The Naturals

CHAPTER 7

I stepped off the jet and blinked, my eyes adjusting to the sun. A woman with bright red hair strode toward the plane. She was wearing a gray suit and black sunglasses, and she walked like she had someplace to be.

“I heard a rumor we were getting in around the same time,” she called out to Briggs. “Thought I’d come to greet you in person.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned her attention to me. “I’m Special Agent Lacey Locke. Briggs is my partner, and you’re Cassandra Hobbes.”

She timed this speech to end just as she closed the space between us. She held out a hand, and I was struck by the fact that she looked somehow impish despite the sunglasses and the suit.

I took her hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “Most people just call me Cassie.”

“Cassie it is, then,” she replied. “Briggs tells me you’re one of mine.”

One of hers?

Michael filled in the blank. “A profiler.”

“Don’t sound so enthusiastic about the science of profiling, Michael,” Locke said lightly. “Cassie might mistake you for a seventeen-year-old boy without a strong sense of derision for the rest of the world.”

Michael held a hand to his chest. “Your sarcasm wounds me, Agent Locke.”

She snorted.

“You’re home early,” Briggs cut in, aiming the comment at Agent Locke. “Nothing in Boise?”

Locke gave a brief jerk of her head. “Dead end.”

An unspoken communication passed between the two of them, and then Briggs turned to me. “As Michael so obligingly pointed out, Agent Locke is a profiler. She’ll be in charge of your training.”

“Lucky you,” Locke said with a grin.

“Are you …” I wasn’t sure how to ask.

“A Natural?” she said. “No. There’s only one thing I’ve ever been a natural at, and sadly, I can’t tell you about that until you’re twenty-one. But I did go through the FBI Academy and took every class they offered in behavioral analysis. I’ve been a part of the behavioral science unit for almost three years.”

I wondered if it would be rude to ask how old she was now.

“Twenty-nine,” she said. “And don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”

“Used to what?”

She grinned again. “People answering questions before you ask them.”

The program’s base of operations was a looming Victorian-style house in the tiny town of Quantico, Virginia—close enough to FBI headquarters on Marine Corps Base Quantico to be handy, but not so close that people were going to start asking questions.

“Living room. Media room. Library. Study.” The person that Briggs had found to look after the house—and us—was a retired marine by the name of Judd Hawkins. He was sixty-something, eagle-eyed, and a man of few words. “Kitchen’s through there. Your room is on the second floor.” Judd paused for a fraction of a second to look at me. “You’ll be sharing with one of the other girls. I expect that’s not a problem?”

I shook my head, and he strode back down the hallway and toward a staircase. “Look alive, Ms. Hobbes,” he called back. I hurried to catch up and thought I heard a smile in his voice, though there was barely a hint of it on his face.

I fought a smile of my own. Judd Hawkins might not have been gruff and no-nonsense, but my gut was telling me he had more soft spots than most people would have thought.

He caught me studying him and gave a brisk, businesslike nod. Like Briggs, he didn’t seem to mind the idea that I might be getting a general picture of his personality from the little details.

Unlike a certain other individual I could think of, who’d done his best to thwart me at every turn.

Refusing to glance back at Michael, I noticed a series of framed pictures lining the staircase. A dozen or so men. One woman. Most were in their late twenties or early thirties, but one or two were older. Some were smiling; some were not. A paunchy man with dark eyebrows and thinning hair hung between a handsome heartbreaker and a black-and-white photo from the turn of the century. At the top of the stairs, an elderly couple smiled out from a slightly larger portrait.

I glanced at Judd, wondering if these were his relatives, or if they belonged to someone else in this house.

“They’re killers.” An Asian girl about my age stepped around the corner. She moved like a cat—and smiled like she’d just eaten a canary.

“The people in the pictures,” she clarified. “They’re serial killers.” She twirled her shiny black ponytail around her index finger, clearly enjoying my discomfort. “It’s the program’s cheery way of reminding Dean why he’s here.”

Dean? Who was Dean?

“Personally, I think it’s a little macabre, but then again, I’m not a profiler.” The girl flicked her ponytail. “You are, though. Aren’t you?”

She took a step forward, and my eyes were drawn to her footwear: black leather boots with heels high enough to make my feet shudder in spasms of sympathy. She was wearing skintight black pants and a high-necked sleeveless sweater, electric blue to match the streaks in her black hair.

As I took in her clothing, the girl closed the space between us until she was standing so close to me that I thought she might reach out and start twirling my hair instead of her own.

“Lia,” Judd said, absolutely unfazed, “this is Cassie. If you’re finished trying to scare her, I’m betting she’d really like to set that bag down.”

Lia shrugged. “Mi casa es su casa. Your room is through there.”

“Your” room, I thought. Not “our” room.

“Cassie’s really broken up about not rooming with you, Lia,” Michael said, interpreting my facial expression with a wink. Lia pivoted to face him, and her lips twisted upward in a slow, sizzling grin.

“Miss me?” she asked.

“Like a thorn in my paw,” Michael replied.

Coming up the stairs behind us, Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “Lia,” he said. “Nice to see you.”

Lia gave him a look. “Now, Agent Briggs,” she replied, “that’s simply not true.”

Agent Locke rolled her eyes. “Lia’s specialty is deception,” she told me. “She has an uncanny knack for being able to tell when people are lying. And,” Agent Locke added, meeting Lia’s eyes, “she’s a very good liar.”

Lia didn’t seem to take offense at the agent’s words. “I’m also bilingual,” she said. “And very, very flexible.”

The second very was aimed directly at Michael.

“So,” I said, my duffel bag digging into my shoulder as I tried to process the fact that Lia was a Natural liar, “the pictures on the wall aren’t serial killers?”

That question was answered with silence. Silence from Michael. Silence from Judd. Silence from Agent Locke, who looked a bit abashed.

Agent Briggs cleared his throat. “No,” he said finally. “That’s true.”

My eyes were drawn to the portrait of the elderly couple.

Smiling serial killers, five-inch heels, and a girl with a gift for lying? This was going to be interesting.

CHAPTER 8

Briggs and Locke left shortly after Judd showed me to my room. They promised to return the next day for training, but for now, all that was expected of me was to settle in. My roommate—whoever she was—had yet to make an appearance, so for the moment, I had the room to myself.

Twin beds sat at opposite ends of the room. A bay window overlooked the backyard. Tentatively, I opened what I assumed to be the closet door. The closet was exactly half full: half of each rack, half of the floor space, half of the shelves. My roommate favored patterns to solids, bright colors to pastels, and had a healthy amount of black and white in her wardrobe, but no gray.

All of her shoes were flats.

“Dial it back a notch, Cassie,” I told myself. I’d have months to analyze my roommate’s personality—without creepily stalking her half of the closet. Quickly and efficiently, I emptied my own bag. I’d lived in Colorado for five years, but before that, the longest I’d ever lived in one place was four months. My mother was always off to the next show, the next town, the next mark, and I was an expert unpacker.

There was still space on my side of the closet when I was done.

“Knock-knock.” Lia’s voice was high and clear. She didn’t wait for permission before coming into the room, and I realized with a start that she’d changed clothes.

The boots had been replaced with ballet flats, and she’d traded the tight black pants for a lacy, flowing skirt. Her hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck, and even her eyes looked softer.

It was like she’d given herself a makeover—or switched personalities altogether.

First Michael, now Lia. I wondered if he’d picked up the trick of changing clothing styles from her, or if she’d gotten it from him. Given that Lia was the one who specialized in deception, my money was on the former.

“Are you finished unpacking yet?” she asked.

“I’m still working on some stuff,” I said, busying myself with the dresser.

“No. You’re not.”

I’d never considered myself a liar until that moment, when Lia’s ability took the option away.

“Look, those serial killer pictures give new meaning to the word creepy.” Lia leaned back against the doorjamb. “I was here for six weeks before someone told me that Grandma and Gramps were actually Faye and Ray Copeland, who were convicted of killing five people and made a cozy little quilt out of their clothes. Trust me, it’s better that you know now.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“Anyway,” Lia said, dragging out the word, “Judd gives crappy tours. He’s a surprisingly decent cook, and he’s got eyes in the back of his head, but he’s not exactly what one would call chatty, and unless we’re about to burn the place down, he’s pretty hands-off. I thought you might want a real tour. Or that you might have some questions.”

I wasn’t sure that a person renowned for her skill at lying was the ideal information source or tour guide, but I wasn’t about to turn down a peace offering, and I did have one question.

“Where’s my roommate?”

“Where she always is,” Lia replied innocently. “The basement.”

The basement ran the length of the house and stretched out underneath the front and back yards. From the bottom of the stairs, all I could see was two enormous white walls that ran the width of the space, but didn’t quite reach the fourteen-foot ceilings. There was a small space between where one wall ended and the next began.

An entrance.

I walked toward it. Something exploded, and I jumped backward, my hands flying up in front of my face.

Glass, I thought belatedly. Shattering glass.

A second later, I realized that I couldn’t see the source of the sound. I lowered my hands and looked back at Lia, who hadn’t so much as flinched.

“Is that normal?” I asked her.

She gave a graceful little shrug. “Define normal.”

A girl poked her head out from behind one of the partitions. “Conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern.”

The first thing I noticed about the girl—other than the chipper tone in her voice and the fact that she had literally just defined normal—was her hair. It was blond, glow-in-the-dark pale, and stick straight. The ends were uneven and her blunt-cut bangs were too short, like she’d chopped them off herself.

“Aren’t you supposed to be wearing safety goggles?” Lia asked.

“It is possible that my goggles have been compromised.” With that, the girl disappeared back behind the partition.

Based on the self-satisfied curve of Lia’s lips, I was going to go out on a limb and guess that I had just met my roommate.

“Sloane, Cassie,” Lia said with a grand gesture. “Cassie, Sloane.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. I took a few steps forward, until I was standing in the space between the partitions and could see what they had hidden before. A narrow hallway stretched out in front of me. It was lined with rooms on either side. Each room had only three walls.

Immediately to my left, I found Sloane standing in the middle of what appeared to be a bathroom. There was a door on the far side, and I realized that the space looked exactly the way a bathroom would if someone had removed the back wall.

“Like a movie set,” I murmured. There was glass all over the floor, and at least a hundred Post-it notes stuck to the edge of the sink and scattered in a spiral pattern on the tiles. I glanced back down the hallway at the other rooms. The other sets.

“Potential crime scene,” Lia corrected. “For simulations. On this side”—Lia posed like a game show assistant—“we have interior locations: bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, foyers. A couple of miniature—and I do mean miniature—restaurant sets, and, just because we really are that cliché, a mock post office, for all your going postal needs.”

Lia pivoted and gestured toward the other side of the hall. “And over here,” she said, “we have a few outdoor scenes: park, parking lot, make-out point.”

I turned back to the bathroom set and Sloane. She knelt gingerly next to the shards of glass on the floor and stared at them. Her face was calm. Her fingers hovered just over the carnage.

After a long moment, she blinked and stood up. “Your hair is red.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

“People with red hair require roughly twenty percent more anesthesia to undergo surgery, and they’re significantly more likely to wake up on the table.”

I got the distinct feeling that this was Sloane’s version of “hello,” and suddenly, everything clicked into place: the prevalence of patterns in her wardrobe, the precision with which she’d divided our closet in two. “Agent Briggs said that someone here was a Natural with numbers and probabilities.”

“Sloane’s absolutely dangerous with anything numerical,” Lia said. She gestured lazily toward the glass shards. “Sometimes literally.”

“It was just a test,” Sloane said defensively. “The algorithm that predicts the scatter pattern of the shards is really quite—”

“Fascinating?” a voice behind us suggested. Lia dragged one long, manicured nail over her bottom lip. I turned around.

Michael smiled. “You should see her when she’s had caffeine,” he told me, nodding at Sloane.

“Michael,” Sloane said darkly, “hides the coffee.”

“Trust me,” Michael drawled, “it’s a kindness to us all.” He paused and then gave me a long, slow smile. “These two have you nice and traumatized yet, Colorado?”

I processed the fact that he’d just given me a nickname, and Lia stepped in between us. “Traumatized?” she repeated. “It’s almost like you don’t trust me, Michael.” Her eyes widened and her lower lip poked out.

Michael snorted. “Wonder why.”

An emotion reader, a deception specialist, a statistician who could not be allowed to ingest coffee, and me.

“Is this it?” I asked. “Just the four of us?”

Hadn’t Lia mentioned someone else?

Michael’s eyes darkened. Lia’s mouth curved slowly into a smile.

“Well,” Sloane said brightly, completely unaware of the changing undercurrent in the room. “There’s also Dean.”

CHAPTER 9

We found Dean in the garage. He was lying on a black bench, facing away from the door. Dark blond hair was plastered to his face with sweat, his jaw clenched as he executed a series of slow and methodical bench presses. Each time his elbows locked, I wondered if he’d stop. Each time, he kept going.

He was muscular but lean, and my first impression was that this wasn’t a workout. This was punishment.

Michael rolled his eyes and then strolled up behind Dean. “Ninety-eight,” he said, his tone full of mock pain. “Ninety-nine. One hundred!”

Dean closed his eyes for a brief moment, then pushed the barbell up again. His arms shook slightly as he went to set the weight down. Michael clearly had no intention of spotting him. To my surprise, Sloane pushed past Michael, wrapped dainty little hands around the barbell, and rocked back on her heels, angling it into place.

Dean wiped his hands on his jeans, grabbed a nearby towel, and sat up. “Thanks,” he told Sloane.

“Torque,” she said, instead of you’re welcome. “The role of the lever was played by my arms.”

Dean stood up, his lips angling slightly upward, but the moment he saw me, the fledgling smile froze on his face.

“Dean Redding,” Michael said, enjoying Dean’s sudden obvious discomfort a little too much, “meet Cassie Hobbes.”

“Nice to meet you,” Dean said, pulling dark eyes from mine and directing those words at the floor.

Lia, who’d been remarkably quiet up to this point, raised an eyebrow at Dean. “Well,” she said, “that’s not strictly—”

“Lia.” Dean’s voice wasn’t loud or hard, but the second he said her name, Lia stopped.

