The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Dean wiped his hands on his jeans, grabbed a nearby towel, and sat up. “Thanks,” he told Sloane.
“Torque,” she said, instead of you’re welcome. “The role of the lever was played by my arms.”
Dean stood up, his lips angling slightly upward, but the moment he saw me, the fledgling smile froze on his face.
“Dean Redding,” Michael said, enjoying Dean’s sudden obvious discomfort a little too much, “meet Cassie Hobbes.”
“Nice to meet you,” Dean said, pulling dark eyes from mine and directing those words at the floor.
Lia, who’d been remarkably quiet up to this point, raised an eyebrow at Dean. “Well,” she said, “that’s not strictly—”
“Lia.” Dean’s voice wasn’t loud or hard, but the second he said her name, Lia stopped.
“That’s not strictly what?” I asked, even though I knew that the next word out of her mouth would have been true.
“Never mind,” Lia said in a singsong tone.
I looked back at Dean: Light hair. Dark eyes. Open posture. Clenched fists.
I cataloged the way he was standing, the lines of his face, the dingy white T-shirt and ratty blue jeans. His hair needed to be cut, and he stood with his back to the wall, his face cast in shadows, like that was where he belonged.
Why wasn’t it nice to meet me?
“Dean,” Michael said, with the air of someone imparting a fascinating bit of useless trivia, “is a Natural profiler. Just like you.”
Those last three words seemed more aimed at Dean than me, and as they hit their target, Dean lifted his eyes to meet Michael’s. There was no emotion on Dean’s face, but there was something in his eyes, and I found myself expecting Michael to look away first.
“Dean,” Michael continued, staring at Dean and talking to me, “knows more about the way that killers think than just about anyone.”
Dean threw down the towel in his hand. Muscles taut, he brushed by Michael and Sloane, by Lia, by me. A few seconds later, he was gone.
“Dean has a temper,” Michael told me, leaning back against the workout bench.
Lia snorted. “Michael, if Dean had a temper, you’d be dead.”
“Dean’s not going to kill anyone,” Sloane said, her voice almost comically serious.
Michael dug a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it in the air. “Wanna bet?”
— — —
That night, I didn’t dream. I also didn’t sleep much, courtesy of the fact that Sloane, who had a dainty little build, also apparently had the nasal passages of an overweight trucker. Instead, as I tried to block out the sound of her snoring, I closed my eyes and pictured each of the Naturals who lived in this house. Michael. Dean. Lia. Sloane. None of them was what I’d expected. None of them fit a familiar mold. As I drifted into that half-awake, half-asleep state that was as close as I was going to get to a real night’s rest, I played a game I’d invented when I was little. I mentally peeled off my own skin and put on someone else’s.
Lia’s.
I started with the physical things. She was taller than I was, and lithe. Her hair was longer, and instead of sleeping with it tucked under her head, she would spread it out on the pillow. Her fingernails were painted, and when she had energy to burn, she rubbed the thumbnail on her left hand with the thumb on her right. In my mind, I turned my head—Lia’s head—to the side, peering into her closet.
If Michael had leveraged a car out of Briggs, Lia would have gone for clothes. I could almost see the closet, full to overflowing. As the room came more into focus, I could feel my subconscious taking over, feel myself losing the real world in favor of this imaginary one I’d built in my head.
I let go of my bed and my closet, my physical sensations. I let myself be Lia, and a rush of information came at me from all sides. Like a writer getting lost in a book, I let the simulation run its course. Where Sloane and I were neat, the Lia in my head was messy, her room a multisensory archive of the past few months. There was no rhyme or reason to the organization of the closet. Dresses hung half on and half off the hangers. There were clothes—dirty, clean, new, and everything in between—on the floor.
I pictured getting out of bed. In my own body, I had a tendency to sit up first, but Lia wouldn’t take the time. She’d roll out of bed, ready for action. Ready to attack. Long hair fell on my shoulders, and I twirled a strand of it around my index finger: another of Lia’s nervous habits, designed to look like it wasn’t nervous at all.
I glanced over at the door to the room. Closed, of course. Probably also locked. Who was I keeping out? What was I afraid of?
Afraid? I scoffed silently, my mind-voice sounding more and more like Lia’s. I’m not afraid of anything.
I walked over to the closet—light on my toes, hips swaying gently—and pulled out the first shirt I touched. The selection was completely random, but what came next wasn’t. I built the outfit up around me. I dressed myself up like a doll, and with each passing moment, I put that much more space between the surface and everything underneath.
I did my hair, my eyes, my nails.
But there was still that little voice in my head. The same one that had insisted I wasn’t scared. Only this time, the one thing it kept saying, over and over again, was that I was here—behind this locked door with who knows what waiting outside—because I had nowhere else to go.
YOU
You’re home now. You’re alone. Everything is in its place. Everything but this.
You know that there are other people like you. Other monsters. Other gods. You know you’re not the only one who takes keepsakes, things to remember the girls by, once their screams and their bodies and their begging-pleading-lying lips are gone.
You walk slowly to the cabinet. You open it. Carefully, gingerly, you place this whore’s lipstick next to all the rest. The authorities won’t notice it’s missing when they search her purse.
