The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (8 page)

“It doesn’t matter.” He continued punching the bag. “It was just a game.”

Truth or Dare.
He was right. It was just a game. So why did I feel like someone had slapped me?

Dean finally stopped punching the bag. He was breathing heavily, his whole body moving with each breath. Casting a sideways glance at me, he spoke again. “You deserve better.”

“Better than a game?” I asked.
Or better than you?

Dean didn’t reply. I knew, then, that this wasn’t really about me. Dean wasn’t seeing
me
. This was about some make-believe, idealized Cassie he’d built up in his
head, something to torment himself with. A girl who
deserved
things. A girl he could never
deserve
. I hated that he was putting me up on a glass pedestal, fragile and out of reach.
Like I didn’t get a say in the matter at all.

“I have a tube of lipstick.” I threw the words at him. “Locke gave it to me. I tell myself that I keep it as a reminder, but it’s not that simple.” He didn’t
reply, so I just kept going. “Locke thought I could be like her.” That had been the whole point of her little game. “She wanted it so badly, Dean. I know she was a monster. I know
that I should hate her. But sometimes, I wake up in the morning and for just a second, I forget. And for that second, before I remember what she did, I miss her. I didn’t even know we were
related, but…”

I trailed off, and my throat tightened, because I couldn’t stop thinking that I should have known. I should have known that she was my last connection to my mother. I should have known
that she wasn’t what she seemed. I should have known, and I didn’t, and people had gotten hurt.

“Don’t make yourself say these things because I need to hear them,” Dean said hoarsely. “You’re nothing like Locke.” He wiped his palms on his jeans, and I
heard the words he wasn’t saying.

You’re nothing like me.

“Maybe,” I said softly, “to do what you and I do, we have to have a little bit of the monster in us.”

A breath caught in Dean’s throat, and for the longest time, the two of us stood there in silence: breathing in, breathing out, breathing
through
the truth I’d just
uttered.

“Your hands are bleeding,” I said finally, my voice as hoarse as his had been a moment before. “You’re hurt.”

“No, I’m…” Dean looked down, caught sight of his bleeding knuckles, and swallowed the rest of his argument.

If I hadn’t interrupted, you would have beaten your hands raw.
That knowledge spurred me into action. A minute later, I was back with a clean towel and a basin of water.

“Sit,” I said. When Dean didn’t move, I fixed him with a look and repeated the order. Physically, I resembled my mother, but when given proper motivation, I could do a decent
impression of my paternal grandmother. A person butted heads with Nonna at his or her own risk.

Taking in the stubborn set of my jaw, Dean sat down on the workout bench. He held out his hand for the towel. I ignored him and knelt, dipping the towel into the water.

“Hand,” I said.

“Cassie—”

“Hand,” I repeated. I felt him ready to refuse, but somehow, his hand found its way to mine. Slowly, I turned it over. Carefully, gingerly, I cleaned the blood from his knuckles,
coaxing the towel along sinew and bone. The water was lukewarm, but heat spread through my body as my thumb trailed lightly over his skin.

I put down his left hand and started in on the right. Neither of us said anything. I didn’t even look at him. I kept my eyes fixed on his fingers, his knuckles, the scar that ran along the
length of his thumb.

“I hurt you.” Dean broke the silence. I could feel the moment slipping away. I wanted it back, so ferociously it surprised me.

I don’t want to want this.
I wanted everything to stay the same. I could do this. I’d been doing this. Nothing had to change.

I put Dean’s hand down. “You didn’t hurt me,” I told him firmly. “You grabbed my wrist.” I pushed up my sleeve and brandished my right arm as proof. Next to
his tan, my skin was almost unbearably fair. “No marks. No bruises. Nothing. I’m fine.”

“You were lucky,” Dean said. “I was…somewhere else.”

“I know.” The night before, when Agent Sterling’s arrival had sent me into a tailspin, he’d been the one to break the hold that
somewhere else
had on me. Dean held
my gaze for a moment, and understanding flickered in his eyes.

“You blame yourself for what happened with Agent Locke.” Dean was a profiler, the same as me. He could climb into my head as easily as I could climb into his. “To the girls
Locke killed, to Michael, to me.”

I didn’t reply.

“It wasn’t your fault, Cassie. You couldn’t have known.” Opposite me, Dean swallowed hard. My eyes traced the movement of his Adam’s apple. His lips parted, and he
spoke. “My father made me watch.”

Those whispered words carried the power of a gunshot, but I didn’t react. If I said anything, if I breathed, if I so much as moved, Dean would clam up again.

“I found out what he was doing, and he made me watch.”

What were we doing, trading secrets? Trading guilt? What he’d just told me was so much bigger than anything I could have told him. He was drowning, and I didn’t know how to pull him
out. The two of us sat there in silence, him on the workout bench, me on the floor. I wanted to touch him, but I didn’t. I wanted to tell him it would be okay, but I didn’t. I pictured
the girl we’d seen on the news.

The dead girl.

Dean could whale away on a punching bag until the skin on his knuckles was gone. We could trade confessions that no one should ever have to make. But none of that could change the fact that Dean
wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep until this case was closed—and neither would I.

T
he next morning, after tossing and turning most of the night, I woke to find a face hovering three inches above my own. I jerked backward in bed,
and Sloane blinked at me.

“Hypothetically speaking,” she said, as if it were perfectly normal to bend over a bed and stare at someone until they woke up, “would constructing a model of the crime scene
we saw on the video yesterday qualify as intruding on Dean’s space?”

I opened my mouth to tell Sloane that she was intruding on
my
space, but then processed her question. “Hypothetically speaking,” I said, stifling a yawn and sitting up in bed,
“have you already reconstructed the crime scene in question?”

