Текст книги "The Naturals"

Автор книги: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

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CHAPTER 22

“This encryption is pathetic,” Sloane said. “It’s like they wantme to hack their files.”

She was sitting cross-legged on the end of her bed, her laptop balanced on her knees. Her fingers flew across the keys as she worked on breaking through the protection on the pilfered USB drive. A stray piece of blond hair drifted into her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Done!”

Sloane turned the laptop around so the two of us could see it. “Seven files,” she said. The smile fell from her face. “Seven victims.”

Locke’s lecture on victimology came flooding back to me. Was that why my mentor had been carrying around a digital copy of these files? Had she been attempting to get inside the victims’ heads?

“What if this is important?” I asked, unable to push back a stab of guilt. “What if Locke and Briggs need this information for their case?” I’d come to the program to help, not to get in the way of the FBI’s efforts.

“Cassie,” Michael said, taking a seat against the foot of the bed and stretching his legs out in front of him. “Is Briggs the type to keep backups?”

Agent Briggs was the type to keep backups of his backups. He and Locke had been gone for three days. If they’d needed this drive, they would have come back for it.

“Should I print out the files?” Sloane asked.

Michael looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Your call, Colorado.”

I should have said no. I should have told Sloane that the case Locke and Briggs were working on was none of our business, but I’d come here to help, and Locke hadsaid that she and Briggs had hit a brick wall.

“Print it.”

A second later, the printer on Sloane’s desk started spitting out pages. After fifty or so sheets, it stopped. Michael leaned over and grabbed the pages. He separated them by case and helped himself to three case files before handing the others to Sloane and me. All seven were homicides. Four in DC in the past two weeks and another three cases, all within the past year, from other jurisdictions.

“First DC victim disappeared from the street she was working ten days ago and showed up the next morning with her face half carved off.” Michael looked up from leafing through the file.

“This one’s dated three days later,” I said. “Facial mutilation, numerous superficial cuts to the rest of the body—she died of blood loss.”

“This would take time,” Sloane said, her face pale. “Hours, not minutes, and according to the autopsy reports, the tissue damage is– severe.”

“He’s playing with them.” Michael finished with his second file and started in on the third. “He takes them. He cuts them. He watches them suffer. And then he cuts off their faces.”

“Don’t say he,” I corrected absentmindedly. “Say Ior you.”

Michael and Sloane both stared at me, and I realized the obvious: their lessons were very different from mine.

“I mean, say UNSUB,” I told them. “Unknown Subject.”

“I can think of some better names for this guy,” Michael murmured, looking through the last case file in his hands. “Who has the file for the last victim?”

“I do.” Sloane’s voice was quiet, and suddenly, she looked very young. “She was a palm reader in Dupont Circle.” For a second, I thought Sloane might actually put the file down, but then her features went suddenly calm. “A person is ten times more likely to become a professional athlete than to make a living reading palms,” she said, taking refuge in the numbers.

Most killers have a type, I thought, falling back on my own lessons. “Do any of the other victims have ties to the psychic community, astrology, or the occult?”

Michael turned back to the two reports in his hand. “Lady of the Evening,” he said, “another Lady of the Evening, and a telemarketer … who worked at a psychic hotline.”

I glanced down at the two files in my hand. “I’ve got a nineteen-year-old runaway and a medium working out of Los Angeles.”

“Two different kinds of victims,” Michael observed. “Prostitutes, drifters, and runaways in column A. People with a tie to the occult in column B.”

I fished Before photos of the victims out of my files and gestured for the others to do the same.

You pick them for a reason, I thought, looking at the women one by one. You cut their faces, slice your knife down through skin and tissue, until you hit the bone. This is personal.

“They’re all young,” I said, studying them and searching for commonalities. “Between eighteen and thirty-five.”

“Those three have red hair.” Michael separated out the victims with no ties to the psychic community.

“The palm reader had red hair, too,” Sloane interjected.

I was staring directly at the palm reader’s Before picture. “The palm reader was a blonde.”

“No,” Sloane said slowly. “She was a naturalblonde. But when they found her, she looked like this.”

Sloane slid a second, gruesome picture toward us. True to Sloane’s words, the corpse’s hair was a deep, unmistakable red.

A recent dye job, I thought. So did she dye her hair … or did you?

