The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (30 page)

“Come on,” I said, hooking an arm through hers and making her stand up. “Let’s go fill Agent Sterling in.”

Sloane looked like she might argue, but Lia preempted it.

“It’s always the little things,” she told Sloane gently. “A tenth of a second, a single piece of information—you never know what will make a difference.”

A second after we made it to the first floor, the front door slammed. For a moment, Lia, Sloane, and I froze, then we made a beeline for the entryway. Sterling and Michael met us on the way
there. We all came to a standstill at once.

Dean was taking off his coat. Briggs had his arms folded over his chest, waiting. Clearly, he’d expected the rush.

“Anything?” he asked Lia.

“Nothing other than the obvious: he’s been dancing a long, slow waltz around the truth.”

“You?” Sterling asked Briggs.

“Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

“Surprise me,” Sterling said dryly.

“We have DNA.” Briggs allowed himself a brief smile—the FBI agent’s version of dancing a jig. “Trina Simms got our UNSUB with her fingernails.”

Was it normal for an UNSUB to leave no evidence behind at the first two crime scenes and let his victim scratch him at the third? After all, practice made perfect—and Daniel Redding struck
me as the type who valued perfection, planning, and attention to detail.

“DNA doesn’t do us much good without a suspect to match it to,” Dean said under his breath.

Michael arched an eyebrow. “I’m guessing that means you two didn’t get anything out of ye olde mastermind?”

That was the first time in my memory that Michael hadn’t referred to Daniel Redding either as Dean’s father or by name. It was a subtle kindness coming from a boy who frequently
called Dean by the last name he shared with the monster, just to get under his skin.

“My father,” Dean said, negating Michael’s efforts, “refused to see us. We forced a meeting, and he wouldn’t talk.”

“That’s not true.” Lia shot Dean an apologetic look, but preemptively waved off any protests. “He did say something.”

“Nothing that bears repeating.” Dean met Lia’s eyes, daring her to call him a liar again.

“Nothing you want to repeat,” she corrected quietly.

Briggs cleared his throat. “Redding said that he didn’t feel like talking today. He said he might feel like talking tomorrow. We’ve got him in complete isolation—no
visitors, no phone calls, no mail, no contact with other prisoners. But we have no idea what instructions he’s already communicated to his partner.”

He might feel like talking tomorrow.
Briggs’s words echoed in my mind, and I whipped my head to look at Dean. “You think that someone else is going to die tomorrow.”

That was just Redding’s style, to refuse to talk until he had something else to gloat about. The refusal to see Dean, though—that would have surprised me if I hadn’t just seen
Agent Sterling clueing Daniel Redding in to the fact that his son had betrayed him. Dean’s father would want to punish him for that, almost as much as he wanted to punish Agent Sterling for
having the gall not just to live, but to steal from him the one thing that mattered most.

His son.

“What else?” I asked. I knew that Dean and Briggs were leaving something out. Redding wouldn’t have let Dean walk out of that room without doing something to reestablish his
power—to hurt Dean, to make him suffer for betraying his father.

Briggs exhaled loudly. Then he turned to me. “There was one other thing.”

“No.”
Dean’s objection was immediate and absolute.

“Dean—”

“I said no.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Briggs told Dean. “The hardest part of this job isn’t being willing to put yourself on the line—your safety, your sanity,
your reputation. The hardest part is letting people you care about do the same.”

Dean turned toward the kitchen. I thought he would walk away, but he didn’t. He stood there, his back to the rest of us, as Agent Briggs told us about Redding’s parting shot.

“He said that if we wanted to talk to him sooner, rather than later, that Dean wouldn’t come alone next time.”

“He wasn’t alone,” I replied, wondering if Redding had been angling for another visit from Sterling.

“If you’re going to tell them, you may as well tell them exactly what he said.” Dean turned back around. He tried to look at Michael, at Sterling, at Briggs—anywhere but
at me.

He failed. “He said,
Next time, bring the girl.
”

YOU

A mistake.

That’s what this is. Not the fact that Trina Simms is dead—that was part of the plan. But leaving evidence behind?

Sloppy. Stupid. Unworthy.

It won’t happen again. You’ll make sure of that. There won’t be any more mistakes.

Hidden in the shadows, you slide your finger along the flat side of the knife. You cut the perfect length of rope. The brand is heavy in your hand. You swing it once, through the air, like a
baseball bat. You imagine the satisfying thunk of metal hitting skull—

No.

That’s not how it’s done. That’s not what you’re going to do in five…four…three…two…

“What are you doing here?”

You take a swing with the brand. Down your quarry goes, and you don’t regret it.

Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.

No one said you couldn’t knock them out first.

You toss the brand to the ground and take out the zip ties. Emerson Cole was an assignment, but this—this is going to be fun.

“H
ow does Redding even know there
is
a girl?” Director Sterling paced the length of the kitchen, past Briggs, past his daughter,
past all of us until he came to a stop in front of Dean.

“He asked,” Dean answered flatly. “I told him there was no one.”

From the kitchen table, Judd kept watch over Director Sterling as the director’s weighty gaze settled on Dean.

“So either Redding didn’t believe you, he knows something, or he’s playing the odds.” The director considered those possibilities. “I don’t like the idea of
bringing any of the others into an interrogation. If the wrong people got wind of it…” He trailed off.

You already brought Dean into an interrogation,
I thought,
but if anyone found out you’d used Dean to get information out of his father, you could explain.

“Can’t say I’m too fond of the idea of putting any of you in a room with a serial killer, either,” Judd commented, nursing his coffee. “Not that anyone
asked.”