“That is a definite possibility.” Her hair was tousled and sticking up at odd angles. There were dark circles under her eyes.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked her.

“I was trying to figure out how the killer managed to pose the girl’s body without being seen,” Sloane said, which both was and wasn’t an answer to my question. When
Sloane got absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist. “I have a theory.”

She tugged on the ends of her white-blond hair. I could practically see her waiting for me to snap at her, to tell her that she was handling the situation with Dean
wrong
. She knew she
was different from other people, and I was realizing, bit by bit, that somewhere along the line, someone—or maybe multiple someones—had conditioned her to believe that different, her
kind of different, was wrong.

“Let me get dressed,” I told her. “Then you can tell me your theory.”

When Dean was upset, he went to the garage. When Sloane was upset, she went to the basement. I wasn’t sure she had another way of coping.

And besides,
I thought as I pulled on a T-shirt,
I’m clearly the last person who should be lecturing anyone about giving Dean space.

The basement ran the length of our Victorian-style house and extended out underneath the front and back yards. Walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling divided the space
into distinct sets, each missing a fourth wall.

“I had to make some modifications to the car specs,” Sloane said, pulling her hair into a tight ponytail as she stopped in front of a battered car parked on the lawn of a set
designed to look like a park. “Briggs had a two-door brought down a couple of weeks ago for a simulation I was running. The hood was two inches too long, and the slope wasn’t quite
steep enough, but it was nothing a carefully wielded sledgehammer couldn’t fix.”

Sloane had a willowy build and relatively little regard for recommended safety measures. The idea of her wielding a sledgehammer of any kind was terrifying.

“Cassie, focus,” Sloane ordered. “We were somewhat limited on outdoor sets, so I went with the neighborhood park scene. The grass is one and one-quarter inch tall, slightly
less uniform than the crime scene lawn. We had a nice arrangement of crash dummies to choose from, so I was able to match the victim’s height within two centimeters. The rope is the wrong
color, but it’s nylon, and the thickness should be a match.”

It was easy to forget sometimes that Sloane’s gift went far beyond the index of statistics stored in her brain. The video we’d seen of the crime scene had been taken from a distance
and lasted less than forty-five seconds, but she’d encoded every last numerical detail: the length and width of the rope tied around the victim’s neck; the exact positioning of the
body; the height of the grass; the make, model, and specs of the car.

As a result, I was looking at a nearly exact replica of what we’d seen on the film. A faceless, naked dummy was draped across the hood of the car. The dummy’s lower extremities
dangled over the front; a rope was knotted around its neck. The body was tilted slightly to one side. On the video, we’d only viewed it from the front, but now, I could actually walk around
and take in the three-sixty view. The hands were bound at the wrists, unevenly, twisting the upper body slightly to the left. I closed my eyes and pictured the girl.

You fought, didn’t you? Fought so hard that the bindings cut into your arms.

“One end of the rope was tied around her neck. The other ran up to the sunroof, down, and was anchored to something inside the car.” Sloane’s voice brought me back to the
present. I stared at the car.

“The UNSUB didn’t do all that on the front lawn of the university president’s house,” I said.

“Correct!” Sloane beamed at me. “Which means that he strung her up and
then
placed the car there. I looked up the topography of the streets surrounding the house.
There’s a road directly west that curves, but if you don’t take the curve, you go off-road and down a forested slope.”

“A forest could have provided cover,” I said, nibbling at my bottom lip as I tried to picture the UNSUB moving, quickly and quietly, still shrouded in the partial darkness of very
early morning. “Assuming he killed her in the car, he could have strung her up in the forest…”

Sloane picked up where I left off. “…pushed her to the edge of the woods, and the slope of the hill would have done the rest. The only question is how he kept the body from bouncing
around on the way down.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but someone else beat me to it.

“It was weighted.”

Sloane and I turned in unison. Agent Sterling came striding toward us, her long legs making quick work of the space. She’d traded the gray suit for a black one and the pink shirt for a
light, silvery gray, a near-perfect match for her eyes. Her hair was in a French braid, and her face was taut, like she’d fixed the braid in place so firmly it pulled her skin tight across
her skull.

She stopped, a few feet away from the scene Sloane had rigged up.

“That’s an impressive likeness,” she said, her clipped words making it clear that the statement wasn’t a compliment. “What source material were you
using?”

Sloane, completely oblivious to the steely tone in Agent Sterling’s voice, replied with a smile. “There was a cell phone video leaked online.”

Agent Sterling closed her eyes, bowed her head slightly, and inhaled. I could practically hear her counting silently to ten. When she opened her eyes, they zeroed in on me. “And what was
your involvement in all of this, Cassandra?”

I could have told her that Sloane had built the replica completely on her own, but I wasn’t about to throw my own roommate to the wolves. Stepping in between Sloane and Sterling, I drew
the agent’s ire to me.

“My involvement?” I repeated, channeling Lia—or possibly Michael. “Let’s go with
moral support
.”

Sterling pursed her lips, then turned back to Sloane. “Was there a particular reason you wanted to rebuild this crime scene?” she asked, gentling her voice slightly.

I tried to catch Sloane’s eye, telegraphing that she should not, under any circumstances, tell her what Dean had told us about his father.

Sloane met my eyes and nodded. I relaxed slightly, then Sloane turned back to Agent Sterling. “Dean told us this case looks a lot like his father’s,” she said
matter-of-factly.

Clearly, Sloane had misinterpreted my look to mean the exact opposite of what I’d been trying to communicate.

“So you rebuilt the scene to figure out if Dean was right about the similarities?” Agent Sterling asked.