The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
As the plane took off and the city grew small behind us, I turned around in my chair.
“You’re leaving the Porsche in Denver?” I asked.
He leaned forward, close enough that his forehead was almost touching mine.
“The devil’s in the details, Cassie. I never said that Porsche was my only car.”
YOU
It’s been days since the last time, days of reliving your failure, over and over again. Each minute has been torture, and now you’re on a schedule. You don’t have the luxury of hunting for the perfect girl. The right girl. There’s nothing special about the one you’ve chosen, except for the color of her hair.
It reminds you of someone else’s hair, and that’s enough. For now.
You kill her in a motel room. No one sees you enter. No one will see you leave. You put duct tape over her mouth. You have to imagine the sound of her screams, but the look in her eyes is worth it.
It’s fast, but not too fast.
It’s yours.
You’re in charge. You decide. You slide the knife into the flesh under her cheekbone. You carve the heavy makeup—and the skin—off of her face.
There. That’s better.
You feel better. More in control. And you know that even though you don’t have time for pictures, you’ll never forget the way the blood looks as it stains her hair.
Some days, you think, it feels like you have been doing this forever. But no matter how many there are, no matter how proficient you’ve become at showing them what you are, what they are, there is a part of you that knows.
It will never be quite right.
It will never be perfect.
There will never be another one like the first.
PART TWO: LEARNING
CHAPTER 7
I stepped off the jet and blinked, my eyes adjusting to the sun. A woman with bright red hair strode toward the plane. She was wearing a gray suit and black sunglasses, and she walked like she had someplace to be.
“I heard a rumor we were getting in around the same time,” she called out to Briggs. “Thought I’d come to greet you in person.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned her attention to me. “I’m Special Agent Lacey Locke. Briggs is my partner, and you’re Cassandra Hobbes.”
She timed this speech to end just as she closed the space between us. She held out a hand, and I was struck by the fact that she looked somehow impish despite the sunglasses and the suit.
I took her hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “Most people just call me Cassie.”
“Cassie it is, then,” she replied. “Briggs tells me you’re one of mine.”
One of hers?
Michael filled in the blank. “A profiler.”
“Don’t sound so enthusiastic about the science of profiling, Michael,” Locke said lightly. “Cassie might mistake you for a seventeen-year-old boy without a strong sense of derision for the rest of the world.”
Michael held a hand to his chest. “Your sarcasm wounds me, Agent Locke.”
She snorted.
“You’re home early,” Briggs cut in, aiming the comment at Agent Locke. “Nothing in Boise?”
Locke gave a brief jerk of her head. “Dead end.”
An unspoken communication passed between the two of them, and then Briggs turned to me. “As Michael so obligingly pointed out, Agent Locke is a profiler. She’ll be in charge of your training.”
“Lucky you,” Locke said with a grin.
“Are you …” I wasn’t sure how to ask.
“A Natural?” she said. “No. There’s only one thing I’ve ever been a natural at, and sadly, I can’t tell you about that until you’re twenty-one. But I did go through the FBI Academy and took every class they offered in behavioral analysis. I’ve been a part of the behavioral science unit for almost three years.”
I wondered if it would be rude to ask how old she was now.
“Twenty-nine,” she said. “And don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
“Used to what?”
She grinned again. “People answering questions before you ask them.”
— — —
The program’s base of operations was a looming Victorian-style house in the tiny town of Quantico, Virginia—close enough to FBI headquarters on Marine Corps Base Quantico to be handy, but not so close that people were going to start asking questions.
“Living room. Media room. Library. Study.” The person that Briggs had found to look after the house—and us—was a retired marine by the name of Judd Hawkins. He was sixty-something, eagle-eyed, and a man of few words. “Kitchen’s through there. Your room is on the second floor.” Judd paused for a fraction of a second to look at me. “You’ll be sharing with one of the other girls. I expect that’s not a problem?”
I shook my head, and he strode back down the hallway and toward a staircase. “Look alive, Ms. Hobbes,” he called back. I hurried to catch up and thought I heard a smile in his voice, though there was barely a hint of it on his face.
I fought a smile of my own. Judd Hawkins might not have been gruff and no-nonsense, but my gut was telling me he had more soft spots than most people would have thought.
He caught me studying him and gave a brisk, businesslike nod. Like Briggs, he didn’t seem to mind the idea that I might be getting a general picture of his personality from the little details.
Unlike a certain other individual I could think of, who’d done his best to thwart me at every turn.
Refusing to glance back at Michael, I noticed a series of framed pictures lining the staircase. A dozen or so men. One woman. Most were in their late twenties or early thirties, but one or two were older. Some were smiling; some were not. A paunchy man with dark eyebrows and thinning hair hung between a handsome heartbreaker and a black-and-white photo from the turn of the century. At the top of the stairs, an elderly couple smiled out from a slightly larger portrait.
I glanced at Judd, wondering if these were his relatives, or if they belonged to someone else in this house.
