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

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  It could have been a coincidence. All of it—the date, the kerosene.

  “You think the FBI doesn’t realize that some people use kerosene as a paint thinner?” Michael asked me, reading my thoughts in my expression. “You really think Briggs and Sterling didn’t go down that road before they took this case?”

  Back at the crime scene, the smell of kerosene had been overwhelming. This wasn’t a little spill we were talking about here—but for some reason, Lia had wanted me to entertain the possibility that it was.

  Why?

  Michael stepped over the threshold and into Celine’s room. After one last glance at Lia, I followed.

  “Two more paintings on the walls,” I commented, breaking the silence. Celine had hung the paintings side by side, matched pieces of an eerie, abstract set. The canvas on the left appeared to be painted entirely black, but the longer I stared at it, the easier it was to see a face staring back from the darkness.

  A man’s face.

  It was subtle, a trick of light and shadows in a painting that, at first glance, held neither. The second canvas was mostly blank, with a few bits of shading here and there. It looked like a completely abstract painting, until you realized that the white space held its own design.

  Another face.

  “She doesn’t paint bodies.” Michael came to stand in front of the paintings. “Even in elementary school, Celine refused to draw anything but faces. No landscapes. Not so much as a single still life. It used to drive the art teachers her parents hired mad.”

  That was the first opening Michael had given me to ask him about this girl, this piece of his past that none of us had even known existed. “You’ve known each other since you were kids?”

  For a moment, I wasn’t sure Michael would answer the question.

  “Off and on,” he said finally. “When I wasn’t at boarding school. When she wasn’t at boarding school. When my father wasn’t pushing me to make friends with the sons of people more important than a partner he already had eating out of his hand.”

  I knew that Michael’s father had a temper. I knew he was abusive, nearly impossible to read, wealthy, and obsessed with the Townsend name. And now I knew something else about Thatcher Townsend. No matter how much money you make, no matter how high up the social ladder you climb—it will never be enough. You will always be hungry. You will always want more.

  “Good news.” Lia’s voice broke into my thoughts. When Michael and I looked over at her, she was removing a false bottom from a chest at the foot of Celine’s bed. “The police took our victim’s laptop into evidence, but they didn’t take her secret laptop.”

  “How did you—” I started to ask, but Lia cut me off with a wave of her hand.

  “I did a stint as a high-end cat burglar after I got kicked out of the Met.” Lia set the laptop up on Celine’s desk.

  “We’ll need Sloane to hack the—” Michael cut off as Lia logged on.

  It wasn’t password-protected. You hide your laptop, but don’t password-protect it. Why?

  “Let’s see what we have here,” Lia said, opening files at random. “Class schedule.” I had just enough time to commit Celine’s class schedule to memory before Lia moved on. She opened a new file—a photograph of two children standing in front of a sailboat. I recognized the little girl immediately. Celine. It took me longer to realize that the little boy standing next to her was Michael. He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.

  “Enough,” Michael said sharply. He tried to close the photo, but Lia blocked him. On the laptop’s screen, I noticed the photo begin to shift, to change.

  Not a photo, I realized after a long moment. A video. An animation.

  Slowly, the children in the photo morphed, until I was looking at a nearly identical photograph of two teenagers standing in front of a sailboat.

  Celine Delacroix, age nineteen, and Michael Townsend, now.

  “You got something you want to share with the class, Townsend?” Lia’s tone was light and mocking, but I knew with every fiber of my being that this wasn’t a joke to her.

  You came up here because you thought he was hiding something. From you. From all of us.

  While Dean and I had been profiling the crime scene, Lia had been watching Michael. She must have seen some kind of tell. Even if he hadn’t lied, she must have noticed something that made her suspect…

  What? What do you suspect, Lia?

  “That’s not a photograph.” Michael gave Lia a look. “It’s a digital drawing. Celine took creative license with the old photo and updated it. Obviously. Unless you didn’t happen to notice that her schedule included a class on digital art?”

