The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (25 page)

Michael told me once that when he lost it, he
really
lost it. I could hear it beneath his pleasant tone—if Christopher laid another hand on me, Dean might not be able to pull
Michael off.

Christopher’s hands knotted themselves into fists. “You shouldn’t have come here. This is sick. You’re all sick.” The fists stayed by his sides, and a moment later,
he stomped out of the living room and out of the house. The front door slammed.

“I’m afraid Christopher doesn’t quite understand my relationship with your father,” Trina confided to Dean. “He was only nine when his own father left, and
well…” Trina sighed. “A single mother does what she can.”

Dean came back to sit beside me. Michael stayed standing, and I realized he was watching Trina from an angle that decreased the chances that she would notice his attention.

“How long have you and Daniel been together?” I asked.
You aren’t
together
,
I thought.
He’s using you.
For what, I wasn’t sure.

“We’ve been seeing each other for about three years,” Trina replied. She seemed pleased to be asked—which was, of course, why I’d chosen that question. If she
believed that we were on board with the relationship, it would feed into the happy little picture she’d painted in her mind. Dean was
visiting
. This wasn’t an interrogation. It
was a conversation.

“Do you think this new case will affect his chances of an appeal?” I asked.

Trina frowned. “What new case?” she asked.

I didn’t reply. Trina looked from me to Dean.

“What’s she talking about, Dean?” she asked. “You know what a crucial time this is in your father’s legal situation.”

His legal situation is that he’s a convicted serial killer,
I thought. Based on my interactions with Briggs and Sterling—and Dean himself—I was almost certain this
appeal was as fictional as Trina’s misguided belief that if the older Redding was released, Daniel and Dean would move in here.

“That’s why I’m here,” Dean said, casting me a sideways glance as he followed my lead. “That girl who was killed at Colonial? And then the professor who was writing
the book?”

“The FBI tried to talk to me about
that
.” Trina sniffed. “They know I’m your father’s support. They think they can turn me against him.”

“But they can’t,” I said soothingly. “Because what you have is real.” I swallowed back the guilt I felt, playing on this woman’s delusions. I forced myself to
remember that she knew Daniel Redding for what he was: a killer. She just didn’t care.

“This case has nothing to do with Daniel.
Nothing.
The FBI would love to pin something else on him. Left on a public lawn?” Trina scoffed. “Daniel would never do
something so rash, so sloppy. And to think that someone else is out there—” She shook her head. “Claiming credit, trading on his reputation. It’s a crime, is what it
is.”

Murder
is
a crime,
I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. We’d gotten what we needed here. Trina Simms wasn’t concerned with continuing Daniel Redding’s
work—to her, the copycat was a plagiarist, a counterfeiter. She was female, a neat-freak, and controlling. Our UNSUB was none of the above.

Our UNSUB was a male, in his twenties, subjugated by others.

“We should go,” Dean said.

Trina clucked and protested, but we made our way to the door. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, as we were leaving, “what kind of car does Christopher
drive?”

“He drives a truck.” If Trina thought it was an odd question, she didn’t show it.

“What color is the truck?” I asked.

“It’s hard to say,” Trina said, her voice taking on the tone she’d used repeatedly with Christopher. “He never washes it. But last I checked, it was
black.”

I shivered as I thought of the profile Agent Sterling had given us and felt the ghost of Christopher’s grip on my arm.

“Thank you for having us,” I managed to say.

Trina reached a hand out and touched my face. “Such a sweet girl,” she told Dean. “Your father would approve.”

“H
ere.” Michael tossed his keys to Dean. Dean caught them. “You drive,” Michael said, sauntering over to the passenger side
of the car. “You look like you could use it.”

Dean’s grip tightened on the keys, and I wondered what game Michael was playing. He never let anyone else drive his car—and Dean was the
last
person he’d make an
exception for. Dean was probably thinking the same thing, but he accepted the offer with a nod.

Michael climbed into the backseat with me. “So,” he said as Dean pulled away from the house, “Christopher Simms: understandably upset that his mom has a thing for serial
killers, or budding psycho himself?”

“He grabbed Cassie.” Dean let that statement hang in the air for a moment. “He could have gone for me. He could have gone for you. But he went for Cassie.”

“And when you threatened him,” I added, “he left.”

You shouldn’t have come here.
I went back over Christopher’s words.
This is sick. You’re all sick.

“What’s the holdup?” Michael asked. For a second, I thought he was talking to me, but then I realized the comment was aimed at Dean. The car wasn’t moving. We were
sitting at a stop sign.

“Nothing,” Dean replied, but his eyes were locked on the road, and suddenly, I realized Michael hadn’t just let Dean drive on a whim. This was the town Dean had grown up in.
This was his past, a place he never would have chosen to go if it weren’t for this case.

“What’s down that road?” I asked Dean.

Michael caught my eye and shook his head slightly. Then he leaned back in his seat. “So, Dean, are we headed back to the house, or are we taking a detour?”

After a long moment, Dean turned down the road. I could see his knuckles tightening over the steering wheel. I glanced at Michael. He shrugged, as if he hadn’t planned this. As if he
hadn’t seen something on Dean’s face on the way into town that had made him want to let Dean drive on the way out.