“That’s not strictly what?” I asked, even though I knew that the next word out of her mouth would have been true.

“Never mind,” Lia said in a singsong tone.

I looked back at Dean: Light hair. Dark eyes. Open posture. Clenched fists.

I cataloged the way he was standing, the lines of his face, the dingy white T-shirt and ratty blue jeans. His hair needed to be cut, and he stood with his back to the wall, his face cast in shadows, like that was where he belonged.

Why wasn’t it nice to meet me?

“Dean,” Michael said, with the air of someone imparting a fascinating bit of useless trivia, “is a Natural profiler. Just like you.”

Those last three words seemed more aimed at Dean than me, and as they hit their target, Dean lifted his eyes to meet Michael’s. There was no emotion on Dean’s face, but there was something in his eyes, and I found myself expecting Michael to look away first.

“Dean,” Michael continued, staring at Dean and talking to me, “knows more about the way that killers think than just about anyone.”

Dean threw down the towel in his hand. Muscles taut, he brushed by Michael and Sloane, by Lia, by me. A few seconds later, he was gone.

“Dean has a temper,” Michael told me, leaning back against the workout bench.

Lia snorted. “Michael, if Dean had a temper, you’d be dead.”

“Dean’s not going to kill anyone,” Sloane said, her voice almost comically serious.

Michael dug a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it in the air. “Wanna bet?”

That night, I didn’t dream. I also didn’t sleep much, courtesy of the fact that Sloane, who had a dainty little build, also apparently had the nasal passages of an overweight trucker. Instead, as I tried to block out the sound of her snoring, I closed my eyes and pictured each of the Naturals who lived in this house. Michael. Dean. Lia. Sloane. None of them was what I’d expected. None of them fit a familiar mold. As I drifted into that half-awake, half-asleep state that was as close as I was going to get to a real night’s rest, I played a game I’d invented when I was little. I mentally peeled off my own skin and put on someone else’s.

Lia’s.

I started with the physical things. She was taller than I was, and lithe. Her hair was longer, and instead of sleeping with it tucked under her head, she would spread it out on the pillow. Her fingernails were painted, and when she had energy to burn, she rubbed the thumbnail on her left hand with the thumb on her right. In my mind, I turned my head—Lia’s head—to the side, peering into her closet.

If Michael had leveraged a car out of Briggs, Lia would have gone for clothes. I could almost see the closet, full to overflowing. As the room came more into focus, I could feel my subconscious taking over, feel myself losing the real world in favor of this imaginary one I’d built in my head.

I let go of my bed and my closet, my physical sensations. I let myself be Lia, and a rush of information came at me from all sides. Like a writer getting lost in a book, I let the simulation run its course. Where Sloane and I were neat, the Lia in my head was messy, her room a multisensory archive of the past few months. There was no rhyme or reason to the organization of the closet. Dresses hung half on and half off the hangers. There were clothes—dirty, clean, new, and everything in between—on the floor.

I pictured getting out of bed. In my own body, I had a tendency to sit up first, but Lia wouldn’t take the time. She’d roll out of bed, ready for action. Ready to attack. Long hair fell on my shoulders, and I twirled a strand of it around my index finger: another of Lia’s nervous habits, designed to look like it wasn’t nervous at all.

I glanced over at the door to the room. Closed, of course. Probably also locked. Who was I keeping out? What was I afraid of?

Afraid? I scoffed silently, my mind-voice sounding more and more like Lia’s. I’m not afraid of anything.

I walked over to the closet—light on my toes, hips swaying gently—and pulled out the first shirt I touched. The selection was completely random, but what came next wasn’t. I built the outfit up around me. I dressed myself up like a doll, and with each passing moment, I put that much more space between the surface and everything underneath.

I did my hair, my eyes, my nails.

But there was still that little voice in my head. The same one that had insisted I wasn’t scared. Only this time, the one thing it kept saying, over and over again, was that I was here—behind this locked door with who knows what waiting outside—because I had nowhere else to go.

YOU

You’re home now. You’re alone. Everything is in its place. Everything but this.

You know that there are other people like you. Other monsters. Other gods. You know you’re not the only one who takes keepsakes, things to remember the girls by, once their screams and their bodies and their begging-pleading-lying lips are gone.

You walk slowly to the cabinet. You open it. Carefully, gingerly, you place this whore’s lipstick next to all the rest. The authorities won’t notice it’s missing when they search her purse.

They never do.

A lazy smile on your face, you run your fingertips across each one. Remembering. Savoring. Planning.

Because it’s never enough. It’s never over.

Especially now.

CHAPTER 10

The next day, I could barely look at Lia. The game I’d played the night before was one my younger self had played with strangers: children I’d met in diners, people who had come to my mother’s shows. They were never real to me—and neither were the things I’d imagined once I’d mentally tried on their shoes. But now I had to wonder how much of it was really imagination and how much of it was my subconscious working its way through Lia’s BPE.

Had I imagined that Lia was messy—or had I profiled it?

“There’s cereal in the cabinet and eggs in the fridge,” Judd greeted me from behind a newspaper as I wandered into the kitchen, still debating that question. “I’m making a grocery run at oh-nine-hundred. If you’ve got requests, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

“No requests,” I said.

“Low maintenance,” Judd commented.

I shrugged. “I try.”

Judd folded his paper, carried an empty mug to the sink, and rinsed it out. A minute later—at nine o’clock on the dot—I was alone in the kitchen. As I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I went back to trying to work my way through the logic of my Lia simulation, to figure out how I knew what I knew—and if I knew it at all.

“I have no idea what those Cheerios did to you, but I’m sure they’re very, very sorry,” Michael said as he slid into the seat next to me at the kitchen table.

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve been stirring them into submission for a good five minutes,” Michael told me. “It’s spoon violence, is what it is.”

I picked up a Cheerio and flicked it at him. Michael caught it and popped it into his mouth.

“So which one of us was it this time?” Michael asked.

Suddenly, I became very interested in my Cheerios.

“Come on, Colorado. When your brain starts profiling, your face starts broadcasting a mix of concentration, curiosity, and calm.” Michael paused. I took a big bite of cereal. “The muscles in your neck relax,” he continued. “Your lips turn ever so subtly down. Your head tilts slightly to one side, and you get crow’s-feet at the corners of your eyes.”

I set my spoon calmly in my bowl. “I do not get crow’s-feet.”

Michael helped himself to my spoon—and a bite of cereal. “Anyone ever tell you you’re cute when you’re annoyed?”

“I hope I’m not interrupting.” Lia came in, stole the cereal box, and started eating right out of the carton. “Actually, that’s not true. Whatever’s going on here, I am absolutely delighted to interrupt it.”

I tried to keep myself from studying Lia—and I definitely tried to keep from wrinkling the corners of my eyes—but it was hard to ignore the fact that she was wearing barely-there silk pajamas. And pearls.

“So, Cassie, are you ready for your first day of How to Crawl into the Skulls of Bad Guys 101?” Lia set the cereal box down and headed for the fridge. Her head disappeared into the refrigerator as she started digging around. Her pajama bottoms left very little to the imagination.

“I’m ready,” I said, averting my eyes.

“Cassie was born ready,” Michael declared. Over in the refrigerator, Lia stopped rummaging for a moment. “Besides,” Michael continued, “whatever Agent Locke has her doing, it has to be better than watching foreign-language films. Without the subtitles.”

I bit back a smile at the aggrieved tone in Michael’s voice. “Is that what they had you do on your first day?”

“That,” Michael said, “is what they had me do for my first month. ‘Emotions aren’t about what people say,’” he mimicked, “‘they’re about posture, facial expressions, and culture-specific instantiations of universal phenomenological experiences.’”

Lia exited the refrigerator with empty hands, shut the door, and opened the freezer. “Poor baby,” she told Michael. “I’ve been here for almost three years, and the only thing they’ve taught me is that psychopaths are really good liars, and FBI agents are really bad ones.”

“Have you met many?” I asked.

“FBI agents?” Lia feigned ignorance as she retrieved a carton of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream from the freezer.

I gave her a look. “Psychopaths.”

She grabbed a spoon out of the drawer and brandished it like a magic wand. “The FBI hides us away in a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood in a nice little town. Do you really think Briggs is going to let me tag along on prison interviews? Or go into the field, where I might actually get to do something?”

Michael put Lia’s words in slightly more diplomatic terms. “The Bureau has tapes,” he said. “And reels and transcripts. Cold cases, mostly. Things that other people haven’t ever been able to solve. And for every cold case they bring us, there are dozens of cases that they’ve already solved. Tests to see if we really are as good as Agent Briggs says we are.”

“Even when you give them the answer they’re looking for,” Lia continued, picking up right where Michael left off, “even when the Powers That Be know that you’re right, they want to know why.”

Why what? This time, I didn’t ask the question out loud—but Michael answered it anyway.

“Why we can do it and they can’t.” He reached over and snagged another bite of my Cheerios. “They don’t just want to train us. They don’t just want to use us. They want to be us.”

“Absolutely,” a new voice concurred. “Deep down, in my heart of hearts, all I really want is to be Michael Townsend.”

Agent Locke strolled into the kitchen and went straight for the fridge. Clearly she was at home here, even if she lived somewhere else.

“Briggs left files for you two”—Agent Locke gestured to Michael and Lia—“in his study. He’s going to run a new simulation with Sloane today, and I’m going to start catching Cassie up to speed.” She heaved a larger-than-life sigh. “It’s not as glamorous as being a jaded seventeen-year-old boy with parental issues and a hair-gel dependency, but c’est la vie.”

Michael reached up to scratch the side of his face—and oh-so-subtly flipped Agent Locke off in the process.

Lia twirled her spoon around her finger, a tiny, ice-cream-laden baton. “Lacey Locke, everybody,” she said, like the FBI agent was a comedian and Lia the announcer.

Locke grinned. “Doesn’t Judd have a rule about you wearing lingerie in the kitchen?” she asked, eyeing Lia’s pajamas. Lia shrugged, but something about Agent Locke’s presence seemed to subdue her. Within minutes, my fellow Naturals had scattered. Neither Lia nor Michael seemed anxious to spend time in the company of an FBI profiler.

“I hope they’re not making life too difficult on you,” Locke said.

“No.” In fact, for a moment there, eating with the two of them, talking to them, had felt natural.

No pun intended.

“Neither Michael nor Lia was given much of a choice about joining the program.” Locke waited for that to sink in. “That tends to put a chip on a person’s shoulder.”

“They’re not the type to respond well to being strong-armed,” I said slowly.

“No,” Agent Locke replied. “They aren’t. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but that wasn’t one of mine. Briggs lacks a certain amount of … finesse. Guy never met a square peg he didn’t want to pound into a round hole.”

That description fit with my impression of Agent Briggs exactly. Agent Locke was speaking my language, but I didn’t have time to relish that fact.

Because Dean was standing in the doorway.

Agent Locke saw him and nodded. “Right on time.”

“On time for what?” I asked.

Dean answered on Agent Locke’s behalf, but unlike the red-haired agent, he wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t friendly. He didn’t want to be there—and unless I was mistaken, he didn’t like me.

“For your first lesson.”

CHAPTER 11

If Dean was unhappy at the prospect of spending the morning with me, he was even less pleased when Agent Locke’s plan for my first day required us to take a little field trip. Clearly, he’d expected a pen-and-paper lesson, or possibly a simulation in the basement, but Agent Locke just tossed him the keys to her SUV.

“You’re driving.”

Most FBI agents wouldn’t have insisted a seventeen-year-old boy drive—but it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Lacey Locke wasn’t most agents. She took the front passenger seat, and I slid into the back.

“Where to?” Dean asked Agent Locke as he backed out of the driveway. She gave him an address, and he murmured a reply. I tried to diagnose the slight twinge of an accent I heard in his voice.

Southern.

He didn’t say a single word for the rest of the drive. I tried to get a read on him. He didn’t seem shy. Maybe he was the type of person who saved his words for those rare occasions when he really had something to say. Maybe he kept to himself and used silence as a way of keeping other people at arm’s length.

Or maybe he just had zero desire to converse with Locke and me.

He’s a Natural profiler, I thought, wondering if his brain was churning, too, assimilating details about me the way I was assessing him.

He was a careful driver.

His shoulders tensed when someone cut him off.

And when we arrived at our destination, he got out of the car, shut the door, and held the keys out to Agent Locke—all without ever looking at me. I was used to fading into the background, but somehow, coming from Dean, it felt like an insult. Like I wasn’t worth profiling, like he didn’t have the slightest interest in figuring me out.

“Welcome to Westside Mall,” Agent Locke said, snapping me out of it. “I’m sure this isn’t what you were expecting for your first day, Cassie, but I wanted to get a sense of what you can do with normal people before we dive into the abnormal end of the spectrum.”

Dean flicked his eyes sideways.

Locke called him on it. “Something you’d like to add?”

Dean stuffed his hands into his pockets. “It’s just been a long time,” he said, “since someone asked me to think about normal.”

Five minutes later, we had a table in the food court.

“The woman in the purple fleece,” Agent Locke said. “What can you tell me about her, Cassie?”

I sat and followed her gaze to the woman in question. Midtwenties. She was wearing running shoes and jeans in addition to the fleece. Either she was sporty and she’d thrown on the jeans because she was coming to the mall, or she wasn’t, but wanted people to think that she was. I said as much out loud.

“What else can you tell me?” Agent Locke asked.

My gut told me that Agent Locke didn’t want details. She wanted the big picture.

Behavior. Personality. Environment.

I tried to integrate Purple Fleece into her surroundings. She’d chosen a seat near the edge of the food court, even though there were plenty of tables available closer to the restaurant where she’d purchased her meal. There were several people sitting near her, but she stayed focused on her food.

“She’s a student,” I said finally. “Graduate school of some kind—my money’s on med school. She’s not married, but has a serious boyfriend. She comes from an upper-middle-class family, heavy emphasis on the upper. She’s a runner, but not a health nut. She most likely gets up early, likes doing things that other people find painful, and if she has any siblings, they’re either younger than she is or they’re all boys.”

I waited for Agent Locke to reply. She didn’t. Neither did Dean.

To fill the silence, I added one last observation. “She gets cold really easily.”

