The Naturals (20 page)

“What?” The sound of my mother’s name was like a bucket of ice water thrown directly into my face.

“567-3524 is the telephone number that corresponds to the word
Lorelai
. It also spells
lose-lag
,
lop-flag
, and
Jose-jag
, but the only seven-letter, single-word possibility—”

“Is
Lorelai
.” I finished Sloane’s sentence and translated the message with that meaning.

For a good time, call Lorelai. Guaranteed plus one. Kola and Thorn
.

“Plus one,” Dean read over my shoulder. “You think the UNSUB is trying to tell us that we’ve got another victim on our hands?”

For a good time, call Lorelai
.

Now I had ironclad proof that this case had something to do with my mother’s. That was why the UNSUB had wanted me to come here. He’d left me this message—complete with a “guaranteed plus one.” Someone the UNSUB had already attacked? Someone he was planning on attacking?

I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that if I didn’t solve this, if
we
didn’t solve this, someone else was going to die.

Genevieve Ridgerton. Plus one. How many people are you going to kill because of me?
I asked silently.

There was no answer, just the realization that everything was playing out exactly as the UNSUB had intended. Every
discovery I’d made had been choreographed. I was playing a part.

Unable to stop myself, I turned my attention to the last line of the message.

Kola and Thorn
.

“Symbolism?” Dean asked me, following my thoughts exactly. “Kola. Cola. Drinking. Thorn. Rose. Blood …”

“An anagram?” Sloane had that faraway look in her eye, the same one she’d gotten the day I met her, kneeling over a pile of glass. “Ankh onto lard. Hot nodal nark. Land rand hook. Oak land north.”

“North Oakland,” Dean cut in. “That’s in Arlington.”

For a good time, call Lorelai. Guaranteed plus one. North Oakland
.

“We need a list of every building on North Oakland,” I said, my body buzzing with a sudden rush of adrenaline.

“What are we looking for?” Briggs asked me.

I didn’t have an answer—a warehouse, maybe, or an abandoned apartment. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t quite rid my brain of the sound of my mother’s name, and I realized suddenly that if this killer knew me half as well as he thought he did, there was another possibility.

For a good time, call Lorelai
.

The dressing room. The blood. I swallowed. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think you might be looking for a theater.”

“W
e’ve got a body at a small, independent theater in Arlington.” Agent Briggs’s fingers curled into his palms as he delivered the news, but he fought the urge to clench his fists. “It’s not Genevieve Ridgerton.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset. Somewhere, fifteen-year-old Genevieve might still be alive. But now we were dealing with body number eight.

Our UNSUB’s “plus one.”

“Starmans, Vance, Brooks: I want the three of you to take the kids back to the house. I want one of you posted at the front door, one at the back door, and one with Cassie at all times.” Agent Briggs turned and started walking out of the club, a signal to the rest of us that he was so confident that we would follow his orders that he didn’t even need to stay here to see them through.

I didn’t need Lia or Michael here to tell me that his confidence was a lie.

“I’m going with you,” I said, following him outside. “The exact same logic that let you bring me here applies in Arlington. The UNSUB turned this into a little treasure hunt. He wants to see me follow it to the end.”

“I don’t care what he wants,” Briggs cut in. “I want to keep you safe.”

His tone was uncompromising and full of warning, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Why? Because I’m
valuable
? Because Naturals work so well as a team, and you’d hate to throw that off?”

Agent Briggs closed the space between us and brought his face down level with mine. “Do you really think that little of me?” he asked quietly. “I’m ambitious. I’m driven. I’m single-minded, but do you really think that I would knowingly put any of you in danger?”

I thought of the moment we’d met. The pen without the cap. His preference for basketball over golf.

“No,” I said. “But we both know that this case is killing you. It’s killing Locke, and now there’s a senator’s daughter involved. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have sent someone to check out that theater. We wouldn’t have discovered the body for hours, maybe days—and who knows what our UNSUB would have done to Genevieve in the meantime?

