The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
This time, I didn’t bother letting my face do the talking for me. I slugged him in the shoulder—hard.
“Fine.” Michael held his palms up in surrender. “You’re not sanctimonious. You’re honorable.” He paused and trained his eyes straight ahead. “Maybe I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I’m not.”
For a split second, Michael let those words—that confession—hang in the air.
“Besides,” he continued, “if I’d told you that between Redding and myself I was the safe option, I would have lost all of that carefully built-up bad-boy cred.”
From self-loathing to sardonic in under two seconds.
“Trust me,” I said lightly, “you don’t have any cred.”
“Oh, really?” Michael said. When I nodded, he stood up and took my hand. “Let’s fix that, then, shall we?”
A wiser person would have said no. I took a deep breath. “What did you have in mind?”
— — —
Blowing stuff up was surprisingly therapeutic.
“Clear!” Michael yelled. The two of us scuttled backward. A second later, a string of fireworks went off, scorching the floor of a fake foyer.
“Somehow, I don’t think this is what Agent Briggs had in mind when he built this basement,” I said.
Michael adopted an austere look. “Simulation is one of our most powerful tools,” he said, doing a passable imitation of Agent Briggs. “How else are we to visualize the work of the infamous Boom-Boom Bandit?”
“Boom-Boom Bandit?” I repeated.
He grinned. “Too much?”
I held my index finger up an inch from my thumb. “Just a little.”
Behind us, the door to the basement opened and slammed shut. I half expected it to be Judd, asking what precisely we thought we were doing down here, but Michael had assured me the basement was soundproof.
“I didn’t know anyone was down here.” Sloane looked at the two of us suspiciously. “Why are you down here?”
Michael and I looked at each other. I opened my mouth to answer, but Sloane’s eyes widened as she took in the evidence.
“Fireworks?” she said, folding her arms over her middle. “In the foyer?”
Michael shrugged. “Cassie needed a distraction, and I needed to give Briggs a few more gray hairs.”
Sloane eyed him mutinously. Considering the amount of time she spent down here, I could see why she might take any misuse of the crime sets seriously.
“Sorry,” I said.
“You should be,” she replied sternly. “You’re doing it all wrong.”
What followed was a ten-minute lecture on pyrodynamics. And several more explosions.
“Well,” Michael said, surveying our work. “That’ll teach Briggs and Locke to leave us to our own devices for too long.”
I shoved my hair out of my face with the heel of my hand. “They’re working a case,” I said, remembering the look on Locke’s face—and the details I’d managed to glean about what she and Briggs were up to. “I think that’s a little bit of a higher priority than training us is.”
“Sloane,” Michael said suddenly, drawing out her name and narrowing his eyes.
“Nothing,” Sloane replied quickly.
“Nothing what?” I asked. Clearly, I was missing something here.
“When I said Locke’s name, Sloane looked down and to the side and her eyebrows pulled up in the center.” Michael paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer. “What did you take, Sloane?”
Sloane made a careful study of her fingernails. “Agent Locke doesn’t like me.”
I thought back to the last time I had seen Sloane and Locke together. Sloane had come into the kitchen and rattled off some statistics about serial killers. Locke hadn’t had a chance to reply when Briggs came into the room with an update on their case. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Locke say anything to Sloane, though she traded barbs easily enough with Michael and Lia.
“There was a USB drive,” Sloane admitted finally, “in Agent Locke’s briefcase.”
Michael’s eyes lit up. “Am I to infer that you have it now?”
Sloane shrugged. “That’s a distinct possibility.”
“You took a USB drive out of Locke’s briefcase?” I processed that bit of information. When Lia had helped herself to the contents of my closet, she’d said that Sloane was the kleptomaniac in the house. I’d assumed she was joking.
Apparently not.
“Let’s concentrate on the important thing here,” Michael said. “What information do you lovely ladies think Locke would be carrying on her person while working a case?”
I glanced at Sloane, then back at Michael. “You think it has something to do with their current case?” I couldn’t keep the surge of interest out of my tone.
“That is also a distinct possibility.” Sloane was sounding distinctly more chipper.
Michael threw an arm over her shoulder. “Have I ever told you that you’re my favorite?” he asked her. Then he cast a wicked glance at me. “Still in need of distraction?”
CHAPTER 22
“This encryption is pathetic,” Sloane said. “It’s like they want me to hack their files.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the end of her bed, her laptop balanced on her knees. Her fingers flew across the keys as she worked on breaking through the protection on the pilfered USB drive. A stray piece of blond hair drifted into her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Done!”
Sloane turned the laptop around so the two of us could see it. “Seven files,” she said. The smile fell from her face. “Seven victims.”
Locke’s lecture on victimology came flooding back to me. Was that why my mentor had been carrying around a digital copy of these files? Had she been attempting to get inside the victims’ heads?
“What if this is important?” I asked, unable to push back a stab of guilt. “What if Locke and Briggs need this information for their case?” I’d come to the program to help, not to get in the way of the FBI’s efforts.
“Cassie,” Michael said, taking a seat against the foot of the bed and stretching his legs out in front of him. “Is Briggs the type to keep backups?”
Agent Briggs was the type to keep backups of his backups. He and Locke had been gone for three days. If they’d needed this drive, they would have come back for it.
“Should I print out the files?” Sloane asked.
Michael looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Your call, Colorado.”
I should have said no. I should have told Sloane that the case Locke and Briggs were working on was none of our business, but I’d come here to help, and Locke had said that she and Briggs had hit a brick wall.
“Print it.”
