The Naturals
Page 11

“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 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.