“Two classes of victims,” Michael said again, lining the redheads up in one column and the psychics in another, with the palm reader from Dupont Circle between the two. “You think we’re looking for two different killers?”

“No,” I said. “We’re only looking for one killer.”

My companions could make observations. Sloane could generate relevant statistics. If there’d been witness testimony, Michael could have told us who was exhibiting signs of guilt. But here, now, looking at the pictures, this was my domain. I would have had to backtrack to explain how I knew, to figure outhow I knew—but I was certain. The pictures, what had been done to these women, it was the same. Not just the details, but the anger, the urges …

All of these women had been killed by the same person.

You’re escalating, I thought. Something happened, and now you need more, faster.

I stared at the photos, my mind whirring, picking up each detail of the pictures, the files, until only three things stood out.

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

That was the moment that the ground disappeared from underneath me. I lost the ability to blink. My eyes got very dry. My throat was worse. My vision blurred, and all of the photographs got very fuzzy except for one.

The nineteen-year-old runaway.

The hair, the facial structure, the freckles. Through blurred vision, she looked like …

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

“Cassie?” Michael took my hands in his. “You’re freezing.”

“The UNSUB is killing redheads,” I said, “and he’s killing psychics.”

“That’s not a pattern,” Sloane said peevishly. “That’s two patterns.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not. I think …”

Knife. Redhead. Psychic.

I couldn’t say the words. “My mother …” I took a short breath and brutally expelled it. “I don’t know what my mother’s body looked like,” I said finally, “but I do know that she was attacked with a knife.”

Michael and Sloane stared at me. I got up and walked over to my dresser. I opened the top drawer and found what I was looking for.

A picture.

Don’t look at it, I thought.

Directing my gaze at anything but the picture in my hand, I stooped and tapped my fingers on the palm reader’s photograph. “I don’t think she dyed her hair red,” I said. “I think the killer did.”

You kill psychics. You kill redheads. But one or the other isn’t enough anymore. It’s never enough.

Glancing up at Michael and Sloane, I laid my mother’s picture down between the two columns.

Sloane studied it. “She looks like the other victims,” she said, nodding to the column of redheads.

“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 intome. “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; boringwasn’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 beforehe’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.

He came in and shut the door behind him. “Lia eavesdrops,” he explained, gesturing toward the closed door.

I shrugged and waited for him to say something he wouldn’t want overheard.

“I’m sorry.” He managed two words, paused, and then pushed out two more. “About before.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about.” There was no law saying he had to trust me. Outside of Locke’s lessons, we’d barely spent any time together. He hadn’t chosento kiss me.

“Lia told me about the files you and Michael and Sloane found.”

The sudden change of subject took me by surprise. “How does Lia even know about that?”

Dean shrugged. “She eavesdrops.”

And since I wasn’t exactly Lia’s favorite person right now, she had no reason whatsoever to keep her mouth closed about whatever it was that she’d overheard.

“So, what?” I asked Dean. “We’re even now? I found out about your dad and Lia told you that I think the UNSUB Briggs and Locke are after might be the one who killed my mom and now everything’s okay?”

Dean sat down on Sloane’s bed and faced me. “Nothing’s okay.”

Why was it that I’d managed to hold on to my cool with Michael and Sloane, but now that Dean was here, I could feel myself starting to slip?

“Sloane said that she thinks it’s highly unlikely that this killer is the same one who took my mother,” I said, looking down at my lap and trying not to cry. “It’s been five years. The MO is different. I don’t even know if the signature is the same, because they never found my mother’s body.”

Dean leaned forward and angled his head up at mine. “Some killers go for years without being caught, and their MOs change as time goes on. They learn. They evolve. They need more.”

Dean was telling me that I could be right, that the time frame didn’t preclude this being the same UNSUB, but I knew from his tone of voice that he wasn’t just talking about thisUNSUB.

“How long was it before they caught him?” I asked softly. I didn’t specify who himwas. I didn’t have to.

Dean met my gaze and held it. “Years.”

I wondered if that one word was more than he’d told anyone else about his father.

I thought that maybe it was.

“My mother. I was the one who found …” I couldn’t say her bodybecause there hadn’t been one. I swallowed hard, but I kept going, because it was important, somehow, to put it into words, to tell him.

