting to worm their way into your brain. You can feel them, wiggling through your gray matter, whispering to you in a familiar voice.

  “You were sloppy,” it says. “Someone could have seen you.”

  But they didn’t. They didn’t see you. You’re better than that. You passed this test with flying colors. You bound her. You branded her. You cut her. You hung her.

  You did it. You’re done. But it doesn’t feel like enough. You don’t feel like enough.

  Good enough.

  Strong enough.

  Smart enough.

  Worthy.

  If you’d done it right, you’d still be able to hear her screams. The press would be giving you a name. They’d be talking about you on the news, not her. She was nothing. No one. You made her special.

  But no one even knows you’re alive.

  “I’ll do it,” you say. “I’ll do it again.”

  But the voice tells you to wait. It tells you to be patient. What will be will be—in time.

  I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I couldn’t remember my nightmare, but knew that I’d had one. My heart was racing. My chest was heavy, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was trapped. I threw off the covers.

  My fingers found their way to the Rose Red lipstick of their own accord. On the other side of the room, Sloane turned over in her bed. I held my breath, waiting to see if she’d wake up. She didn’t. As quietly as I could, I slipped out of bed and out of our room.

  I needed space. I needed air. I needed to breathe.

  The house was silent as I crept downstairs. I wasn’t even sure where I was going until I ended up outside the kitchen door.

  “I told you, I’m fine.”

  I came to an abrupt halt as the silence in the house gave way to the muted sound of arguing on the other side of the door.

  “You’re not fine, Dean. You’re not supposed to be fine with this. I’m not fine with this.”

  Agent Sterling and Dean. They’re fighting.

  I heard the sound of a chair scraping across tile and prepared to retreat. I listened for footsteps, but none were forthcoming. It sounded like someone had just pushed back from the table—angrily.

  “You left.”

  “Dean—”

  “You left the FBI. I think we both know why.”

  “I left because I wasn’t doing my job, Dean. I was angry. I needed to prove that I wasn’t scared, and I got someone killed. Because I couldn’t follow the rules. Because Tanner couldn’t let even one case go.”

  Tanner was Briggs’s first name. The fact that Agent Sterling was using it in a conversation with Dean made me wonder just how much history the two of them shared. This wasn’t a conversation you had with a kid you’d met once when you arrested his father.

  “What was the girl’s name?” Dean’s voice was lower-pitched than Agent Sterling’s. I struggled to make out his words as he spoke.

  “I can’t tell you that, Dean.”

  “What was her name?”

  “You’re not authorized to work on active cases. Leave it alone.”

  “You tell me her name. I’ll leave it alone.”


  “No, you won’t.” Agent Sterling’s voice was getting harder to decipher. I wondered if she was speaking more softly because the alternative was starting to yell.

  “I made you a promise once.” Dean’s voice was controlled—too controlled. “I kept it. Tell me this girl’s name, and I’ll promise to leave it alone.”

  My fingers tightened around the tube of lipstick in my hand. Briggs had let me read through Locke’s file. I’d memorized the names of every one of her victims.

  “Isn’t it enough that I swore we would take care of this?” Agent Sterling said sharply. “We’ve got some solid leads. I can’t tell you what they are, but I can promise you we have them. It’s a copycat, Dean. Paint by numbers. That’s all. Daniel Redding is in jail. He’s going to be in jail for the rest of his miserable life.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Why do you need to know?” This time, Agent Sterling’s voice got loud enough that I would have heard it even if I hadn’t been standing right outside the door. “You tell me that, and I’ll answer your question.”

  “I just do.”

  “Not good enough, Dean.”

  Silence. Neither one of them spoke for at least a minute. The sound of my own breathing seemed unbearably loud. I was sure that any second, one of them would come storming out. They’d discover me standing here, listening at the door to a conversation that I knew was more private than anything Dean had told me.

  But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even remember how.

  “Her name was Gloria.” That was Dean, not Sterling, so I wasn’t sure who the her in question was. “He introduced her to me. He made her say my name. He asked her if she’d like to be my mom. I was nine. I told him I didn’t want a new mother. And he looked at Gloria and said, ‘That’s a shame.’”

  “You didn’t know.” Sterling’s voice was quiet again, but still high enough in pitch that the words carried.

  “And once I did know,” Dean replied, his voice on the edge of breaking, “he wouldn’t tell me their names.”

  Another torturously long silence. The vicious beating of my own heart drowned out the sound of my breathing. I took a step backward, a tiny, silent step.

  I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be listening to this.

  I turned, but even with my back to the door, I heard Agent Sterling answer Dean’s question. “The girl’s name was Emerson Cole.”

  Back in my own bed, I closed my eyes and tried not to think about what I’d overheard, as if by pushing it out of my mind, I could make up for the fact that I’d listened at the door for far too long.

  I failed.

  Dean and Agent Sterling hadn’t just met each other before. They knew each other. They had history. Stop thinking about it, I told myself. Don’t do this. I couldn’t stop, any more than Sloane would have been able to see a mathematical equation without calculating the answer.

  Dean made you a promise once, Agent Sterling, and whatever it was, he kept it. The closest I could come to granting Dean privacy was to try getting inside Agent Sterling’s head instead of his. You don’t like thinking about the Daniel Redding case. You care about Dean. Michael said you’re afraid to even look at him, but clearly, you don’t blame Dean for what his father did.

  Another implication of their conversation finally sank in.

  You know that Dean discovered what his father was doing, don’t you? You know that Daniel Redding made his son watch.

  The words Dean had whispered to me the day before, the secret I’d been sure he’d never told anyone—she knew it, too. Somehow, that made it harder to hold on to my resentment against Agent Sterling.

