The Naturals (The Naturals #1)(15)

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 starts broadcasting a mix of concentration, curiosity, and calm.” Michael paused. I took a big bite of cereal. “The muscles in your neck relax,” he continued. “Your lips turn ever so subtly down. Your head tilts slightly to one side, and you get crow’s-feet at the corners of your eyes.”

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?”