The Naturals
Page 24

I fished Before photos of the victims out of my files and gestured for the others to do the same.
You pick them for a reason, I thought, looking at the women one by one. You cut their faces, slice your knife down through skin and tissue, until you hit the bone. This is personal.
“They’re all young,” I said, studying them and searching for commonalities. “Between eighteen and thirty-five.”
“Those three have red hair.” Michael separated out the victims with no ties to the psychic community.
“The palm reader had red hair, too,” Sloane interjected.
I was staring directly at the palm reader’s Before picture. “The palm reader was a blonde.”
“No,” Sloane said slowly. “She was a natural blonde. But when they found her, she looked like this.”
Sloane slid a second, gruesome picture toward us. True to Sloane’s words, the corpse’s hair was a deep, unmistakable red.
A recent dye job, I thought. So did she dye her hair … or did you?
“Two classes of victims,” Michael said again, lining the redheads up in one column and the psychics in another, with the palm reader from Dupont Circle between the two. “You think we’re looking for two different killers?”
“No,” I said. “We’re only looking for one killer.”
My companions could make observations. Sloane could generate relevant statistics. If there’d been witness testimony, Michael could have told us who was exhibiting signs of guilt. But here, now, looking at the pictures, this was my domain. I would have had to backtrack to explain how I knew, to figure out how I knew—but I was certain. The pictures, what had been done to these women, it was the same. Not just the details, but the anger, the urges …
All of these women had been killed by the same person.
You’re escalating, I thought. Something happened, and now you need more, faster.
I stared at the photos, my mind whirring, picking up each detail of the pictures, the files, until only three things stood out.
Knife.
Redhead.
Psychic.
That was the moment that the ground disappeared from underneath me. I lost the ability to blink. My eyes got very dry. My throat was worse. My vision blurred, and all of the photographs got very fuzzy except for one.
The nineteen-year-old runaway.
The hair, the facial structure, the freckles. Through blurred vision, she looked like …
Knife.
Redhead.
Psychic.
“Cassie?” Michael took my hands in his. “You’re freezing.”
“The UNSUB is killing redheads,” I said, “and he’s killing psychics.”
“That’s not a pattern,” Sloane said peevishly. “That’s two patterns.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not. I think …”
Knife. Redhead. Psychic.
I couldn’t say the words. “My mother …” I took a short breath and brutally expelled it. “I don’t know what my mother’s body looked like,” I said finally, “but I do know that she was attacked with a knife.”
Michael and Sloane stared at me. I got up and walked over to my dresser. I opened the top drawer and found what I was looking for.
A picture.
Don’t look at it, I thought.
Directing my gaze at anything but the picture in my hand, I stooped and tapped my fingers on the palm reader’s photograph. “I don’t think she dyed her hair red,” I said. “I think the killer did.”
You kill psychics. You kill redheads. But one or the other isn’t enough anymore. It’s never enough.
Glancing up at Michael and Sloane, I laid my mother’s picture down between the two columns.
Sloane studied it. “She looks like the other victims,” she said, nodding to the column of redheads.
“No,” I said. “They look like her.”
These women had all been killed in the past nine months. My mother had been missing for five years.
“Cassie, who is that?” Michael had to have known the answer to that question, but he asked it anyway.
“That’s my mother.” I still couldn’t let myself look at the picture. “She was attacked with a knife. Her body was never found.” I paused, just for a second. “My mother made her living by convincing people she was psychic.”
Michael looked at me—and into me. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I was saying that Briggs and Locke were tracking an UNSUB who killed women with red hair and people who claimed to be psychic. It could have been a coincidence. I should have assumed it was a coincidence.
But I didn’t.
“I’m saying this killer has a very specific type: people who resemble my mother.”
YOU
Last night, you woke up in a cold sweat, and the only voice in your head was your father’s. The dream seemed real. It always seems real. You could feel the sticky sheets, smell the urine, hear the whistle of His hand tearing through the air. You woke up shaking, and then you realized—
The bed was wet.
No, you thought. No. No. No.
But there wasn’t anyone there to punish you. Your father’s dead, and you’re not.
You’re the one who does the punishing now.
But it’s never enough. The neighbor’s dog. The whores. Even the palm reader wasn’t enough. You open the bathroom cabinet. One by one, you run your hands over each of the tubes of lipstick, remember each of the girls.
It’s calming.
Soothing.
Exciting.
You stop when you get to the oldest tube. The first. You know what you want. What you need. You’ve always known.
All that’s left to do now is take it.
CHAPTER 23
When I’d found out about Dean’s dad, I’d taken off running, but now that my mom’s photograph was staring up at me from a sea of murder victims, all I could do was sit there.
“Maybe this was a bad idea.” Coming from Michael, those words sounded completely alien.
“No,” I said. “You wanted to distract me. I’m distracted.”
“The likelihood that this UNSUB is the one who attacked your mother is extremely low.” Sloane spoke hesitantly, like she thought one more word—or one more statistic—might set me off. “This killer abducts his victims and kills them at a separate location, leaving little to no physical evidence at the site of abduction. There’s some indication that at least two of the victims may have been drugged. The women have relatively few defensive wounds, indicating that they’re likely restrained before the knife comes into play.”
Sloane was talking about this killer’s MO. With her gift, that was as far as she could go. She couldn’t see underneath it, couldn’t imagine how a killer might have refined his technique over the span of five years.
“When does Agent Briggs get back?” I asked.
“He’s never going to let you work on this,” Michael told me.
“Is that your way of telling me that you don’t want him to know we hacked a stolen jump drive?” I shot back.
Michael snorted. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind taking out an ad in the paper or hiring a skywriter to announce that he and Locke were outsmarted by three bored teenagers.”
I could think of a lot of words to describe my life right now; boring wasn’t one of them.
“Briggs is nothing if not predictable, Cassie. His job is proving that we can solve cold cases, not dragging us along on active ones. He’s probably lucky his bosses didn’t fire him when they figured out what he was doing with Dean. Even if this case does have something to do with your mother’s, he’ll never let you work on it.”
I turned to Sloane for a second opinion.
“Two hours and fifty-six minutes,” she said. “Briggs was due back in town today, but he’ll need to settle things at the office and grab a change of clothes and a shower before coming in.”
That meant I had two hours and fifty-six minutes to decide how to broach this case to Agent Briggs—or better yet, Agent Locke.
— — —
The good thing about being in cahoots with an emotion reader was that Michael could tell that I wanted to be left alone, and he obliged. Better yet, he took Sloane—and the files—with him.