  As a matter of reflex, I ran through the rest of Celine’s schedule in my head. Visual Thinking. Death and Apocalypse in Medieval Art. Theories, Practice, and Politics of Human Rights. Color.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Lia asked Michael. “When you went home over Christmas?”

  Michael’s jaw clenched slightly. “I haven’t seen Celine in nearly three years. But I’m touched that you’re jealous. Really.”

  “Who says I’m jealous?”

  “The emotion reader in the room.” Michael glanced at me. “Maybe the profiler in the room can tell the lie detector that it’s borderline pathological to be jealous of one of our vics?”

  Vics. As in victims. The Michael I knew wasn’t capable of thinking of someone he cared about that way. Celine Delacroix wasn’t a nameless, faceless victim to him. And I couldn’t help wondering—if Celine hadn’t seen Michael in three years, how had she captured the way he looked now so precisely?

  “Tell me you’re not hiding something.” Lia gave Michael what seemed to be a perfectly pleasant smile. “Go ahead. I dare you.”

  “I’m not doing this with you,” Michael said through clenched teeth. “This isn’t about you, Lia. This is none of your damn business.”

  They were so caught up arguing with each other that they didn’t see the picture on the screen change again. This time, there was only one face depicted in the drawing.

  Thatcher Townsend’s.

  “Michael.” I waited until he looked at me to continue. “Why would Celine have a picture of your father on her computer? Why would she have drawn him?”

  Michael stared at the computer screen, his face unreadable.

  “Townsend, tell me you think this case has something to do with the Masters.” Lia went for the jugular. “Tell me that you haven’t known, from the second you saw that crime scene, that it does not.”

  “In five seconds,” Michael said instead, his gaze intent on Lia, “I’m going to tell you that I love you. And if you’re still in the room when I say it, you’re going to know.”

  Whether he loved her. Whether he didn’t.

  If she’d known for certain that the answer was the latter, Lia wouldn’t have moved. If no part of her wanted him to love her, she wouldn’t have cared. Instead, she looked at Michael with something like hatred in her eyes.

  And then she ran.

  It was several seconds before I found my voice. “Michael—”

  “Don’t,” he told me. “Because I swear to God, Colorado, if you say a single word right now, I’m not going to be able to keep from telling you exactly what combination of emotions I saw flash across your face when you started to think that Celine might not have been taken by one of your precious Masters.”

  My mouth went dry. If Celine had been taken by the Masters on a Fibonacci date, she was already dead. But if this case was unrelated, she might still be alive. And I…

  I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t hopeful. Part of me—a sick, twisted part of me that I barely even recognized—wanted her to be a victim of the cabal. Because if she was their victim, there was a chance they’d left evidence behind. We desperately needed a lead. I needed something to go on.

  Even though I knew Celine mattered to Michael. Even though he mattered to me.

  YOU

  Some things you remember. Some th
ings you don’t. Some things you’ll shudder at—and some things you won’t.

  When had I become a person capable of being disappointed that a missing girl might still be alive?

  This is the cost, I thought as I left Michael alone in Celine’s room and made my way back toward the crime scene. Of being willing to make a deal with any devil, to pay any price.

  Dean took one look at my face and his jaw tightened. “What did Townsend do?”

  “What makes you think Michael did anything?”

  Dean gave me a look. “One: he’s Michael. Two: he’s scheduled for a meltdown. Three: Lia has been Miss Rosy Sunshine since she got downstairs, and Lia doesn’t do roses or sunshine unless she’s screwing with someone or deeply upset. And four…” Dean shrugged. “I may not be an emotion reader, but I know you.”

  Right now, Dean, I don’t even know myself.

  “I went to see your father.” I wasn’t sure if saying those words to Dean was confession or penance. “I told him about us so that he’d tell me about the Masters.”

  Dean was quiet for several seconds. “I know.”

