The Naturals

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  — — —

  Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to 4587 North Oakland Street. The local police were already there, but at the FBI’s insistence, they hadn’t touched a thing. Dean, Sloane, and I waited in the car with Agents Starmans and Vance until the local PD had been cleared off the scene, and then they brought us up to the third floor.

  To this tiny theater’s only dressing room. I made it halfway down the hall before Agent Briggs stepped out of the room, blocking the entrance.

  “You don’t need to see this, Cassie,” he said.

  I could smell it—not rotten, not yet, but coppery: rust with just a hint of decay. I pushed past Briggs. He let me.

  The room was rectangular. There was blood smeared across the light switch, blood pooled near the door. The entire left-hand side of the room was lined with mirrors, like a dance studio.

  Like my mother’s dressing room.

  My limbs felt heavy all of a sudden. My lips were numb. I couldn’t breathe, and just like that, I was right back—

  The door is slightly ajar. I push it open. There’s something wet and squishy beneath my feet, and the smell—

  I grope for the light switch. My fingers touch something warm and sticky on the wall. Frantically, I search for the light switch—

  Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on.

  I turn it on.

  I’m standing in blood. There’s blood on the walls, blood on my hands. A lamp lies shattered on the wood floor. A desk is upturned, and there’s a jagged line in the floorboards.

  From the knife.

  Pressure on my shoulders forced me to stop reliving the memory. Hands. Dean’s hands, I realized. He brought his face very close to mine.

  “Stay in control,” he said, his voice steady and warm. “Every time you go back there, every time you see it—it’s just blood, just a crime scene, just a body.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “That’s all it is, Cassie. That’s all you can let it be.”

  I wondered which memories he relived over and over—wondered about the bodies and the blood. But right now, in this moment, I was just glad that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.

  I took his advice. I forced myself to look at the mirror, smeared with blood. I could make out handprints, finger tracks, like the victim had used the mirror to pull herself along the ground after she was too weak to walk.

  “Time of death was late last night,” Briggs said. “We’ll have Forensics in here to see if they can lift any fingerprints besides the victim’s off the mirror.”

  “That’s not her blood.”

  I glanced over at Sloane and realized that she was kneeling next to the body. For the first time, I looked at the victim. Her hair was red. She’d obviously been stabbed repeatedly.

  “The medical examiner will tell you the same thing,” Sloane continued. “This woman is five feet tall, approximately a hundred and ten pounds. Given her size, we’re looking at death from exsanguination with the loss of three quarts of blood, maybe less. She’s wearing jeans and a cashmere top. Cashmere—and other forms of wool—can absorb up to thirty percent of its weight in moisture without even appearing damp. Since the deepest wounds are concentrated over her stomach and chest areas, and her top and jeans were both tight, she’d have had to bleed through the fabric before dripping all over the floor.”

  I looked at the woman’s clothes. Sure enough, they were soaked with blood.

  “By the time her clothes were saturated enough to leave a puddle of that size on the floor over there”—Sloane gestured toward the door—“our victim wouldn’t have been conscious to fight off her attacker, let alone lead him on a merry chase through the room. She’s too small, she doesn’t have enough blood, the fabrics she’s wearing don’t expel liquid quickly enough—the numbers don’t add up.”

  “She’s right.” Agent Briggs stood up from examining the floor. “There’s a knife mark on the floor over here. If it was made with a bloody knife, there would be blood embedded in the scratch, but there’s not, meaning that either the UNSUB missed at his first attempt at stabbing the woman—which certainly doesn’t seem likely, given her size and the fact that he would have had the element of surprise—or the UNSUB deliberately made these marks with a clean knife.”

  I put myself in the victim’s shoes. She was eight or nine inches shorter than my mother’s five-nine, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have fought. But even if the UNSUB had come after her in the exact same way, what were the chances that the scene would have looked this much like my mother’s dressing room? The mirrors on the wall, the blood smeared on the light switch, the dark liquid pooled by the door.