A second later, the printer on Sloane’s desk started spitting out pages. After fifty or so sheets, it stopped. Michael leaned over and grabbed the pages. He separated them by case and helped himself to three case files before handing the others to Sloane and me. All seven were homicides. Four in DC in the past two weeks and another three cases, all within the past year, from other jurisdictions.
“First DC victim disappeared from the street she was working ten days ago and showed up the next morning with her face half carved off.” Michael looked up from leafing through the file.
“This one’s dated three days later,” I said. “Facial mutilation, numerous superficial cuts to the rest of the body—she died of blood loss.”
“This would take time,” Sloane said, her face pale. “Hours, not minutes, and according to the autopsy reports, the tissue damage is—severe.”
“He’s playing with them.” Michael finished with his second file and started in on the third. “He takes them. He cuts them. He watches them suffer. And then he cuts off their faces.”
“Don’t say he,” I corrected absentmindedly. “Say I or you.”
Michael and Sloane both stared at me, and I realized the obvious: their lessons were very different from mine.
“I mean,
“I can think of some better names for this guy,” Michael murmured, looking through the last case file in his hands. “Who has the file for the last victim?”
“I do.” Sloane’s voice was quiet, and suddenly, she looked very young. “She was a palm reader in Dupont Circle.” For a second, I thought Sloane might actually put the file down, but then her features went suddenly calm. “A person is ten times more likely to become a professional athlete than to make a living reading palms,” she said, taking refuge in the numbers.
Most killers have a type, I thought, falling back on my own lessons. “Do any of the other victims have ties to the psychic community, astrology, or the occult?”
Michael turned back to the two reports in his hand. “Lady of the Evening,” he said, “another Lady of the Evening, and a telemarketer … who worked at a psychic hotline.”
I glanced down at the two files in my hand. “I’ve got a nineteen-year-old runaway and a medium working out of Los Angeles.”
“Two different kinds of victims,” Michael observed. “Prostitutes, drifters, and runaways in column A. People with a tie to the occult in column B.”
I fished Before photos of the victims out of my files and gestured for the others to do the same.
You pick them for a reason, I thought, looking at the women one by one. You cut their faces, slice your knife down through skin and tissue, until you hit the bone. This is personal.
“They’re all young,” I said, studying them and searching for commonalities. “Between eighteen and thirty-five.”
“Those three have red hair.” Michael separated out the victims with no ties to the psychic community.
“The palm reader had red hair, too,” Sloane interjected.
I was staring directly at the palm reader’s Before picture. “The palm reader was a blonde.”
“No,” Sloane said slowly. “She was a natural blonde. But when they found her, she looked like this.”
Sloane slid a second, gruesome picture toward us. True to Sloane’s words, the corpse’s hair was a deep, unmistakable red.
A recent dye job, I thought. So did she dye her hair … or did you?
“Two classes of victims,” Michael said again, lining the redheads up in one column and the psychics in another, with the palm reader from Dupont Circle between the two. “You think we’re looking for two different killers?”
“No,” I said. “We’re only looking for one killer.”
My companions could make observations. Sloane could generate relevant statistics. If there’d been witness testimony, Michael could have told us who was exhibiting signs of guilt. But here, now, looking at the pictures, this was my domain. I would have had to backtrack to explain how I knew, to figure out how I knew—but I was certain. The pictures, what had been done to these women, it was the same. Not just the details, but the anger, the urges …
All of these women had been killed by the same person.
You’re escalating, I thought. Something happened, and now you need more, faster.
I stared at the photos, my mind whirring, picking up each detail of the pictures, the files, until only three things stood out.
Knife.
Redhead.
Psychic.
That was the moment that the ground disappeared from underneath me. I lost the ability to blink. My eyes got very dry. My throat was worse. My vision blurred, and all of the photographs got very fuzzy except for one.
The nineteen-year-old runaway.
The hair, the facial structure, the freckles. Through blurred vision, she looked like …
Knife.
Redhead.
Psychic.
“Cassie?” Michael took my hands in his. “You’re freezing.”
“The UNSUB is killing redheads,” I said, “and he’s killing psychics.”
“That’s not a pattern,” Sloane said peevishly. “That’s two patterns.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not. I think …”
Knife. Redhead. Psychic.
I couldn’t say the words. “My mother …” I took a short breath and brutally expelled it. “I don’t know what my mother’s body looked like,” I said finally, “but I do know that she was attacked with a knife.”
Michael and Sloane stared at me. I got up and walked over to my dresser. I opened the top drawer and found what I was looking for.
A picture.
Don’t look at it, I thought.
Directing my gaze at anything but the picture in my hand, I stooped and tapped my fingers on the palm reader’s photograph. “I don’t think she dyed her hair red,” I said. “I think the killer did.”
You kill psychics. You kill redheads. But one or the other isn’t enough anymore. It’s never enough.
Glancing up at Michael and Sloane, I laid my mother’s picture down between the two columns.
Sloane studied it. “She looks like the other victims,” she said, nodding to the column of redheads.
“No,” I said. “They look like her.”
These women had all been killed in the past nine months. My mother had been missing for five years.
“Cassie, who is that?” Michael had to have known the answer to that question, but he asked it anyway.
“That’s my mother.” I still couldn’t let myself look at the picture. “She was attacked with a knife. Her body was never found.” I paused, just for a second. “My mother made her living by convincing people she was psychic.”
Michael looked at me—and into me. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I was saying that Briggs and Locke were tracking an UNSUB who killed women with red hair and people who claimed to be psychic. It could have been a coincidence. I should have assumed it was a coincidence.
But I didn’t.
“I’m saying this killer has a very specific type: people who resemble my mother.”
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.
CHAPTER 23
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 fi
“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.