If you don’t want to use me as bait anymore, fine. But you need to take me with you. You need to take all three of us with you, because we might see something that you can’t.”

That was the whole reason Briggs had started the Naturals program. The whole reason that he’d come to twelve-year-old Dean. No matter how long they did this job, or how much training they had, these agents would never have instincts as finely honed as ours.

“Let her come.” Locke placed a hand on Briggs’s arm, and for the first time, I wondered if there was anything between the two of them other than work. “If Cassie’s old enough to play bait, she’s old enough to learn from the experience.” Locke glanced around the room—at Sloane and Dean. “They all are.”

— — —

Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to 4587 North Oakland Street. The local police were already there, but at the FBI’s insistence, they hadn’t touched a thing. Dean, Sloane, and I waited in the car with Agents Starmans and Vance until the local PD had been cleared off the scene, and then they brought us up to the third floor.

To this tiny theater’s only dressing room. I made it halfway down the hall before Agent Briggs stepped out of the room, blocking the entrance.

“You don’t need to see this, Cassie,” he said.

I could smell it—not rotten, not yet, but coppery: rust with just a hint of decay. I pushed past Briggs. He let me.

The room was rectangular. There was blood smeared across the light switch, blood pooled near the door. The entire left-hand side of the room was lined with mirrors, like a dance studio.

Like my mother’s dressing room.

My limbs felt heavy all of a sudden. My lips were numb. I couldn’t breathe, and just like that, I was right back—

The door is slightly ajar. I push it open. There’s something wet and squishy beneath my feet, and the smell
—

I grope for the light switch. My fingers touch something warm and sticky on the wall. Frantically, I search for the light switch
—

Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on.

I turn it on
.

I’m standing in blood. There’s blood on the walls, blood on my hands. A lamp lies shattered on the wood floor. A desk is upturned, and there’s a jagged line in the floorboards
.

From the knife
.

Pressure on my shoulders forced me to stop reliving the memory. Hands. Dean’s hands, I realized. He brought his face very close to mine.

“Stay in control,” he said, his voice steady and warm. “Every time you go back there, every time you see it—it’s
just blood, just a crime scene, just a body.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “That’s all it is, Cassie. That’s all you can let it be.”

I wondered which memories he relived over and over—wondered about the bodies and the blood. But right now, in this moment, I was just glad that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.

I took his advice. I forced myself to look at the mirror, smeared with blood. I could make out handprints, finger tracks, like the victim had used the mirror to pull herself along the ground after she was too weak to walk.

“Time of death was late last night,” Briggs said. “We’ll have Forensics in here to see if they can lift any fingerprints besides the victim’s off the mirror.”

“That’s not her blood.”

I glanced over at Sloane and realized that she was kneeling next to the body. For the first time, I looked at the victim. Her hair was red. She’d obviously been stabbed repeatedly.

“The medical examiner will tell you the same thing,” Sloane continued. “This woman is five feet tall, approximately a hundred and ten pounds. Given her size, we’re looking at death from exsanguination with the loss of three quarts of blood, maybe less. She’s wearing jeans and a cashmere top. Cashmere—and other forms of wool—can absorb up to thirty percent of its weight in moisture without even appearing damp. Since the deepest wounds are concentrated
over her stomach and chest areas, and her top and jeans were both tight, she’d have had to bleed
through
the fabric before dripping all over the floor.”

I looked at the woman’s clothes. Sure enough, they were soaked with blood.

“By the time her clothes were saturated enough to leave a puddle of that size on the floor over there”—Sloane gestured toward the door—“our victim wouldn’t have been conscious to fight off her attacker, let alone lead him on a merry chase through the room. She’s too small, she doesn’t have enough blood, the fabrics she’s wearing don’t expel liquid quickly enough—the numbers don’t add up.”

“She’s right.” Agent Briggs stood up from examining the floor. “There’s a knife mark on the floor over here. If it was made with a bloody knife, there would be blood embedded in the scratch, but there’s not, meaning that either the UNSUB missed at his first attempt at stabbing the woman—which certainly doesn’t seem likely, given her size and the fact that he would have had the element of surprise—or the UNSUB deliberately made these marks with a clean knife.”