  Something about this didn’t feel right.

  “She’s left-handed.”

  I turned to look at Dean, and he continued, “Victim’s wearing her watch on her right hand, and her manicure is more chipped on her left hand than her right,” he said. “Was your mother left-handed, Cassie?”

  I shook my head and realized where he was going with this. “They wouldn’t have fought off an attacker in the same way,” I said.

  Dean gave a brief nod of agreement. “If anything, we’d expect spatter on this wall.” He gestured to the plain wall opposite the mirrors. It was clean.

  “The UNSUB didn’t kill her here.” Locke was the first one who said it out loud. “There’s virtually no blood pooled around the body. She was killed somewhere else.”

  You killed her. You brought her here. You painted the room in blood.

  “For a good time, call Lorelai,” I murmured.

  “Cassie?” Agent Locke raised an eyebrow at me. I answered the question that went along with the eyebrow raise.

  “She’s just a prop,” I said, looking at the woman, wishing I knew her name, wishing that I could still make out the features of her face. “This is a set. This entire thing was staged to look like my mother’s death. Exactly like it.” My stomach twisted sharply.

  “Okay,” Agent Locke said. “So I’m the killer. I’m fixated on you, and I’m fixated on your mother. Maybe she was my first kill, but this time, it isn’t about your mother.”

  “It’s about you.” Dean picked up where Agent Locke had left off. “I’m not trying to relive her death. I’m trying to force you to relive discovering her.”

  The UNSUB had wanted me here. The presents, the coded message, and now this—a corpse dumped in a crime scene strikingly like my mother’s.

  “Briggs.” One of Briggs’s agents—Starmans—stuck his head into the room. “Medical examiner and the forensics team are here. Do you want me to hold them off?”

  Briggs looked at Dean, at me, and then at Sloane, still kneeling next to the body. We’d been careful not to touch anything or disturb the crime scene, but plopping three teenagers down in the middle of a murder investigation wasn’t exactly covert. Briggs, Locke, and their team obviously knew about us, but I wasn’t convinced that the rest of the FBI did, and Briggs confirmed that when he glanced from Starmans to Locke.

  “Get them out of here, Starmans,” Briggs said. “I want you, Brooks, and Vance rotating through on Cassie’s protection detail. Director Sterling has offered some of his best men for surveillance. They’ll keep an eye on the house from the outside, but I want one of you with Cassie at all times, and tell Judd that the house arrest is still in effect. No one leaves that house until this killer is caught.”

  I didn’t fight the orders.

  I didn’t fight to stay there in the room, looking for clues.

  There weren’t any. This was never about me figuring out who this killer was. This was always, always about the UNSUB playing with me, forcing me to relive the worst day of my life.

  Sloane slipped an arm around my waist. “There are fourteen varieties of hugs,” she said. “This is one of them.”

  Locke put a hand on my shoulder and steered the two of us out of the room, Dean on our heels.

  This is a game. I heard Dean’s voice echoing through my memory. It’s always a g
ame. That was what he’d told Michael, and at the time, I’d agreed. To the killer, this was a game—and suddenly, I couldn’t help thinking that the good guys might not win this one.

  We might lose.

  I might lose.

  CHAPTER 33

  I wasn’t allowed to go into the house until Judd and the agents on my protection detail had swept it, and even then, Agent Starmans accompanied me to my bedroom.

  “You okay?” he asked, giving me a sidelong glance.

  “Fine,” I replied. It was a stock answer, perfected around the Sunday night dinner table. I was a survivor. Whatever life threw at me, I came out okay, and the rest of the world thought I was great. I’d been faking things for so long that, until the past few weeks with Michael, Dean, Lia, and Sloane, I’d forgotten what it was like to be real.

  “You’re a tough kid,” Agent Starmans told me.

  I wasn’t in the mood to talk, and I especially wasn’t in the mood to be patted metaphorically on the head. All I wanted was to be left alone and given a chance to process, to recover.

