The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (36 page)

“But how did you—”

“Your ankle tracker.”

“Agent Sterling said she hadn’t activated it.”

Briggs smiled wryly. “She hadn’t, but since she was on a playing-by-the-rules kick when she checked it out, she filled out all the paperwork.
I
’s were dotted.
T
’s were crossed. We had the serial number and were able to activate it remotely.”

It was ironic—I’d saved Agent Sterling’s life by breaking the rules, and she’d saved mine by following them.

Briggs helped me to my feet. “My team’s on their way in,” he said. “We left straight from the house, so we had a head start.”

We?

“Cassie.” Dean broke through the brush.

“I told him to wait at the cabin,” Briggs said to me. “I told you to wait at the cabin,” he reiterated to Dean, annoyance creeping into his voice. But he didn’t
stop me from taking three steps toward Dean, or Dean from crossing the remaining space between us in a heartbeat. The next second, he had a hand on each of my shoulders, touching me, confirming
that I was okay, that I was here, that I was
real
.

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

His hands went from my shoulders to my face. His right hand cupped the left side. His left gently bypassed my injuries, burying itself in my hair and holding my head up for me, like he thought
my neck might not be able to do the job.

“Activating the tracker was Sloane’s idea. Everyone else forgot about it. Briggs was at our place when we got the coordinates. I may have arranged it so that I was in his car when he
went to leave.”

Briggs wouldn’t have wasted even a second trying to kick him out.

“What happened?” Dean asked me, his voice thick with emotions I couldn’t quite identify. I knew he was probably asking about the abduction, about my face, about being tied up
in the cabin and scrambling for my life, but I chose to interpret the question slightly differently.

“I hit him in the head with a rock. Then I jumped on him from up in that tree.” I gestured vaguely with one hand. Dean stared at me, his expression unreadable until the ends of his
lips began to turn slowly upward.

“I was wrong,” he said, “when I said I just felt
something
.” He was breathing heavily. I couldn’t breathe at all. “When I said I wasn’t sure it
was enough.”

He was scared, like me. But he felt it, and I felt it, and
he was there
. I’d spent so long trying
not
to choose, trying
not
to feel, and in an instant, I felt
something inside of me break, like floodwaters bursting through a dam.

Dean pulled me gently toward him. His lips brushed lightly over mine. The action was hesitant, uncertain. My hands settled on the back of his neck, pulling
him
closer.

Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe when the smoke cleared, things would look different. But I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep living my life on maybes if I wanted to
live
.

I rose up on my toes, my body pressed against his, and returned the kiss, the pain in my face fading, washed away with the rest of the world, until there was only
this
moment—one
that I hadn’t thought I’d live to see.

I
spent the night at the hospital. I had a concussion, bruising on my neck from nearly being strangled, and countless cuts and abrasions on my
hands and legs. They had to pry Dean away from me.

I was alive.

The next morning, the doctors released me into Agent Briggs’s custody. We were halfway to his car before I realized that he was being too quiet.

“Where’s Agent Sterling?” I asked.

“Gone.” We climbed into the car. I gingerly pulled on my seat belt. Briggs pulled out onto the road. “Her injuries were minimal, but she’s on a mandated leave until a
Bureau psychologist gives her the green light for fieldwork.”

“Is she coming back?” My eyes stung as I asked the question. A week ago, I would have been glad to be rid of her, but now…

“I don’t know,” Briggs said, a muscle in his jaw ticking. He was the kind of person who hated admitting uncertainty. “After Redding captured her—after Dean helped
her escape—she fought to get back to active duty. She threw herself into work.”

That was then. This was now. I’d thought Agent Sterling was coming around to the idea of the program, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face when she’d asked
me
why
. Why hadn’t I listened to her? Why had I made the madman take me, too?

All she’d wanted, in those last moments, was to believe that I would make it out of that hellhole alive.

“She blames herself?” I asked—but it wasn’t really a question.

“Herself. Her father. Me.” Something in Briggs’s tone told me that Agent Sterling wasn’t the only one shouldering that guilt. “You were never supposed to be in the
field,” he told me. “None of your lives were ever supposed to be on the line.”

If the Naturals hadn’t worked this case, Christopher Simms would have killed that girl. If I hadn’t gone with Agent Sterling, she’d be dead. No matter how much what I’d
been through haunted Agent Briggs, I knew in my gut that at the end of the day, he would be able to live with the risks of this program. I wasn’t sure that Agent Sterling could.

“Where are we going?” I asked when Briggs drove past our exit on the highway.

He didn’t say anything for several minutes. Mile blurred into mile. We ended up at an apartment complex across the street from the prison.

“There’s something I want you to see.”

Webber’s apartment had two bedrooms. His life was highly segmented. He slept in one room—hospital corners on his bed, blackout curtains on the windows—and he worked in the
other.

Briggs’s team was cataloging evidence when we walked in: notebooks and photographs, weapons, a computer. Hundreds—if not thousands—of evidence bags told the story of
Webber’s life.

The story of his relationship with Daniel Redding.

“Go ahead,” Briggs told me, nodding toward the carefully documented bags. “Just wear gloves.”

He hadn’t brought Dean to this crime scene. He hadn’t brought Michael or Lia or Sloane.

“What am I looking for?” I asked, slipping on a pair of gloves.

“Nothing,” Briggs said simply.

You brought me here to look at this,
I thought, slipping back into profiling mode without even thinking about it.
Why?