  You think you can protect him. You think if he doesn’t know what’s happening, it won’t affect him. That’s why you didn’t want to tell him Emerson’s name.

  If Agent Sterling knew him so well, if she cared about Dean so much, why couldn’t she see that it was the not knowing that was going to kill him? It didn’t matter if this killer was just a copycat—the fact that Dean had needed to know the girl’s name told me he wouldn’t be able to make that separation in his mind.

  He’d blame himself for this girl, the way he blamed himself for all the others.

  I told him I didn’t want a new mother.

  And Daniel Redding had replied, “That’s a shame.” In Dean’s mind—and maybe in his father’s—at least one of Daniel Redding’s victims had died because she wouldn’t make a suitable replacement mother for Dean.

  Because Dean had said he didn’t want her.

  So much for my resolution to stick to profiling Sterling instead of Dean.

  Thwap. A small, cold projectile hit me in the side of the head. For a second, I thought I’d imagined it, and then—thwap.

  I opened my eyes, turned toward the door, and wiped the side of my face, which was damp. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the light, I’d been pelted for a third time.

  “Lia,” I hissed, keeping my voice to a whisper to avoid waking Sloane. “Quit throwing ice at me.”

  Lia popped a piece of ice into her mouth and rolled it around with her tongue. Without a word, she beckoned me into the hallway. Fairly certain she would continue throwing ice at me until I agreed, I rolled out of bed and followed her into the hall. She closed the bedroom door behind us and pulled me into the nearby bathroom. Once she’d locked that door, she flipped the light switch on, and I realized that, in addition to the cup of ice she held in her left hand, she held a sparkly mint-green shirt in her right.

  My eyes went from the clothes in Lia’s hands to the clothes she was wearing: black leather pants and a silver top that was held in place by a chain around her neck and had no back whatsoever.

  “What are you wearing?” I asked.

  Lia answered my question with an order. “Put this on.”

  She thrust the shirt at me. I took a step back. “Why?”

  “Because,” Lia said, like the two of us hadn’t fought twice in the past forty-eight hours, “you can’t go to a Colonial University frat party dressed in your pajamas.”

  “A frat party,” I repeated. Then the rest of her statement sunk in. Colonial University. The scene of the crime.

  “This is a bad idea,” I told Lia. “Judd would kill us. Not to mention the fact that Agent Sterling’s already on the warpath, and all Sloane and I did was build a mock-up of the crime scene in the basement.”

  “Sloane built a mock-up of the crime scene,” Lia corrected. “You didn’t do anything other than get caught.”

  “You’re a crazy person,” I told Lia, struggling to keep my voice to a whisper. “You want us to sneak out of the house to attend a college frat party at a university where there is an ongoing FBI investigation. Forget about Judd and Agent Sterling. Briggs would kill us.”

  “Only if we get caught,” Lia retorted. “And unlike certain redheads in this room, I specialize at not getting caught. Put on the dress, Cassie.”

  “What dress?”

  Lia held up the glittery thing I’d mistaken for a shirt. “This dress.”

  “There is no world in which that is long enough to be a dress.”

  “It’s a dress. In fact, as of this moment, it’s your dress, which you are going to put on without complaining, because frat boys are more talkative when you’re showing a little leg.”

  I inhaled, preparing to counter Lia’s statement with one of my own, but she took a step forward, invading my personal space and pushing me back against the bathroom counter.

  “You’re the profiler,” she said. “You tell me how okay Dean is going to be if the FBI botches this case. Then tell me that you are one hundred percent certain that we won’t pick up on something they miss.”

  The FBI had profilers and interrogators. Those agents had training. They had experience. They had a million and one things that we didn’t—but no one had instincts like ours. That was the whole point of the program. That was the reason Judd was afraid that if the FBI started using us on active cases, they wouldn’t be able to sto
p.

  “Who do you think college students are going to get chatty with,” Lia asked me, “FBI agents or two scantily clad and passably nubile teenage girls?”

  Even setting aside our abilities, Lia was right. No one would suspect we were part of the investigation. They might tell us something the FBI didn’t know.

  “If Sterling implied that she could, in any way, get the director to disband this program, she was lying. I can guarantee you that’s outside her purview. At most, she could send one of us home, and I would bet you a lot of money that the director wouldn’t let her send you home, because you’re a nice, shiny alternative to Dean, who the director has never trusted and never liked.” Lia took a step back, allowing me some breathing room. “You say you care about Dean,” she told me, her voice low. “You say you want to help. This will help. I’d lie to you about a lot of things, Cassie, but helping Dean isn’t one of them. I wouldn’t do this for you, or for Michael, or even for Sloane. But I would waltz into hades and make nice with the devil himself for Dean, so either you put on the damn dress or you get the hell out of my way.”

  I put on the dress.

  “Are you sure this isn’t a shirt?” I asked, eyeing the hemline.

  Lia manhandled my face and slathered it with base before brandishing a tube of pink lip gloss and a container of black mascara. “It’s a dress,” she swore.

  It was times like these I really wished Lia weren’t a compulsive liar.

  “How are we even getting to this party?” I asked.

  Lia smirked. “It just so happens I know a boy with a car.”

  Michael’s Porsche was a remnant of his life before the program. Watching him behind the wheel, it was easy to picture the person he’d been then, the trust-fund brat bouncing from one boarding school to another, summering in the Hamptons, jetting out to Saint Barts or Saint Lucia for a long weekend.

  It was easy to picture that Michael bouncing from girl to girl.

  Lia sat in the front seat beside him. She was leaning back, the leather seat caressing her cheek, her long hair whipping in the wind. She’d rolled down her window and showed no signs of wanting to roll it back up. Every once in a while, her gaze flitted over to Michael. I wished I could read the inscrutable expression on Lia’s face. What was she thinking?