Killer Instinct
Page 27

I thought of the R burned into Agent Sterling’s chest.
Briggs pocketed his phone and turned back to Sterling. “We’ve got a possible address for the professor’s cabin.”
“Go on, then.” Judd spoke up from behind us. I wondered how long he’d been there. “You two, get out of here,” he said to Briggs and Sterling. “I may be old, but I’m still capable of making sure none of these miscreants leave the house.”
We miscreants didn’t leave the house. We convened in the basement.
“I want to know exactly where Cassie got the information she gave Briggs,” Dean said. The fact that he was talking about me and not to me cut deeper than it should have.
“Well, I want to know why you thought that being in the same room with your father was anything but the worst idea ever,” Lia retorted.
“He knew something,” Dean told her.
“Or he wanted you to think he knew something. You shouldn’t have gone. And if you had to go, you should have taken me with you.” Lia turned her back on Dean, but not before I realized that she wasn’t just angry. She was hurt. Dean had gone to see his father for the first time in five years. I’d gone with him. She hadn’t.
“Lia,” Dean said softly.
“No,” she snapped without turning back around. “I watch your back. You watch mine. He’s hard to read, but he’s not impossible, Dean. I could have listened in. I could have helped.”
“You can’t help,” Dean told her. He turned the topic back to his original question. “You know how Cassie got the information, don’t you, Lia?”
“Of course I know,” Lia said. “It was my idea! And it was our risk to take, Dean.”
“Risk?” Dean repeated, his voice silky and low. “Lia, what did you do?”
“They snuck out,” Sloane piped up from beside me. All of us turned to look at her. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet since Briggs had called all of us downstairs. “According to my calculations, Cassie was gone for two hours, forty-three minutes, and seventeen seconds. And she was only wearing two-fifths of a dress.”
“Sloane!” I said.
“What?” she shot back. “If you wanted me to keep my mouth shut, you should have taken me with you.”
We hurt her feelings, I realized suddenly. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask her.
“Next time,” Lia told her.
“There’s not going to be a next time!” Dean exploded. He took a deep breath, calming himself. “Tell me you didn’t go to Colonial.”
“We didn’t go to Colonial,” Lia replied without missing a beat.
Dean stared at her for a few seconds, then turned to me. Clearly, I was easier prey. “You went to a college campus knowing that a murder had just been committed there, wearing two-fifths of a dress and looking for people who might be connected to the killer?”
“If it’s any consolation,” Michael told Dean, “I went along for the ride.”
Dean went very still. For a second, I thought he might actually hit Michael. “Why in the world would that be a consolation?”
“Because,” Michael replied, a glint in his eyes, “if I hadn’t been there, Cassie would have gone off alone with a college senior who has an unhealthy fascination with your dad’s case.”
“Michael!” I said.
“Cassie!” Dean turned a thunderous look on me.
I threw Lia under the bus. “At least I didn’t actually go off by myself with two strange guys in Fogle’s class.”
Dean turned back to Lia.
“I have no idea what she’s talking about.” Lia’s innocent act was as good as they came. Dean threw his hands up in the air.
“Do you all have a death wish?” he asked.
“No!” I couldn’t hold the objection back. “We all wanted to help you.”
Those were the very last words I should have said. The whole point of not telling Dean had been to keep him from feeling responsible for our actions. From the moment he’d come back from the interview with his father, he’d been pulling away, and I’d just given him the final shove.
He left. When Lia tried to follow him, he said something to her, his voice so low that I couldn’t make out the words. She blanched, the blood draining completely from her face, and stood there, frozen in place as Dean stalked off. After several seconds of shocked silence, Lia fled, too.
Michael looked at Sloane and then at me. He strolled toward the door. “I think that went well.”
Sloane and I were the only ones left in the basement. “I thought you weren’t supposed to be down here,” she said abruptly. Her terseness surprised me, until I remembered the look on her face when she’d mentioned us sneaking out without her.
“I’m not,” I said.
Sloane didn’t respond. She walked over to a bathroom set and stood just outside the shower. She stared at it, like I wasn’t even there.
“Are we okay?” I asked her.
Dean was furious. Michael had taken off for parts unknown. When the dust settled, Lia would probably blame this whole mess on me. I needed Sloane cheerful and spouting statistics. I needed not to be alone.
“You’re okay, and I’m okay. It would seem to follow logically that we’re okay.” Sloane’s gaze settled on the shower drain. It took me a moment to realize she was counting—counting the holes in the drain, counting the tiles on the shower floor.
“We didn’t mean to leave you out,” I told her.
“I’m used to it.”
With the way Sloane’s brain worked, she’d probably spent her whole life before the program on the outside looking in. I was her roommate, and I was a profiler—I should have known better.
“Dean is my friend, too.” Sloane’s voice was small, but fierce. She looked up from the floor, but still didn’t turn to face me. “I’m not good at mingling, or at parties. I say the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing. I know that—but even numbers are better than odd, and if I’d been there, Lia wouldn’t have had to go off alone.” Sloane paused and bit her lip. “She didn’t even ask.” She swallowed hard. “Before you came, Lia might have asked me.” Sloane finally turned to look at me. “There’s only a seventy-nine-point-six percent chance, but she might have.”
“Next time,” I told Sloane, “I will ask you.”
Sloane considered my words carefully, then accepted them with a nod. “Are we going to hug now?” she asked. The question was absolutely clinical. I slipped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed.
“Statistically,” Sloane told me, sounding more like her usual self, “the bathroom is the deadliest room in the house.”
I found Michael working on his car. Or, more specifically, I found him holding some kind of power sander and staring at his car with a diabolical expression.
“Judd let you play with the power tools?” I asked.
Michael turned the sander on and off experimentally, then he smiled. “Judd is a man of discerning tastes and good sense.”
“Meaning that Judd doesn’t know that you’re playing with the power tools,” I concluded.
“I’m going to have to plead the Fifth on that one,” Michael told me.
There was a beat of silence, and then I asked the question I really wanted an answer to. “Are we okay?”
“Why wouldn’t we be?” Michael turned the power sander on and attempted to attack the rust on the car’s front bumper, drowning out all conversation.
I’d thought that I could keep things from changing, but they were changing anyway. With Michael and me. With Dean and me.
“Michael,” I said, my voice soft enough that he couldn’t hear it over the sound of metal on metal.
Michael turned the sander off. Then he turned to me. I felt naked, the way I always did when I knew my face was giving me away. Why couldn’t he just be a normal boy, one who couldn’t take one look at me and know exactly which emotions were churning around in my gut?
“We’re fine, Cassie. It’s just that sometimes, when you’re in the business of being devastatingly handsome and admirably patient, you need an outlet. Or two. Or seven.”