The Naturals
Page 13

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 protect me.
“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.
CHAPTER 13
I overslept the next morning and woke up to the feeling that I was being watched.
“Knock, knock.”
Based on the greeting—and the fact that the person speaking had opened my door, knocked on it, and said those words at the exact same time—I expected Lia. Instead, I opened my eyes to find Agent Locke standing in my doorway, a cup from Starbucks in one hand and car keys in the other.
I glanced over at Sloane’s bed, but it was empty.
“Late night?” my newly acquired mentor asked, eyebrows arched. I thought of Dean and the pool and decided that was not an area of discussion I wanted to pursue.
“Really?” Agent Locke said, eyeing the look on my face. “I was just kidding, but you’ve got I-was-up-late-with-a-boy-last-night face. Maybe we should have some girl talk.”
I didn’t know what was worse, the fact that Locke thought my late night had something to do with a stupid teenage crush or the fact that she sounded suspiciously like my female cousins.
“No girl talk,” I said. “As a general rule, ever.”
Agent Locke nodded. “So noted.” She eyed my pajamas, and then jerked her head toward the closet. “Get up. Get dressed.” She tossed me the car keys. “I’ll get Dean. You’re driving.”
— — —
I wasn’t exactly happy when Agent Locke’s directions ended up taking us right back to the mall—and specifically to Mrs. Fields cookies. After seeing the mocked-up blood spatter on the pool’s edge the night before, profiling shoppers seemed senseless. It seemed silly.
If she makes us guess what kind of cookies people are going to order …
“Three and a half years ago, Sandy Harrison was here with her husband and their three children. Her husband took their eight-year-old son to the bookstore, and she was left with the two younger girls.” Agent Locke said all of this in a perfectly normal voice. Not a single shopper turned to look at us, but her words froze me to the spot. “Sandy and the girls were in line for lemonade. Three-year-old Madelyn made a beeline for the cookies, and Sandy had to pull her back. It was Christmastime, and the mall was crammed full of people. Madelyn was desperately in need of a nap and on the verge of a meltdown. The line was moving. Sandy made it to the counter and turned to ask her older daughter, Annabelle, whether she wanted regular lemonade or pink.”
I knew what was coming.
“Annabelle was gone.”
It was easy to picture the mall at Christmastime, to see the young family splitting up, the father taking the son and the mother juggling two young girls. I saw the smaller one on the verge of a tantrum, saw the mother’s attention diverted. I imagined her looking down and realizing that even though she’d just looked away for a few seconds, even though she was always so careful …
“Mall security was called immediately. Within half an hour, they’d alerted the police. They stopped traffic into and out of the mall. The FBI was called on board and we issued an AMBER Alert. If a child isn’t recovered in the first twenty-four hours, then chances are good that he or she will never be recovered alive.”