The Naturals (18 page)

Sloane—who was the only person in the house I couldn’t justify throwing out of my room, since it was her room, too—had pulled Cassie babysitting duty when I’d tried to sneak away for some time alone.

“Morticians?” I repeated. I eyed her suspiciously. “Did someone give you coffee?”

Sloane very pointedly did not answer the coffee question. “I thought you could use a distraction.”

I plopped down on my bed. “Don’t you have any more cheerful statistics?”

Sloane frowned in contemplation. “Are balloon animals cheerful?”

Oh dear lord
.

“Balloonists are more likely than other circus performers to suffer from subconjunctival hemorrhages.”

“Sloane, subconjunctival hemorrhages are not cheerful.”

She shrugged. “If you had a balloon, I could make you a dachshund.”

Another few days of this and I might willingly serve myself up to the UNSUB. Who would have thought my fellow Naturals would take Briggs’s decree that I not be left alone so seriously? Dean and Michael could barely stand to be in the same room with each other, but the second I stepped out of my bedroom, one or both of them would be there waiting for me. The only thing that could have made this whole situation more awkward was if Lia hadn’t magnanimously decided to stay out of the fray.

“Knock, knock!”

So much for Lia’s magnanimousness.

“What do you want?” I asked her, not bothering to sugarcoat my words.

“My, but we’re cranky today.”

If looks could kill, Lia would have been dead on the floor,
and I would have been on trial for murder.

“I suppose,” Lia said, with the air of someone making a most generous concession, “that the argument you had with Dean about his father wasn’t entirely your fault, and since this whole hair-in-a-box thing seems to have given him a renewed purpose in life, I’m not morally obligated to make you miserable anymore.”

I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Thank you?”

“I thought you could use a distraction.” Lia smiled. “If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s distractions.”

The last time I’d let Lia dictate our plans, I’d ended up kissing Dean
and
Michael in a span of less than twenty-four hours, but after three days of house arrest and way too many statistics about dachshunds, I was desperate.

“What kind of distraction did you have in mind?”

Lia tossed a bag on my bed. I opened it.

“Did you rob a cosmetics store?”

Lia shrugged. “I like makeup—and nothing says distraction like a makeover. Besides …” She reached in the bag and pulled out a lipstick. Smiling wickedly, she uncapped it and twisted the bottom. “This is definitely your color.”

I eyed the lipstick. The color was dark—halfway between red and brown. Way too sexy for me—and strangely familiar.

“What do you say?” Lia didn’t actually wait for an answer. She pushed me into a sitting position on the bed. She leaned
into my personal space and tilted my chin back. And then she dragged the lipstick across my lips.

“Kleenex!” Lia barked.

Sloane supplied the Kleenex, a goofy grin on her face.

“Blot,” Lia ordered.

I blotted.

“I knew that would be a good color on you,” Lia told me, her voice smug and self-satisfied. Without another word, she turned her attention to my eyes. When she was finally finished, I pushed her off me and walked over to the mirror.

“Oh.” I couldn’t keep the sound from escaping my mouth. My blue eyes looked impossibly big. My lashes had been thoroughly mascara-ed, and the color on my lips was dark against my porcelain skin.

I looked like my mother. My features, the way they came together on my face—everything.

Blue dress. Blood. Lipstick
.

A series of images flashed through my mind, and I realized with sudden clarity why the color of this lipstick had seemed so familiar. I turned back to the bed and scavenged through the bag of makeup until I found it. I turned the tube upside down, looking for the color’s name.

“
Rose Red
,” I read, swallowing after I said the words. I turned to Lia. “Where did you get this?”

“What does it matter?”

My knuckles went white around the tube. “Where did you get this, Lia?”

“Why do you want to know?” she countered, folding her arms over her chest and examining her nails.

“I just do, okay?” I couldn’t tell her more than that—and I shouldn’t have had to. “Please?”

Lia gathered the makeup off the bed and made her way to the door. She gave me one of those smiles that wasn’t a smile. “I bought it, Cassie. With money. As part of our fine system of capitalistic exchange. Happy?”