There was no other excuse for wearing a fleece—even indoors—in July.

“What makes you think she’s a student?” Agent Locke asked finally.

I met Dean’s eyes and knew suddenly that he saw it, too. “It’s ten thirty in the morning,” I said, “and she’s not at work. It’s too early for a lunch break, and she’s not dressed like someone who’s on the job.”

Agent Locke raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she works from home. Or maybe she’s between jobs. Maybe she teaches elementary school and she’s on summer vacation.”

Those objections were perfectly valid, but somehow—to me—they still felt wrong. It was hard to explain; I thought of Michael warning me that the FBI would never stop trying to figure out how I did what I did.

I thought about Agent Locke saying she’d learned profiling the hard way—one class at a time.

“She’s not even looking at them.”

To my shock, Dean was the one who came to my rescue.

“Pardon?” Agent Locke turned her attention to him.

“The other people here in her age range.” Dean nodded toward a couple of young moms with small children, plus several department store employees lined up for coffee. “She’s not looking at them. They aren’t her peers. She doesn’t even realize they’re the same age. She pays more attention to college students than to other adults, but she clearly doesn’t consider herself one of them, either.”

And that was the feeling I hadn’t been able to put into words. It was like Dean could see into my head, make sense of the information bouncing around my brain—but, of course, that wasn’t it. He hadn’t needed to get into my head, because he’d been thinking the exact same thing.

After a long moment of silence, Dean flicked his eyes over to me. “Why med school?”

I glanced back at the girl. “Because she’s a runner.”

Dean smiled, ever so slightly. “You mean she’s a masochist.”

Across the room, the girl we’d been talking about rose, and I was able to make out the bags in her hand, the stores she’d shopped at. It fit. Everything fit.

I wasn’t wrong.

“What makes you think she has a boyfriend?” Dean asked, and under his quiet drawl I could hear curiosity—and maybe even admiration.

I shrugged in response to his question—mainly because I didn’t want to tell him that the reason I’d been sure this girl wasn’t single was the fact that the entire time we’d been there, she hadn’t so much as glanced at Dean.

From a distance, he would have looked older.

Even in jeans and a faded black T-shirt, you could see the muscles tensing against the fabric of his sleeves. And the muscles not covered by his sleeves.

His hair, his eyes, the way he stood, and the way he moved—if she’d been single, she would have looked.

“New game,” Agent Locke said. “I point to the car, you tell me about the person who owns it.”

We’d been at the mall for three hours. I’d thought coming out to the parking lot had signaled the end of today’s training, but apparently I was wrong.

“That one, Cassie. Go.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I was used to starting with people: their posture, the way they talked, their clothes, their occupations, their gender, the way they arranged a napkin on their lap—that was my language. Starting with a car was like flying blind.

“In our line of work,” Agent Locke told me as I stared at a white Acura, debating whether it belonged to a shopper or someone who worked at the mall, “you don’t get to meet the suspect before you profile the crime. You go to the scene and you rebuild what happened. You take physical evidence, you turn it into behavior, and then you try to narrow down the range of suspects. You don’t know if you’re looking for a man or a woman, a teenager or an old man. You know how they killed, but you don’t know why. You know how they left the body, but you have to figure out how they found the victim.” She paused. “So, Cassie. Who owns this car?”

The make and model weren’t telling me much. This car could have belonged to either a man or a woman, and it was parked in front of the food court, which meant that I had no idea what the owner’s destination inside the mall was. The parking space wasn’t a good one, but it wasn’t bad. The parking job left a little to be desired.

“They were in a hurry,” I said. “The parking job is crooked, and they didn’t bother cruising for a better space.” That also told me that the driver didn’t have the kind of ego that would push a person to hunt for a prime spot, as if getting a great parking place at the mall was an indicator of personal worth. “No car seat, so no young children. No bumper stickers, relatively recently washed. They’re not here for food—no reason to hurry for that—but they parked at the food court, so either they don’t know where they’re going once they get inside the mall or their store of choice is close by.”

I paused, waiting for Dean to pick up where I had left off, but he didn’t. Instead, Agent Locke gave me a single piece of advice.

“Don’t say they.”

“I didn’t mean they as in plural,” I said hastily. “I just haven’t decided yet if it’s a man or a woman.”

Dean glanced at the mall entrance and then back at me. “That’s not what she means. They keeps you on the outside. So do he and she.”

“So what word am I supposed to use?”

“Officially,” Agent Locke said, “we use the term Unknown Subject—or UNSUB.”

“And unofficially?” I asked.

Dean shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “If you want to climb inside someone’s head,” he said roughly, “you use the word I.”

The night before, I’d imagined myself in Lia’s body, imagined what it was like to be her. I could imagine driving this car, parking it like this, climbing out—but this wasn’t about cars. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be profiling shoppers.

I’d be profiling killers.

“What if I don’t want to be them?” I asked. I knew that if I closed my eyes, if I so much as blinked, I would be right back in my mother’s dressing room. I’d be able to see the blood. I’d be able to smell it. “What if I can’t?”

“Then you’re lucky.” Dean’s voice was quiet, but his eyes were hard. “And you’d be better off at home.”

My stomach twisted. He didn’t think I belonged here. Suddenly, it was all too easy to remember that when we’d met the day before and he’d said “nice to meet you,” it had been a lie.

Agent Locke set a hand on my shoulder. “If you want to get close to an UNSUB, but you don’t want to put yourself in their shoes, there’s another word you can use.”

I turned my back on Dean and focused my full attention on Agent Locke. “And what word is that?” I asked.

Locke met my gaze. “You.”

CHAPTER 12

That night, I dreamed that I was walking through a narrow hallway. The floor was tiled. The walls were white. The only sound in the entire room was my sneaker-clad feet scuffing against the freshly mopped floor.

This isn’t right. Something about this isn’t right.

Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, and on the ground, my shadow flickered, too. At the end of the hallway, there was a metal door, painted to match the walls. It was slightly ajar, and I wondered if I’d left it that way or if my mother had cracked the door open to keep an eye out for me.

Don’t go in there. Stop. You have to stop.

I smiled and kept right on walking. One step, two steps, three steps, four. On some level, I knew that this was a dream, knew what I would find when I opened that door—but I couldn’t stop. My body felt numb from the waist down. My smile hurt.

I laid my hand flat against the metal door and pushed.

“Cassie?”

My mother was standing there, dressed in blue. A breath caught in my throat—not because she was beautiful, though she was, and not because she was on the verge of scolding me for taking so long to report back on the crowd.

A vise closed in around my lungs, because this was wrong. This hadn’t happened, and I wished to God it had.

Please don’t be a dream. Just this once, let it be real. Don’t let it—

“Cassie?” My mom stumbled backward. She fell. Blood turned blue silk red. It splattered against the walls. There was so much of it—too much.

She’s crawling in it, slipping, but everywhere she goes, the knife is there.

Hands grabbed at her ankles. I turned, trying to see her attacker’s face, and just like that, my mother was gone and I was back outside the door. My hand pushed it open.

This is how it happened, I thought dully. This is real.

I stepped into the darkness. I felt something wet and squishy beneath my feet, and the smell—oh, God, the smell. I scrambled for the light switch.

Don’t. Don’t turn it on, don’t—

I woke with a start.

In the bed beside me, Sloane was dead to the world. I’d had the dream often enough to know that there was no point in closing my eyes again. I crept quietly out of bed and went to the window. I needed to do something—to take my cue from the woman I’d profiled that morning and run until my body hurt, or to follow in Dean’s footsteps and take it out on some weights. Then I caught sight of the backyard—and more specifically, the pool.

The yard was dimly lit, the water gleaming black in the moonlight. Silently, I grabbed a swimsuit and slipped out of the room without waking Sloane. Minutes later, I was sitting at the edge of the pool. Even in the dead of night, the air was hot. I dangled my legs over the edge.

I lowered myself into the pool. Slowly, the tension left my body. My brain shut off. For a few minutes, I just treaded water, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood at nighttime: crickets and the wind and my hands moving through the water. Then I stopped—stopped treading water, stopped fighting the pull of gravity—and let myself sink.

I opened my eyes underwater, but couldn’t see anything. There was darkness all around me, and then suddenly, there was a flicker of light at the pool’s surface.

I wasn’t alone.

You don’t know that, I told myself, but I saw the faintest blur of motion, and that protest died a quick and brutal death. There was someone up there—and I couldn’t stay underwater indefinitely.

Just like that, I felt like I was back in the narrow hallway of my dreams, walking slowly toward something awful.

It’s nothing.

Still, I fought the need for air. I wanted—irrationally—to stay underwater, where it was safe. But I couldn’t. Water plugged my ears, and as my lungs screamed for air, the sound of my own heartbeat surrounded me.

I came up slowly, breaking the surface as quietly as I could. Treading water, I turned in a circle, my eyes scanning the yard for an intruder. At first, I saw nothing. And then I saw a pair of eyes, the moonlight caught in them just so.

Looking at me.

“I didn’t know you were out here,” the owner of those eyes said. “I should go.”

My heart kept right on pounding, even once I realized the voice belonged to Dean. Now that my brain had identified him, I could make out a few more of his features. His hair hung in his face. His eyes—which I’d seen as a predator’s a moment before—now just looked surprised.

Clearly, he hadn’t expected anyone to be swimming at three in the morning.

“No,” I said, my voice traveling along the surface of the water. “It’s your yard, too. Stay.”

I felt ridiculous for being so jumpy. This was a quiet, sleepy little town. The yard was fenced. No one knew what the FBI was training us to do. We weren’t targets. This wasn’t my dream.

I wasn’t my mother.

For an elongated moment, I thought Dean would turn and walk away, but instead, he sat a few inches away from the edge of the pool. “What are you doing out here?”

For some reason, I felt compelled to tell him the truth. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Dean gazed out at the yard. “I stopped sleeping a long time ago. Most nights, I get three good hours, maybe four.”

I’d given him a truth, and he’d given me one. We fell into silence then, him at the edge of the pool and me treading water at the center.

“It wasn’t real, you know.” He spoke to his hands, not to me.

“What wasn’t real?”

“Today.” Dean paused. “At the mall with Locke. Playing games in parking lots. That’s not what this is.”

In the scant light of the moon, his eyes looked so dark they were nearly black, and something about the way he was looking at me made me realize—he wasn’t criticizing me.

He was trying to protect me.

“I know what this is,” I said. I knew better than anyone. Turning away from him, I stared up at the sky, all too aware of the fact that he was staring at me.

“Briggs shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said finally. “This place will ruin you.”

“Did it ruin Lia?” I asked. “Or Sloane?”

“They’re not profilers.”

“Did this place ruin you?”

Dean didn’t pause, not even for a second. “There was nothing to ruin.”

I swam over to the edge, right next to him. “You don’t know me,” I said, pulling myself out of the water. “I’m not scared of this place. I’m not afraid to learn how to think like a killer, and I am not afraid of you”

I wasn’t even sure why I’d added on those last six words, but they were the ones that made his eyes flash. I was halfway to the house when I heard him stand up. I heard him walk across the grass to the tiny, shacklike pool house. I heard him throw a switch.

Suddenly, the yard wasn’t dark anymore. It took me a moment to realize where the light was coming from. The pool was glowing. There was no other word for it. It looked like someone had splattered glow-in-the-dark paint across the edge. There was a drop of fluorescent color here, a drop there. Long streaks of it. Blobs. Four parallel smears across the tile on the side of the pool.

I glanced at Dean.

“Black light,” he said, as if that were all the explanation I’d need.

I couldn’t help myself. I moved closer. I squatted to get a better look. And that was when I saw the glow-in-the-dark outline of a body at the bottom of the pool.

“Her name was Amanda,” Dean said.

I realized then what the smears and streaks of paint on the concrete and the side of the pool were supposed to be.

Blood.

The color had fooled me, even though the pattern was all too familiar.

“She was stabbed three times.” Dean wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t even look at the pool. “She cracked her head on the cement when she slipped in her own blood. And then he wrapped her fingers around her throat. He forced her upper body over the side of the pool.”

I could see it happening, see the killer standing over a girl’s body. She would have kicked. She would have clawed at his hands, tried to use the side of the pool for leverage.

“He held her under.” Dean knelt next to the pool and demonstrated, acting out the motion. “He drowned her. And then he set her free.” He let go of his imaginary prey and sent her off toward the center of the pool.

“This is a crime scene,” I said finally. “One of the fake crime scenes that they use to test us, like the sets in the basement.”

Dean stared out at the center of the pool, where the victim’s body would have been. “It’s not fake,” he said finally. “It really happened. It just didn’t happen here.”

I reached out to touch Dean’s shoulder. He shrugged off my touch, turning to face me, his body close to mine. “Everything about this place—the house, the yard, the pool—was constructed with one thing in mind.”

“Full immersion,” I said, holding his gaze. “Like those schools where they only speak French.”

Dean jerked his head toward the pool. “This isn’t a language people should want to learn.”

Normal people—that was what Dean meant. But I wasn’t normal. I was a Natural. And this mock crime scene wasn’t the worst thing I’d seen.

I turned to walk back to the house. I heard Dean walk across the lawn. I heard him flip the switch. And when I glanced back over my shoulder, the pool was just a pool. The yard was just a yard. And the outline of the body was gone.

CHAPTER 13

I overslept the next morning and woke up to the feeling that I was being watched.

“Knock, knock.”

Based on the greeting—and the fact that the person speaking had opened my door, knocked on it, and said those words at the exact same time—I expected Lia. Instead, I opened my eyes to find Agent Locke standing in my doorway, a cup from Starbucks in one hand and car keys in the other.

I glanced over at Sloane’s bed, but it was empty.

“Late night?” my newly acquired mentor asked, eyebrows arched. I thought of Dean and the pool and decided that was not an area of discussion I wanted to pursue.

“Really?” Agent Locke said, eyeing the look on my face. “I was just kidding, but you’ve got I-was-up-late-with-a-boy-last-night face. Maybe we should have some girl talk.”

I didn’t know what was worse, the fact that Locke thought my late night had something to do with a stupid teenage crush or the fact that she sounded suspiciously like my female cousins.

“No girl talk,” I said. “As a general rule, ever.”

