The Naturals (The Naturals #1)(37)

“No,” I said. “They look like her.”

These women had all been killed in the past nine months. My mother had been missing for five years.

“Cassie, who is that?” Michael had to have known the answer to that question, but he asked it anyway.

“That’s my mother.” I still couldn’t let myself look at the picture. “She was attacked with a knife. Her body was never found.” I paused, just for a second. “My mother made her living by convincing people she was psychic.”

Michael looked at me—and into me. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

I was saying that Briggs and Locke were tracking an UNSUB who killed women with red hair and people who claimed to be psychic. It could have been a coincidence. I should have assumed it was a coincidence.

But I didn’t.

“I’m saying this killer has a very specific type: people who resemble my mother.”





YOU


Last night, you woke up in a cold sweat, and the only voice in your head was your father’s. The dream seemed real. It always seems real. You could feel the sticky sheets, smell the urine, hear the whistle of His hand tearing through the air. You woke up shaking, and then you realized— The bed was wet.

No, you thought. No. No. No.

But there wasn’t anyone there to punish you. Your father’s dead, and you’re not.

You’re the one who does the punishing now.

But it’s never enough. The neighbor’s dog. The whores. Even the palm reader wasn’t enough. You open the bathroom cabinet. One by one, you run your hands over each of the tubes of lipstick, remember each of the girls.

It’s calming.

Soothing.

Exciting.

You stop when you get to the oldest tube. The first. You know what you want. What you need. You’ve always known.

All that’s left to do now is take it.





CHAPTER 23


When I’d found out about Dean’s dad, I’d taken off running, but now that my mom’s photograph was staring up at me from a sea of murder victims, all I could do was sit there.

“Maybe this was a bad idea.” Coming from Michael, those words sounded completely alien.

“No,” I said. “You wanted to distract me. I’m distracted.”

“The likelihood that this UNSUB is the one who attacked your mother is extremely low.” Sloane spoke hesitantly, like she thought one more word—or one more statistic—might set me off. “This killer abducts his victims and kills them at a separate location, leaving little to no physical evidence at the site of abduction. There’s some indication that at least two of the victims may have been drugged. The women have relatively few defensive wounds, indicating that they’re likely restrained before the knife comes into play.”

Sloane was talking about this killer’s MO. With her gift, that was as far as she could go. She couldn’t see underneath it, couldn’t imagine how a killer might have refined his technique over the span of five years.

“When does Agent Briggs get back?” I asked.

“He’s never going to let you work on this,” Michael told me.

“Is that your way of telling me that you don’t want him to know we hacked a stolen jump drive?” I shot back.

Michael snorted. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind taking out an ad in the paper or hiring a skywriter to announce that he and Locke were outsmarted by three bored teenagers.”

I could think of a lot of words to describe my life right now; boring wasn’t one of them.

“Briggs is nothing if not predictable, Cassie. His job is proving that we can solve cold cases, not dragging us along on active ones. He’s probably lucky his bosses didn’t fire him when they figured out what he was doing with Dean. Even if this case does have something to do with your mother’s, he’ll never let you work on it.”

I turned to Sloane for a second opinion.

“Two hours and fifty-six minutes,” she said. “Briggs was due back in town today, but he’ll need to settle things at the office and grab a change of clothes and a shower before coming in.”

That meant I had two hours and fifty-six minutes to decide how to broach this case to Agent Briggs—or better yet, Agent Locke.

— — —

The good thing about being in cahoots with an emotion reader was that Michael could tell that I wanted to be left alone, and he obliged. Better yet, he took Sloane—and the files—with him.

If he hadn’t, I probably would still have been sitting there, staring at the crime-scene photos and wondering if my mom had died without a face. Instead, I was lying on my bed, staring at the door and trying to think of something—anything—I could offer the FBI to make them want me on this case.

Two hours and forty-two minutes later, someone knocked on my door. I thought it might be Agent Briggs, back fourteen minutes earlier than Sloane had predicted.

But it wasn’t.

“Dean?”

He hadn’t ever sought me out before he’d told me that we weren’t partners, weren’t friends, weren’t anything. I couldn’t imagine why he’d come looking for me voluntarily now.

“Can I come in?”

There was something about the way he was standing there that told me he was expecting me to say no. Maybe I should have. Instead, I nodded, not trusting my voice.