“I’d gone to check out the crowd, eavesdrop, see if there was anything I could pick up on that might help my mom during the show. I was gone ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and when I got back, she was gone. The entire room had been tossed. The police say she fought. I knowshe fought—but there was so much blood. I don’t know how many times he stabbed her, but when I got back to the room, I could smell it. The door was partway open. The light was off. I stepped into the room and I felt something wet underneath my feet. I said her name, I think. And then I reached for the light switch. I got the wall instead, and there was blood on the wall. It was on my hands, Dean, and then I turned on the light, and it was everywhere.”

Dean didn’t say anything, but he was there, so close that I could feel the heat of his body next to mine. He was listening, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he understood.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t usually talk about this, and I don’t let it do this to me, but I remember thinking that whoever hurt my mother hated her. He knew her, and he hated her, Dean. It was there, in the room, in the spatter, in the way she’d fought—it wasn’t random. He knew her, and how could I explain that to anyone? Who would have believed me? I was just some stupid kid, but now Briggs and Locke have this case, and their UNSUB is killing people who look like my mother and people who hold a similar job, and he’s doing it with a knife. And even though the victims are scattered geographically, even though none of them knew each other, it’s personal.” I paused. “I don’t think he’s killing them. I think he’s killing heragain. And I’m not just some stupid kid anymore. I’m a profiler. A Natural. But even so—who’s going to believe me?”

Dean put a hand on my neck, the way he had the first time I’d crawled into a killer’s mind. “Nobody is going to believe you,” he said. “You’re too close to it.” He ran his thumb up and down the side of my neck. “But Briggs will believe me.”

Dean was the only person in this house who shared my ability. Michael and Sloane might have been skeptical about my theory, but Dean had instincts like mine. He’d know if I was crazy, or if there was something to this. “You’ll look at the case?” I asked him.

He nodded and dropped his hand from my neck, like he’d only just realized he was touching me.

I stood. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going to get the file.”

CHAPTER 24

“Michael, can I have the—” I burst into the kitchen, only to find that Michael and Sloane weren’t the only ones there. Judd was cooking, and Agent Briggs was standing with his back to me, a thin black briefcase by his feet.

“—the bacon,” I finished hastily.

Agent Briggs turned to face me. “And why does Michael have your bacon?” he asked.

As if this whole situation wasn’t awkward enough, Lia chose that moment to come sauntering into the room. “Yes, Cassie,” she said with a wicked grin, “tell us why Michael has your bacon.”

The way she said the phrase left very little question that she was using it as a euphemism.

“Lia,” Judd said, waving a spatula in her general direction, “that’s enough.” Then he turned to me. “Grub will be ready soon. I expect you can hold out until then?”

“Yes,” I said. “No bacon needed.”

From behind Briggs’s back, Michael pantomimed smacking his palm into his forehead. Apparently, my attempts at subterfuge left something to be desired. I tried to make a quick exit, but Agent Briggs stopped me in my tracks.

“Cassie. A word.”

I glanced at Michael, wondering what—if anything—Briggs knew about what Michael, Sloane, and I had been up to.

“Ambidextrous,” Sloane said suddenly.

“This should be good,” Lia murmured.

Sloane cleared her throat. “Agent Briggs asked for a word. Ambidextrousis a good one. Less than point-five percent of the words in the English language contain all five vowels.”

I was grateful for the distraction, but unfortunately, Briggs didn’t bite. “Cassie?”

“Sure.” I nodded and followed him out of the room. I wasn’t sure where we were heading at first, but after we passed the library, I realized we were going to the only room on the ground floor I hadn’t been in yet—Briggs’s study.

He opened the door and gestured for me to enter. I walked into the room, taking in my surroundings. The room was full of animals, lifeless and frozen in place.

Hunting trophies.

There was a grizzly bear, reared up on its back legs, its mouth caught in a silent roar. On the other side of the room, a lifelike panther crouched, canines gleaming, while a mountain lion seemed to be on the prowl.

The most disturbing thing about this entire room—maybe this entire situation—was that I hadn’t pegged Agent Briggs for a hunter.

“They’re predators. Reminders of what my team deals with every time we go out in the world.”

