The Naturals
Page 41

Hearing Dean’s name made my eyes dart over to his body. He still wasn’t moving—but Michael was. His eyes were open. He was bleeding. He couldn’t walk, he couldn’t even crawl, but he was pulling himself slowly across the floor—to his gun.
Locke moved to follow my gaze, but I stopped her.
“It isn’t the same,” I said, my voice decisive and calm.
“What isn’t?” Locke—no, her name wasn’t really Locke, not if she was my mother’s sister—said.
I had less than a second to think of an answer, but growing up the daughter of a woman who made her living by pretending to be psychic hadn’t just taught me the BPEs. For better or worse, I’d learned to put on a show, so I said the one thing I could think of that would keep Lacey Hobbes’s attention focused solely and 100 percent on me.
“You tried to restage my mother’s murder, but you got it wrong. What you’re doing to these women isn’t the same as what I did to my mother.”
The woman in front of me had wanted to kill my mother, but she’d also desperately wanted her acceptance. She’d wanted to be a part of a family, and she’d brought me here tonight with some twisted hope that I could be that for her. She’d enjoyed being my mentor. She wanted me to be like her.
Now my job was to convince her that I was.
“My mother didn’t protect you,” I said, mirroring the rage and desperation and hurt I saw on her face. “She didn’t protect me, either. There were men. She didn’t love them. She didn’t stay with them. She didn’t say a word when they took their frustrations out on me. She was weak. She was a whore. She hurt me.”
Lia would have known I was lying, but the woman in front of me wasn’t Lia. I smiled, letting the expression spread slowly across my face, keeping my eyes on my aunt, never looking, even for a second, at Michael.
“So I hurt her.”
My aunt stared at me, her face still twisted in disbelief, but her eyes wistful with longing.
“She was getting ready. Putting on her lipstick. Pretending she was so perfect and so special, that she wasn’t a monster. I said her name. She turned around, and I took my knife. I plunged it into her stomach. She said my name. That was it. Just ‘Cassie.’ So I stabbed her again. And again. She fought. She kicked and she screamed, but this time, I was the one with the power. I was the one doing the hurting, and she was the one getting hurt. She fell on her stomach. I flipped her over so I could see her face. I didn’t drag the knife over her cheekbones. I didn’t carve her up. I dipped my fingers into her side. I made her scream. And then I painted her lips with blood.”
Locke—no, Hobbes—Lacey was captivated. For a single second, I thought she might believe me. Her knife hand hung loosely by her side. Her other hand reached into her pocket. She pulled something out—I couldn’t see what. She fingered it for a moment—gingerly, carefully—and then she crushed her fingers into a fist.
“An excellent performance,” she said. “But I’m a profiler, too. I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, Cassie, and your mother wasn’t killed by a twelve-year-old girl. You’re not a killer. You don’t have what it takes.” She lifted the knife and started forward, the longing in her eyes turning to something else.
Bloodlust.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” I said, dropping the act as she advanced on me. “They’ll know it was you. They’ll catch you—”
“No,” Locke corrected. “I’ll catch Dean. You called me from his phone. I was worried, but when I called the house, you weren’t there. Everyone went into an uproar. They found out Dean was missing, too, and that he’d stolen Briggs’s guns. I tracked you down. I found Dean here with Genevieve. He shot Michael. He carved you up. I’m the heroic agent who stopped him, who figured out that the DC murders were the work of a copycat with access to our system, unrelated to the other murders altogether. I was too late to save you, but I did manage to kill Dean before he could kill me. Like father, like son.
“Did you really think you could win?” she asked. “Did you think you could fool me?”
Behind her, Michael had the gun in his hand. He rolled onto his side. He aimed.
“I never expected you to believe me,” I said. “Or to let me live. I just needed you to listen.”
Her eyes met mine. They widened. A gunshot went off. Then two, then three, four, five. And my aunt Lacey fell to the floor, her body splayed out next to Genevieve.
Dead.
PART FIVE: DECIDING
CHAPTER 38
Michael was in the hospital for two weeks. Dean was released after two days. But even once we were back at the house, even once the case was closed, none of us had really recovered.
Genevieve Ridgerton had survived—barely. She’d refused to see any of us—especially me.
Michael had months of physical rehabilitation ahead of him. The doctors said he might never walk without a limp again. Dean had barely said a word to me. Sloane couldn’t talk about anything other than the absolute unlikelihood of a serial killer being able to pass the psych evals and background check necessary to join the FBI, even under an assumed name. And I was dealing with the fact that Lacey Locke, née Hobbes, was my aunt.
Her story had checked out. She and my mother were born and raised outside of Baton Rouge, though both had shed their accents along the way. Their father, Clayton Hobbes, had been convicted twice of assault and battery—once against his wife, who ran off when my mother was nine and Lacey was three. The girls had attended school until the ages of ten and sixteen, but the system had lost them somewhere along the way.
They’d grown up in hell. My mother had gotten out. Lacey hadn’t.
The Bureau cross-referenced Lacey’s murders with cases that Briggs’s team had worked, and they discovered at least five more that fit the pattern. The agents would fly out on a case; Lacey would slip away, and somewhere, forty or fifty miles away, someone would disappear. They would die. And if a police report was filed, it never made its way to the FBI’s attention, because the crime didn’t appear to be serial in nature.
The woman who’d called herself Lacey Locke had paid attention to state lines. She’d never killed in the same state twice—until I joined the Naturals program. She’d escalated then, committing a series of murders here in DC as she became increasingly fixated on me.
At least fourteen people were dead, and a senator’s daughter had been kidnapped and gravely injured. The case was a nightmare for the Bureau—and a nightmare for us. The prohibition against Naturals’ participation in active cases was back and stronger than ever. Director Sterling had managed to keep our names out of the news this time. As far as he was concerned, all anyone needed to know was that the killer was dead.
My aunt was dead.
Just like my mother.
Two weeks after Michael had pulled the trigger, I could still see those last moments playing out, over and over again. I sat beside the pool, dangling my feet in the water and wondering what happened next.
Where did I go from here?
“If you’re going to leave the program, leave. But for God’s sake, Cassie, if you’re going to stay, stop moping around like your kitty cat has cancer, and do something about it.”
I turned to see Lia standing above me. She was the one person who hadn’t changed as a result of all of this. In a way, it was almost comforting to know that I could count on her to stay the same.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, pulling my feet out of the pool and standing up so that we were eye to eye.
“You can start by getting rid of that Rose Red lipstick I gave you,” Lia said. Leave it to her to know that I still had it, that I’d carried the tube she’d given me everywhere I went since discovering an ancient tube of Rose Red, worn to a nub, in my aunt’s hand the night she died. Apparently, it had been my mother’s color of choice even as a girl. Lacey had kept it all these years.
That was what she’d carried in her pocket.
That was what she’d held as I’d spun my story about my mother’s death.
The FBI had found a dozen other lipsticks in a cabinet at her house. Keepsakes that she took from each victim. A little sister, dying to be like big sis, stealing her lipstick until the end.