The Naturals
Page 19

“Cassie?” Agent Locke said, snapping me back to the present.
“Right,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes. “Right what?”
“Sorry,” I told Locke. “Could you repeat what you just said?”
She gave me a long, appraising look, then repeated herself. “I said that walking through a crime scene from a victim’s perspective can tell you a lot about the killer. Say you go into a victim’s house and you find out that she compulsively writes to-do lists, color-codes her clothes, and has a pet fish. This woman is the third victim, but she’s the only one of the three who doesn’t have defensive wounds. The killer normally keeps his victims alive for days, but this woman was killed by a strong blow to the head on the day she was taken. Her blouse was buttoned crookedly when they found her.”
Putting myself into the killer’s head, I could imagine him taking women. Playing with them. So why would he let this one off easy? Why end his game early, when she showed no signs of fighting back?
Because she showed no signs of fighting back.
I switched perspectives, imagining myself as the victim. I’m organized, orderly, and type A in the extreme. I want a pet, but can’t bring myself to get one that would actually disrupt my life, so I settle for a fish instead. Maybe I’ve read about the previous murders in the paper. Maybe I know how things end for the women who fought back.
So maybe I don’t fight back. Not physically.
The things Locke had told me about the victim said that she was a woman who liked to stay in control. She would have tried reasoning with her killer. She would have resisted his attempts to control her. She might have even tried to manipulate him. And if she’d succeeded, even for an instant …
“The UNSUB killed the others for fun,” I said, “but he killed her in a fit of rage.”
Their interaction would have been a game of control for him, too—and she was just enough of a control freak to disrupt that.
“And?” Agent Locke prompted.
I drew a blank.
“He buttoned her shirt,” Dean said. “If she’d buttoned it, it wouldn’t have been crooked.”
That observation sent my mind whirring. If he’d killed her in a rage, why would he have dressed her afterward? If he’d undressed her, I could understand it—the final humiliation, the final assertion of control.
You know her, I thought.
“The UNSUB’s first two victims were chosen randomly.” Agent Locke met my eyes, and for a second, it felt like she was reading my mind. “We assumed the third victim was as well. We were wrong.” Locke rocked back on her heels. “That’s why you need both sides of the coin. Checks and balances, victims and UNSUBs—because you’ll always be wrong about something. You’ll always miss something. What if there’s a personal connection? What if the UNSUB is older than you thought? What if he is a she? What if there are two UNSUBs working as a pair? What if the killer is just a kid himself?”
I knew suddenly that we weren’t talking about the type A woman and the man who’d killed her anymore. We were talking about the doubts plaguing Locke right now, the assumptions she’d made on her current case. We were talking about an UNSUB that Locke and Briggs hadn’t been able to catch.
“Ninety percent of all serial killers are male.” Sloane announced her presence, then walked up to join us. “Seventy-six percent are American, with a substantial percentage of serial murders concentrated in California, Texas, New York, and Illinois. The vast majority of serial killers are Caucasian, and over eighty-nine percent of victims of serial crimes are Caucasian as well.”
I could not help noticing that she spoke significantly slower when not under the influence of caffeine.
Briggs followed Sloane into the room. “Lacey.” He got Agent Locke’s attention. “I just got a call from Starmans. We have body number four.”
Thinking about those words—and what they meant—felt like eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help myself. Another body. Another person, dead.
Locke clenched her jaw. “Same profile?” she asked Briggs.
Briggs gave a brisk, slight nod. “A palm reader in Dupont Circle. And the national database search we ran came back with more than one match for our killer’s MO.”
What MO? I couldn’t shake the question, any more than I could stop wondering who this new victim was, if she’d had a family, who had told them that she was dead.
“That bad?” Locke asked, reading Briggs’s face. I wished Michael were there to help me do the same. This case was none of my business—but I wanted to know.
“We should talk elsewhere,” Briggs said.
Elsewhere. As in somewhere that Sloane, Dean, and I weren’t.
“You didn’t have trouble coming to Dean for advice when he was twelve,” I said, unable to stop myself. “Why stop now?”
Briggs’s eyes darted over to Dean, who met his gaze without blinking. Clearly, that wasn’t information Dean was supposed to share with the rest of us—but just as clearly, Dean wasn’t going to look away first.
“The flower beds could use some weeding.” Judd broke the tension, coming into the room to stand between Briggs and Dean. “If you’re done with the kids for a bit, I can put them to work. Might be good for them to get their hands dirty, get some sun.”
Judd directed those words at Agent Briggs, but Locke was the one who replied. “It’s fine, Judd.” She glanced first at Dean, then at me. “They can stay. Briggs, you were saying the database turned up more than one case with the same MO?”
For a moment, Briggs looked like he might argue with Locke about letting us stay, but she just stood there, stubbornly waiting him out.
Briggs gave in first. “Our database search returned three cases consistent with our killer’s MO in the past nine months,” he said, clipping each word. “New Orleans, Los Angeles, and American Falls.”
“Illinois?” Locke asked.
Briggs shook his head. “Idaho.”
I processed that information. If the cases Briggs was talking about were related, we were dealing with a killer who’d crossed state lines and had been killing for the better part of a year.
“My go bag is in the car,” Locke said, and suddenly, I remembered—we weren’t dealing with anything. Locke hadn’t let Briggs shuffle the three of us out of the room, but at the end of the day, this wasn’t a training exercise, and it wasn’t my case, or even ours.
It was theirs.
“We leave at sixteen hundred hours.” Briggs straightened his tie. “I left work for Lia, Michael, and Sloane. Locke, do you have anything for Cassie and Dean—besides weeding the flower beds?” he added with a glance at Judd.
“I’m not leaving them a cold case.” Locke turned to me, almost apologetically. “You have an incredible amount of raw talent, Cass, but you’ve spent too much time in the real world and not enough in ours. Not yet.”
“She can handle anything you throw at her.”
I looked at Dean, surprised. He was the last person I expected to be making this argument on my behalf.
“Thank you for that glowing endorsement, Dean,” Locke said, “but I’m not going to rush this. Not with her.” She paused. “Library,” she told me. “Third shelf from the left. There’s a series of blue binders. Prison interviews. Make your way through those, and we’ll talk about getting you started on cold cases when I get back.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Dean’s voice was curiously flat. Locke shrugged.
“You’re the one who said she was ready.”
CHAPTER 18
That night, when I snuck out to the pool for a midnight swim, Dean wasn’t the one who joined me.
“I would have pegged you for a no-nonsense one-piece,” Michael said as I came up for air after swimming laps. He dangled his legs over the side of the pool. “Something sporty.”
I was wearing a two-piece bathing suit—halfway between sporty and a bikini.
“Should I be insulted?” I asked, swimming to the opposite side of the pool and pulling myself up onto the ledge.