There was something about the way Agent Briggs said those words that made me realize, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he knew what Michael, Sloane, and I had been up to in his absence. He knew that weknew the exact details of the case that he and Agent Locke were working now.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“Judd told me.” Briggs crossed the room and sat on the edge of the desk. He gestured for me to take a seat in a chair in front of him. “You know, Judd might fade into the background around here, but there’s not much that goes on in this house that he doesn’t know. Information gathering has always been a specialty of his.”

Keeping his eyes fixed on me, Briggs opened his briefcase and took out a file: all of the papers we’d printed out earlier. “I confiscated this from Michael. And this,” he added, holding up the USB drive, “from Sloane. Her laptop will be making a trip to our tech lab to ensure that all traces of data have been wiped from the hard drive.”

I hadn’t even had a chance to tell Agent Briggs my suspicions, and he was already shutting me down—and shutting me out.

Briggs ran one hand roughly over his chin, and I realized that he hadn’t shaved in at least a day.

“The case isn’t going well.” I paused. “Is it?”

“I need you to listen to what I’m saying, Cassandra.”

That was only the second time he’d called me by my full name since I’d told him I preferred Cassie.

“I was up front with you about what this program is and what it is not. The FBI isn’t about to authorize teenagers to dive into the middle of active cases.”

His choice of words was more revealing than he knew. The FBIhad qualms about throwing teenagers into the thick of things. Briggs—personally—did not.

“So what you’re saying is that using the twelve-year-old son of a serial killer as your own personal encyclopedia of murderous minds was fine, but now that the program is official, we can’t even look at the files?”

“What I’m saying,” Briggs countered, “is that this UNSUB is dangerous. He’s local. And I have no intention of involving any of you.”

“Even if this case has something to do with my mother’s?”

Briggs paused. “You’re jumping to conclusions.” He didn’t ask me why I thought this case had something to do with my mother’s. Now that I’d brought up the idea, he didn’t have to. “The occupations. The red hair. The knife. It isn’t enough.”

“The UNSUB dyed the latest victim’s hair red.” I didn’t bother asking if I was right about that, knowing in my gut that I was. “That’s above and beyond victim selection. It’s not just an MO anymore. It’s part of the UNSUB’s signature.”

Briggs crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not talking with you about this.”

And yet, he didn’t leave the room—and he didn’t stop listening.

“Did the UNSUB dye her hair before or after he killed her?”

Briggs didn’t say a word. He was playing this by the book—but he didn’t tell me to stop talking, either.

“Dyeing the victim’s hair before the kill could be an attempt to create a more ideal target, one who claims to be psychic andhas red hair. But dyeing her hair afterward …” I paused, just long enough to see that Briggs was listening, really listening, to every word. “Dyeing her hair after she’s already dead is a message.”

“And what message is that?” Agent Briggs asked sharply, like he was dismissing my words out of hand, when both of us knew that he was not.

“A message for you: hair color matters. The UNSUB wants you to know that there’s a connection between the cases. He doesn’t trust you to come to that conclusion on your own, so he’s helping you get there.”

Briggs was silent for three or four loaded seconds.

“We can’t do this, Cassie. I understand your interest in the case. I understand your wanting to help, but whatever you think you’re doing, it ends now.”

I started to object and he held up a hand, silencing me.

“I’ll tell Locke to let you start working on cold cases. You’re obviously ready. But if you so much as sniff in the direction of thiscase again, there will be consequences, and I can guarantee that you will find them unpleasant.” He leaned forward, his posture unconsciously mimicking the roaring bear’s. “Have I made myself clear?”

I didn’t respond. If he was looking for a promise that I’d stay out of this, he was going to be disappointed.

“I already have a Natural profiler in this program.” Briggs looked me straight in the eye, his lips set in a thin, forbidding line. “I’d prefer to have two, but not at the risk of my job.”

There it was: the ultimate threat. If I pushed this, Briggs could send me home. Back to Nonna and the aunts and the uncles and the constant awareness that I would never be like them, like anyoneoutside of these walls.

“You’ve made yourself clear,” I said.

Briggs closed his briefcase. “Give it a couple of years, Cassie. They won’t keep you out of the field forever.”

He waited for my reply, but I said nothing. He stood up and walked to the door.

“If he’s dyeing their hair, the rules are changing,” I called after him, not bothering to turn around to see if he’d stopped to listen or not. “And that means that before things get better, they’re going to get a whole lot worse.”