  I stared at him. “How—”

  “I know you,” Dean repeated, “and I know Lia, and the only reason she would have told me that there was something going on between her and Michael was to distract me from something worse.”

  I told your father what it’s like when you touch me. I told him that he haunts your dreams.

  “I don’t know what that monster said to you.” Dean held my gaze. “But I do know that he has a very particular reaction to anything beautiful, anything real—anything that’s mine.” His fingers lightly traced the edge of my jaw, then moved to lay flat on the back of my neck. “He doesn’t get to do that anymore, Cassie,” Dean said fiercely. “And you don’t get to let him.”

  My chest tightened, but I didn’t pull back from his touch. I didn’t step away.

  “Celine Delacroix wasn’t taken by one of the Masters.” I let the heat from Dean’s skin warm mine. I pushed down the echo of his father’s voice. “I’m not sure how, but Michael knew. Lia suspected he was hiding something. And a very large part of me wishes…”

  “You wish there were a lead,” Dean cut in. His Southern accent was more audible in those words than any I’d heard him speak in a long time. “You wish we had a trail to follow. But you don’t wish this girl had been burned alive, Cassie. You don’t wish she’d died screaming. You’re not capable of it.”

  He sounded so certain of that, so certain of me, even after what I’d told him. I thought of my mother, fighting her predecessor to death. We never really know what we’re capable of.

  I changed the subject. “You weren’t surprised when I said that Celine hadn’t been taken by one of the Masters.”

  “I suspected.” Dean had stayed behind to walk through the crime scene again because something didn’t feel right. I wondered why he’d seen it and I hadn’t. I was supposed to be a Natural. I was supposed to be better than this. I’d recognized that this was our UNSUB’s first time. Why hadn’t I taken that a step further and seen that the Masters would never have allowed someone that out of control, that messy into their ranks?

  “You were in the girl’s head,” Dean said softly. “I was in her assailant’s. From her perspective, it wouldn’t have mattered if the intruder had chosen her as the first of nine kills or if she was the one and only target. It wouldn’t have mattered if there was an element of ritual to his movements or only desire and anger. Either way, she still would have fought back.”

  I closed my eyes, picturing myself in Celine’s shoes once more. You fought back. You didn’t run. You knew the UNSUB. You might have been terrified, but you were angry, too.

  “Celine has a secret laptop,” I told Dean. “The police missed it. And whatever’s going on here, I think it has something to do with Michael’s father.”

  “We knew this was a long shot.” Briggs addressed those words to Sterling, even though Dean and I were the ones who’d come bearing the news. “But the dates matched, and the MO was in the ballpark. We had to check it out.”

  “So you said.” Sterling clipped the words. “And so said the director.”

  I thought back to what I’d seen of that exchange. Director Sterling had spoken only to Briggs—not to his daughter, not to Judd.

  “Don’t make this about your father,” Briggs told Sterling, his voice low.

  “I didn’t. You did.” Sterling’s tone reminded me that Briggs was her ex-husband as well as her partner. “This was never a long shot, Tanner. If you’d asked me—if you or my father had even bothered to remember that there was a profiler in the room—I could have told you that there was too much anger here to fit with what we know about the Masters, too little control.”

  The implications of that statement hit me like a semitruck. “You knew this case wasn’t related to the Masters?” My voice came out strained. You knew, and you let me believe—

  “I knew that a girl was missing,” Agent Sterling said softly.

  “And you never thought to share any of this with me?” Briggs’s voice hardened.

  An unflinching Sterling met his gaze. “You never asked.” After a moment’s silence, she turned to me. There was a subtle shift in her tone, one that reminded me that once upon a time, she’d told me that when she looked at me, she saw herself. “You can never let yourself become so focused on one possibility—or one case—that you lose your objectivity, Cassie. The moment a case becomes about what you need—revenge, approval, redemption, control…you’ve already lost. There’s a thin line between following your gut and seeing what you want to see, and that’s not a lesson I could teach you.” She glanced back at Briggs. “We all have to learn that one on our own.”

