The Naturals (24 page)

“I’m sorry—”

“‘Sorry’ never did anything!
Lorelai
was sorry. She was sorry, but she had to go, and she left me there alone.” Locke’s voice broke, but the fury was still clear in every word. “You were supposed to kill the girl. It was supposed to be
us
, Cassie. You. And me. But
you left
!”

She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She didn’t see
me
when her wild eyes landed on mine. The blade in her hand gleamed. The blood dripped onto the floor. I had two seconds, maybe three.

“What do you mean, I left?” I asked, hoping my words would break through the fog in her brain, bring her back to the here and now. “Left where?”

Locke stopped. She hesitated. She looked at me. She saw me. She got ahold of herself, and with her voice still full of venom, she advanced. “Lorelai left. She was eighteen, and I was twelve. She was supposed to protect me. She was supposed to watch out for me. At night, when Daddy went away and the monster came out to play, she made him angry. She made him angry on purpose so he’d hit her instead of me. She said she wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” Locke paused. “She lied.”

We’d known that the UNSUB was fixated on my mother. We just hadn’t known why.

“She was my sister, and she just left me there. She knew what he was like after Mama left. She knew what he would do to me once she was gone, and she left anyway. Because of
you
. Because Daddy was right, and Lorelai was a little whore. She did all the wrong things, and when I found out she was pregnant with that air force boy’s baby …” Locke was completely caught up in the memory. I eyed her gun on the floor, wondering if I could reach it in time. “I thought that Daddy would kill her if he knew.
I
wasn’t even supposed to know, but I found out, and he found out, and he wasn’t even angry! He didn’t slit her throat, didn’t carve up her pretty little face until the boys didn’t want her anymore. She was pregnant, and he was happy.

“And then she left. In the middle of the night. She woke me up, and she kissed me, and she told me she was leaving. She told me she wasn’t ever coming back, that she wouldn’t raise a baby in this house, that our daddy wouldn’t ever lay a finger on
you
.” Locke’s knuckles—my aunt’s knuckles—tightened around the base of the blade. Her hand shook. “I begged her to take me with her, but she said she couldn’t. That he’d come after us. That she didn’t have any legal right to take me. That it would be
too hard
. She left me there to rot, and once she was gone, the only person left for him to punish was me.”

Don’t do anything else that I’ll be forced to make you regret
.

You’ll only be hurting yourself
.

I won’t have you sniveling on the floor like a common whore
.

My mother had never talked about her family. She’d never mentioned an abusive father or an absent mother. She’d never mentioned a little sister, but now I could
see
their family unit: the bruises and the welts and the terror, the Daddy-monster, the little sister that she couldn’t save, and the baby that she could.

“When people ask me why I do what I do,” the woman who was that baby sister said, “I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered. I’d finally gotten out of that house. I went to college, and I spent years looking for my big sister. At first, I just wanted to find her. I just wanted to be with her—and with you. If she’d taken me with you, I could have helped! You would have loved me. I would have loved you.” Locke’s voice got very soft, and I realized that this was a scenario she’d played out in her head, growing up in that hellhole. She’d thought about my mom, and she’d thought about me before she ever met me, before she ever knew my name.

“She shouldn’t have left you there.” I braved saying the words because they felt true. Locke was just a kid when my mother left, and my mom had never even looked back. She’d raised me on the road, moving from city to city, never letting it slip that she had a family out there, just like she’d never mentioned my dad.

My whole life, we’d been running from something, and I didn’t even know it.

“She never should have left me there,” Locke repeated. “Eventually, I stopped dreaming about finding her and being a family again, and I started dreaming about finding her and hurting her, the way Daddy hurt me. Making her pay for leaving me there. Peeling her face off until no one thought she was the pretty one, until just looking at her made
you
scream.”

The dressing room. The blood. The smell
 …

“But by the time I found her—by the time I found you—it was too late. She was already dead. She was gone, and it wasn’t fair.
I
was supposed to kill her.
I
was supposed to be the one.”