Agent Locke nodded. “So noted.” She eyed my pajamas, and then jerked her head toward the closet. “Get up. Get dressed.” She tossed me the car keys. “I’ll get Dean. You’re driving.”

I wasn’t exactly happy when Agent Locke’s directions ended up taking us right back to the mall—and specifically to Mrs. Fields cookies. After seeing the mocked-up blood spatter on the pool’s edge the night before, profiling shoppers seemed senseless. It seemed silly.

If she makes us guess what kind of cookies people are going to order …

“Three and a half years ago, Sandy Harrison was here with her husband and their three children. Her husband took their eight-year-old son to the bookstore, and she was left with the two younger girls.” Agent Locke said all of this in a perfectly normal voice. Not a single shopper turned to look at us, but her words froze me to the spot. “Sandy and the girls were in line for lemonade. Three-year-old Madelyn made a beeline for the cookies, and Sandy had to pull her back. It was Christmastime, and the mall was crammed full of people. Madelyn was desperately in need of a nap and on the verge of a meltdown. The line was moving. Sandy made it to the counter and turned to ask her older daughter, Annabelle, whether she wanted regular lemonade or pink.”

I knew what was coming.

“Annabelle was gone.”

It was easy to picture the mall at Christmastime, to see the young family splitting up, the father taking the son and the mother juggling two young girls. I saw the smaller one on the verge of a tantrum, saw the mother’s attention diverted. I imagined her looking down and realizing that even though she’d just looked away for a few seconds, even though she was always so careful …

“Mall security was called immediately. Within half an hour, they’d alerted the police. They stopped traffic into and out of the mall. The FBI was called on board and we issued an AMBER Alert. If a child isn’t recovered in the first twenty-four hours, then chances are good that he or she will never be recovered alive.”

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.”

Agent Locke’s expression was serious, but nowhere near as detached as Dean’s. She’d been doing this job for a while, but it still got to her—the way it would probably always get to me. “Collectively, we refer to these extra actions—and what they tell us about the UNSUB—as a signature. An UNSUB’s signature tells us something about his or her underlying psychology: fantasies, deep-seated needs, emotions.”

Dean looked down at his hands. “Those needs, those fantasies, those emotions,” he said, “they don’t change. A killer can switch weapons, they can start killing on a quicker schedule, they can change venues, they can start targeting a different class of victims—but their signature stays the same.”

I turned my attention back to the pictures. Three of the women had been stabbed: two in back alleys, one in her own kitchen. The woman in the kitchen had fought; from the looks of the pictures, the other two had never had a chance.

“These two,” I said, pulling out the first two stabbing pictures. “The killer surprised them. You said the UNSUB stabbed this one from behind.” I indicated the girl on the left. “After she was dead—or close enough to it that she couldn’t put up much of a fight—he turned her over. So she could see him.”

This was what Agent Locke was talking about when she used the phrase deep-seated need. The killer had attacked this girl from behind, but it was important to him—for whatever reason—that she see his face and that he see hers.

“Don’t say he,” Dean said. He shifted, and suddenly, I could feel the heat from his body. “Say you, Cassie. Or say I.”

“Fine,” I said. I stopped talking about the killer—and started talking to him. “You want them to see you. You want to stand over them. And as they lie there dying, or maybe even after they’re dead, you can’t help but touch them. You straighten their clothes. You lay their arms out to the side.” I stared at the picture of the girl he’d attacked from behind, and something else struck me about it. “You think they’re beautiful, but girls like that, women like that, they never even see you.” I paused. “So you make them see you.”

I looked at the next picture: another woman, stabbed and found dead on the pavement. Like the first, she’d been chosen for convenience. But according to the notes on the picture, she hadn’t been stabbed from behind.

“It wasn’t enough,” I said. “Turning her over after she died, it wasn’t enough. So you took the next one from the front.”

Like the first victim, this one had been laid carefully on her back, her hair fanned around her face in an unnatural halo. Without even thinking about it, I took the third picture on the top row—a gunshot victim who’d died running—and set it aside. That wasn’t the work of the same UNSUB. It was quick and clean, and there wasn’t a whiff of desire about it.

Turning my attention to the bottom row of pictures, I scanned them, trying to keep my emotions in check the way Dean did. One of these four women had been killed by the same UNSUB as the first two. The easy answer—and the wrong one—would have been the third stabbing victim, but she’d been stabbed in the kitchen, with a knife from her own drawer. She’d fought, she’d died bloody, and the killer had left her there, her skirt on sideways, her body contorted.

You need to see them, I told the killer silently, picturing his silhouette in my mind. You need them to see you. They need to be beautiful.

This third victim had been killed after the first two. The UNSUB’s MO had changed: different weapon, different location. But deep down, the killer hadn’t changed. He was still the same person with the same sick underlying needs.

Every time you kill, you need more. You need to be better. She needs to be better. Killing women on the street wasn’t enough anymore. You didn’t want a quickie in a back alley. You wanted a relationship. A woman. A home.

I zeroed in on the two women who’d been killed in their bedrooms. Both had been found lying on their beds. One had been shot. The other had been strangled.

You catch her at night. In her house. In her bedroom. She doesn’t look through you now, does she? She’s not too good for you now.

I tried to imagine the UNSUB shooting a woman, but the math on that one just did not compute.

You want her to see you. You want to touch her. You want to feel the life going out of her, little by little.

“This was the last one,” I said, pointing to the woman who’d been strangled in her own bed. “Different MO. Same signature.”

This woman had died watching him, and he’d posed her, propped her head up on a pillow, fanning her brown hair out around her death-still face.

Suddenly, I was nauseous. It wasn’t just what had been done to these women. It was that for a moment, I’d connected with the person who’d done it. I’d understood.

I felt a hand, warm and steady, on the back of my neck. Dean.

“You’re fine,” he said. “It’ll pass.”

This from the boy who’d never wanted me to go to the place I’d just gone.

“Just breathe,” he told me, dark eyes making a careful study of mine. I returned the favor, concentrating on his face—here, now, this moment, nothing else.

“You okay, Cass?” Agent Locke sounded worried in spite of herself. I could practically see her wondering if she’d pushed me too far, too fast.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Liar.” Lia strolled into the kitchen like a model on a catwalk, but for once, I was glad for the distraction.

“Okay,” I said, amending my previous statement. “I’m not fine, but I will be.” I turned around and met Lia’s eyes. “Satisfied?”

She smiled. “Delighted.”

Agent Locke cleared her throat and adopted a stern expression that reminded me of Agent Briggs. “We’re still working here, Lia.”

Lia looked at me, then at Dean, who dropped his hands to his side. “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

I wasn’t sure if Lia was calling Locke out on a lie or telling the agent to back off. I also wasn’t sure whether she was doing it for me—or for Dean.

“Fine,” Agent Locke capitulated. “My brilliant lecture on the difference between organized and disorganized killers can wait until tomorrow.” Her phone vibrated. She picked it up, glanced at the screen for a few seconds, and then corrected herself. “And by ‘tomorrow,’” she said, “I mean Monday. Have a good weekend.”

“Somebody has a case,” Lia said, her eyes lighting up.

“Somebody has to jet,” Agent Locke replied. “No rest for the wicked, and as much as I’d love to take a human lie detector with me to a crime scene, Lia, that’s not what this program is. You know that.”

I’d gotten nauseous over pictures, long-dead women, and a killer who’d already been convicted. Locke was talking about an active crime scene.

A fresh body.

“You’re right,” Dean said, stepping in between Lia and Locke. “That’s not what this program is,” he told the agent, and even from behind, I could picture the look in his eyes—intense and full of warning. “Not anymore.”

YOU

You’re getting sloppy, killing so close to home, leaving the bodies spread throughout the back streets of the capital, like Hansel and Gretel dropping more and more bread crumbs the farther into the forest they go.

But from the moment you first laid eyes on her, it’s been harder to push back the desire to kill, harder to remember why you make it a point not to play in your own backyard.

Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s fate.

Time to finish what you started.

Time to get their attention.

Time to come home.

CHAPTER 15

I woke up on Saturday at noon to two sounds: the shuffling of cards and the faint, high-pitched whir of metal on metal. I opened my eyes and turned over onto my side. Sloane was sitting cross-legged on her bed, a mug in one hand and the other dealing out cards: seven columns, a different number of cards in each one, all of them facedown.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Sloane stared at the backs of the cards for a moment and then picked one up and moved it. “Solitaire,” she said.

“But all of the cards are facedown.”

“Yes.” Sloane took a sip from her mug.

“How can you play Solitaire if all of the cards are facedown?”

Sloane shrugged. “How can you play with some of them faceup?”

“Sloane is something of a card shark. Briggs found her in Vegas.” Lia stuck her head out of the closet. “If she skims the deck once, she can more or less track the cards, even once they’re shuffled.”

I registered the fact that Lia was in our closet. Metal on metal, I thought. Metal hangers sliding across a metal rack.

“Hey,” I said, taking a better look at Lia’s current attire. “That’s my dress.”

“Mine now.” Lia smiled. “Didn’t the FBI warn you that I have sticky fingers? Kleptomania, pathological lying—it’s all the same, really.”

I thought Lia was joking, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Kidding,” she confirmed after a few seconds. “About the kleptomania, not about the fact that I have no intention of giving this dress back. Honestly, Sloane is the klepto in this house, but this really is more my color than yours.”

I turned to Sloane, who’d ratcheted the speed of her game up a notch—or three.

“Sloane,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Why is Lia poking around in our closet?”

Sloane looked up, but didn’t stop playing. “Motivation is really more your domain than mine. I find most people somewhat bewildering.”

I rephrased the question. “Why would you let Lia poke around in our closet?”

“Oh,” Sloane said, once she took my meaning. “She brought a bribe.”

“Bribe?” I asked. And that was when I realized what, exactly, was in Sloane’s mug.

“You brought her coffee?”

Lia smoothed a hand over the front of my dress. “Guilty as charged.”

Sloane on coffee was a bit like an auctioneer on speed. The numbers poured out of her mouth rapid-fire, a statistic for every occasion. For eight hours.

“Sixteen percent of American men have blue eyes,” she informed me blithely. “But over forty percent of male TV doctors do.”

Watching TV with a hyped-up statistician would have been challenging enough, but Sloane wasn’t the only one who’d followed me to the media room after dinner.

“Her mouth says, I love you, Darren, but her posture says, I can’t believe the writers are doing this to my character—she would never get involved with this schmuck!” Michael popped a piece of popcorn into his mouth.

“Do you mind?” I asked him, gesturing toward the screen.

He grinned. “Not at all.”

I tried to tune the two of them out, but the effort was futile. I couldn’t get lost in the medical melodrama any more than they could, because all I could think—over and over again—was that Dr. Darren the Schmuck’s BPE simply did not add up.

“We could switch to reality TV,” Michael suggested.

“Roughly one percent of the population are considered to be psychopaths,” Sloane announced. “Recent estimates suggest that over fourteen percent of reality television stars are.”

“Whose estimates?” Michael asked.

Sloane smiled like a Cheshire cat. “Mine.”

Michael put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Forget studying killers. Let’s arrest fourteen percent of all reality television stars and call it a day.”

Sloane slouched in her chair and toyed with the end of her ponytail. “Being a psychopath isn’t a crime,” she said.

“Are you defending psychopaths?” Michael asked, arching one eyebrow to ridiculous heights. “This is why we don’t give you coffee.”

“Hey,” Sloane said defensively, “I’m just saying that statistically, a psychopath is more likely to end up as a CEO than a serial killer.”

“Ahem.” Lia was the only person I knew who would actually say the word ahem to announce her presence. Once she had our attention, she looked at each one of us in turn. “Judd just left for a night on the town with an old friend. We have the house to ourselves.” She clasped her hands together in front of her body. “Living room. Fifteen minutes. Come prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” I asked, but before the question had fully exited my mouth, she was gone.

“That probably does not bode well.” Michael’s words didn’t sound much like a complaint. He stood. “I’ll see you ladies in fifteen.”

As I watched him walk out the door, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d spent most of my life as an observer, and Lia was the type to pull people off the sidelines.

“Any guesses what we’re getting ourselves into?” I asked Sloane.

“Based on previous experience,” Sloane replied, “my guess would be trouble.”

CHAPTER 16

Michael and Dean were already in the living room when Sloane and I arrived. In the past fourteen minutes, my blond companion had quieted, like the Energizer Bunny powering down. She took a seat on the sofa next to Michael. I sat down next to her. Across from us, Dean was sitting on the edge of the fireplace, his gaze locked on the floor, hair in his face.

Sofa, chairs, pillows, rug, I thought. And he chooses to sit on stone.

I flashed back to the first time I’d seen him, lifting weights and pushing his body to the brink. My very first impression had been that he was punishing himself.

“Glad to see you all made it.” Lia didn’t just walk into a room; she made an entrance. All eyes on her, she sank to the floor and stretched her legs out, crossing her feet at the ankles and spreading my dress out around her. “For your entertainment this evening: Truth or Dare.” She paused, raking her eyes over the rest of us. “Any objections?”

Dean opened his mouth.

“No,” Lia told him.

“You asked for objections,” Dean said.

Lia shook her head. “You don’t get to object.”

“Do I?” Michael asked.

Lia considered the question. “Do you want to?”

Michael glanced at me, then back at Lia. “Not particularly.”

“Then, yes,” Lia replied. “You do.”

Beside me, Sloane raised her hand.

“Yes, Sloane?” Lia said pleasantly. Apparently, she wasn’t concerned that our resident numbers girl might object.

“I’m familiar with the gist of the game, but I’m unclear on one thing.” Sloane’s eyes gleamed. “How do you win?”

Michael grinned. “You have to love a girl with a competitive streak.”

“You don’t win Truth or Dare,” I said. In fact, I deeply suspected this was the kind of game that everybody lost.

“Is that an objection?” Lia asked.

From across the room, Dean was telegraphing the words SAY YES to me, as clearly as if he’d hired a plane to write them in the sky. And if I’d been in a room with any other teenagers on the planet, I would have. But I was in a room with Michael, who I couldn’t quite profile, and Dean, who’d said the other day that Naturals didn’t work on active cases anymore. I had questions, and this was the only way I was going to get to ask them.