  You’re thinking about the Nightshade case. My profiling instinct went into overdrive. Years ago, Briggs and Sterling hadn’t known that the killer they were hunting was one of the Masters. They hadn’t known that when they went after Nightshade, he’d go after one of their own—Scarlett Hawkins. Judd’s daughter. Sterling’s best friend.

  “And what the hell kind of lesson were you trying to teach me?” Agent Briggs bit out. “Not to make decisions without discussing them with you first? Not to take your father’s side on anything? Not to ask Judd to trust me?”

  “I went above the director’s head on the Naturals program for a reason,” Sterling replied, emotional armor firmly in place. “My father is very good at his job. He’s got a mile-wide Machiavellian streak. And he can be very persuasive.”

  “I made a judgment call,” Briggs shot back. “This has nothing to do with your father.”

  “He always wanted a son,” Sterling said quietly. “A driven, ambitious, sculpted-in-his-own-image son.”

  Briggs’s whole body went taut. “Is this about Scarlett? You still blame—”

  “I blame myself.” Sterling dropped those words like a bomb. “This isn’t about you, or my father. This is about not letting any of us get so obsessed with one case, with winning, that we don’t see or care about anything else. Scarlett died on the altar of winning, Tanner. Masters or no Masters, I’ll be damned before we do the same thing to these kids.”

  “And what about what this case is doing to Michael?” Briggs shot back. “Sacrificing his psychological well-being on the altar of your self-righteousness, that’s just fine?”

  “I hate it when Mommy and Daddy fight.” Lia sidled up beside me. “Do you think they’re going to get a divorce?” Lia had never met a grease fire she didn’t want to throw water onto.

  Briggs pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Briggs and Sterling are already divorced,” Sloane said helpfully as she peeled off her latex gloves and joined the melee.

  Dean intervened before the situation could escalate. “We still have a missing person.”

  That was why Agent Sterling hadn’t fought Briggs’s decision to come here. I thought of Celine, thought of the insidious emotion that had risen up inside of me when I’d real
ized what this case was—and what it wasn’t.

  You don’t wish this girl had been burned alive, Cassie. Dean’s words echoed in my mind. You don’t wish she’d died screaming. You’re not capable of it.

  I wanted that to be true.

  “We have to find out who took Celine.” My throat tightening, I wove my fingers through Dean’s, Daniel Redding and his mind games be damned. “If she’s alive, we have to find her. And if she’s dead, we’re going to find out who killed her.”

  I’d spent the past two and a half months in the basement, staring at the Masters’ handiwork. I’d sat down across from the devil and offered him a deal. But no matter what I did, no matter what we did, the reality of the situation was that I might never find my mother. Even if we caught one of the Masters—or two or three—the endless cycle of serial murder might never stop.

  There was so much that wasn’t in my control. But this was.

  “Where’s Michael?” Sloane asked suddenly. “Ninety-three percent of the time when there is an emotional or physical altercation, Michael is within a four-foot radius of the action.”

  There was a beat of silence, and then Agent Briggs reiterated Sloane’s question. “Where is Michael?”

  “I left him in Celine’s room,” I said. What I didn’t say—what I should have realized much earlier—was that I was willing to bet a lot of money that he hadn’t stayed in that room for long.

  It didn’t take long to figure out where Michael had gone. If he suspected his father had something to do with Celine’s disappearance, he’d almost certainly gone to confront the threat head-on.

  “You take the kids back to the safe house,” Briggs told Sterling. “I’ll go after Michael.”

  “Because the one person Michael will listen to when he’s spiraling out of control is an authority figure,” Lia chirped. “There is no possible way this could go badly, especially if you start issuing orders. Heaven knows people who’ve spent their lives as punching bags do best when they have absolutely no control over a situation and someone else dominates them completely.”