I put myself in the victim’s shoes. She was eight or nine inches shorter than my mother’s five-nine, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have fought. But even if the UNSUB had come after her in the exact same way, what were the chances that the scene would have looked this much like my mother’s dressing room? The mirrors on the wall, the
blood smeared on the light switch, the dark liquid pooled by the door.

Something about this didn’t feel right.

“She’s left-handed.”

I turned to look at Dean, and he continued, “Victim’s wearing her watch on her right hand, and her manicure is more chipped on her left hand than her right,” he said. “Was your mother left-handed, Cassie?”

I shook my head and realized where he was going with this. “They wouldn’t have fought off an attacker in the same way,” I said.

Dean gave a brief nod of agreement. “If anything, we’d expect spatter on this wall.” He gestured to the plain wall opposite the mirrors. It was clean.

“The UNSUB didn’t kill her here.” Locke was the first one who said it out loud. “There’s virtually no blood pooled around the body. She was killed somewhere else.”

You killed her. You brought her here. You painted the room in blood
.

“For a good time, call Lorelai,” I murmured.

“Cassie?” Agent Locke raised an eyebrow at me. I answered the question that went along with the eyebrow raise.

“She’s just a prop,” I said, looking at the woman, wishing I knew her name, wishing that I could still make out the features of her face. “This is a set. This entire thing was
staged to look like my mother’s death. Exactly like it.” My stomach twisted sharply.

“Okay,” Agent Locke said. “So I’m the killer. I’m fixated on you, and I’m fixated on your mother. Maybe she was my first kill, but this time, it isn’t about your mother.”

“It’s about you.” Dean picked up where Agent Locke had left off. “I’m not trying to relive her death. I’m trying to force you to relive discovering her.”

The UNSUB had wanted me here. The presents, the coded message, and now this—a corpse dumped in a crime scene strikingly like my mother’s.

“Briggs.” One of Briggs’s agents—Starmans—stuck his head into the room. “Medical examiner and the forensics team are here. Do you want me to hold them off?”

Briggs looked at Dean, at me, and then at Sloane, still kneeling next to the body. We’d been careful not to touch anything or disturb the crime scene, but plopping three teenagers down in the middle of a murder investigation wasn’t exactly covert. Briggs, Locke, and their team obviously knew about us, but I wasn’t convinced that the rest of the FBI did, and Briggs confirmed that when he glanced from Starmans to Locke.

“Get them out of here, Starmans,” Briggs said. “I want you, Brooks, and Vance rotating through on Cassie’s protection detail. Director Sterling has offered some of his best
men for surveillance. They’ll keep an eye on the house from the outside, but I want one of you with Cassie at all times, and tell Judd that the house arrest is still in effect. No one leaves that house until this killer is caught.”

I didn’t fight the orders.

I didn’t fight to stay there in the room, looking for clues.

There weren’t any. This was never about me figuring out who this killer was. This was always, always about the UNSUB playing with me, forcing me to relive the worst day of my life.

Sloane slipped an arm around my waist. “There are fourteen varieties of hugs,” she said. “This is one of them.”

Locke put a hand on my shoulder and steered the two of us out of the room, Dean on our heels.

This is a game
. I heard Dean’s voice echoing through my memory.
It’s always a game
. That was what he’d told Michael, and at the time, I’d agreed. To the killer, this was a game—and suddenly, I couldn’t help thinking that the good guys might not win this one.

We might lose.

I
might lose.

I
wasn’t allowed to go into the house until Judd and the agents on my protection detail had swept it, and even then, Agent Starmans accompanied me to my bedroom.

“You okay?” he asked, giving me a sidelong glance.

“Fine,” I replied. It was a stock answer, perfected around the Sunday night dinner table. I was a survivor. Whatever life threw at me, I came out okay, and the rest of the world thought I was great. I’d been faking things for so long that, until the past few weeks with Michael, Dean, Lia, and Sloane, I’d forgotten what it was like to be real.