The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (11 page)

“Who do you think college students are going to get chatty with,” Lia asked me, “FBI agents or two scantily clad and passably nubile teenage girls?”

Even setting aside our abilities, Lia was right. No one would suspect we were part of the investigation. They might tell us something the FBI didn’t know.

“If Sterling implied that she could, in any way, get the director to disband this program, she was lying. I can guarantee you that’s outside her purview. At most, she could send one
of us home, and I would bet you a lot of money that the director wouldn’t let her send
you
home, because you’re a nice, shiny alternative to Dean, who the director has never
trusted and never liked.” Lia took a step back, allowing me some breathing room. “You say you care about Dean,” she told me, her voice low. “You say you want to help. This
will help. I’d lie to you about a lot of things, Cassie, but helping Dean isn’t one of them. I wouldn’t do this for you, or for Michael, or even for Sloane. But I would waltz into
hades and make nice with the devil himself for Dean, so either you put on the damn dress or you get the hell out of my way.”

I put on the dress.

“Are you sure this isn’t a shirt?” I asked, eyeing the hemline.

Lia manhandled my face and slathered it with base before brandishing a tube of pink lip gloss and a container of black mascara. “It’s a dress,” she swore.

It was times like these I really wished Lia weren’t a compulsive liar.

“How are we even getting to this party?” I asked.

Lia smirked. “It just so happens I know a boy with a car.”

M
ichael’s Porsche was a remnant of his life before the program. Watching him behind the wheel, it was easy to picture the person he’d
been then, the trust-fund brat bouncing from one boarding school to another, summering in the Hamptons, jetting out to Saint Barts or Saint Lucia for a long weekend.

It was easy to picture that Michael bouncing from girl to girl.

Lia sat in the front seat beside him. She was leaning back, the leather seat caressing her cheek, her long hair whipping in the wind. She’d rolled down her window and showed no signs of
wanting to roll it back up. Every once in a while, her gaze flitted over to Michael. I wished I could read the inscrutable expression on Lia’s face. What was she thinking?

When she looked at Michael, what did she feel?

Michael kept his eyes locked on the road.

As hard as I tried not to profile the two of them, I kept thinking that Lia was the one who’d asked Michael to join us on this ill-advised outing, and that he’d agreed to help her.
Why?

Because opportunities for trouble were not to be missed. Because he owed her. Because as much as Michael enjoyed jabbing at Dean, he didn’t like watching him bleed.
The answers
flooded my brain, and Michael caught my gaze in the rearview mirror. He’d told me once that when I was profiling someone, my eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.

“We’ll want to make a quick detour,” Lia said. Michael glanced over at her, and she gestured with the tip of one dark purple nail. “Pull off at the next exit.” She
glanced back at me. “Enjoying the ride?”

She was in the front seat. I was in the back. “I’m not doing this for enjoyment,” I told her.

She let her gaze trail from me to Michael and then back again. “No,” she agreed. “You’re not doing this for enjoyment. You’re doing it for Dean.”

Lia lingered on Dean’s name just slightly longer than the other words in that sentence. Michael’s hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel. Lia wanted him to know I was doing
this for
Dean
. She wanted him dwelling on that fact.

“Gas station,” Lia directed, her hair whipping in the wind. He pulled in and threw the car into park. Lia smiled. “You two wait here.”

It was just like her to stir things up and then leave. No matter how well he masked it, I knew Michael was sitting there asking himself what—exactly—had led me to do this for Dean.
The same way I’d spent the ride wondering why Michael had said yes to Lia.

“Ta,” Lia said, sounding fairly satisfied with herself. In an impressive feat of flexibility, she snaked her body out the open window without ever opening the door.

“This is a bad idea,” I said as Lia sauntered toward the mini-mart.

“Almost certainly,” Michael agreed. From the backseat, I couldn’t see his face, but it was all too easy to imagine the unholy glint in his eyes.

“We snuck out of the house to go to a frat party,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure this
isn’t
a dress.”

Michael turned around in his seat, took in the view, and smiled. “Green’s a good color for you.”

I didn’t reply.

“Now it’s your turn to say something about the way this shirt really brings out my eyes.” Michael sounded so serious that I couldn’t help cracking a smile.

“Your shirt is blue. Your eyes are hazel.”

Michael leaned toward me. “You know what they say about hazel eyes.”

Lia opened the passenger door and flopped back into her seat. “No, Michael. What do they say about hazel eyes?” She smirked.

“Did you get what you needed?” Michael asked her.

Lia handed a brown paper bag back to me. I opened it. “Red Gatorade and cups?”

Lia shrugged. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When at a frat party, drink questionable fruit punch out of a red Solo cup.”

Lia was right about the punch. And the cups. It was dark enough in the dimly lit frat house that no one noticed that our drinks were a slightly different shade of red.

“What now?” I asked Lia over the deafening music.

She began to move her hips, and her upper body followed suit in a way that made it fairly clear that she’d excel at limbo. She eyed a trio of boys at the edge of the room and shoved
Michael toward a blond girl with red-rimmed eyes.

“Now,” she said, “we make friends.”

A profiler, an emotion reader, and a lie detector went to a party….

