Текст книги "The Naturals"

Автор книги: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

YOU

You’re home now. You’re alone. Everything is in its place. Everything butthis.

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 dosomething?”

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 beus.”

“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’mgoing 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.”

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 elsecan 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?”

The make and model weren’t telling me much. This car could have belonged to either a man or a woman, and it was parked in front of the food court, which meant that I had no idea what the owner’s destination inside the mall was. The parking space wasn’t a good one, but it wasn’t bad. The parking job left a little to be desired.

“They were in a hurry,” I said. “The parking job is crooked, and they didn’t bother cruising for a better space.” That also told me that the driver didn’t have the kind of ego that would push a person to hunt for a prime spot, as if getting a great parking place at the mall was an indicator of personal worth. “No car seat, so no young children. No bumper stickers, relatively recently washed. They’re not here for food—no reason to hurry for that—but they parked at the food court, so either they don’t know where they’re going once they get inside the mall or their store of choice is close by.”

I paused, waiting for Dean to pick up where I had left off, but he didn’t. Instead, Agent Locke gave me a single piece of advice.

“Don’t say they.”

“I didn’t mean theyas in plural,” I said hastily. “I just haven’t decided yet if it’s a man or a woman.”

Dean glanced at the mall entrance and then back at me. “That’s not what she means. Theykeeps you on the outside. So do heand she.”

“So what word am I supposed to use?”

“Officially,” Agent Locke said, “we use the term Unknown Subject—or UNSUB.”

“And unofficially?” I asked.

Dean shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “If you want to climb inside someone’s head,” he said roughly, “you use the word I.”

The night before, I’d imagined myself in Lia’s body, imagined what it was like to be her. I could imagine driving this car, parking it like this, climbing out—but this wasn’t about cars. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be profiling shoppers.

I’d be profiling killers.

“What if I don’t want to be them?” I asked. I knew that if I closed my eyes, if I so much as blinked, I would be right back in my mother’s dressing room. I’d be able to see the blood. I’d be able to smell it. “What if I can’t?”

“Then you’re lucky.” Dean’s voice was quiet, but his eyes were hard. “And you’d be better off at home.”

My stomach twisted. He didn’t think I belonged here. Suddenly, it was all too easy to remember that when we’d met the day before and he’d said “nice to meet you,” it had been a lie.

Agent Locke set a hand on my shoulder. “If you want to get close to an UNSUB, but you don’t want to put yourself in their shoes, there’s another word you can use.”

I turned my back on Dean and focused my full attention on Agent Locke. “And what word is that?” I asked.

Locke met my gaze. “You.”

CHAPTER 12

That night, I dreamed that I was walking through a narrow hallway. The floor was tiled. The walls were white. The only sound in the entire room was my sneaker-clad feet scuffing against the freshly mopped floor.

This isn’t right. Something about this isn’t right.

Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and on the ground, my shadow flickered, too. At the end of the hallway, there was a metal door, painted to match the walls. It was slightly ajar, and I wondered if I’d left it that way or if my mother had cracked the door open to keep an eye out for me.

Don’t go in there. Stop. You have to stop.

I smiled and kept right on walking. One step, two steps, three steps, four. On some level, I knew that this was a dream, knew what I would find when I opened that door—but I couldn’t stop. My body felt numb from the waist down. My smile hurt.

I laid my hand flat against the metal door and pushed.

“Cassie?”

My mother was standing there, dressed in blue. A breath caught in my throat—not because she was beautiful, though she was, and not because she was on the verge of scolding me for taking so long to report back on the crowd.

A vise closed in around my lungs, because this was wrong. This hadn’t happened, and I wished to God it had.

Please don’t be a dream. Just this once, let it be real. Don’t let it—

“Cassie?” My mom stumbled backward. She fell. Blood turned blue silk red. It splattered against the walls. There was so much of it—too much.

She’s crawling in it, slipping, but everywhere she goes, the knife is there.

Hands grabbed at her ankles. I turned, trying to see her attacker’s face, and just like that, my mother was gone and I was back outside the door. My hand pushed it open.

This is how it happened, I thought dully. This is real.

I stepped into the darkness. I felt something wet and squishy beneath my feet, and the smell—oh, God, the smell. I scrambled for the light switch.

Don’t. Don’t turn it on, don’t—

I woke with a start.

In the bed beside me, Sloane was dead to the world. I’d had the dream often enough to know that there was no point in closing my eyes again. I crept quietly out of bed and went to the window. I needed to do something—to take my cue from the woman I’d profiled that morning and run until my body hurt, or to follow in Dean’s footsteps and take it out on some weights. Then I caught sight of the backyard—and more specifically, the pool.

The yard was dimly lit, the water gleaming black in the moonlight. Silently, I grabbed a swimsuit and slipped out of the room without waking Sloane. Minutes later, I was sitting at the edge of the pool. Even in the dead of night, the air was hot. I dangled my legs over the edge.

I lowered myself into the pool. Slowly, the tension left my body. My brain shut off. For a few minutes, I just treaded water, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood at nighttime: crickets and the wind and my hands moving through the water. Then I stopped—stopped treading water, stopped fighting the pull of gravity—and let myself sink.