“No,” I told Lia. “That wasn’t an objection. Let’s play.”

A slow smile spread across Lia’s face. Dean banged his head back against the fireplace.

“Can I go first?” Sloane asked.

“Sure,” Lia replied smoothly. “Truth or dare, Sloane?”

Sloane gave her a look. “That’s not what I meant.”

Lia shrugged. “Truth. Or. Dare.”

“Truth.”

In a normal game of Truth or Dare, that would have been the safer option—because if the question was too embarrassing, you could always lie. With Lia in the room, that was impossible.

“Do you know who your father is?”

Lia’s question took me completely off guard. I’d spent most of my life not knowing who my own father was, but couldn’t imagine being forced to admit that in front of a crowd. Lia seemed fond of Sloane, more or less, but clearly, in Truth or Dare, the kid gloves came off.

Sloane met Lia’s eyes, unfazed. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“A swing and a miss,” Michael murmured. Lia gave him a dirty look.

“Your turn,” she told Sloane, and from the look on her face, I guessed she was bracing herself for payback—but Sloane turned to me.

“Cassie. Truth or dare?”

I tried to imagine what kind of dare Sloane might come up with, but drew a blank.

“Statistically, the most common dares involve eating unpleasant food, making prank phone calls, kissing another player, licking something unsanitary, and nudity,” Sloane said helpfully.

“Truth.”

Sloane was silent for several seconds. “How many people do you love?”

The question seemed harmless enough until I started thinking about my answer. Sloane’s blue eyes searched mine, and I got the distinct feeling that she wasn’t asking because she thought it would be amusing to hear my answer.

She was asking because she needed data points to compare to her own.

“How many people do I love?” I repeated. “Like … love how?”

I’d never been in love, so if she was talking about romance, the answer was easy.

“How many people do you love, total?” Sloane said. “Summing across familial, romantic, and all other variations.”

I wanted to just choose a number at random. Five sounded good. Or ten. Too many to count sounded better, but Lia was watching me, very still.

I’d loved my mother. That much was easy. And Nonna and my father and the rest—I loved them. Didn’t I? They were my family. They loved me. Just because I wasn’t showy about it didn’t mean that I didn’t love them back. I’d done what I could to make them happy. I tried not to hurt them.

But did I really love them, the way I’d loved my mom? Could I love anyone like that again?

“One.” I barely managed to get the word out of my mouth. I stared at Lia, hoping she’d tell me that wasn’t true, that losing my mom hadn’t broken something inside of me and I wasn’t destined to spend the rest of my life two shades removed from the kind of love that the rest of my family felt for me.

Lia held my gaze for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Your turn, Cassie.”

I tried to remember why I’d thought playing this game was a good idea. “Michael,” I said finally. “Truth or dare?”

There were so many things I wanted to ask him—what he really thought of the program, what his father was like, beyond the issue of tax fraud, whether there had ever been more to his relationship with Lia than trading verbal barbs. But I didn’t get a chance to ask any of those questions, because Michael leaned forward in his seat, his eyes gleaming. “Dare.”

Of course he wasn’t going to let me dig around in his brain. Of course he was going to make me issue the first dare of the game. I racked my brain for something that didn’t sound lame, but also didn’t involve kissing, nudity, or anything that might give Michael an excuse for trouble.

“Hit me with your best shot, Colorado.” Michael was enjoying this way too much. I had a feeling he was hoping that I would dare him to do something a little bit dangerous, something that would get his adrenaline pumping.

Something Briggs would disapprove of.

“I dare you …” I said the words slowly, hoping an answer would present itself. “… to dance ballet.”

Even I wasn’t sure where that came from.

“What?” Michael said. Clearly, he’d been expecting something a little more exciting, or at the very least risqué.

“Ballet,” I repeated. “Right there.” I pointed to the center of the rug. “Dance.”

Lia started cracking up. Even Dean bit back a smile.

“Ballet is a tradition of performance body movement hailing back to the early Renaissance,” Sloane said helpfully. “It is particularly popular in Russia, France, Italy, England, and the United States.”

Michael stopped her before she could orate an entire history of the art. “I’ve got this,” he said. And then, a solemn expression on his face, he stood up, he walked to the center of the room, and he struck a pose.

I’d seen Michael do smooth. I’d seen him do suave. I’d felt him push a piece of hair out of my face—but this. This was really something. He stood on his tippy-toes. He twirled in a circle. He bent his legs and stuck out his butt. But the best thing was the look in his eyes: cold, steely determination.

He capped the performance off with a curtsy.

“Very nice,” I said between hysterical giggles. He sank back onto the sofa and then turned dagger eyes on Lia.

“Truth or dare.”

Not surprisingly, Lia chose truth. Of all of us, she was probably the only one here who could lie and get away with it.

Michael smiled, as genial as Lia had been when she’d started this whole thing. “What’s your real name?”

For a few brief seconds, vulnerability and irritation passed over Lia’s features in quick succession.

“Your name isn’t Lia?” Sloane sounded strangely hurt at the idea that Lia might have lied about something as simple and basic as her own name.

“Yes,” Lia told her. “It is.”

Michael stared at Lia, raising his eyebrows ever so slightly.

“But once upon a time,” Lia said, sounding less and less like herself with every word, “my name used to be Sadie.”

Lia’s answer filled my mind with questions. I tried to picture her as a Sadie. Had she shed her old name as easily as she changed clothes? Why had she changed it? How had Michael known?

“Truth or dare …” Lia dragged her eyes across each of us, one by one, and I sensed something dark slowly unfurling inside of her. This wasn’t going to end well.

“Cassie.”

It didn’t seem fair that it was my turn again already, when Dean had yet to go, but I stepped up to the plate.

“Dare.” I don’t know what possessed me to choose that option, other than the fact that the look on Lia’s face convinced me that she’d make Sloane’s question look about as personal as an inquiry about the weather.

Lia beamed at me, and then beamed at Michael. Payback.

“I dare you,” Lia said, relishing each and every word, “to kiss Dean.”

Dean reacted to that sentence like he’d been electrocuted. He sat straight up. “Lia,” he said sharply. “No.”

“Oh, come now, Dean,” Lia cajoled. “It’s Truth or Dare. Take one for the team.” Without waiting for his reply, she turned back to me. “Kiss him, Cassie.”

I didn’t know what was worse, Dean’s objection to the idea of being forced to kiss me or the sudden realization that my body didn’t object to the idea of kissing him. I thought of our lessons with Locke, the feel of his hand on the back of my neck. …

Lia watched me expectantly, but Michael’s eyes were the ones I felt on my face as I crossed the room to stand in front of Dean.

I didn’t have to do this.

I could say no.

Dean looked up at me, and for a split second, I saw something other than deadly neutrality on his face. His eyes softened. His lips parted, like there was something he wanted to say.

I knelt next to the fireplace. I put one hand on his cheek, and I brought my lips to his. It was a friendly kiss. A European hello. Our mouths only touched for a second—but I felt it, electric, all the way to my toes.

I pulled back, unable to force my eyes away from his lips as I did. For a few seconds, we just stayed there, staring at each other: him on the fireplace and me kneeling on the rug.

“Your turn, Cassie.” Lia sounded pretty darned satisfied with herself.

I forced myself to stand up and walk back to the sofa. I sat down, still able to feel the ghost of Dean’s lips on mine. “Truth or dare, Dean?”

It was only fair: he was the sole person present who hadn’t been in the hot seat yet. For a second, I thought he might refuse and call an end to this game, but he didn’t.

“Truth.”

This was the opportunity Michael hadn’t given me. There were so many things I wanted to know. I concentrated on that, instead of what had passed between us a moment before.

“The other day, when Locke said she couldn’t take Lia to the crime scene, you said that wasn’t what the program was anymore.” I paused. “What did you mean?”

Dean nodded, as if that were a perfectly reasonable question to ask after you’d kissed a person. “I was the first one,” he said. “Before there was a program, before they started using the term Naturals, it was just Briggs and me. I didn’t live with Judd. The FBI brass didn’t know about me. Briggs brought me questions. I gave him answers.”

“Questions about killers.” I wasn’t allowed a follow-up question, so I phrased it as a statement. Dean nodded. Lia cut in, breaking off all conversation.

“He was twelve,” she said, clipping the words. “Your turn, Dean.”

“Cassie,” Dean said. That was it—no “truth or dare.” Just my name.

Beside me, Michael’s jaw clenched. Lia’s payback had hit its target—and then some.

“Truth,” I said, trying not to dwell on Michael’s reaction or what it might mean.

“Why did you come here?” Dean asked, looking at Lia, at his own hands, at anything but me. “Why join this program at all?”

There were a lot of answers to that question that would have been technically true. I could have said that I wanted to help people. I could have said that I’d always known that I’d never quite fit in the regular world. But I didn’t.

“My mother was murdered.” I cleared my throat, trying to say the words like they were just any other words. “Five years ago. Based on the blood spatter, they think she was stabbed. Repeatedly. The police never found her body, but there was enough blood that they don’t think she could have survived. I used to think that maybe she had. I don’t anymore.”

Dean didn’t react visibly to that confession—but Lia went unnaturally still, and Sloane’s mouth dropped open as she averted her eyes. Michael had known about my mother, but I’d never said a word to any of the others.

Truth or dare, Dean. I wanted to say the words, but I couldn’t keep asking Dean questions. Already, we’d kept this game between the two of us for too long. “Truth or dare, Lia?”

“Truth.” Lia said the word like a challenge. I asked her whether she was messy or neat. She lowered her chin, raised her eyebrows, and stared at me.

“Seriously,” she said. “That’s your question?”

“That’s my question,” I confirmed.

“I’m a mess,” she said. “By every sense of the word.” She didn’t give me time to meditate on the fact that I’d pegged her right before she targeted Michael for the next round. I expected him to pick dare again, but he didn’t.

“Truth.”

Lia ran dainty hands over her dress. She gave him her most wide-eyed, innocent look. Then she asked him if he was jealous when I kissed Dean. Michael didn’t bat an eye, but I thought Dean might actually throttle Lia.

“I don’t get jealous,” Michael said. “I get even.”

No one was surprised when Michael aimed the next round at Dean.

“Truth or dare, Dean?”

“Truth.” Dean’s eyes narrowed, and I remembered Lia saying that if Dean had a temper, Michael would have been dead by now. I waited, my stomach heavy and my throat dry, for Michael to ask Dean something horrible.

But he didn’t.

“Have you ever seen The Bad Seed?” he inquired politely. “The movie.”

A muscle in Dean’s jaw twitched. “No.”

Michael grinned. “I have.”

Dean stood up. “I’m done here.”

“Dean—” Lia’s tone was halfway between mulish and wheedling, but he silenced her with a look. Two seconds later, he was stalking out of the room, and a few seconds after that, I heard the front door open, then slam.

Dean was gone—and a person didn’t have to be an emotion reader to see the look of satisfaction on Michael’s face.

YOU

Every hour, every day, you think about The Girl. But it’s not time for the grand finale. Not yet. Instead, you find another toy at a little shop in Dupont Circle. You’ve had your eye on her for a while, but resisted the urge to add her to your collection. She was too close to home, in an area that was too densely populated.

But right now, the so-called Madame Selene is just what you need. Bodies are bodies, but a palm reader—there’s a certain poetry to that. A message you want—need—have to send. It would be simpler to kill her in the shop, to drive a knife through each palm and leave her body on display, but you’ve worked so hard this week.

You deserve a little treat.

Taking her is easy. You’re a ghost. A stranger with candy. A sympathetic ear. When Madame Selene wakes up in the warehouse, she won’t believe that you’re the one who’s done this to her.

Not at first.

But eventually, she’ll see.

You smile, thinking about the inevitability of it all. You touch the tips of her brown hair and pick up the handy box of Red Dye Number 12. You hum under your breath, a children’s song that takes you back to the beginning, back to the first.

The palm reader’s eyes flicker open. Her hands are bound. She sees you. Then she sees the hair dye, the knife in your left hand, and she realizes.—

You are the monster.

And this time, you deserve to take things slow.

CHAPTER 17

When Agent Locke showed up Monday morning, she had dark circles under her eyes. Belatedly, I remembered that while we’d been watching TV and playing Truth or Dare, she and Briggs had been out working a case. A real case, with real stakes.

A real killer.

For a long time, Locke didn’t say anything. “Briggs and I hit a brick wall this weekend,” she said finally. “We’ve got three bodies, and the killer is escalating.” She ran a hand through hair that looked like it had been only haphazardly brushed. “That’s not your problem. It’s mine, but this case has reminded me that the UNSUB is only half the story. Dean, what can you tell Cassie about victimology?”

Dean stared holes in the countertop. I hadn’t seen him since Truth or Dare, but it was like nothing had changed between us, like we’d never kissed.

“Most killers have a type,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s a physical type. For others, it may be a matter of convenience—maybe you focus on hikers, because no one reports them missing for a few days, or students, because it’s easy to get ahold of their class schedules.”

Agent Locke nodded. “Occasionally the victims may be serving as a substitute for someone in the UNSUB’s life. Some killers kill their first girlfriend or their wife or their mother, over and over again.”

“The other thing victimology tells us,” Dean continued, flicking his eyes over to Agent Locke, “is how the victim would have reacted to being abducted or attacked. If you’re a killer …” He paused, searching for the right words. “There’s a give-and-take between you and the people you kill. You choose them. You trap them. Maybe they fight. Maybe they run. Some try to reason with you, some say things that set you off. Either way, you react.”

“We don’t have the luxury of knowing every last detail about the UNSUB’s personality,” Agent Locke cut in, “but the victim’s personality and behavior account for half of the crime scene.”

The moment I heard the phrase crime scene, I flashed back to opening the door to my mother’s dressing room. I’d always thought that I knew so little about what had happened that day. By the time I’d gotten back to the dressing room, the killer was gone. My mother was gone. There was so much blood.…

Victimology, I reminded myself. I knew my mother. She would have fought—nail-scratching, breaking-lamps-over-his-head, struggling-for-the-knife fought. And there were only two things that could have stopped her: dying or the realization that I was due back in the room at any second.

