The Naturals (The Naturals #1)(16)

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.”