I opened my eyes underwater, but couldn’t see anything. There was darkness all around me, and then suddenly, there was a flicker of light at the pool’s surface.

I wasn’t alone.

You don’t know that, I told myself, but I saw the faintest blur of motion, and that protest died a quick and brutal death. There was someone up there—and I couldn’t stay underwater indefinitely.

Just like that, I felt like I was back in the narrow hallway of my dreams, walking slowly toward something awful.

It’s nothing.

Still, I fought the need for air. I wanted—irrationally—to stay underwater, where it was safe. But I couldn’t. Water plugged my ears, and as my lungs screamed for air, the sound of my own heartbeat surrounded me.

I came up slowly, breaking the surface as quietly as I could. Treading water, I turned in a circle, my eyes scanning the yard for an intruder. At first, I saw nothing. And then I saw a pair of eyes, the moonlight caught in them just so.

Looking at me.

“I didn’t know you were out here,” the owner of those eyes said. “I should go.”

My heart kept right on pounding, even once I realized the voice belonged to Dean. Now that my brain had identified him, I could make out a few more of his features. His hair hung in his face. His eyes—which I’d seen as a predator’s a moment before—now just looked surprised.

Clearly, he hadn’t expected anyone to be swimming at three in the morning.

“No,” I said, my voice traveling along the surface of the water. “It’s your yard, too. Stay.”

I felt ridiculous for being so jumpy. This was a quiet, sleepy little town. The yard was fenced. No one knew what the FBI was training us to do. We weren’t targets. This wasn’t my dream.

I wasn’t my mother.

For an elongated moment, I thought Dean would turn and walk away, but instead, he sat a few inches away from the edge of the pool. “What are you doing out here?”

For some reason, I felt compelled to tell him the truth. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Dean gazed out at the yard. “I stopped sleeping a long time ago. Most nights, I get three good hours, maybe four.”

I’d given him a truth, and he’d given me one. We fell into silence then, him at the edge of the pool and me treading water at the center.

“It wasn’t real, you know.” He spoke to his hands, not to me.

“What wasn’t real?”

“Today.” Dean paused. “At the mall with Locke. Playing games in parking lots. That’s not what this is.”

In the scant light of the moon, his eyes looked so dark they were nearly black, and something about the way he was looking at me made me realize—he wasn’t criticizing me.

He was trying to protectme.

“I know what this is,” I said. I knew better than anyone. Turning away from him, I stared up at the sky, all too aware of the fact that he was staring at me.

“Briggs shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said finally. “This place will ruin you.”

“Did it ruin Lia?” I asked. “Or Sloane?”

“They’re not profilers.”

“Did this place ruin you?”

Dean didn’t pause, not even for a second. “There was nothing to ruin.”

I swam over to the edge, right next to him. “You don’t know me,” I said, pulling myself out of the water. “I’m not scared of this place. I’m not afraid to learn how to think like a killer, and I am not afraid of you”

I wasn’t even sure why I’d added on those last six words, but they were the ones that made his eyes flash. I was halfway to the house when I heard him stand up. I heard him walk across the grass to the tiny, shacklike pool house. I heard him throw a switch.

Suddenly, the yard wasn’t dark anymore. It took me a moment to realize where the light was coming from. The pool was glowing. There was no other word for it. It looked like someone had splattered glow-in-the-dark paint across the edge. There was a drop of fluorescent color here, a drop there. Long streaks of it. Blobs. Four parallel smears across the tile on the side of the pool.

I glanced at Dean.

“Black light,” he said, as if that were all the explanation I’d need.

I couldn’t help myself. I moved closer. I squatted to get a better look. And that was when I saw the glow-in-the-dark outline of a body at the bottom of the pool.

“Her name was Amanda,” Dean said.

I realized then what the smears and streaks of paint on the concrete and the side of the pool were supposed to be.

Blood.

The color had fooled me, even though the pattern was all too familiar.

“She was stabbed three times.” Dean wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t even look at the pool. “She cracked her head on the cement when she slipped in her own blood. And then he wrapped her fingers around her throat. He forced her upper body over the side of the pool.”

I could see it happening, see the killer standing over a girl’s body. She would have kicked. She would have clawed at his hands, tried to use the side of the pool for leverage.

“He held her under.” Dean knelt next to the pool and demonstrated, acting out the motion. “He drowned her. And then he set her free.” He let go of his imaginary prey and sent her off toward the center of the pool.

“This is a crime scene,” I said finally. “One of the fake crime scenes that they use to test us, like the sets in the basement.”

Dean stared out at the center of the pool, where the victim’s body would have been. “It’s not fake,” he said finally. “It really happened. It just didn’t happen here.”

I reached out to touch Dean’s shoulder. He shrugged off my touch, turning to face me, his body close to mine. “Everything about this place—the house, the yard, the pool—was constructed with one thing in mind.”

“Full immersion,” I said, holding his gaze. “Like those schools where they only speak French.”

Dean jerked his head toward the pool. “This isn’t a language people should want to learn.”

Normal people—that was what Dean meant. But I wasn’t normal. I was a Natural. And this mock crime scene wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen.

I turned to walk back to the house. I heard Dean walk across the lawn. I heard him flip the switch. And when I glanced back over my shoulder, the pool was just a pool. The yard was just a yard. And the outline of the body was gone.