Bad Blood: (The Naturals #4) (Naturals, The)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Sterling took the proffered hand, but I knew in my gut that she wouldn’t offer the man even a hint of a smile.

  “Please,” Townsend said smoothly, stepping back from the threshold, “come in.”

  This was Michael’s father. I tried to wrap my mind around that fact. He had Michael’s air of confidence, Michael’s presence, Michael’s irrepressible charm. I waited for something to ping my inner profiler, for some hint, however small, that the man who’d answered that door was a monster.

  “He hasn’t lied yet,” Lia told Michael.

  Michael flashed her a sharp-edged smile. “It’s not lying if you believe every word you say.”

  I’d expected Thatcher Townsend to be a man who threw his weight around, a man who needed to own and possess and control. I’d expected someone like Dean’s father, or Sloane’s. At the very least, I’d expected a man whose demons might be invisible to the average person, but not to me.

  Nothing.

  “What can you tell us about your father’s business partner?” Dean asked Michael as the introductions got under way on camera.

  “Remy Delacroix?” Michael shrugged. “He likes pretty things and pretty people. He likes being in control. And, God knows why, he likes my father. The two have been in business together since before I was born. Remy frowns when he’s unhappy, snaps when he’s angry, and hits on anything in a skirt.”

  What you see is what you get. Earlier, when Michael had said those words, he’d been parroting his father. And he’d been lying. Thatcher Townsend wasn’t transparent. If Michael’s father had been as easy to read as Remy Delacroix, Michael never would have become the type of person who could read a world of meaning in the blink of an eye.

  “So you’re saying we’ll know fairly quickly if Delacroix had anything to do with his daughter’s disappearance.” I focused on that in an effort to help Michael do the same.

  “I’m saying that Remy wouldn’t touch a hair on Celine’s head.” Michael kept his gaze locked intently on the screen. “As I said, he likes pretty people, and CeCe’s been beautiful since the day she was born.”

  Lia didn’t stiffen, didn’t bat an eye, didn’t so much as lean away from Michael. But she would have heard the truth in those words. She would have heard the affection when Michael referred to Celine Delacroix as CeCe.

  “Whatever resources you need, you’ll have them.” Remy Delacroix’s words brought my attention back to the video feed. He looked like a shadow of Michael’s father: slightly shorter, slightly blander features, more tightly wound. “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what laws you have to break. You get my little girl home.”

  Agent Sterling didn’t tell the man that the FBI wasn’t in the business of breaking laws. Instead, she eased him into questioning with a query that should have been easy to field. “Tell us about Celine.”

  “What is there to tell?” Delacroix replied, obviously agitated. “She’s a nineteen-year-old girl. A damn Yale student. If you’re trying to say that she might have done something to bring this on herself—”

  Beside him, his wife laid a hand on his arm. I knew from reading the case file that Elise Delacroix was older than her husband, a former economics professor with an Ivy League education and the connections to match. As Remy’s ranting subsided, Elise glanced at Michael’s father, and after a moment, Thatcher went to pour his business partner a drink.

  “What do you see?” I asked Michael.

  “On Remy’s face? Agitation. Part bluster, part fear, part righteous indignation. No guilt.”

  I wondered how many parents wouldn’t feel guilty if they’d discovered their daughter had been missing for nearly a week before anyone had noticed.

  “Celine is independent,” Elise Delacroix told the agents once her husband had a drink in his hand. She was an elegant African American woman with her daughter’s tall, lithe build and shoulders she kept squared at all times. “Passionate, but unfocused. She has her father’s temper and my drive, though she tries her best to hide the latter.”

  That the woman had mentioned her husband’s temper to the FBI stuck out to me. You have to know that the parents are always suspects in cases like these. Either you have nothing to hide or you simply don’t care about throwing your husband under the bus.

  “Elise is always in control,” Michael told me. “Of her husband, of her emotions, of the family image. The one thing she can’t control is Celine.”

  “Does she miss her daughter?” Dean asked, his eyes still on the screen.