What if she went with him? The police had assumed she was dead—or at the very least unconscious—when the UNSUB had removed her from the room. But my mother wasn’t a small woman, and the dressing room was on the second floor of the theater. Under normal circumstance, my mother wouldn’t have just let a killer waltz her out the door—but she might have done anything to keep her assailant away from me.

“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.

“No,” Michael replied. “But you are.”

He was right, of course. In the dim light of the moon, I wondered how he could even see my face, let alone read an emotion I was trying to hide.

“You like it here.” Michael lowered himself into the pool, and for the first time, I registered the fact that his chest was bare. “You like Agent Locke. You like all of her little lessons. And you like the idea of helping out with real cases even more.”

I didn’t say anything. Clearly, Michael was capable of having this conversation all by himself.

“What? You aren’t even going to try to profile me?” Michael flicked water at my knees. “Where’s the girl from the diner?” he asked me. “Tit for tat.”

“You don’t want to be profiled,” I told him. “You don’t want people to know you.” I paused. “You don’t want me to know you.”

He was silent for one second, two, three—and then, “Truth.”

“Yeah,” I said wryly. “I speak the truth.”

“No,” Michael replied. “Truth. Isn’t that what you wanted me to say last night, instead of dare?”

“I don’t know,” I told him, grinning. “I wouldn’t trade the memory of your ballet man-dance for anything.”

Michael pushed off from the ledge and started treading water. “I also excel at synchronized swimming.” I laughed, and he made his way over to my ledge. “I mean it, Cassie. Truth.” He paused, two feet away from me. “You ask. I’ll tell you. Anything.”

I waited for the catch, but there wasn’t one.

“Fine,” I said, considering my questions carefully. “Why don’t you want to be profiled? What is it you’re so afraid that people are going to find out?”

“I got into a fight once,” Michael said, sounding oddly at ease. “Right before I came here. Put the other guy in the hospital. I just kept hitting him, over and over again, even once he was down. I don’t lose it often, but when I do, it’s bad. I take after the old man in that. We Townsends don’t do anything halfway.” Michael paused. He’d answered my second question, but not my first. “Maybe I don’t want to be profiled because I don’t want to know what you’d see. What little box I fit in. Who I really am.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.

He gave me a lazy smile. “That’s a matter of some debate.”

I’d been planning on asking about his father, but now I couldn’t bring myself to ask if the old man had ever lost it with him. “Your family’s wealthy?”

“As sin,” Michael replied. “My past is a long string of boarding schools, excess, and the finest fill-in-the-blank that money can buy.”

“Does your family know you’re here?”

Michael pushed off the side and started treading water again. I couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but I didn’t need to see him to know that his trademark smirk held more than a hint of self-loathing. “A better question might be if they care.”

Three questions. Three honest answers. Just because he’d offered to show me his scars didn’t mean I had to tear them open. “You and Lia?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Yes,” Michael replied, catching me off guard, because I hadn’t considered it a yes-or-no question. “On again, off again. Never for very long, and it was never a good call—for either of us.”

If I didn’t want to know the answer, I shouldn’t have asked. I stood up and cannonballed back into the pool, sending a small tsunami of water Michael’s way. The moment I came back up, he flicked water at my face.

“You know, of course,” he said solemnly, “that this means war.”

One second, there was a good three feet of space between us, and the next, we were wrestling, each trying to outdunk and outsplash the other, neither of us fully aware of just how close together our bodies were.

I got a mouthful of water. I sputtered. Michael dunked me, and I came up gasping for air—and saw Dean standing on the patio. He was standing perfectly, horribly still.

Michael dunked me again before he realized I’d stopped fighting. He turned around and saw Dean.

“You got a problem, Redding?” Michael asked.

“No,” Dean replied. “No problem.”

I gave Michael a sharp look and trusted that he’d be able to read me well enough for it to be effective, even in the dark.

Michael got the message. “Care to join us?” he asked Dean, overly politely.

“No,” Dean replied, just as politely. “Thank you.” He paused, and the silence swelled around us. “You two have a good night.”

As Dean disappeared back into the house, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d taken something from him—the place he came to think, the moment we’d shared the night he’d shown me the black lights.

“Truth or dare.” Michael’s voice cut into my thoughts.

“What?”

“Your turn,” Michael told me. “Truth or dare?”

“Truth.”

Michael reached out to push my wet hair out of my face. “If Lia had dared you to kiss me, would you have done it?”

“Lia wouldn’t have dared me to kiss you.”

“But if she had?”

I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. “It was just a game, Michael.”

Michael leaned forward and brushed his lips against mine. Then he pulled back and studied my face. Whatever he saw there, he liked.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s all I needed to know.”

I didn’t sleep much that night. I just kept thinking about Michael and Dean, the subtle barbs that passed between the two of them, the feel of each one’s lips. By the time the sun came up the next morning, I wanted to kill someone. Preferably Michael—but Lia was a close second.

“We’re out of ice cream,” I said murderously.

“True,” Lia replied. She’d swapped the silk pajamas for boxer shorts and a ratty T, and there wasn’t so much as a hint of remorse on her face.

“I blame you,” I said.

“Also true.” Lia studied my face. “And unless I’m mistaken, you’re not just blaming me for the ice cream. And that makes me terribly curious, Cassie. Care to share?”

It was impossible to keep a secret in this house—let alone two. First Dean, then Michael. I hadn’t signed up for this. If Lia hadn’t dared me to kiss Dean, Michael never would have kissed me in the pool, and I wouldn’t be in this mess, unsure what I felt, what they felt, what I was supposed to do about it.

“No,” I said out loud. I was here for one reason and one reason alone. “Forget breakfast,” I said, slamming the freezer door shut. “I have work to do.”

I turned to leave, but not before I caught sight of Lia twirling her gleaming black ponytail around her index finger, her dark eyes watching me a little too closely for comfort.

CHAPTER 19

I made my way to the library to drown my sorrows in serial killer interviews. Wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor bookshelves bulged with carefully organized titles: textbooks, memoirs, biographies, academic journals, and the oddest assortment of fiction I’d ever seen: old-fashioned dime-store mysteries, romance novels, comic books, Dickens, Tolkien, and Poe.

The third shelf from the left was full of blue binders. I picked up the first one and opened it.

FRIEDMAN, THOMAS

OCTOBER 22-28, 1993

FLORIDA STATE PRISON, STARKE, FL

Thomas Friedman. Such a normal-sounding name. Gingerly, I flipped through the transcript: a bare-bones play with a limited cast of characters, no plot, and no resolution. Supervisory Special Agent Cormack Kent was the interviewer. He asked Friedman about his childhood, his parents, his fantasies, the nine women he’d strangled with high-sheen dress hose. Reading Friedman’s words—black ink typed onto the page—would have been bad enough, but the worst part was that after a few pages, I could hear the way he would have talked about the women he’d killed: excitement, nostalgia, longing—but no remorse.

“You should sit down.”

I’d been expecting someone to join me in the library. I hadn’t expected that someone to be Lia.

“Dean’s not coming,” Lia said. “He read those interviews a long time ago.”

“Have you read them?” I asked.

“Some,” Lia replied. “Mostly, I’ve heard them. Briggs gives me the audio. I play Spot the Lie. It’s a real party.”

I realized suddenly that most people my age—most people any age—wouldn’t be able to take reading these interviews. They wouldn’t want to, and they certainly wouldn’t lose themselves in it, the way I would. The way I already had. Friedman’s interview was horrible and horrifying—but I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that wanted to understand.

“What’s the deal with you and Dean?” I asked Lia, forcing myself to think about anything other than the fact that part of me wanted to keep reading. Michael might have told me that he and Lia had hooked up—more than once—but Dean was the one who could dial her back a notch just by saying her name.

“I’ve been in love with him since I was twelve.” Lia shrugged, like she hadn’t just bared her soul to me. And then I realized, she hadn’t.

“Oh, God,” she said, gasping for air between giggles. “You should see your face. Really, Cassie, I’m not a fan of incest, and Dean is the closest thing to a brother I have. If I tried to kiss him, he might actually hurl on me.”

That was comforting. But the fact that it was comforting just sent me right back into the tailspin from that morning: why should I care if there was anything between Lia and Dean, when Michael was the one who’d kissed me of his own free will?

“Look, as adorable as watching you angst is,” Lia said, “take a bit of friendly advice: there’s not a person in this house who isn’t really, truly, fundamentally screwed up to the depths of their dark and shadowy souls. Including you. Including Dean. Including Michael.”

That sounded more like an insult than advice.

“Dean would want me to tell you to stay away from him,” Lia said.

“And Michael?” I asked.

Lia shrugged. “I want to tell you to stay away from Michael.” She paused. “I won’t, but I want to.”

I waited to see if she was finished. She didn’t say anything else.

“As far as advice goes, that kind of sucked.”

Lia executed an elaborate bow. “I try.” Her eyes flitted back to the binder in my hand. “Do me a favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

Lia gestured to the binder. “If you’re going to read those,” she said, “don’t say anything about them to Dean.”

For the next four days, Locke and Briggs were away working on their case, and other than avoiding Michael and Dean and weeding the flower beds for Judd, there was nothing for me to do but read. And read. And read. A thousand pages of interviews later, I got sick of being cooped up in the library and decided to take a little field trip. I took a walk through town and ended up plopping down by the Potomac River, enjoying the view and reading interview twenty-seven, binder twelve. The 1990s had given way to the twenty-first century, and SSA Kent had been replaced by a series of other agents—among them, Agent Briggs.

“Enjoying a bit of light reading?”

I looked up to see a man around my dad’s age. He had a five-o’clock shadow and a friendly smile on his face.

I shifted so that my arm covered my reading material in case he decided to look. “Something like that.”

“You looked pretty absorbed.”

Then why did you interrupt me? I wanted to ask. Either he’d sought me out specifically, or he was the kind of person who didn’t see the contradiction in interrupting someone’s reading to tell her she looked absorbed in the text.

“You live at Judd’s place, right?” he said. “He and I go way back.”

I relaxed slightly, but still had no intention of getting sucked into a conversation about my reading material—or anything else. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said in my best waitress voice, hoping he’d sense a false note under the cheerfulness in my voice and leave me to my own devices.

“Enjoying the weather?” he asked me.

“Something like that.”

“I can’t take you anywhere.” Michael appeared on my other side and eased himself onto the ground next to me. “She’s too gregarious for her own good,” he told the man standing next to us. “Always chatting up complete strangers. Frankly, I think she over-shares. It’s embarrassing.”

I put the heel of my hand on Michael’s shoulder and shoved, but couldn’t push down the stab of gratitude I felt that I was no longer suffering through Small Town Talk Time alone.

“Well,” the man said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to say hello.”

Michael nodded austerely. “How do you do?”

I waited until our visitor was out of earshot before I turned to him. “‘How do you do’?” I repeated incredulously.

Michael shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m in a social pickle, I like to ask myself, WWJAD?” I raised an eyebrow, and he explained. “What Would Jane Austen Do?”

If Michael read Jane Austen, I was the heir to the British throne.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Rescuing you,” he answered blithely. “What are you doing here?”

I gestured to the binder. “Reading.”

“And avoiding me?” he asked.

I repositioned my body and hoped the glare from the sun would compromise his view of my face. “I’m not avoiding anyone. I just wanted to be alone.”

Michael brought his hand up to his face to shield it from the sun. “You wanted to be alone,” he repeated. “To read.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said defensively. “That’s why we’re all here. To learn.”

Not to obsess over the fact that I’ve kissed more boys in the past week than I have in my entire life, I added silently. To my surprise, Michael didn’t comment on the emotions I had to be broadcasting. He just reclined next to me and held up some reading material of his own.

“Jane Austen,” I said, disbelieving.

Michael gestured toward my binder. “Carry on.”

For fifteen or twenty minutes, the two of us read in silence. I finished interview twenty-seven and started in on number twenty-eight.

REDDING, DANIEL

JANUARY 15–18, 2007

VIRGINIA STATE PENITENTIARY, RICHMOND, VA

I almost missed it, would have missed it had the name not been printed over and over again, documenting this particular serial killer’s every word.

Redding.

Redding.

Redding.

The interviewer was Agent Briggs. The subject’s name was Redding, and he’d been incarcerated in Virginia. I stopped breathing. My mouth went suddenly dry. I flipped through the pages, faster and faster, skimming at warp speed until Daniel Redding asked Briggs a question about his son.

Dean.

CHAPTER 20

Dean’s father was a serial killer. While I was traveling the country with my mom, Dean had been living twenty yards away from the shack where his father tortured and killed at least a dozen women.

And Dean had never said a word to me: not when we were working our way through Locke’s puzzles and bouncing ideas off each other; not when he caught me swimming in the pool that first time; not after we’d kissed. He’d told me that spending time inside the minds of killers would ruin me, but hadn’t breathed a word about his past.

Suddenly, everything fell into place. The tone in Lia’s voice when she’d said the pictures on the stairwell were there for Dean’s benefit. The fact that Agent Briggs had gone to Dean for help on a case when he was twelve. Michael introducing Dean by telling me that he knew more about the ways that killers thought than just about anyone. Lia asking me, as a favor, not to say anything about these interviews to Dean. The Bad Seed.

I stood up and shoved the binder back into my bag. Michael said my name, but I ignored him. I was halfway back to the house before I’d even registered the fact that I was running.

What was I doing?

I didn’t have an answer to that question. And yet, I couldn’t turn around. I kept going until I reached the house. I climbed the stairs, heading for my room, but Dean was waiting for me at the top, like he’d known today would be the day.

“You’ve been reading the interviews,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied softly. “I have.

“Did you start with Friedman?” Dean asked.

I nodded, waiting for him to name the awful unspoken something that hung in the air between us.

“That’s the guy with the panty hose, right? Did you get to the part where he talks about watching his older sister get dressed? Or what about that bit with the neighbor’s dog?”

I’d never heard Dean sound like this—so flippant and cruel.

“I don’t want to talk about Friedman,” I said.

“Right,” Dean replied. “You want to talk about my father. Did you read the whole interview? On day three, Briggs bribed him to talk about his childhood. You know what he bribed him with? Pictures of me. And when that didn’t work, pictures of them. The women he killed.”

