The Naturals (The Naturals #1)(17)

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.”

Agent Locke raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she works from home. Or maybe she’s between jobs. Maybe she teaches elementary school and she’s on summer vacation.”

Those objections were perfectly valid, but somehow—to me—they still felt wrong. It was hard to explain; I thought of Michael warning me that the FBI would never stop trying to figure out how I did what I did.

I thought about Agent Locke saying she’d learned profiling the hard way—one class at a time.

“She’s not even looking at them.”

To my shock, Dean was the one who came to my rescue.

“Pardon?” Agent Locke turned her attention to him.

“The other people here in her age range.” Dean nodded toward a couple of young moms with small children, plus several department store employees lined up for coffee. “She’s not looking at them. They aren’t her peers. She doesn’t even realize they’re the same age. She pays more attention to college students than to other adults, but she clearly doesn’t consider herself one of them, either.”

And that was the feeling I hadn’t been able to put into words. It was like Dean could see into my head, make sense of the information bouncing around my brain—but, of course, that wasn’t it. He hadn’t needed to get into my head, because he’d been thinking the exact same thing.

After a long moment of silence, Dean flicked his eyes over to me. “Why med school?”

I glanced back at the girl. “Because she’s a runner.”

Dean smiled, ever so slightly. “You mean she’s a masochist.”

Across the room, the girl we’d been talking about rose, and I was able to make out the bags in her hand, the stores she’d shopped at. It fit. Everything fit.

I wasn’t wrong.

“What makes you think she has a boyfriend?” Dean asked, and under his quiet drawl I could hear curiosity—and maybe even admiration.

I shrugged in response to his question—mainly because I didn’t want to tell him that the reason I’d been sure this girl wasn’t single was the fact that the entire time we’d been there, she hadn’t so much as glanced at Dean.

From a distance, he would have looked older.

Even in jeans and a faded black T-shirt, you could see the muscles tensing against the fabric of his sleeves. And the muscles not covered by his sleeves.

His hair, his eyes, the way he stood, and the way he moved—if she’d been single, she would have looked.

— — —

“New game,” Agent Locke said. “I point to the car, you tell me about the person who owns it.”

We’d been at the mall for three hours. I’d thought coming out to the parking lot had signaled the end of today’s training, but apparently I was wrong.

“That one, Cassie. Go.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I was used to starting with people: their posture, the way they talked, their clothes, their occupations, their gender, the way they arranged a napkin on their lap—that was my language. Starting with a car was like flying blind.

“In our line of work,” Agent Locke told me as I stared at a white Acura, debating whether it belonged to a shopper or someone who worked at the mall, “you don’t get to meet the suspect before you profile the crime. You go to the scene and you rebuild what happened. You take physical evidence, you turn it into behavior, and then you try to narrow down the range of suspects. You don’t know if you’re looking for a man or a woman, a teenager or an old man. You know how they killed, but you don’t know why. You know how they left the body, but you have to figure out how they found the victim.” She paused. “So, Cassie. Who owns this car?”