The Naturals
Page 14

I swallowed hard. “Did you find her?”
“We did,” Agent Locke replied. “The question is, would you have?” She let that sink in for a second, maybe two. “The first hour is the most crucial, and you’ve already lost that. The girl was missing for ninety-seven minutes before you even got the call. You need to figure out who took her and why. Most abductions are committed by family members, but her parents weren’t divorced and there were no custody issues. You need to know this family’s secrets. You need to know them inside and out—and you need to figure out how someone got that little girl out of this mall. What do you do?”
I looked around at the mall, at the people here. “Security footage?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Locke said tersely. “There’s no physical evidence, not even a scrap.”
Dean spoke up. “She didn’t cry.” Agent Locke nodded, and he continued. “Even at Christmastime, even in a crowd, I’m not going to risk forcibly grabbing a kid whose mother is three feet away.”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to get in the abductor’s head, so I did the next best thing. I got into Annabelle’s. “I see someone. Maybe I know him. Maybe he has something I want. Or maybe he dropped something and I want to give it back.” I paused. “I’m not the one crying and begging for cookies. I’m the older sister. I’m a good girl. I’m mature … so I follow him. Just to get a better look, just to hand something back to him, whatever. …” I paced out the steps. Five of them, and I was around the corner and facing a service door.
Obligingly, Dean went to open it, but it was locked.
“Maybe I work here,” he said. “Maybe I’ve just stolen the access card. Either way, I’m prepared. I’m ready. Maybe I was just waiting for a child—any child—to take the bait.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Agent Locke said. “Was this a crime of opportunity or was the girl a specific target? To find her, you’d need to know.”
I backed up and tried to play the scene all over again.
“What kind of person are you looking for?” Agent Locke asked. “Male? Female? What’s the age range? Intelligence? Education?”
I looked at the cookie store, then the service door, then at Dean. This was what he was talking about the night before. This was the job.
All business, I turned back to Agent Locke. “Exactly how old was the girl?”
CHAPTER 14
“Locke working you too hard?” Michael swooped in on me at breakfast, a habit of his, and one I’d grown to look forward to in the past week. Every day, Agent Locke showed up with a new challenge, and every day, I solved it. With Dean.
Sometimes, it felt like mornings with Michael were my only real break.
“Some of us like working hard,” I told him.
“As opposed to those of us who are the entitled product of an oh-so-privileged upbringing?” Michael asked, wiggling his eyebrows.
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
He leaned over and tweaked my ponytail. “Likely story, Colorado.”
“Do you really hate it here?” I asked. I couldn’t tell if he legitimately disliked the program or if the attitude was for show. The biggest thing I’d figured out about Michael in the past week was that there was a very good chance that he’d been wearing masks for longer than he’d been working for the FBI—pretending to be something he wasn’t was second nature.
“Let’s just say that I have the rare ability to be dissatisfied wherever I am,” Michael said, “although I’m starting to think this place has its perks.” This time, instead of messing with my ponytail, he pushed a stray piece of hair out of my face.
“Cassie.” Dean’s voice took me by surprise, and I jumped. “Locke’s here.”
“All work and no play,” Michael whispered.
I ignored him—and went to work.
— — —
“One. Two. Three.” Agent Locke set the pictures down one at a time. “Four, five, six, and seven.”
Two rows of pictures—three in one row and four in the other—stared up at me from the kitchen table. Each picture contained a body: glassy eyes, limbs splayed every which way.
“Am I interrupting?”
Locke, Dean, and I turned to see Judd in the doorway. “Yes,” Locke said with a smile. “You are. What can we do for you, Judd?”
The older man bit back a smile of his own. “You, young lady, can point me in Briggs’s direction.”
“Briggs is out doing some legwork on a case,” Locke replied. “It’s just me today.”
Judd was silent for a moment. His eyes fell on the pictures on the kitchen table, and he raised an eyebrow at Locke. “Clean up when you’re done.”
With that, Judd left us to our own devices, and I turned my attention back to the photographs. The three on the top row featured women lying lifeless on pavement. The four on the bottom were indoors: two on beds, one on the kitchen floor, one in a bathtub. Three of the victims had been stabbed. Two had been shot. One had been bludgeoned, and one had been strangled.
I forced myself to stare at the pictures. If I blinked, if I turned away, if I flinched, I might not be able to look back. Beside me, Dean was looking at the pictures, too. He scanned them, left to right, up and down, like he was taking inventory, like the bodies in these pictures hadn’t ever been people: somebody’s mother, somebody’s love.
“Seven bodies,” Agent Locke said. “Five killers. Three of these women were killed by the same man. The remaining four were the work of four different killers.” Agent Locke tapped lightly on the top of each photo, bringing my eyes from one to the next. “Different victims, different locations, different weapons. What’s significant? What’s not? As profilers, a large part of our job is identifying patterns. There are millions of unsolved cases out there. How do you know if the killer you’re tracking is responsible for any of them?”
I could never tell when Agent Locke was asking a rhetorical question and when she expected an answer. A few seconds of keeping my mouth shut told me that this was an instance of the first.
Agent Locke turned to Dean. “Care to explain to Cassie the difference between a killer’s MO and their signature?”
Dean tore his attention away from the photos and forced himself to look at me. Studying mutilated bodies was routine. Talking to me—apparently, that was hard.
“MO stands for modus operandi,” he said, and that’s as far as he got before he shifted his gaze from my face to a spot just over my left shoulder. “Mode of operation. It refers to the method used by the killer. Location, weapon, how they pick victims, how they subdue them—that’s a killer’s MO.”
He looked down at his hands, and I looked at them, too. His palms were calloused, his fingernails short and uneven. A thin white scar snaked its way from the base of his right thumb to the outside of his wrist.
“A killer’s MO can change,” Dean continued, and I tried to focus on his words instead of his scar. “An UNSUB might start off killing his victims quickly. He’s not sure he’ll be able to get away with it, but with time and experience, a lot of UNSUBs develop ways to savor the kill. Some killers escalate—taking more chances, spacing their kills closer together.”
Dean closed his eyes for a split second before opening them again. “Anything about an UNSUB’s MO is subject to change, so while it can be informative to track the MO, it’s not exactly bulletproof.” Dean fingered the closest picture again. “That’s where their signature comes in.”
Agent Locke took up the slack in the explanation. “An UNSUB’s MO includes all of the elements necessary to commit a crime and evade capture. As a killer, you have to select a victim, you have to have a means of executing the crime unnoticed, you have to have either physical prowess or some kind of weapon to kill them with. You have to dispose of the body in some way.”
Agent Locke pointed to the picture that had captured Dean’s attention.
“But after you stab someone in the back, you don’t have to roll them over and pose their arms, palms up at their sides.” She stopped pointing, but kept talking—about other killers, other things that she’d seen in her work with the FBI. “You don’t have to kiss their foreheads or cut off their lips or leave a piece of origami next to the body.”