“Dean—”

“What? Isn’t this what you wanted? To talk about it?”

“No,” I said. “I want to talk about you.”

“Me?” Dean couldn’t have sounded more incredulous if he’d tried. “What else is there to say?”

What was there to say?

“I don’t care.” My breath was still ragged from running. I was saying this wrong. “Your father—it doesn’t change who you are.”

“What I am,” he corrected. “And yes, it does. Why don’t you go ask Sloane what the statistics say about psychopathy and heredity? And then why don’t you ask her what they say about growing up in an environment where it’s the only thing you know.”

“I don’t care about the statistics,” I said. “We’re partners. We work together. You knew I was going to find out. You could have told me.”

“We’re not partners.”

The words hurt me—and he meant for them to.

“We won’t ever be partners,” Dean said, his voice razor-sharp and unrepentant. “And do you want to know why? Because as good as you are at getting inside normal people’s heads, I don’t even have to work to get inside a killer’s. Doesn’t that bother you? Didn’t you ever notice how easy it was for me to be the monster when we were ‘working’ together?”

I’d noticed—but I’d attributed it to the fact that Dean had more experience at profiling killers. I hadn’t realized that that experience was firsthand.

“Did you know about your father?” I regretted the question the moment I asked it, but Dean didn’t bat an eye.

“No,” he said. “Not at first, but I should have.”

Not at first?

“I told you, Cassie. By the time Briggs started coming by with questions on cases, there was nothing left to ruin.”

“That’s not true, Dean.”

“My father was in prison. I was in foster care, and even back then, I knew that I wasn’t like the other kids. The way my mind worked, the things that made sense to me …” He turned his back on me. “I think you should go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“I. Don’t. Care.” He let out a shuddery breath. “Just leave me alone.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone.” And there it was, something I hadn’t even let myself think since Truth or Dare.

“How exactly was I supposed to tell you?” Dean asked, still facing away from me. “‘Hey, guess what? Your mom was murdered, and my dad is a killer.’”

“This isn’t about my mom.”

“What do you want me to say, Cassie?” Dean finally turned back around to face me. “Just tell me, and I’ll say it.”

“I just want you to talk to me.”

Dean’s fingers curled into fists at his sides. I could barely see his eyes behind the hair that fell in his face. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he said. “You’re better off with Michael.”

“Dean—”

A hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. Hard.

“He said he didn’t want to talk to you, Cassie.” Lia’s face was a mask of calm. Her tone was anything but. “Don’t turn back to look at him. Don’t say another word to him. Just go. And one more thing?” She leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “Remind me never to ask you for a favor again.”

CHAPTER 21

I walked slowly back down the stairs, trying to figure out what had just happened. What was I thinking, confronting Dean? He was allowed to have secrets. He was allowed to be angry that Locke had assigned me to read those interviews, knowing that one of them was his father’s. I shouldn’t have gone up there. I should have left him alone.

“Lia or Dean?”

I looked up and saw Michael standing near the front door.

“What?”

“The look on your face,” he replied. “Lia or Dean?”

I shrugged. “Both?”

Michael nodded, as if my answer were a foregone conclusion. “You okay?”

“You’re the emotion reader,” I said. “You tell me.”

He took that as an invitation to come closer. He stopped a foot or two away and studied my face. “You’re confused. Madder at yourself than you are at either of them. Lonely. Angry. Stupid.”

“Stupid?” I sputtered.

“Hey, I just call it like I see it.” Michael was apparently in the mood to be blunt. “You feel stupid. Doesn’t mean you are.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I sat down on the bottom step, and after a few seconds, Michael sat down beside me, stretching his legs out on the hardwood floor. “Why make thinly veiled comments about The Bad Seed instead of just telling me the truth?”

“I thought about telling you.” Michael leaned back on his elbows, his casual posture contradicting the tension unmistakable in his voice. “Every time I saw the two of you hunched over one of Locke’s little puzzles, I thought about telling you. But what would you have said if I did?”

I tried to imagine hearing about Dean’s father from Michael, who could barely manage a civil word where Dean was concerned.

“Exactly.” Michael reached forward to tap the edge of my lips, like that was the precise spot that had tipped him off to what was going on inside my mind. “You wouldn’t have thanked me for telling you. You would have hated me for it.”

I swatted Michael’s hand away from my face. “I wouldn’t have hated you.”

Michael gestured in the general direction of my forehead, but refrained from actually touching my face this time. “Your mouth says one thing, but your eyebrows say another.” He paused, and his own mouth twisted into a lazy grin. “You might not realize this, Colorado, but you can be a little sanctimonious.”

This time, I didn’t bother letting my face do the talking for me. I slugged him in the shoulder—hard.

“Fine.” Michael held his palms up in surrender. “You’re not sanctimonious. You’re honorable.” He paused and trained his eyes straight ahead. “Maybe I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I’m not.”

For a split second, Michael let those words—that confession—hang in the air.

“Besides,” he continued, “if I’d told you that between Redding and myself I was the safe option, I would have lost all of that carefully built-up bad-boy cred.”

From self-loathing to sardonic in under two seconds.

“Trust me,” I said lightly, “you don’t have any cred.”

“Oh, really?” Michael said. When I nodded, he stood up and took my hand. “Let’s fix that, then, shall we?”

A wiser person would have said no. I took a deep breath. “What did you have in mind?”

Blowing stuff up was surprisingly therapeutic.

“Clear!” Michael yelled. The two of us scuttled backward. A second later, a string of fireworks went off, scorching the floor of a fake foyer.

“Somehow, I don’t think this is what Agent Briggs had in mind when he built this basement,” I said.

Michael adopted an austere look. “Simulation is one of our most powerful tools,” he said, doing a passable imitation of Agent Briggs. “How else are we to visualize the work of the infamous Boom-Boom Bandit?”

“Boom-Boom Bandit?” I repeated.

He grinned. “Too much?”

I held my index finger up an inch from my thumb. “Just a little.”

Behind us, the door to the basement opened and slammed shut. I half expected it to be Judd, asking what precisely we thought we were doing down here, but Michael had assured me the basement was soundproof.

“I didn’t know anyone was down here.” Sloane looked at the two of us suspiciously. “Why are you down here?”

Michael and I looked at each other. I opened my mouth to answer, but Sloane’s eyes widened as she took in the evidence.

“Fireworks?” she said, folding her arms over her middle. “In the foyer?”

Michael shrugged. “Cassie needed a distraction, and I needed to give Briggs a few more gray hairs.”

Sloane eyed him mutinously. Considering the amount of time she spent down here, I could see why she might take any misuse of the crime sets seriously.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You should be,” she replied sternly. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

What followed was a ten-minute lecture on pyrodynamics. And several more explosions.

“Well,” Michael said, surveying our work. “That’ll teach Briggs and Locke to leave us to our own devices for too long.”

I shoved my hair out of my face with the heel of my hand. “They’re working a case,” I said, remembering the look on Locke’s face—and the details I’d managed to glean about what she and Briggs were up to. “I think that’s a little bit of a higher priority than training us is.”

“Sloane,” Michael said suddenly, drawing out her name and narrowing his eyes.

“Nothing,” Sloane replied quickly.

“Nothing what?” I asked. Clearly, I was missing something here.

“When I said Locke’s name, Sloane looked down and to the side and her eyebrows pulled up in the center.” Michael paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer. “What did you take, Sloane?”

Sloane made a careful study of her fingernails. “Agent Locke doesn’t like me.”

I thought back to the last time I had seen Sloane and Locke together. Sloane had come into the kitchen and rattled off some statistics about serial killers. Locke hadn’t had a chance to reply when Briggs came into the room with an update on their case. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Locke say anything to Sloane, though she traded barbs easily enough with Michael and Lia.

“There was a USB drive,” Sloane admitted finally, “in Agent Locke’s briefcase.”

Michael’s eyes lit up. “Am I to infer that you have it now?”

Sloane shrugged. “That’s a distinct possibility.”

“You took a USB drive out of Locke’s briefcase?” I processed that bit of information. When Lia had helped herself to the contents of my closet, she’d said that Sloane was the kleptomaniac in the house. I’d assumed she was joking.

Apparently not.

“Let’s concentrate on the important thing here,” Michael said. “What information do you lovely ladies think Locke would be carrying on her person while working a case?”

I glanced at Sloane, then back at Michael. “You think it has something to do with their current case?” I couldn’t keep the surge of interest out of my tone.

“That is also a distinct possibility.” Sloane was sounding distinctly more chipper.

Michael threw an arm over her shoulder. “Have I ever told you that you’re my favorite?” he asked her. Then he cast a wicked glance at me. “Still in need of distraction?”

CHAPTER 22

“This encryption is pathetic,” Sloane said. “It’s like they want me to hack their files.”

She was sitting cross-legged on the end of her bed, her laptop balanced on her knees. Her fingers flew across the keys as she worked on breaking through the protection on the pilfered USB drive. A stray piece of blond hair drifted into her face, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Done!”

Sloane turned the laptop around so the two of us could see it. “Seven files,” she said. The smile fell from her face. “Seven victims.”

Locke’s lecture on victimology came flooding back to me. Was that why my mentor had been carrying around a digital copy of these files? Had she been attempting to get inside the victims’ heads?

“What if this is important?” I asked, unable to push back a stab of guilt. “What if Locke and Briggs need this information for their case?” I’d come to the program to help, not to get in the way of the FBI’s efforts.

“Cassie,” Michael said, taking a seat against the foot of the bed and stretching his legs out in front of him. “Is Briggs the type to keep backups?”

Agent Briggs was the type to keep backups of his backups. He and Locke had been gone for three days. If they’d needed this drive, they would have come back for it.

“Should I print out the files?” Sloane asked.

Michael looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Your call, Colorado.”

I should have said no. I should have told Sloane that the case Locke and Briggs were working on was none of our business, but I’d come here to help, and Locke had said that she and Briggs had hit a brick wall.

“Print it.”

A second later, the printer on Sloane’s desk started spitting out pages. After fifty or so sheets, it stopped. Michael leaned over and grabbed the pages. He separated them by case and helped himself to three case files before handing the others to Sloane and me. All seven were homicides. Four in DC in the past two weeks and another three cases, all within the past year, from other jurisdictions.

“First DC victim disappeared from the street she was working ten days ago and showed up the next morning with her face half carved off.” Michael looked up from leafing through the file.

“This one’s dated three days later,” I said. “Facial mutilation, numerous superficial cuts to the rest of the body—she died of blood loss.”

“This would take time,” Sloane said, her face pale. “Hours, not minutes, and according to the autopsy reports, the tissue damage is—severe.”

“He’s playing with them.” Michael finished with his second file and started in on the third. “He takes them. He cuts them. He watches them suffer. And then he cuts off their faces.”

“Don’t say he,” I corrected absentmindedly. “Say I or you.”

Michael and Sloane both stared at me, and I realized the obvious: their lessons were very different from mine.

“I mean, say UNSUB,” I told them. “Unknown Subject.”

“I can think of some better names for this guy,” Michael murmured, looking through the last case file in his hands. “Who has the file for the last victim?”

“I do.” Sloane’s voice was quiet, and suddenly, she looked very young. “She was a palm reader in Dupont Circle.” For a second, I thought Sloane might actually put the file down, but then her features went suddenly calm. “A person is ten times more likely to become a professional athlete than to make a living reading palms,” she said, taking refuge in the numbers.

Most killers have a type, I thought, falling back on my own lessons. “Do any of the other victims have ties to the psychic community, astrology, or the occult?”

Michael turned back to the two reports in his hand. “Lady of the Evening,” he said, “another Lady of the Evening, and a telemarketer … who worked at a psychic hotline.”

I glanced down at the two files in my hand. “I’ve got a nineteen-year-old runaway and a medium working out of Los Angeles.”

“Two different kinds of victims,” Michael observed. “Prostitutes, drifters, and runaways in column A. People with a tie to the occult in column B.”

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.

If he hadn’t, I probably would still have been sitting there, staring at the crime-scene photos and wondering if my mom had died without a face. Instead, I was lying on my bed, staring at the door and trying to think of something—anything—I could offer the FBI to make them want me on this case.

Two hours and forty-two minutes later, someone knocked on my door. I thought it might be Agent Briggs, back fourteen minutes earlier than Sloane had predicted.

But it wasn’t.

“Dean?”

He hadn’t ever sought me out before he’d told me that we weren’t partners, weren’t friends, weren’t anything. I couldn’t imagine why he’d come looking for me voluntarily now.

“Can I come in?”

There was something about the way he was standing there that told me he was expecting me to say no. Maybe I should have. Instead, I nodded, not trusting my voice.

He came in and shut the door behind him. “Lia eavesdrops,” he explained, gesturing toward the closed door.

I shrugged and waited for him to say something he wouldn’t want overheard.

“I’m sorry.” He managed two words, paused, and then pushed out two more. “About before.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about.” There was no law saying he had to trust me. Outside of Locke’s lessons, we’d barely spent any time together. He hadn’t chosen to kiss me.

“Lia told me about the files you and Michael and Sloane found.”

The sudden change of subject took me by surprise. “How does Lia even know about that?”

Dean shrugged. “She eavesdrops.”

And since I wasn’t exactly Lia’s favorite person right now, she had no reason whatsoever to keep her mouth closed about whatever it was that she’d overheard.

“So, what?” I asked Dean. “We’re even now? I found out about your dad and Lia told you that I think the UNSUB Briggs and Locke are after might be the one who killed my mom and now everything’s okay?”

Dean sat down on Sloane’s bed and faced me. “Nothing’s okay.”

Why was it that I’d managed to hold on to my cool with Michael and Sloane, but now that Dean was here, I could feel myself starting to slip?

“Sloane said that she thinks it’s highly unlikely that this killer is the same one who took my mother,” I said, looking down at my lap and trying not to cry. “It’s been five years. The MO is different. I don’t even know if the signature is the same, because they never found my mother’s body.”

Dean leaned forward and angled his head up at mine. “Some killers go for years without being caught, and their MOs change as time goes on. They learn. They evolve. They need more.”

Dean was telling me that I could be right, that the time frame didn’t preclude this being the same UNSUB, but I knew from his tone of voice that he wasn’t just talking about this UNSUB.