  Michael was quiet for the longest time as he watched Elise Delacroix. The tone in her voice never changed. The control she exerted over her facial features never wavered.

  Michael managed an answer to Dean’s question. “She’s broken. Terrified. Guilt-ridden. And disgusted—with her husband, with herself.”

  “With Celine?” I asked quietly.

  Michael didn’t answer.

  On-screen, Agent Briggs had moved on to establishing a time line, and I tried to put myself in Celine’s shoes, growing up with a father who, when asked about his daughter, said there was nothing to tell, and a mother whose first instinct had been to talk about her daughter’s temper and drive.

  Independent, I thought. Passionate. Stubborn. I could see shades of Elise in the Celine from the pictures. Solid colors, not prints. You paint like you’re dancing, paint like you’re fighting—and you look at cameras like you know the secrets of the world.

  In the background of the feed, Thatcher Townsend made two more drinks: one for Elise and one for himself. It occurred to me for the first time to wonder where Michael’s mother was. It also occurred to me to wonder why Remy and Elise had chosen to give this interview in the Townsends’ house.

  “What’s your father feeling?” I asked Michael, hating myself for asking, but knowing we had to treat this like any other case.

  Michael scanned his father’s face as Thatcher held, but didn’t drink, his bourbon on the rocks. Within seconds, Michael was texting Agent Briggs.

  “You want to know what I see when I look at my father, Colorado?” he asked, his voice utterly devoid of emotion, like whatever he’d read on Thatcher Townsend’s face had numbed something inside him, deadened it like a dentist would before removing a dying tooth. “Beneath that somber expression, he’s furious. Affronted. Personally insulted.”

  Insulted by what? I wondered. By the fact that someone took Celine? By the FBI’s presence in his home?

  “And every time someone says CeCe’s name, he feels exactly what he’s always felt, every time he’s looked at Celine Delacroix since she was fourteen years old.” Michael’s words set my gut to twisting, deep inside me. “Hunger.”

  YOU

  You know the Seven, almost as well as they know you. Their strengths. Their weaknesses. The Masters thirst for power. They drape you in diamonds—one for each victim. Each sacrifice. Each choice.

  Diamonds and scars, scars and diamonds. The men who’ve turned you into this pretty, deadly thing go out into the world. They live their lives. They prosper.

  They kill.

  For you.

  Hunger wasn’t an emotion. It was a need. A deep-seated, biological, primitive need. I didn’t want to even think about what might make a grown man look at a teenage girl that way, why Thatcher Townsend might be personally insulted that someone had dared to abduct the daughter of a family friend.

  “Gloves.” Agent Sterling held a pair out to each of us. She and Agent Briggs hadn’t responded to Michael’s text. Instead, Agent Starmans had eventually been the one to tell us that we’d been cleared to visit the crime scene.

  You chose to come home over spring break. As I put on the gloves, I tried to slip back into Celine’s perspective. You had to at least suspect your parents wouldn’t be here. I stood at the threshold to Celine’s studio. Crime-scene tape had it blocked off. From the looks of it, the studio had been a cabana or single-room guesthouse at some point. It was detached from the main house, overlooking the po
ol.

  Even from the doorway, the smell of kerosene was overwhelming.

  “Signs of forced entry.” Sloane came to stand beside me, scanning the door. “Light scratches around the lock. There’s a ninety-six percent probability that further analysis would reveal dents on the pins inside the lock.”

  “Translation?” Lia asked. Beside her, Michael closed his eyes, an elongated blink that made me wish that I were half as good at reading his emotions as he was at reading mine.

  “The lock was engaged. Someone picked it.” Sloane ducked under the crime-scene tape, her blue eyes taking everything in as she methodically scanned the room.

  You locked the door. I stood in the doorway a moment longer, trying to picture Celine inside. You came out here to paint, and you locked the door. I wondered if that had been force of habit—or if she’d had a reason to turn the lock. Taking my time, I entered the studio, careful to avoid the evidence markers on the floor.