  “You’re divorced,” I replied. “Sometime within the past four years, maybe five. Long enough ago that you should have moved on.”

  I normally made it a rule not to take the things I deduced about people and turn them into weapons, but I needed space. I needed to breathe. I stood and walked over to the window. Agent Starmans cleared his throat.

  “What do you think the UNSUB is going to do?” I asked wearily. “Take me out with a sniper rifle?”

  Not this killer. He’d want up close and personal. You didn’t have to be a Natural profiler to see that.

  “Why don’t you cut the poor agent some slack, Colorado? I’m fairly certain making grown men cry is Lia’s specialty, not yours.” Michael didn’t bother knocking before entering the room and giving Agent Starmans his most charming smile.

  “I’m not making anyone cry,” I said mutinously.

  Michael turned his gaze on me. “Underneath your ticked-off-that-they-won’t-leave-me-alone-and-even-more-ticked-off-that-I’m-scared-to-actually-be-alone exterior, I detect a slight trace of guilt, which suggests that you did say something below the belt, and you’re feeling the tiniest bit bad for using your powers for evil, and he”—Michael jerked his head toward Agent Starmans—“is fighting down-turned lips and furrowed eyebrows. I don’t need to tell you what that means, do I?”

  “Please don’t,” Agent Starmans muttered.

  “Of course, there’s also his posture, which suggests some level of sexual frustration—”

  Agent Starmans took a step forward. He towered over Michael, but Michael just kept smiling, undeterred.

  “No offense.”

  “I’ll be out in the hall,” Agent Starmans said. “Keep the door open.”

  It took me a moment after the agent retreated to realize that Michael had put him on the spot on purpose.

  “Were you really reading his posture?” I whispered.

  Michael ducked his head next to mine, a delightfully wicked smile on his face. “Unlike you, I have no problems using my ability for nefarious purposes.” He reached up and ran his thumb over the edge of my lip and onto my cheek. “You have something on your face.”

  “Liar.”

  He brushed his thumb over my other cheek. “I never lie about a pretty girl’s face. You’re carrying so much tension in yours that I have to ask: should I be worried about you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Liar,” Michael whispered back.

  For a second, I could almost forget everything that had happened today: Genevieve Ridgerton; the coded message on the bathroom wall; the UNSUB butchering a woman and using her body as a prop to recreate my mother’s death; the fact that all of this killer’s actions were designed to manipulate me.

  “You’re doing it again,” Michael said, and this time, he ran the middle and index fingers of each hand along the lines of my jaw.

  In the hallway, Agent Starmans took a step back. And then another, until he was almost out of sight.

  “Are you touching me just to make him uncomfortable?” I asked Michael, keeping my voice low enough that the agent wouldn’t overhear.

  “Not just to make him uncomfortable.”

  My lips twitched. Even the possibility of a smile felt foreign on my face.

  “Now,” Michael said, “are you going to tell me what happened today, or do I have to drag it out of Dean?”

  I gave him a skeptical look. Michael amended his previous statement. “Are you going to tell me what happened today, or am I going to have to have Lia drag it out of Dean?”

  Knowing Lia, she’d probably managed to pry at least half of the story out of Dean already—and with my luck, she would pass it on to Michael with embellishments. It was better that he heard it from me—so I started at the beginning with Club Muse and the message on the bathroom wall and didn’t stop until I’d told him about the crime scene in Arlington and its resemblance to my mother’s.

  “You think the similarity was intentional,” Michael said.

  I nodded. Michael didn’t ask me to elaborate, and I realized how much of our conversation happened in silence, with him reading my face and me knowing exactly how he’d respond.

  “The theory is that the UNSUB staged all of this for me,” I said finally. “It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill. It was about making me relive it.”

  Michael stared at me. “Say the second sentence again.”

  “It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill,” I repeated.