We ended up parked on the pavement next to a dirt road that snaked back into the woods. Dean turned the car off and got out. My gaze caught on a mailbox. Somewhere, buried in those woods, at the
end of that road, there was a house.

Dean’s old house.

“You wanted him to come here,” I whispered furiously to Michael, watching Dean from inside the car. “You gave him the keys—”

“I gave him a choice,” Michael corrected. “I’ve seen Dean angry. I’ve seen him disgusted and drowning in guilt, scared of himself and what he’s capable of,
scared of
you
.” Michael let that sink in for a moment. “But until today, I’ve never once seen him raw.” Michael paused. “It’s not the bad memories that
tear a person apart like that, Cassie. It’s the good ones.”

We fell into a momentary silence. Outside, Dean started walking down the dirt road. I watched him go, then I turned back to Michael. “Did you give him the keys because he needed to come
here, or because once upon a time, he threw
your
past in your face?”

Coming here might help Dean—but it would, without question, hurt, too.

“You’re the profiler,” Michael replied. “You tell me.”

“Both,” I said.
Pseudo-rivals. Pseudo-siblings. Pseudo-something else.
Michael and Dean had a complicated relationship, one that had nothing to do with me. Michael had
arranged this to help Dean
and
to hurt him.

“Do you want to go after him?” Michael’s question took me by surprise.

“You’re the emotion reader,” I retorted. “You tell me.”

“That’s the problem, Colorado,” Michael replied, leaning toward me. “You want me to tell you what you feel. I want you to
know
.”

Slowly, my hand crept toward the door handle. Michael leaned across the seat toward me. “You were always going to go after him,” he told me, his lips so close to mine that I thought
at any minute he might close the gap. “The thing you need to figure out is
why
.”

I could still feel Michael’s breath on my face when he leaned across me and pushed open the car door.

“Go on,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”

But this time, I heard an underlying edge in his voice—something that told me Michael wouldn’t be waiting for long.

I caught up to Dean outside a picket fence. It might have been white once, but now it was dirt-stained and weatherworn. The siding on the house behind it was the same color. A
bright yellow tricycle lay on its side in the yard, a stark contrast to everything around it. I followed Dean’s gaze to a patch of bare grass just outside the fence.

“They tore down the toolshed,” Dean commented, like he was talking about the weather and not the building where his father had tortured and murdered all those women.

I stared at the tricycle on the lawn, wondering about the people who had bought this place. They had to know its history. They had to know what had once been buried in this yard.

Dean started walking again, halfway around the side of the house. He knelt next to the fence, his fingers searching for something.

“There,” he said. I knelt beside him. I moved his hand so I could see. Initials. His and someone else’s.

MR.

“Marie,” Dean said. “My mother’s name was Marie.”

The front door to the house opened. A toddler came barreling toward the tricycle. The little boy’s mother stayed on the front porch, but when she saw us, her eyes narrowed to slits.

Teenagers. Strangers. On her property.

“We should go,” Dean said quietly.

We were halfway back down the dirt road before he spoke again.

“We used to play Go Fish.” He stared straight ahead as he spoke, walking at the same steady pace. “Old Maid, Uno, War—anything with cards.”

We.
As in Dean and his mother.

“What happened to her?” That was a question I’d never asked. Daniel Redding had told Briggs that his wife had left—but I hadn’t processed the fact that she
hadn’t just left Daniel Redding. She’d left Dean, too.

“She got bored.” Dean walked like a soldier, eyes straight ahead, pace never faltering. “Bored with him. Bored with me. He’d brought her back to this small town, cut off
all contact with her family.” He swallowed once. “One day I came home and she was gone.”

“Did you ever think—”

“That he killed her?” Dean stopped and turned to face me. “I used to. When the FBI dug up the bodies, I kept waiting for them to tell me that she hadn’t just left. That
she was still there, in the ground.” He started walking again, slower this time, like his body was weighed down with cement. “And then my social worker found her. Alive.”

“But…” That one word escaped my mouth before I managed to clamp down on the question on the tip of my tongue. I refused to say what I was thinking—that if Dean’s mother
was alive and they knew where she was, how had Dean ended up in foster care? Why was it that the director claimed that if it weren’t for this program, he wouldn’t have anywhere else to
go?

“She was dating someone.” Dean scuffed a foot into the dirt. “I was Daniel Redding’s son.”

He stopped there—nine words to explain something I couldn’t even fathom.

You were her son, too,
I thought. How could a person look at their own child and just say “No, thanks”?
Go Fish and Old Maid and carving their initials into the fence.
I knew then that Marie Redding was the reason Dean had come back here.

It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It’s the good ones.

“What was she like?” The question felt like sandpaper in my mouth, but if this was what he’d come here for, I could listen. I would make myself listen.

Dean didn’t answer my question until we’d made our way back to the car. Michael was sitting in the driver’s seat. Dean walked around to the passenger side. He put his hand on
the door, then looked up at me.

“What was she like?” he repeated softly. He shook his head. “Nothing like Trina Simms.”

W
hen we got back, Judd was sitting on the front porch, waiting for us.
Not good.
I spent about five seconds wondering if we could claim to
have spent the day in town. Judd held up his hand and stopped the words before I could form them.