My aunt hadn’t killed my mother—because someone else had gotten there first.

“When I found out that she was dead, and you were gone, when I found out that they’d sent you to live with your
father’s
family—I was your family, too! I thought about taking you. I even went to Colorado, but when I got there, there was this junkie at my motel. She was cheap and loose and dirty, and her hair was the exact right shade of red. I killed her, and I said, ‘How do you like that, Lore?’ I carved her up until I could imagine Lorelai’s face underneath, and God, it felt good.” She paused. “It was the sweetest, you know. The
first time. It always is. And after the first time, you always need more.”

“Is that why you joined the FBI?” I asked. “Lots of travel, easy access, the perfect cover?”

Agent Locke took a step toward me. Every muscle in her body was taut. For a moment, I thought that she would hit me—again and again and again.

“No,” she said. “That’s not why I joined.”

When people ask me why I do what I do, I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered
.

Locke’s words came back to me then, and I realized that she’d been telling the truth.

“You joined the FBI because you wanted to find my mother’s killer.”

Not because she was upset that my mom was dead. Because she’d wanted to be the one to kill her.

“I changed my name. I studied. I planned. I passed the psych exams with flying colors. Even once Briggs and I started working together and he brought me in on the Naturals program, no one really saw me. They only saw what I wanted them to see. Lia never caught me in a lie. Michael never saw a hint of unsavory emotion. And Dean—I was like family to him.”

Hearing Dean’s name made my eyes dart over to his body. He still wasn’t moving—but Michael was. His eyes
were open. He was bleeding. He couldn’t walk, he couldn’t even crawl, but he was pulling himself slowly across the floor—to his gun.

Locke moved to follow my gaze, but I stopped her.

“It isn’t the same,” I said, my voice decisive and calm.

“What isn’t?” Locke—no, her name wasn’t really Locke, not if she was my mother’s sister—said.

I had less than a second to think of an answer, but growing up the daughter of a woman who made her living by pretending to be psychic hadn’t just taught me the BPEs. For better or worse, I’d learned to put on a show, so I said the one thing I could think of that would keep Lacey
Hobbes
’s attention focused solely and 100 percent on me.

“You tried to restage my mother’s murder, but you got it wrong. What you’re doing to these women isn’t the same as what
I
did to my mother.”

The woman in front of me had wanted to kill my mother, but she’d also desperately wanted her acceptance. She’d wanted to be a part of a family, and she’d brought me here tonight with some twisted hope that I could be that for her. She’d enjoyed being my mentor. She wanted me to be like her.

Now my job was to convince her that I was.

“My mother didn’t protect you,” I said, mirroring the rage and desperation and hurt I saw on her face. “She didn’t
protect me, either. There were men. She didn’t love them. She didn’t stay with them. She didn’t say a word when they took their frustrations out on me. She was weak. She was a whore. She
hurt
me.”

Lia would have known I was lying, but the woman in front of me wasn’t Lia. I smiled, letting the expression spread slowly across my face, keeping my eyes on my aunt, never looking, even for a second, at Michael.

“So I hurt her.”

My aunt stared at me, her face still twisted in disbelief, but her eyes wistful with longing.

“She was getting ready. Putting on her lipstick. Pretending she was so perfect and so special, that she wasn’t a monster. I said her name. She turned around, and I took my knife. I plunged it into her stomach. She said my name. That was it. Just ‘Cassie.’ So I stabbed her again. And again. She fought. She kicked and she screamed, but this time, I was the one with the power. I was the one doing the hurting, and she was the one getting hurt. She fell on her stomach. I flipped her over so I could see her face. I didn’t drag the knife over her cheekbones. I didn’t carve her up. I dipped my fingers into her side. I made her scream. And then I painted her lips with blood.”

Locke—no, Hobbes—
Lacey
was captivated. For a single second, I thought she might believe me. Her knife hand hung loosely by her side. Her other hand reached into her
pocket. She pulled something out—I couldn’t see what. She fingered it for a moment—gingerly, carefully—and then she crushed her fingers into a fist.