  Shattered glass. A broken easel. My mind superimposed the images from the crime scene photos onto the markers on the floor. A second table was overturned near the far wall. A curtain had been pulled down, torn. There were drops of blood on the floor, a hand-shaped smear on the inside of the door frame.

  You fought.

  No, I thought, my heart thrumming in my chest. Using the word you kept me at a distance. That wasn’t what I wanted. That wasn’t what Celine needed.

  I fought. I pictured myself standing in the middle of the studio, painting. Without meaning to, my body assumed the position we’d seen Celine in right before the security footage had cut out. My right arm was elevated, a pretend brush held in my hand. My torso twisted slightly to one side. My chin rose, my eyes on a phantom painting.

  “The door was locked,” I said. “Maybe I heard someone outside. Maybe I heard the light sound of scratching. Maybe the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.”

  Or maybe I was so consumed by painting that I didn’t hear a thing. Maybe I didn’t see the doorknob turn. Maybe I didn’t hear it open.

  “I was quiet.” Dean stood at the door, staring at me. My first instinct had been to get inside Celine’s head. His first instinct was always to profile the UNSUB. “There will be a time for noise, a time for screams. But first I have to get what I came for.”

  I saw the logic in what Dean was saying: the UNSUB had come here for Celine. She hadn’t been a random target. A killer choosing his victims randomly wouldn’t have chosen a girl protected by a state-of-the-art security system. Only someone who’d been watching her would have known she was here alone.

  “You thought you could slip in and take me,” I said, my eyes on Dean. “You thought that if you were quiet enough and quick enough, you could subdue me before I’d put up much of a fight.”

  You thought wrong.

  Dean ducked under the tape and crossed the room. Standing behind me, he placed a hand over my mouth and pulled my body back against his. The motion was careful, slow, but I let myself feel it the way Celine would have. On instinct—and moving just as slowly as Dean had—I bent forward, thrusting my elbows back into his stomach. The brush, I thought, in my hand. I moved as if to stab him in the leg, and at the same time, I bit the hand that held me. Lightly. Gently.

  Celine would have bit her captor hard.

  Dean pulled back, and I escaped his grasp.

  “I’m screaming by this point,” I said. “As loud as I can. I rush for the door, but—”

  Dean came up behind me again. As he mocked grabbing me, I went for the edge of the closest table. If I hold on tight enough, you can’t—

  “Not that way,” Sloane said suddenly, breaking into my thoughts. “Based on the pattern of the debris we saw in the crime scene photos, the contents of the table would have been knocked off the table from this side.” She came around to the far side of the table and mimicked the motion it would have taken, sweeping her arms over the table lengthwise.

  I frowned. That side of the table?

  “Maybe it wasn’t me,” I told Dean after a moment. “If I was terrified and fighting for my life, the first chance I got, I would go for the door.”

  Unless I was looking for a weapon. Unless I had reason to believe that I could fight and win.

  Dean’s hands clenched themselves slowly into fists. “I could have done it.” He swept his hands over the table, a vein in his neck jumping out against his suntanned skin. “To scare you. To punish you.”

  I pictured glass flying everywhere. This studio is mine. My space. My haven. What Dean was saying made sense only if the UNSUB knew that—and only if he’d known, on some level, that Celine would stay and fight.

  That she wouldn’t run.

  I took in the rest of the room and integrated it with what I’d seen in the initial crime scene photos. The overturned table. The curtain, torn down from the rod. The broken easel. The remains of Celine’s painting, broken and dying on the floor.

  “What about the kerosene?” Lia had been remarkably quiet while we’d been profiling, but she’d reached the limit on biting her tongue.

  Her question jarred me out of Celine’s perspective and into the UNSUB’s. If you’d planned to abduct her, you wouldn’t have brought the kerosene with you. And if you’d planned to burn her alive here, you would have torched the place.

  “Maybe I couldn’t do it,” Dean said softly. “Maybe, going in, I didn’t realize what it would be like.” He paused. “How much I would like it.”

