The Naturals
Page 33

“The UNSUB left us a message,” I said, but what I really meant was that he’d left me a message.
I scrawled the words onto the page, then handed it to Briggs.
“For a good time, call 567-3524. Guaranteed plus one. Kola and Thorn.” Briggs lifted his eyes from the page to meet mine. “You’re sure this is from the UNSUB?”
“It matches the cards,” I told him. The way my name had looked in the killer’s script was burned into my mind. “I’m sure.”
To them, the cards were evidence. But to me, they were personal. Without even thinking about it, I reached for my cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Dean asked me.
I pressed my lips into a firm line. “Calling the number.”
Nobody stopped me.
“I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service. Please try your call again later.”
I hung up, looked down at the floor, then shook my head.
“No area code,” Sloane said. “Are we thinking DC? Virginia? Maryland? That’s eleven possible area codes within a hundred-mile radius.”
“Starmans.” Agent Briggs was on his cell phone immediately. “I’m going to read you a telephone number. I need you to try it with every area code within a three-hour driving distance of this location.”
“Can I see your phone, Cassie?” Sloane’s request distracted me from Briggs’s conversation. Unsure why she wanted it, I handed her my phone. She stared at it for a minute, her lips moving rapidly, but no sounds coming out. Finally she looked up. “It’s not a phone number—or at least, not one you’re supposed to call.”
I waited for an explanation. She obliged.
“567-3524. On a telephone, five, six, three, two, and four each correspond to three letters on the keypad. Seven is a four-letter number: P, Q, R, and S. That’s two thousand nine hundred and sixteen possible seven-letter combinations for 567-3524.”
I wondered how long it would take Sloane to run through the two thousand nine hundred and sixteen possible combinations.
“Lorelai.”
“What?” The sound of my mother’s name was like a bucket of ice water thrown directly into my face.
“567-3524 is the telephone number that corresponds to the word Lorelai. It also spells lose-lag, lop-flag, and Jose-jag, but the only seven-letter, single-word possibility—”
“Is Lorelai.” I finished Sloane’s sentence and translated the message with that meaning.
For a good time, call Lorelai. Guaranteed plus one. Kola and Thorn.
“Plus one,” Dean read over my shoulder. “You think the UNSUB is trying to tell us that we’ve got another victim on our hands?”
For a good time, call Lorelai.
Now I had ironclad proof that this case had something to do with my mother’s. That was why the UNSUB had wanted me to come here. He’d left me this message—complete with a “guaranteed plus one.” Someone the UNSUB had already attacked? Someone he was planning on attacking?
I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that if I didn’t solve this, if we didn’t solve this, someone else was going to die.
Genevieve Ridgerton. Plus one. How many people are you going to kill because of me? I asked silently.
There was no answer, just the realization that everything was playing out exactly as the UNSUB had intended. Every discovery I’d made had been choreographed. I was playing a part.
Unable to stop myself, I turned my attention to the last line of the message.
Kola and Thorn.
“Symbolism?” Dean asked me, following my thoughts exactly. “Kola. Cola. Drinking. Thorn. Rose. Blood …”
“An anagram?” Sloane had that faraway look in her eye, the same one she’d gotten the day I met her, kneeling over a pile of glass. “Ankh onto lard. Hot nodal nark. Land rand hook. Oak land north.”
“North Oakland,” Dean cut in. “That’s in Arlington.”
For a good time, call Lorelai. Guaranteed plus one. North Oakland.
“We need a list of every building on North Oakland,” I said, my body buzzing with a sudden rush of adrenaline.
“What are we looking for?” Briggs asked me.
I didn’t have an answer—a warehouse, maybe, or an abandoned apartment. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t quite rid my brain of the sound of my mother’s name, and I realized suddenly that if this killer knew me half as well as he thought he did, there was another possibility.
For a good time, call Lorelai.
The dressing room. The blood. I swallowed. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think you might be looking for a theater.”
CHAPTER 32
“We’ve got a body at a small, independent theater in Arlington.” Agent Briggs’s fingers curled into his palms as he delivered the news, but he fought the urge to clench his fists. “It’s not Genevieve Ridgerton.”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset. Somewhere, fifteen-year-old Genevieve might still be alive. But now we were dealing with body number eight.
Our UNSUB’s “plus one.”
“Starmans, Vance, Brooks: I want the three of you to take the kids back to the house. I want one of you posted at the front door, one at the back door, and one with Cassie at all times.” Agent Briggs turned and started walking out of the club, a signal to the rest of us that he was so confident that we would follow his orders that he didn’t even need to stay here to see them through.
I didn’t need Lia or Michael here to tell me that his confidence was a lie.
“I’m going with you,” I said, following him outside. “The exact same logic that let you bring me here applies in Arlington. The UNSUB turned this into a little treasure hunt. He wants to see me follow it to the end.”
“I don’t care what he wants,” Briggs cut in. “I want to keep you safe.”
His tone was uncompromising and full of warning, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Why? Because I’m valuable? Because Naturals work so well as a team, and you’d hate to throw that off?”
Agent Briggs closed the space between us and brought his face down level with mine. “Do you really think that little of me?” he asked quietly. “I’m ambitious. I’m driven. I’m single-minded, but do you really think that I would knowingly put any of you in danger?”
I thought of the moment we’d met. The pen without the cap. His preference for basketball over golf.
“No,” I said. “But we both know that this case is killing you. It’s killing Locke, and now there’s a senator’s daughter involved. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have sent someone to check out that theater. We wouldn’t have discovered the body for hours, maybe days—and who knows what our UNSUB would have done to Genevieve in the meantime?
If you don’t want to use me as bait anymore, fine. But you need to take me with you. You need to take all three of us with you, because we might see something that you can’t.”
That was the whole reason Briggs had started the Naturals program. The whole reason that he’d come to twelve-year-old Dean. No matter how long they did this job, or how much training they had, these agents would never have instincts as finely honed as ours.
“Let her come.” Locke placed a hand on Briggs’s arm, and for the first time, I wondered if there was anything between the two of them other than work. “If Cassie’s old enough to play bait, she’s old enough to learn from the experience.” Locke glanced around the room—at Sloane and Dean. “They all are.”
— — —
Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to 4587 North Oakland Street. The local police were already there, but at the FBI’s insistence, they hadn’t touched a thing. Dean, Sloane, and I waited in the car with Agents Starmans and Vance until the local PD had been cleared off the scene, and then they brought us up to the third floor.
To this tiny theater’s only dressing room. I made it halfway down the hall before Agent Briggs stepped out of the room, blocking the entrance.
“You don’t need to see this, Cassie,” he said.
I could smell it—not rotten, not yet, but coppery: rust with just a hint of decay. I pushed past Briggs. He let me.