“They’re killers.” An Asian girl about my age stepped around the corner. She moved like a cat—and smiled like she’d just eaten a canary.
“The people in the pictures,” she clarified. “They’re serial killers.” She twirled her shiny black ponytail around her index finger, clearly enjoying my discomfort. “It’s the program’s cheery way of reminding Dean why he’s here.”
Dean? Who was Dean?
“Personally, I think it’s a little macabre, but then again, I’m not a profiler.” The girl flicked her ponytail. “You are, though. Aren’t you?”
She took a step forward, and my eyes were drawn to her footwear: black leather boots with heels high enough to make my feet shudder in spasms of sympathy. She was wearing skintight black pants and a high-necked sleeveless sweater, electric blue to match the streaks in her black hair.
As I took in her clothing, the girl closed the space between us until she was standing so close to me that I thought she might reach out and start twirling my hair instead of her own.
“Lia,” Judd said, absolutely unfazed, “this is Cassie. If you’re finished trying to scare her, I’m betting she’d really like to set that bag down.”
Lia shrugged. “Mi casa es su casa. Your room is through there.”
“Your” room, I thought. Not “our” room.
“Cassie’s really broken up about not rooming with you, Lia,” Michael said, interpreting my facial expression with a wink. Lia pivoted to face him, and her lips twisted upward in a slow, sizzling grin.
“Miss me?” she asked.
“Like a thorn in my paw,” Michael replied.
Coming up the stairs behind us, Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “Lia,” he said. “Nice to see you.”
Lia gave him a look. “Now, Agent Briggs,” she replied, “that’s simply not true.”
Agent Locke rolled her eyes. “Lia’s specialty is deception,” she told me. “She has an uncanny knack for being able to tell w
Lia didn’t seem to take offense at the agent’s words. “I’m also bilingual,” she said. “And very, very flexible.”
The second very was aimed directly at Michael.
“So,” I said, my duffel bag digging into my shoulder as I tried to process the fact that Lia was a Natural liar, “the pictures on the wall aren’t serial killers?”
That question was answered with silence. Silence from Michael. Silence from Judd. Silence from Agent Locke, who looked a bit abashed.
Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “No,” he said finally. “That’s true.”
My eyes were drawn to the portrait of the elderly couple.
Smiling serial killers, five-inch heels, and a girl with a gift for lying? This was going to be interesting.
CHAPTER 8
Briggs and Locke left shortly after Judd showed me to my room. They promised to return the next day for training, but for now, all that was expected of me was to settle in. My roommate—whoever she was—had yet to make an appearance, so for the moment, I had the room to myself.
Twin beds sat at opposite ends of the room. A bay window overlooked the backyard. Tentatively, I opened what I assumed to be the closet door. The closet was exactly half full: half of each rack, half of the floor space, half of the shelves. My roommate favored patterns to solids, bright colors to pastels, and had a healthy amount of black and white in her wardrobe, but no gray.
All of her shoes were flats.
“Dial it back a notch, Cassie,” I told myself. I’d have months to analyze my roommate’s personality—without creepily stalking her half of the closet. Quickly and efficiently, I emptied my own bag. I’d lived in Colorado for five years, but before that, the longest I’d ever lived in one place was four months. My mother was always off to the next show, the next town, the next mark, and I was an expert unpacker.
There was still space on my side of the closet when I was done.
“Knock-knock.” Lia’s voice was high and clear. She didn’t wait for permission before coming into the room, and I realized with a start that she’d changed clothes.
The boots had been replaced with ballet flats, and she’d traded the tight black pants for a lacy, flowing skirt. Her hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck, and even her eyes looked softer.
It was like she’d given herself a makeover—or switched personalities altogether.
First Michael, now Lia. I wondered if he’d picked up the trick of changing clothing styles from her, or if she’d gotten it from him. Given that Lia was the one who specialized in deception, my money was on the former.
“Are you finished unpacking yet?” she asked.
“I’m still working on some stuff,” I said, busying myself with the dresser.
“No. You’re not.”
I’d never considered myself a liar until that moment, when Lia’s ability took the option away.
“Look, those serial killer pictures give new meaning to the word creepy.” Lia leaned back against the doorjamb. “I was here for six weeks before someone told me that Grandma and Gramps were actually Faye and Ray Copeland, who were convicted of killing five people and made a cozy little quilt out of their clothes. Trust me, it’s better that you know now.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
“Anyway,” Lia said, dragging out the word, “Judd gives crappy tours. He’s a surprisingly decent cook, and he’s got eyes in the back of his head, but he’s not exactly what one would call chatty, and unless we’re about to burn the place down, he’s pretty hands-off. I thought you might want a real tour. Or that you might have some questions.”
I wasn’t sure that a person renowned for her skill at lying was the ideal information source or tour guide, but I wasn’t about to turn down a peace offering, and I did have one question.
“Where’s my roommate?”
“Where she always is,” Lia replied innocently. “The basement.”