They never do.
A lazy smile on your face, you run your fingertips across each one. Remembering. Savoring. Planning.
Because it’s never enough. It’s never over.
Especially now.
CHAPTER 10
The next day, I could barely look at Lia. The game I’d played the night before was one my younger self had played with strangers: children I’d met in diners, people who had come to my mother’s shows. They were never real to me—and neither were the things I’d imagined once I’d mentally tried on their shoes. But now I had to wonder how much of it was really imagination and how much of it was my subconscious working its way through Lia’s BPE.
Had I imagined that Lia was messy—or had I profiled it?
“There’s cereal in the cabinet and eggs in the fridge,” Judd greeted me from behind a newspaper as I wandered into the kitchen, still debating that question. “I’m making a grocery run at oh-nine-hundred. If you’ve got requests, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
“No requests,” I said.
“Low maintenance,” Judd commented.
I shrugged. “I try.”
Judd folded his paper, carried an empty mug to the sink, and rinsed it out. A minute later—at nine o’clock on the dot—I was alone in the kitchen. As I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I went back to trying to work my way through the logic of my Lia simulation, to figure out how I knew what I knew—and if I knew it at all.
“I have no idea what those Cheerios did to you, but I’m sure they’re very, very sorry,” Michael said as he slid into the seat next to me at the kitchen table.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been stirring them into submission for a good five minutes,” Michael told me. “It’s spoon violence, is what it is.”
I picked up a Cheerio and flicked it at him. Michael caught it and popped it into his mouth.
“So which one of us was it this time?” Michael asked.
Suddenly, I became very interested in my Cheerios.
“Come on, Colorado. When your brain starts profiling, your face
I set my spoon calmly in my bowl. “I do not get crow’s-feet.”
Michael helped himself to my spoon—and a bite of cereal. “Anyone ever tell you you’re cute when you’re annoyed?”
“I hope I’m not interrupting.” Lia came in, stole the cereal box, and started eating right out of the carton. “Actually, that’s not true. Whatever’s going on here, I am absolutely delighted to interrupt it.”
I tried to keep myself from studying Lia—and I definitely tried to keep from wrinkling the corners of my eyes—but it was hard to ignore the fact that she was wearing barely-there silk pajamas. And pearls.
“So, Cassie, are you ready for your first day of How to Crawl into the Skulls of Bad Guys 101?” Lia set the cereal box down and headed for the fridge. Her head disappeared into the refrigerator as she started digging around. Her pajama bottoms left very little to the imagination.
“I’m ready,” I said, averting my eyes.
“Cassie was born ready,” Michael declared. Over in the refrigerator, Lia stopped rummaging for a moment. “Besides,” Michael continued, “whatever Agent Locke has her doing, it has to be better than watching foreign-language films. Without the subtitles.”
I bit back a smile at the aggrieved tone in Michael’s voice. “Is that what they had you do on your first day?”
“That,” Michael said, “is what they had me do for my first month. ‘Emotions aren’t about what people say,’” he mimicked, “‘they’re about posture, facial expressions, and culture-specific instantiations of universal phenomenological experiences.’”
Lia exited the refrigerator with empty hands, shut the door, and opened the freezer. “Poor baby,” she told Michael. “I’ve been here for almost three years, and the only thing they’ve taught me is that psychopaths are really good liars, and FBI agents are really bad ones.”
“Have you met many?” I asked.
“FBI agents?” Lia feigned ignorance as she retrieved a carton of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream from the freezer.
I gave her a look. “Psychopaths.”
She grabbed a spoon out of the drawer and brandished it like a magic wand. “The FBI hides us away in a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood in a nice little town. Do you really think Briggs is going to let me tag along on prison interviews? Or go into the field, where I might actually get to do something?”
Michael put Lia’s words in slightly more diplomatic terms. “The Bureau has tapes,” he said. “And reels and transcripts. Cold cases, mostly. Things that other people haven’t ever been able to solve. And for every cold case they bring us, there are dozens of cases that they’ve already solved. Tests to see if we really are as good as Agent Briggs says we are.”
“Even when you give them the answer they’re looking for,” Lia continued, picking up right where Michael left off, “even when the Powers That Be know that you’re right, they want to know why.”
Why what? This time, I didn’t ask the question out loud—but Michael answered it anyway.
“Why we can do it and they can’t.” He reached over and snagged another bite of my Cheerios. “They don’t just want to train us. They don’t just want to use us. They want to be us.”
“Absolutely,” a new voice concurred. “Deep down, in my heart of hearts, all I really want is to be Michael Townsend.”
Agent Locke strolled into the kitchen and went straight for the fridge. Clearly she was at home here, even if she lived somewhere else.
“Briggs left files for you two”—Agent Locke gestured to Michael and Lia—“in his study. He’s going to run a new simulation with Sloane today, and I’m going to start catching Cassie up to speed.” She heaved a larger-than-life sigh. “It’s not as glamorous as being a jaded seventeen-year-old boy with parental issues and a hair-gel dependency, but c’est la vie.”