  How much you would like the fight. How much you would like her fury, her terror. How much you would want to make this one last.

  “The good news,” I said, my voice horrible and bitter and low, “is that if this is the work of one of the Masters, she’s definitely his first.”

  Sloane was still analyzing the physical evidence, but I’d seen all I needed to see—all I could stand seeing. A small part of me couldn’t help drawing parallels between this crime scene and the first one I’d ever seen—my mother’s.

  She fought. She bled. They took her.

  The difference was that Celine had been taken on a Fibonacci date, and that meant that if this was the work of the Masters, we weren’t looking for a missing girl, a potential Pythia.

  We were looking for a corpse.

  “I’d like to see the victim’s bedroom,” I said. I owed it to Celine Delacroix to get to know her, then to come back down here and walk through it all over again, until I found whatever it was that we’d been overlooking.

  That was what profilers did. We submerged ourselves in the darkness again and again and again.

  “I’ll take you to Celine’s room.” Michael didn’t wait for permission before he started walking toward the main house. I caught Agent Sterling’s gaze. She nodded for me to follow Michael.

  “I’ll wait down here,” Dean told me.

  When we’d been profiling, I hadn’t felt the crushing distance between us, but now, my mind went to the secrets I was keeping from him, his father’s mocking words.

  “I want to go over the scene again,” Dean continued. “Something about this doesn’t feel right.”

  Nothing feels right, I thought. And then, deep inside of me, something whispered, Nothing ever will. I would give everything I had to this case. I’d give and give, until the girl I’d been—the girl Dean had loved—was gone, worn away like a sand castle swept out with the tide.

  Ignoring the dull ache that accompanied that thought, I turned and followed Michael into the house. Lia fell in beside me.

  “You’re coming with?” I asked.

  Lia gave a graceful little shrug. “Why not?” The fact that she didn’t even try to lie about her motivations gave me pause. “Keep up,” Lia told me, breezing past. “I’d hate to have any alone time whatsoever with Michael in his ex-girlfriend’s room.”

  Michael had said that Celine was the one person who’d cared about him growing up. He’d said that she was beautiful. He’d called her by a nickname. And Lia and Michael’s on-again off-again relation
ship had a tendency to end badly.

  Every time.

  We caught up with Michael just as he halted at the threshold of Celine’s room. As I came to stand next to him, I saw the thing that had made him pause.

  A self-portrait. I didn’t question the instinct that said that Celine had painted this piece herself. It was big, larger than life. Unlike the photographs I’d seen of our victim, this painting showed a girl who wasn’t elegant, didn’t want to be. The paint was thick and textured on the canvas, nearly three-dimensional. The strokes were rough and visible. Celine had only painted herself from the shoulders up. Her skin was bare, dark brown and luminescent. And the expression on her face…

  Naked and vulnerable and fierce.

  Beside me, Michael stared at the painting. You’re reading her, I thought. You know exactly what the girl in that painting is feeling. You know what the girl who painted it was feeling. You know her like you know yourself.

  “She didn’t use a brush.” Lia let that comment register before she continued. “CeCe dearest painted that one with a knife.”

  My brain instantly integrated that tidbit into what I knew about Celine.

  “How much do you want to bet our knife-wielding Picasso cleans her brushes with kerosene?” Lia asked. “Turpentine would be more common, but I’m guessing Celine Delacroix doesn’t do common. Does she, Michael?”

  “You a profiler now?” Michael asked Lia.

  “Just an aficionado of fine art,” Lia retorted. “I lived in a bathroom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for six weeks, back when I was on the streets.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Lia, utterly unable to tell if that was true or a bald-faced lie. In response, Lia pushed past Michael and into Celine’s room.

  “If Celine cleans her brushes in kerosene,” I murmured, thinking out loud, “she would have had some on hand. Not a ton, but…”

  But enough that you might not have had to bring it with you. I paused. And if you didn’t bring it with you, you might never have intended to burn her alive.