“An excellent performance,” she said. “But I’m a profiler, too. I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, Cassie, and your mother wasn’t killed by a twelve-year-old girl. You’re not a killer. You don’t have what it takes.” She lifted the knife and started forward, the longing in her eyes turning to something else.

Bloodlust.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” I said, dropping the act as she advanced on me. “They’ll know it was you. They’ll catch you—”

“No,” Locke corrected.
“I’ll
catch Dean. You called me from his phone. I was worried, but when I called the house, you weren’t there. Everyone went into an uproar. They found out Dean was missing, too, and that he’d stolen Briggs’s guns. I tracked you down. I found Dean here with Genevieve.
He
shot Michael.
He
carved you up. I’m the heroic agent who stopped him, who figured out that the DC murders were the work of a copycat with access to our system, unrelated to the other murders altogether. I was too late to save you, but I did manage to kill Dean before he could kill me. Like father, like son.

“Did you really think you could win?” she asked. “Did you think you could fool me?”

Behind her, Michael had the gun in his hand. He rolled onto his side. He aimed.

“I never expected you to believe me,” I said. “Or to let me live. I just needed you to listen.”

Her eyes met mine. They widened. A gunshot went off. Then two, then three, four, five. And my aunt Lacey fell to the floor, her body splayed out next to Genevieve.

Dead
.

M
ichael was in the hospital for two weeks. Dean was released after two days. But even once we were back at the house, even once the case was closed, none of us had really recovered.

Genevieve Ridgerton had survived—barely. She’d refused to see any of us—especially me.

Michael had months of physical rehabilitation ahead of him. The doctors said he might never walk without a limp again. Dean had barely said a word to me. Sloane couldn’t talk about anything other than the absolute unlikelihood of a serial killer being able to pass the psych evals and background check necessary to join the FBI, even under an assumed name. And I was dealing with the fact that Lacey Locke, née Hobbes, was my aunt.

Her story had checked out. She and my mother were born and raised outside of Baton Rouge, though both had
shed their accents along the way. Their father, Clayton Hobbes, had been convicted twice of assault and battery—once against his wife, who ran off when my mother was nine and Lacey was three. The girls had attended school until the ages of ten and sixteen, but the system had lost them somewhere along the way.

They’d grown up in hell. My mother had gotten out. Lacey hadn’t.

The Bureau cross-referenced Lacey’s murders with cases that Briggs’s team had worked, and they discovered at least five more that fit the pattern. The agents would fly out on a case; Lacey would slip away, and somewhere, forty or fifty miles away, someone would disappear. They would die. And if a police report was filed, it never made its way to the FBI’s attention, because the crime didn’t appear to be serial in nature.

The woman who’d called herself Lacey Locke had paid attention to state lines. She’d never killed in the same state twice—until I joined the Naturals program. She’d escalated then, committing a series of murders here in DC as she became increasingly fixated on me.

At least fourteen people were dead, and a senator’s daughter had been kidnapped and gravely injured. The case was a nightmare for the Bureau—and a nightmare for us. The prohibition against Naturals’ participation in active cases was back and stronger than ever. Director Sterling had managed
to keep our names out of the news this time. As far as he was concerned, all anyone needed to know was that the killer was dead.

My aunt was dead.

Just like my mother.

Two weeks after Michael had pulled the trigger, I could still see those last moments playing out, over and over again. I sat beside the pool, dangling my feet in the water and wondering what happened next.

Where did I go from here?

“If you’re going to leave the program, leave. But for God’s sake, Cassie, if you’re going to stay, stop moping around like your kitty cat has cancer, and do something about it.”

I turned to see Lia standing above me. She was the one person who hadn’t changed as a result of all of this. In a way, it was almost comforting to know that I could count on her to stay the same.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, pulling my feet out of the pool and standing up so that we were eye to eye.