“How long was it before they caught him?” I asked softly. I didn’t specify who him was. I didn’t have to.

Dean met my gaze and held it. “Years.”

I wondered if that one word was more than he’d told anyone else about his father.

I thought that maybe it was.

“My mother. I was the one who found …” I couldn’t say her body because there hadn’t been one. I swallowed hard, but I kept going, because it was important, somehow, to put it into words, to tell him.

“I’d gone to check out the crowd, eavesdrop, see if there was anything I could pick up on that might help my mom during the show. I was gone ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and when I got back, she was gone. The entire room had been tossed. The police say she fought. I know she fought—but there was so much blood. I don’t know how many times he stabbed her, but when I got back to the room, I could smell it. The door was partway open. The light was off. I stepped into the room and I felt something wet underneath my feet. I said her name, I think. And then I reached for the light switch. I got the wall instead, and there was blood on the wall. It was on my hands, Dean, and then I turned on the light, and it was everywhere.”

Dean didn’t say anything, but he was there, so close that I could feel the heat of his body next to mine. He was listening, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he understood.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t usually talk about this, and I don’t let it do this to me, but I remember thinking that whoever hurt my mother hated her. He knew her, and he hated her, Dean. It was there, in the room, in the spatter, in the way she’d fought—it wasn’t random. He knew her, and how could I explain that to anyone? Who would have believed me? I was just some stupid kid, but now Briggs and Locke have this case, and their UNSUB is killing people who look like my mother and people who hold a similar job, and he’s doing it with a knife. And even though the victims are scattered geographically, even though none of them knew each other, it’s personal.” I paused. “I don’t think he’s killing them. I think he’s killing her again. And I’m not just some stupid kid anymore. I’m a profiler. A Natural. But even so—who’s going to believe me?”

Dean put a hand on my neck, the way he had the first time I’d crawled into a killer’s mind. “Nobody is going to believe you,” he said. “You’re too close to it.” He ran his thumb up and down the side of my neck. “But Briggs will believe me.”

Dean was the only person in this house who shared my ability. Michael and Sloane might have been skeptical about my theory, but Dean had instincts like mine. He’d know if I was crazy, or if there was something to this. “You’ll look at the case?” I asked him.

He nodded and dropped his hand from my neck, like he’d only just realized he was touching me.

I stood. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going to get the file.”

CHAPTER 24

“Michael, can I have the—” I burst into the kitchen, only to find that Michael and Sloane weren’t the only ones there. Judd was cooking, and Agent Briggs was standing with his back to me, a thin black briefcase by his feet.

“—the bacon,” I finished hastily.

Agent Briggs turned to face me. “And why does Michael have your bacon?” he asked.

As if this whole situation wasn’t awkward enough, Lia chose that moment to come sauntering into the room. “Yes, Cassie,” she said with a wicked grin, “tell us why Michael has your bacon.”

The way she said the phrase left very little question that she was using it as a euphemism.

“Lia,” Judd said, waving a spatula in her general direction, “that’s enough.” Then he turned to me. “Grub will be ready soon. I expect you can hold out until then?”

“Yes,” I said. “No bacon needed.”

From behind Briggs’s back, Michael pantomimed smacking his palm into his forehead. Apparently, my attempts at subterfuge left something to be desired. I tried to make a quick exit, but Agent Briggs stopped me in my tracks.

“Cassie. A word.”

I glanced at Michael, wondering what—if anything—Briggs knew about what Michael, Sloane, and I had been up to.

“Ambidextrous,” Sloane said suddenly.

“This should be good,” Lia murmured.

Sloane cleared her throat. “Agent Briggs asked for a word. Ambidextrous is a good one. Less than point-five percent of the words in the English language contain all five vowels.”

I was grateful for the distraction, but unfortunately, Briggs didn’t bite. “Cassie?”

“Sure.” I nodded and followed him out of the room. I wasn’t sure where we were heading at first, but after we passed the library, I realized we were going to the only room on the ground floor I hadn’t been in yet—Briggs’s study.

He opened the door and gestured for me to enter. I walked into the room, taking in my surroundings. The room was full of animals, lifeless and frozen in place.

Hunting trophies.

There was a grizzly bear, reared up on its back legs, its mouth caught in a silent roar. On the other side of the room, a lifelike panther crouched, canines gleaming, while a mountain lion seemed to be on the prowl.

The most disturbing thing about this entire room—maybe this entire situation—was that I hadn’t pegged Agent Briggs for a hunter.

“They’re predators. Reminders of what my team deals with every time we go out in the world.”

There was something about the way Agent Briggs said those words that made me realize, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he knew what Michael, Sloane, and I had been up to in his absence. He knew that we knew the exact details of the case that he and Agent Locke were working now.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“Judd told me.” Briggs crossed the room and sat on the edge of the desk. He gestured for me to take a seat in a chair in front of him. “You know, Judd might fade into the background around here, but there’s not much that goes on in this house that he doesn’t know. Information gathering has always been a specialty of his.”

Keeping his eyes fixed on me, Briggs opened his briefcase and took out a file: all of the papers we’d printed out earlier. “I confiscated this from Michael. And this,” he added, holding up the USB drive, “from Sloane. Her laptop will be making a trip to our tech lab to ensure that all traces of data have been wiped from the hard drive.”

I hadn’t even had a chance to tell Agent Briggs my suspicions, and he was already shutting me down—and shutting me out.

Briggs ran one hand roughly over his chin, and I realized that he hadn’t shaved in at least a day.

“The case isn’t going well.” I paused. “Is it?”

“I need you to listen to what I’m saying, Cassandra.”

That was only the second time he’d called me by my full name since I’d told him I preferred Cassie.

“I was up front with you about what this program is and what it is not. The FBI isn’t about to authorize teenagers to dive into the middle of active cases.”

His choice of words was more revealing than he knew. The FBI had qualms about throwing teenagers into the thick of things. Briggs—personally—did not.

“So what you’re saying is that using the twelve-year-old son of a serial killer as your own personal encyclopedia of murderous minds was fine, but now that the program is official, we can’t even look at the files?”

“What I’m saying,” Briggs countered, “is that this UNSUB is dangerous. He’s local. And I have no intention of involving any of you.”

“Even if this case has something to do with my mother’s?”

Briggs paused. “You’re jumping to conclusions.” He didn’t ask me why I thought this case had something to do with my mother’s. Now that I’d brought up the idea, he didn’t have to. “The occupations. The red hair. The knife. It isn’t enough.”

“The UNSUB dyed the latest victim’s hair red.” I didn’t bother asking if I was right about that, knowing in my gut that I was. “That’s above and beyond victim selection. It’s not just an MO anymore. It’s part of the UNSUB’s signature.”

Briggs crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not talking with you about this.”

And yet, he didn’t leave the room—and he didn’t stop listening.

“Did the UNSUB dye her hair before or after he killed her?”

Briggs didn’t say a word. He was playing this by the book—but he didn’t tell me to stop talking, either.

“Dyeing the victim’s hair before the kill could be an attempt to create a more ideal target, one who claims to be psychic and has red hair. But dyeing her hair afterward …” I paused, just long enough to see that Briggs was listening, really listening, to every word. “Dyeing her hair after she’s already dead is a message.”

“And what message is that?” Agent Briggs asked sharply, like he was dismissing my words out of hand, when both of us knew that he was not.

“A message for you: hair color matters. The UNSUB wants you to know that there’s a connection between the cases. He doesn’t trust you to come to that conclusion on your own, so he’s helping you get there.”

Briggs was silent for three or four loaded seconds.

“We can’t do this, Cassie. I understand your interest in the case. I understand your wanting to help, but whatever you think you’re doing, it ends now.”

I started to object and he held up a hand, silencing me.

“I’ll tell Locke to let you start working on cold cases. You’re obviously ready. But if you so much as sniff in the direction of this case again, there will be consequences, and I can guarantee that you will find them unpleasant.” He leaned forward, his posture unconsciously mimicking the roaring bear’s. “Have I made myself clear?”

I didn’t respond. If he was looking for a promise that I’d stay out of this, he was going to be disappointed.

“I already have a Natural profiler in this program.” Briggs looked me straight in the eye, his lips set in a thin, forbidding line. “I’d prefer to have two, but not at the risk of my job.”

There it was: the ultimate threat. If I pushed this, Briggs could send me home. Back to Nonna and the aunts and the uncles and the constant awareness that I would never be like them, like anyone outside of these walls.

“You’ve made yourself clear,” I said.

Briggs closed his briefcase. “Give it a couple of years, Cassie. They won’t keep you out of the field forever.”

He waited for my reply, but I said nothing. He stood up and walked to the door.

“If he’s dyeing their hair, the rules are changing,” I called after him, not bothering to turn around to see if he’d stopped to listen or not. “And that means that before things get better, they’re going to get a whole lot worse.”

YOU

You can’t remember the last time you felt this way. All of the others—all of them—were imitations. A copy of a copy of the thing you wanted most. But now—now you’re close.

A smile on your face, you pick up the scissors. The girl on the floor screams, the duct tape stretching tight across her face, but you ignore her. She’s not the real prize here, just a means to an end.

You grab her by the hair and jerk her head back. She struggles, and you tighten your grip and slam her head into the wall.

“Be still,” you whisper. You let her hair fall back down and then lift a single lock of it up.

You raise the scissors. You cut the hair.

And then you cut her.

CHAPTER 25

I went to bed early. So much had happened in the past twenty-four hours that my body physically hurt. I didn’t want to be awake anymore. That plan worked for a few hours, but just after midnight, I awoke to the sound of footsteps outside of my door and the dulcet melody of Sloane snoring next to me.

For a second, I thought I’d imagined the footsteps, but then I saw the hint of a shadow underneath the door.

There’s someone out there.

Whoever it was just stood there. I crept toward the door, my hair stuck to my forehead with sweat and my heartbeat thudding in my ears.

I opened the door.

“Not going for a swim tonight?”

It took a second for Michael’s features to come together in the darkness, but I recognized his voice immediately.

“I don’t feel like swimming.” I lowered my voice, but not as much as I would have if my roommate’s nasal passages hadn’t been threatening to deafen me within the year.

“I got you something.” Michael took a step forward, until his face was mere inches from mine. Slowly, he held up an inch-thick file.

I looked at him, then at the file, then back at him.

“You didn’t,” I said.

“Oh yes,” he replied. “I did.”

“How?” Already, my fingers were itching to snatch the file from his hand.

“Briggs took Sloane’s computer. He didn’t take mine.”

I thought about Briggs’s warning, his threat to send me home. And then, slowly, I closed my fingers around the file. “You copied the files onto your laptop.”

Michael smiled. “You’re welcome.”

I tucked the file under my mattress. Maybe there was another clue in there. Maybe there wasn’t. First chance I got, I was showing it to Dean. Unfortunately, when I went to find him the next morning, he wasn’t alone.

“Miss me?” Agent Locke didn’t wait for me to answer her question. “Sit.”

I sat. So did Dean.

“Here.” Agent Locke held out a thick legal file, the accordion bottom stretched to capacity and then some.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Briggs thinks you’re ready to take the next step, Cassie.” Locke paused. “Is he right?”

“A cold case?” The file was faded—and much, much heavier than the one tucked under my mattress.

“A string of unsolved murders from the nineties,” Locke told us. “Home invasion; one bullet to the head, execution-style. The rest of the file contains all of the similar unsolved homicides that have taken place in that area since.”

Dean groaned. “No wonder the file’s so thick,” he muttered. “A third of all drug-related hits probably look just like this.”

“Then I guess it should keep the two of you busy.” Locke gave me a look that I took to mean Briggs had told her about our little discussion.

“I’ll check in later in the week. You two have a lot of reading to do, and I have a case to solve.”

She left the two of us alone. I opened my mouth to say something about the case file jammed under my mattress, but then I closed it again. Lia eavesdropped—and apparently, so did Judd.

“How would you feel about working on our cold case in the basement?” I asked. The soundproof basement. It took Dean a moment to catch on, but then he led the way down the stairs, closing the door firmly behind us. We walked the length of the basement, three-walled rooms lining either side, like theater sets in want of a play.

Once I was sure we were alone, I started talking. “When I went to get the file yesterday, Briggs busted me. By the time I got back to my room, you were gone.”

“Lia may have mentioned that Briggs busted you,” Dean said. “You okay?”

“I told him my theory. I asked to work on the case. He said no.”

“You going to work on it anyway?” Dean paused in front of one of the outdoor sets: a partial park. I sat down on a park bench, and he leaned back against the bench’s arm.

“I have a copy of the file,” I said. “Will you look at it?”

He nodded. Five minutes later, he was elbow-deep in the case—and I had Locke’s cold case in my hands, ready to cover in case anyone came down to check on us.

“Sometimes victims are just substitutes,” Dean said after he’d read through the entire file. “I’m married, but I’d never get away with killing my own wife, so I kill hookers and pretend that they’re her. My kid died, and now every time I see a kid in a baseball cap, I have to make him mine.”

Dean had always used the word I to climb into killers’ heads, but now that I knew his background, hearing that word come out of his mouth gave me chills.

“Maybe the first time I killed someone, it wasn’t planned, but now the only time I ever really feel alive is when I’m feeling the life go out of someone else, someone like her.”

“You see it, too, don’t you?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’d bet money that this person is either reliving their first kill or fantasizing about a person they want to kill but can’t.”

“And if I told you there was a red-haired psychic attacked with a knife five years ago, and they never found the body?”

Dean paused. “Then I’d want to know everything there was to know about that case,” he said.

So did I.

YOU

The box is black. The tissue is white. And the present—the present is red. You lay it gingerly in the tissue. You put the lid on the box. You wash the scissors and use them to cut a long, black ribbon—silk.

Special.

Just like The Girl is.

No, you think, picking up the present and stroking your gloved thumb along its edge. You don’t have to call her The Girl. Not anymore.

You’ve seen her. You’ve watched her. You’re sure. No more imitations. No more copies. It’s time she got to know you, the way you knew her mother.

You put the card on top of the package. You scrawl her name on the outside, each letter a labor of love.

C-A-S-S-I-E.