Michael reached up to scratch the side of his face—and oh-so-subtly flipped Agent Locke off in the process.
Lia twirled her spoon around her finger, a tiny, ice-cream-laden baton. “Lacey Locke, everybody,” she said, like the FBI agent was a comedian and Lia the announcer.
Locke grinned. “Doesn’t Judd have a rule about you wearing lingerie in the kitchen?” she asked, eyeing Lia’s pajamas. Lia shrugged, but something about Agent Locke’s presence seemed to subdue her. Within minutes, my fellow Naturals had scattered. Neither Lia nor Michael seemed anxious to spend time in the company of an FBI profiler.
“I hope they’re not making life too difficult on you,” Locke said.
“No.” In fact, for a moment there, eating with the two of them, talking to them, had felt natural.
No pun intended.
“Neither Michael nor Lia was given much of a choice about joining the program.” Locke waited for that to sink in. “That tends to put a chip on a person’s shoulder.”
“They’re not the type to respond well to being strong-armed,” I said slowly.
“No,” Agent Locke replied. “They aren’t. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but that wasn’t one of mine. Briggs lacks a certain amount of … finesse. Guy never met a square peg he didn’t want to pound into a round hole.”
That description fit with my impression of Agent Briggs exactly. Agent Locke was speaking my language, but I didn’t have time to relish that fact.
Because Dean was standing in the doorway.
Agent Locke saw him and nodded. “Right on time.”
“On time for what?” I asked.
Dean answered on Agent Locke’s behalf, but unlike the red-haired agent, he wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t friendly. He didn’t want to be there—and unless I was mistaken, he didn’t like me.
“For your first lesson.”
CHAPTER 11
If Dean was unhappy at the prospect of spending the morning with me, he was even less pleased when Agent Locke’s plan for my first day required us to take a little field trip. Clearly, he’d expected a pen-and-paper lesson, or possibly a simulation in the basement, but Agent Locke just tossed him the keys to her SUV.
“You’re driving.”
Most FBI agents wouldn’t have insisted a seventeen-year-old boy drive—but it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Lacey Locke wasn’t most agents. She took the front passenger seat, and I slid into the back.
“Where to?” Dean asked Agent Locke as he backed out of the driveway. She gave him an address, and he murmured a reply. I tried to diagnose the slight twinge of an accent I heard in his voice.
Southern.
He didn’t say a single word for the rest of the drive. I tried to get a read on him. He didn’t seem shy. Maybe he was the type of person who saved his words for those rare occasions when he really had something to say. Maybe he kept to himself and used silence as a way of keeping other people at arm’s length.
Or maybe he just had zero desire to converse with Locke and me.
He’s a Natural profiler, I thought, wondering if his brain was churning, too, assimilating details about me the way I was assessing him.
He was a careful driver.
His shoulders tensed when someone cut him off.
And when we arrived at our destination, he got out of the car, shut the door, and held the keys out to Agent Locke—all without ever looking at me. I was used to fading into the background, but somehow, coming from Dean, it felt like an insult. Like I wasn’t worth profiling, like he didn’t have the slightest interest in figuring me out.
“Welcome to Westside Mall,” Agent Locke said, snapping me out of it. “I’m sure this isn’t what you were expecting for your first day, Cassie, but I wanted to get a sense of what you can do with normal people before we dive into the abnormal end of the spectrum.”
Dean flicked his eyes sideways.
Locke called him on it. “Something you’d like to add?”
Dean stuffed his hands into his pockets. “It’s just been a long time,” he said, “since someone asked me to think about normal.”
Five minutes later, we had a table in the food court.
“The woman in the purple fleece,” Agent Locke said. “What can you tell me about her, Cassie?”
I sat and followed her gaze to the woman in question. Midtwenties. She was wearing running shoes and jeans in addition to the fleece. Either she was sporty and she’d thrown on the jeans because she was coming to the mall, or she wasn’t, but wanted people to think that she was. I said as much out loud.
“What else can you tell me?” Agent Locke asked.
My gut told me that Agent Locke didn’t want details. She wanted the big picture.
Behavior. Personality. Environment.
I tried to integrate Purple Fleece into her surroundings. She’d chosen a seat near the edge of the food court, even though there were plenty of tables available closer to the restaurant where she’d purchased her meal. There were several people sitting near her, but she stayed focused on her food.
“She’s a student,” I said finally. “Graduate school of some kind—my money’s on med school. She’s not married, but has a serious boyfriend. She comes from an upper-middle-class family, heavy emphasis on the upper. She’s a runner, but not a health nut. She most likely gets up early, likes doing things that other people find painful, and if she has any siblings, they’re either younger than she is or they’re all boys.”
I waited for Agent Locke to reply. She didn’t. Neither did Dean.
To fill the silence, I added one last observation. “She gets cold really easily.”
There was no other excuse for wearing a fleece—even indoors—in July.
“What makes you think she’s a student?” Agent Locke asked finally.
I met Dean’s eyes and knew suddenly that he saw it, too. “It’s ten thirty in the morning,” I said, “and she’s not at work. It’s too early for a lunch break, and she’s not dressed like someone who’s on the job.”