“The color—” I started to say.

“It’s a popular color,” Lia cut in. “If you bribe Sloane with some java, she could probably tell you exactly how many millions of tubes of it they sell every year. Seriously, Cassie. Don’t ask why. Just say thank you.”

“Thanks,” I said softly, but I couldn’t help feeling that the universe was mocking me, and I couldn’t keep from looking down at the tube in my hand and thinking, over and over again, that once upon a time, I’d known someone else who was partial to Rose Red lipstick.

My mother.

“Hold still.”

The girl whimpers, her eyes filling with tears, her hands pulling at the bindings. You backhand her, and she falls to the ground. There’s no pleasure to be had in this.

She’s not Lorelai
.

She’s not Cassie
.

She’s not even a proper imitation. But you had to do something. You had to show the people closing ranks around Cassie what happens when they try to stand between you and what is yours.

“Hold still,” you say again
.

This time, the girl obeys. You don’t kill her. You don’t even hurt her
.

Not yet
.

I
woke midmorning to slanting rays of light breaking through my bedroom window. Sloane was nowhere to be seen. After doing a cursory check of the hallway, I slunk into the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

Solitude. For now.

I pulled the shower curtain, stretching it across the length of the tub. With a twist of my wrist, I turned on the spray, as hot as it would go. The sound of water drumming against the porcelain tub was soothing and hypnotic. I sank down to the floor, pulling my knees to my chest.

Six days ago, a serial killer had contacted me, and my only reaction had been to crawl into the UNSUB’s head, calm and cool. But last night, wearing the same shade of lipstick as my mother had undone me.

It was a coincidence
, I told myself.
A horrible, twisted, untimely coincidence that within days of being contacted by a
killer who might have murdered my mother, Lia had made me up to look just like her
.

“It’s a popular color. Just say thank you.”

Steam built up in the air around me, reminding me that I was wasting hot water, a cardinal sin in a house with five teenagers. I stood and swiped my arm across the mirror, leaving a streak on its steam-covered surface.

I stared at myself, banishing the image of Rose Red on my lips. This was me. I was fine.

Stripping off my pajamas, I stepped into the shower, letting the spray hit me straight in the face. The flashback came suddenly and without warning.

Fluorescent lights flicker overhead. On the ground, my shadow flickers, too
.

The door to her dressing room is slightly ajar
.

I concentrated on the sound of the water, the feel of it on my skin, pushing back against the memories.

The smell
—

Abruptly, I turned off the shower. Wrapping a towel around my torso, I stepped out onto the bath mat, dripping wet. I combed my fingers through my hair and turned to the sink.

That was when I heard the scream.

“Cassie!” It took me a moment to pick out my name, and another after that to recognize that Sloane was the one yelling. Wearing only a towel, I rushed across to our room.

“What? Sloane, what is it?”

She was still clad in her pajamas. White-blond hair stuck to her forehead. “It had my name on it,” she said, her voice strained. “It’s not stealing if it has my name on it.”

“What had your name on it?”

With shaking hands, she held out a padded envelope.

“Who did you
not steal
this from?” I asked.

Sloane looked distinctly guilty. “One of the agents downstairs.”

They’d been screening all of our mail, not just mine.

Angling my head so that I could see what was inside the envelope, I realized why Sloane had screamed.

There, inside the envelope, was a small, black box.

— — —

Once the box had been removed from the envelope, there was no question that it matched the first one: the ribbon, the bow, the white card with my name written on it in careful, not quite cursive script. The only difference was the size—and the fact that this time, the UNSUB had used Sloane to get to me.

You know the FBI has me under guard. You want me anyway
.

“You didn’t open the box.” Agent Briggs sounded surprised. About ten seconds after I’d realized what was inside the envelope, Agents Starmans and Brooks had burst into the bedroom. They’d called Locke and Briggs. I’d had just
enough time to get dressed before the dynamic duo had arrived—with another, older man in tow.