Because this wasn’t about processing evidence. It was about me and what I’d been through out in the woods. I would always have questions about Locke, the way that Dean would always
have questions about his father, but this UNSUB—this man who’d tried to snuff out my life—didn’t have to be some larger-than-life figure, another ghost to haunt my
dreams.

Hospital corners and hunting rifles.

Briggs had brought me here so that I could understand—and move on, as much as a person
could
move on after something like this.

It took me hours to go through it all. There was a picture of Emerson Cole tucked into the side of a journal. Webber’s writing—
all capital letters, angled to one
side
—marked the pages, telling me his story in horrific, nauseating detail. I read it, sifting through those details, absorbing them and building a profile.

Six months ago, you transferred onto Redding’s cell block. You were fascinated with him, mesmerized by the way he played the other prisoners, the guards. The prison was the only place
you had any power, any control, and when another rejection came in from the police academy, that wasn’t enough anymore.

You wanted a different kind of power. Intangible. Undeniable. Eternal.

Webber had become obsessed with Redding. He’d thought he was successfully hiding that obsession until Redding had offered him a very special job.

He recognized your potential. You needed to prove yourself—to prove that you were smarter and better and
more
than everyone who looked down on you, rejected you, and shoved you
to the side.

Redding had asked Webber to do two things: keep tabs on Agent Briggs and find Dean. Webber had proven himself on both fronts. He’d followed Agent Briggs. He’d found the house where
Dean was living. He’d reported back.

That was the turning point. That was the moment when you knew that to eclipse that mewling little brat in Redding’s eyes, you’d have to do more.

There was a newspaper article folded up and stuck between two of the pages in the journal—an article Webber had given Daniel Redding to read, then hidden away in his work room.

An article about FBI Special Agent Lacey Locke. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A killer who was one of the Bureau’s own.

Shortly after that, Redding had said that you were ready. You were his student. He was your master. And if there were others competing for your role, well, you’d take care of them in
time.

I flipped from one page to the next and back again, rereading, building a time line in my mind. Redding had begun laying the groundwork for this series of “tests” for his
apprentices—or, as Webber liked to refer to it,
what would be
—the day after he’d read the article about the Locke murders.

Don’t you think it’s weird?
I’d asked what seemed like an eternity ago.
Six weeks ago, Locke was reenacting my mother’s murder, and now someone’s out
there playing copycat to Dean’s dad?

Sitting there, re-creating the series of events that had led to the murder of Emerson Cole, I realized that it wasn’t weird. It wasn’t a coincidence.

Daniel Redding had started this
after
reading about the Locke murders. Dean understood killers because of his father; it went without saying that Daniel Redding understood them, too. And
if he understood Locke—what drove her, what motivated her, what she wanted—if he’d had Webber keeping tabs on Dean, if he knew who I was and what had happened to my mother…

Locke killed those women for me, and Redding stepped up to the challenge.

There were still so many questions: how Redding had known who I was; how he’d drawn the connections he must have drawn to figure out what had happened with Locke; what—if
anything—he knew about my mother’s murder. But Webber’s journal didn’t hold those answers.

Once the
test
started, Webber’s writing became less focused on Redding.

You worshipped him—but then you became him. No, you became something
better
. Something new.

Five people were dead. By his own confession in these pages, Webber had killed four of them: Emerson, the professor, and both of his competitors. The original plan—laid out by Redding to
each of the three, with Webber enabling the communication—had been for each of the three to choose one victim and kill one of the others’.

In your mind, there was never room for any others.

There were pages in this journal describing Webber’s fantasies of what it would have been like if he’d been the one to kill Trina Simms. He’d pictured it, he’d imagined
it, and Clark had died for the sin of not
doing it right
. Christopher’s days were numbered the second he got caught.

And then there was one.

“Cassie?” Briggs said my name, and I looked up at him from my spot on the floor. “You okay?”

I’d been here for hours. Briggs had achieved his objective: when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t caught back up in the horror of being hunted like an animal. I didn’t feel Webber
looming over me, or his arm cutting off the air in my throat. Those memories weren’t gone. They would never be gone. But for minutes, hours, maybe even days at a time, I could forget.

“Yeah,” I said, closing the journal and tearing the gloves off first one hand and then the other. “I’m good.”

By the time we got back to the house, it was almost dark. Lia, Dean, and Sloane were sitting on the front porch, waiting for me. Michael was taking a sledgehammer to the
cracked windows of the junkyard car.

Every time he took a swing, every piece of glass he shattered, I felt something shattering inside me.

He knew.

From the moment Dean had come back to the house, from the moment Michael had laid eyes on him, he knew.

I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t plan it.

Michael looked up and caught sight of me, as if my thoughts had somehow made their way from my mind to his. He studied me, the way he had the first day we’d met, before I’d known
what he could do.

“That’s it, then?” he asked me.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My eyes darted toward the porch. Toward Dean.

Michael gave me a careless smile. “You win some, you lose some,” he said with a shrug. Like I’d never been anything more than a game. Like I didn’t matter.

Because he wouldn’t
let
me matter anymore.

“It’s just as well,” he continued, each word a calculated shot to my heart. “Maybe if Redding’s getting some, he’ll finally loosen up.”

I knew, objectively, what this was.
If you can’t keep them from hitting you, you
make
them hit you.
That didn’t stop his words from cutting into me. The bruises and
scrapes, the pounding in my head—it all faded away under Michael’s casual cruelty, his utter indifference.