The Naturals
Page 12

“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 they as 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. They keeps you on the outside. So do he and 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.