“However,”
the director continued, ignoring Judd, “I could put another call into the warden. If we can install our own people as security and clear the cell block of
prisoners and guards, I’m willing to entertain the idea of sending one of the girls in.”

“Me,” I said, speaking for the first time since Briggs had told us about Redding’s request. “It has to be me.”

I was the one who’d gone with Dean to Broken Springs. If the UNSUB had managed to communicate that to Redding, I was the one he wanted.

“I could do it.” Lia didn’t bother prefacing those words with anything else. “Daniel said he’d talk if you brought the girl. He never said which one.”

“Lia.” Dean said her name quietly. She turned around in her seat to face him. “If I don’t want Cassie in a room with him, what makes you think I would be any happier
putting you on the chopping block?”

“I can take care of myself.” Lia sounded remarkably like Dean—the words were simple and soft, with none of her normal flare.

“And I can’t?” I asked, insulted.

“Maybe I should go,” Sloane said thoughtfully.

“No,” everyone in the room—including the director—said at once.

“I know jujitsu,” Sloane cajoled. “And besides, from what I’ve gathered, this particular witness specializes in mind games and subtle suggestion, and that won’t
work on me. I get numbers and facts and the literal meanings of words. Subtle gets lost in translation.”

No one could argue with Sloane’s logic.

“I can probably offend him without even trying to!” Sloane was sounding altogether too enthusiastic now. “If things get too intense, I’ll tell him some statistics about
domesticated ferrets.”

“That’s…errr…a very generous offer, Sloane, but I’d prefer you stay behind the scenes.” The director’s voice came out somewhat strangled. “There’s
a two-way mirror. Once we’ve secured the area, there’s no reason the rest of you can’t observe.”

“I can think of a few.” Judd set his coffee down.

“With all due respect, Judd,” the director replied tightly, “this is FBI business.” And Judd wasn’t FBI. After a tense moment of silence, our caretaker stood and
walked out of the room.

“Cassie, Dean, and Briggs will go in,” the director declared in the resulting silence.

“Why?” Dean took a step toward the director. “Why send anyone in? We haven’t gotten a thing out of him, and we’re not going to. He’s going to play with us,
and someone else is going to die. We’re wasting time. We’re doing exactly what he wants.”

“He’s on edge.” Agent Sterling responded before the director could. “He’s a narcissist. If we give him enough rope, he’ll hang himself, Dean.”

“I guess that’s why he was so easy to catch the first time,” Dean retorted.

“I went to see him. I riled him up, and that’s going to work to our advantage.” Agent Sterling took a step toward Dean. “He doesn’t just want to win this game. He
wants to win in a way that haunts us—and that means that if he thinks he’s got the upper hand, he
will
tell us something. There
will
be clues, because he will want me up
at night five years from now, wondering why I didn’t see it.”

“You won’t have to see it,” Michael interjected. He looked at Lia. “If we’re on the other side of that glass,
we
will.”

“What happened to keeping us out of this case?” Dean appealed to Agent Sterling, his voice hard. “Wasn’t that what you wanted—for us to be
normal
and
safe
?”

That was a low blow.

“If I could give you
normal
, I would.” Agent Sterling’s voice was sharp. “But I can’t, Dean. I can’t erase the things that have happened to you. I
can’t make you—any of you—
want
normal. I tried to keep you out of it. I’ve tried treating you all like kids, and
it doesn’t work
. So, yes, I’m an
enormous hypocrite, but if the five of you can help us stop that man from taking even one more life, I’m not going to fight you on it.” She looked at her father. “I’m
done
fighting you on it.”

The interrogation room was smaller than it had looked on-screen and more claustrophobic than it had felt from the other side of the mirror. Dean, Briggs, and I arrived first.
One of the agents on Briggs’s team, who I recognized as Agent Vance, went to get Dean’s father from the prison officials. Once the director had pointed out that Redding’s
involvement in this case had happened under the warden’s nose, the warden had been accommodating—a nice contrast to what Agent Sterling and I had dealt with on our
last
visit.

I took a seat at the table and waited for Dean and Briggs to sit down beside me.

They stayed standing, hovering over my shoulder like a pair of Secret Service agents flanking the president. The door to the room opened with a creak, and it took everything in me not to turn
and track Daniel Redding’s progress from the door to the table. Agent Vance fixed the chains, tested them, and then stepped back.

“So,” Redding said, eyes only for me. “You’re the girl.”

There was a musical quality to his voice that hadn’t come across in the recordings.

“You’re quiet,” Redding commented. “And pretty.” He flashed me a subtle smile.

“Not that pretty,” I said.

He tilted his head to the side. “You know, I think you believe that.” He paused. “Modesty is such a refreshing trait for someone in your generation. In my experience, most
young people
over
estimate their traits and abilities. They get too confident too quickly.”

The DNA under Trina Simms’s nails,
I thought. There was no way that Redding could know about that—and yet, I was aware that there were two layers to this conversation: the
obvious and what lay underneath.

Agent Briggs put a hand on my shoulder, and I turned my attention to the list of questions in front of me—Agent Sterling’s list.

“I have some questions,” I said. “If I ask them, will you answer them?”

“I’ll do you one better,” Redding told me. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

We’d see about that. Or, more specifically,
Lia
would see about that from her position behind the two-way mirror.

“Let’s talk about your partner,” I said.

“
Partner
isn’t the word I would have chosen.”

I knew that—and I’d used it on purpose. Agent Sterling had suggested that it was to our benefit if Redding thought he was in charge. Let him think me an ordinary girl, not an
adversary.

“What word would you use?”