An hour later, Michael had identified the people in the room who seemed hardest hit by the murder that had rocked the campus. We’d found a few partyers who were upset for other
reasons—including, but not limited to, unrequited crushes and backstabbing roommates—but there was a certain combination of sorrow, fascination, and fear that Michael had zeroed in on
as marking someone a person of interest.

Unfortunately, most of our persons of interest had nothing interesting to say.

Lia had danced with at least half the boys in the room and spotted at least three dozen lies. Michael was playing sympathetic ear to the female half of the student population. I stuck to the
edges, nursing my fake punch and turning a profiler’s eye on the college students crammed into the frat house like jelly beans in a Guess How Many jar. It felt like Colonial’s entire
student body had showed up—and based on the general lack of sobriety, I was certain that none of
them
were drinking Gatorade.

“People mourn in their own ways.” A boy sidled up next to me. He was just shy of six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. There was a hint of a goatee on his chin, and he was
wearing plastic-rimmed glasses that I deeply suspected weren’t prescription. “We’re young. We’re not supposed to die. Getting wasted on cheap alcohol is their misguided
attempt at reclaiming the illusion of immortality.”

“Their attempt,” I said, trying to look like I found him intriguing—and not like I was thinking that there was a 40 percent chance he was a philosophy major and a 40 percent
chance he was pre-law. “But not yours?”

“I’m more of a realist,” the boy said. “People die. Young people, pretty people, people who have their whole lives in front of them. The only real immortality is doing
something worth remembering.”

Definitely a philosophy major. Any second, he was going to start quoting someone.

“‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’”

And there it was. The challenge to getting information out of this guy wouldn’t be getting him to talk; it would be getting him to actually say something.

“Did you know her?” I asked. “Emerson Cole?”

This guy wasn’t one of the students Michael had picked out, but I knew before he responded that the answer would be yes. He wasn’t
mourning
Emerson, but he’d known her
all the same.

“She was in my class.” The boy adopted a serious expression and leaned back against the wall.

“Which class?”

“Monsters or Men,” the boy replied. “Professor Fogle’s class. I took it last year. Now I’m the TA. Fogle’s writing a book, you know. I’m his research
assistant.”

I tried to catch Lia’s eye on the dance floor. Professor Fogle was a person of interest in Emerson’s murder. He taught a class on serial killers. And somehow, his teaching assistant
had found me.

He likes being the pursuer,
I thought, watching Lia dancing her way through the frat boys, listening for lies.
Not the pursued.

“Did you know her?” the boy asked, suddenly turning the tables on me. “Emerson. Did you know her?”

“No,” I said, unable to keep from thinking of the lengths Dean had gone just to learn her name. “I guess you could say she was a friend of a friend.”

“You’re lying.” The boy reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. It took everything in me not to pull away. “I consider myself an excellent judge of
character.”

You consider yourself excellent at everything,
I thought.

“You’re right,” I said, fairly certain those were his favorite words. “I don’t even go to school here.”

“You saw the story on the news,” the boy said, “and you decided to come check it out.”

“Something like that.” I ran through everything I knew about him and settled on playing to his supposed expertise. “I heard that the professor’s a person of interest
because of that class he’s teaching. Your class.”

The boy shrugged. “There was one lecture in particular….”

I took a step forward, and the boy’s eyes darted down to my legs. The outfit Lia had picked for me left very little to the imagination. Behind him, I caught sight of Michael, who pointed
at the boy and raised his eyebrows. I didn’t nod to tell him that I had a promising lead. I didn’t have to. Michael saw the answer in my face.

“I could show you the lecture in question.” The boy lifted his gaze from my legs to my face. “I have all of Professor Fogle’s slides on my laptop. And,” he added,
“I have a key to the lecture hall.” The boy dangled said key in front of me. “It’ll be just like sitting in on the class. Unless you’d rather stay here and drown your
sorrows with the masses.”

I met Michael’s eyes over the boy’s head.

Follow me,
I thought, hoping he’d somehow manage to read my intention in the set of my features.
This is too good to pass up.

“T
ake a seat. I’ll get the lights.” The boy’s name was Geoffrey. With a
G
. That was how he’d introduced
himself on the way to the lecture hall—like it would have been a tragedy if I’d mistakenly thought he was Jeffrey with a
J
.

I wasn’t about to turn my back on a boy who’d lured me away from a frat party, so I waited for Geoffrey with a
G
to turn the lights on, my back to the wall. The lights
flickered overhead and then the auditorium was flooded with light. Hundreds of old-fashioned wooden desks sat in perfect rows. At the front of the room, there was a stage. Geoffrey walked backward
down the aisle.

“Getting cold feet?” he asked me. “Criminology isn’t for everyone.” Most people would have stopped there. Geoffrey didn’t. “I’m
pre-law.”

“Philosophy minor?” I couldn’t help asking.

He paused and gave me an odd look. “Double major.” Eyes on mine, Geoffrey climbed onto the stage and plugged his laptop into the projector.

Who brings their laptop to a frat party?

I answered my own question:
a person who was planning on bringing a girl back here for the show all along.
I took a seat, still on guard, but less wary. Geoffrey wasn’t our UNSUB.
He was so high on himself that I couldn’t imagine him needing the validation of the kill.