— — —
The basement ran the length of the house and stretched out underneath the front and back yards. From the bottom of the stairs, all I could see was two enormous white walls that ran the width of the space, but didn’t quite reach the fourteen-foot ceilings. There was a small space between where one wall ended and the next began.
An entrance.
I walked toward it. Something exploded, and I jumped backward, my hands flying up in front of my face.
Glass, I thought belatedly. Shattering glass.
A second later, I realized that I couldn’t see the source of the sound. I lowered my hands and looked back at Lia, who hadn’t so much as flinched.
“Is that normal?” I asked her.
She gave a graceful little shrug. “Define normal.”
A girl poked her head out from behind one of the partitions. “Conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern.”
The first thing I noticed about the girl—other than the chipper tone in her voice and the fact that she had literally just defined normal—was her hair. It was blond, glow-in-the-dark pale, and stick straight. The ends were uneven and her blunt-cut bangs were too short, like she’d chopped them off herself.
“Aren’t you supposed to be wearing safety goggles?” Lia asked.
“It is possible that my goggles have been compromised.” With that, the girl disappeared back behind the partition.
Based on the self-satisfied curve of Lia’s lips, I was going to go out on a limb and guess that I had just met my roommate.
“Sloane, Cassie,” Lia said with a grand gesture. “Cassie, Sloane.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. I took a few steps forward, until I was standing in the space between the partitions and could see what they had hidden before. A narrow hallway stretched out in front of me. It was lined with rooms on either side. Each room had only three walls.
Immediately to my left, I found Sloane standing in the middle of what appeared to be a bathroom. There was a door on the far side, and I realized that the space looked exactly the way a bathroom would if someone had removed the back wall.
“Like a movie set,” I murmured. There was glass all over the floor, and at least a hundred Post-it notes stuck to the edge of the sink and scattered in a spiral pattern on the tiles. I glanced back down the hallway at the other rooms. The other sets.
“Potential crime scene,” Lia corrected. “For simulations. On this side”—Lia posed like a game show assistant—“we have interior locations: bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, foyers. A couple of miniature—and I do mean miniature—restaurant sets, and, just because we really are that cliché, a mock post office, for all your going postal needs.”
Lia pivoted and gestured toward the other side of the hall. “And over here,” she said, “we have a few outdoor scenes: park, parking lot, make-out point.”
I turned back to the bathroom set and Sloane. She knelt gingerly next to the shards of glass on the floor and stared at them. Her face was calm. Her fingers hovered just over the carnage.
After a long moment, she blinked and stood up. “Your hair is red.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“People with red hair require roughly twenty percent more anesthesia to undergo surgery, and they’re significantly more likely to wake up on the table.”
I got the distinct feeling that this was Sloane’s version of “hello,” and suddenly, everything clicked into place: the prevalence of patterns in her wardrobe, the precision with which she’d divided our closet in two. “Agent Briggs said that someone here was a Natural with numbers and probabilities.”
“Sloane’s absolutely dangerous with anything numerical,” Lia said. She gestured lazily toward the glass shards. “Sometimes literally.”
“It was just a test,” Sloane said defensively. “The algorithm that predicts the scatter pattern of the shards is really quite—”
“Fascinating?” a voice behind us suggested. Lia dragged one l
Michael smiled. “You should see her when she’s had caffeine,” he told me, nodding at Sloane.
“Michael,” Sloane said darkly, “hides the coffee.”
“Trust me,” Michael drawled, “it’s a kindness to us all.” He paused and then gave me a long, slow smile. “These two have you nice and traumatized yet, Colorado?”
I processed the fact that he’d just given me a nickname, and Lia stepped in between us. “Traumatized?” she repeated. “It’s almost like you don’t trust me, Michael.” Her eyes widened and her lower lip poked out.
Michael snorted. “Wonder why.”
An emotion reader, a deception specialist, a statistician who could not be allowed to ingest coffee, and me.
“Is this it?” I asked. “Just the four of us?”
Hadn’t Lia mentioned someone else?
Michael’s eyes darkened. Lia’s mouth curved slowly into a smile.
“Well,” Sloane said brightly, completely unaware of the changing undercurrent in the room. “There’s also Dean.”
CHAPTER 9
We found Dean in the garage. He was lying on a black bench, facing away from the door. Dark blond hair was plastered to his face with sweat, his jaw clenched as he executed a series of slow and methodical bench presses. Each time his elbows locked, I wondered if he’d stop. Each time, he kept going.
He was muscular but lean, and my first impression was that this wasn’t a workout. This was punishment.
Michael rolled his eyes and then strolled up behind Dean. “Ninety-eight,” he said, his tone full of mock pain. “Ninety-nine. One hundred!”
Dean closed his eyes for a brief moment, then pushed the barbell up again. His arms shook slightly as he went to set the weight down. Michael clearly had no intention of spotting him. To my surprise, Sloane pushed past Michael, wrapped dainty little hands around the barbell, and rocked back on her heels, angling it into place.