  “There,” Michael said. “Every time you say the words reliving the kill, you duck your head slightly to the right. It’s like you’re shaking your head or being bashful or … something.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that he was wrong, that he was reading too much into that single sentence, but I couldn’t form the words, because he was right. I didn’t know why I felt like I was missing something, but I did. If Michael had seen some hint of that in my facial expression …

  Maybe my body knew something that I didn’t.

  “It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill,” I said again. That was true. I knew it was true. But now that Michael had pointed it out, I could feel my gut telling me, loud and clear, that it wasn’t the whole truth.

  “I’m missing something.” The horror at the crime scene had been familiar. Almost too familiar. What kind of killer remembered the details of a crime scene so exactly? The splatter, the blood on the mirrors and the light switch, the knife marks on the floor …

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.” Michael’s words penetrated my thoughts. I focused on his hazel eyes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow in the doorway. Agent Starmans. Had he overheard us? Was he trying to overhear us?

  Michael grabbed my neck. He pulled me toward him. When Agent Starmans glanced in the room, all he saw was Michael and me.

  Kissing.

  The kiss in the pool was nothing compared to this. Then, our lips had barely brushed. Now, my lips were opening. Our mouths were crushed together. His hand traveled from my neck down to my lower back. My lips tingled, and I leaned into the kiss, shifting my body until I could feel the heat from his in my arms, my chest, my stomach.

  On some level, I was aware of the fact that Agent Starmans had hightailed it back down the hall, leaving me alone with Michael. On some level, I was aware of the fact that now was not a time for kissing, of the vortex of emotion I felt when I looked at Michael, of the sound of someone else coming down the hallway.

  My fingers curled into claws. I dug them into his T-shirt, his hair. And then finally—finally—I realized what I was doing. What we were doing.

  I pulled back, then hesitated. Michael dropped his hands from my back. There was a soft smile on his face, a look of wonderment in his eyes. This was Michael without layers. This was Michael and me—and Dean was standing in the doorway.

  “Dean.” I forced myself not to scramble backward, not to lean away from Michae
l in any way. I wouldn’t do that to him. The kiss might have started as a distraction, he might have taken advantage of the moment, but I’d kissed him back, and I wasn’t going to turn around and make him feel like nothing just because Dean was standing in the doorway and there was something there between him and me, too.

  Michael had never made any secret of the fact that he was pursuing me. Dean had fought any attraction he felt for me every step of the way.

  “We need to talk,” Dean said.

  “Whatever you have to say,” Michael drawled, “you can say in front of me.”

  I gave Michael a look.

  “Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of me, unless Cassie wishes to speak to you privately, in which case I completely respect her right to do so,” Michael corrected himself.

  “No,” Dean said. “Stay. It’s fine.”

  He didn’t sound fine—and if I was picking up on that, I didn’t want to know how easy it was for Michael to see what Dean was feeling.

  “I brought you this,” Dean said, holding out a file. At first, I thought it was the case file for our UNSUB, but then I saw the label on the file. LORELAI HOBBES.

  “My mother’s file?”

  “Locke snuck me a copy,” Dean said. “She thought there might be something here, and she was right. The attack on your mother was poorly planned. It was emotional. It was messy. And what we saw today—”

  “Wasn’t any of those things,” I finished. Dean had just put into words the feeling I’d been on the verge of explaining to Michael. A killer could grow and change, their MO could develop, but the emotions, the rage, the titillation—that didn’t just go away. Whoever had attacked my mom would have been too overwhelmed by adrenaline to commit the minutiae of the scene to memory.

  The person responsible for the blood in my mother’s dressing room five years ago wouldn’t have been able to reenact her murder so coldly today.

  This wasn’t about reliving a kill.

  “Even if I’m evolving,” Dean said, “even if I’ve gotten good at what I do—seeing you, Cassie, seeing your mother in you, I’d be frenzied.” Dean slipped a picture of my mother’s crime scene out of the folder. Then he laid a second picture down next to it, of the scene today. Looking at the two photos side by side, I accepted what my gut was telling me, what Dean was telling me.