“I didn’t want to compromise the physical evidence,” I said.

“You did the right thing.” The man who’d come with Briggs and Locke spoke for the first time. His voice was gruff, a perfect match for his face, which was weatherworn and suntanned. I put his age at somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five. He wasn’t tall, but he had a commanding presence, and he looked at me like I was a child.

“Cassie, this is Director Sterling.” Locke made the introduction, but the things she didn’t say numbered in the dozens.

For instance, she didn’t say that this man was their boss.

She didn’t say that he was the person who’d signed off on the Naturals program.

She didn’t say that he’d been the one to rake Briggs over coals for using Dean on active cases.

She didn’t have to.

“I want to be there when you open it.” I addressed the words to Agent Locke, but Director Sterling was the one who replied.

“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” he said.

This was a man with children, maybe even grandchildren, even if he was a higher-up at the FBI. I could use that.

“I’m a target,” I said, allowing my eyes to go wide. “Keeping
this information from me makes me vulnerable. The more I know about this UNSUB, the safer I am.”

“We can keep you safe.” The director spoke like a man used to having his words taken as law.

“That’s what Agent Briggs said four days ago,” I said, “and now this guy is coming at me through Sloane.”

“Cassie—” Agent Briggs started to talk to me in the same voice the director used—like I was a little kid, like they hadn’t brought me here to solve cases in the first place.

“The UNSUB struck again, didn’t he?” My question—which was a guess, really—was met with absolute silence.

I was right.

“This UNSUB wants me.” I worked my way through the logic. “You tried to keep him away from me. Whatever’s in that box, it’s a step up from what the UNSUB sent me last time. A warning for you, a present for me. If he thinks you’re keeping it from me, things are only going to get worse.”

The director nodded to Agent Briggs. “Open the box.”

Briggs put on a pair of gloves. He pulled on the edge of the ribbon, and the bow came undone. He set the card to the side and lifted the lid off the box.

White tissue paper.

Carefully, he opened the tissue paper. A ringlet of hair lay in the box. It was blond.

“Open the card,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.

Briggs opened the envelope and pulled out a card. Like
the last one, it was white, elegant, but plain. Briggs opened the card, and a photograph fell out.

I caught sight of the girl in the picture before they could obscure it from me. Her wrists were bound behind her body. Her face was swollen, and dried blood had crusted around her scalp. Her eyes were filled with tears and so much fear that I could
hear
her screaming behind the duct-tape gag.

She had dirty blond hair and a baby face.

“She’s too young,” I said, my stomach twisting. The girl in the picture was fifteen, maybe sixteen—and none of the UNSUB’s other victims had been minors.

This girl was younger than me.

“Briggs.” Locke picked up the photo and held it out to him. “Look at the newspaper.”

I’d been so fixated on the girl’s face that I hadn’t noticed the newspaper carefully poised against her chest.

“She was alive this time yesterday,” Briggs said, and that was when I knew—why this present was different from the last one, why the hair in the box was blond.

“You took her,” I said softly, “because they took me.”

Locke caught my eye, and I knew she’d heard me. She
agreed
with me. Guilt rose like nausea in the back of my throat. I pushed it down. I could process this later. I could hate the UNSUB—and myself—for the blood and bruises on this girl’s face later. But right now, I had to hold it together.

I had to
do
something.

“Who is she?” I asked. If taking this girl was the killer’s way of lashing out because the FBI had tried to keep him from me, she wouldn’t be just anyone. This girl didn’t fit with the victimology of the UNSUB’s other victims, but if there was one thing I knew about this killer, it was that he always chose his targets for a reason.

“Ms. Hobbes, I appreciate your personal interest in this case, but that information is above your pay grade.”

I gave the director a look. “You don’t pay me. And if the killer is watching, and you insist on keeping me locked up out of reach, it’s going to get worse.”

Why couldn’t he see that? Why couldn’t Briggs? It was
obvious
. The FBI wanted to keep me out of this, but the killer wanted me in.