The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (5 page)

At first, I thought Dean might ignore me, the same way he’d ignored Lia. But eventually, he put down his pencil. He lifted his brown eyes to meet mine. “She was his partner,”
he confirmed. Dean’s voice was low-pitched and pleasant, with a hint of Southern twang. Usually, he was a man of few words, but today, he had five more for us. “She was also his
wife.”

S
he was his wife,
I thought.
Past tense—meaning that she’s not his wife anymore.

“She’s Briggs’s ex-wife?” I said incredulously. “And the director sent her
here
? That can’t be ethical.”

Lia rolled her eyes. “Any more unethical than an off-the-books FBI program that uses underage prodigies to catch serial killers?” She smirked. “Or what about sending his own
daughter to replace Agent Locke? Clearly, nepotism and shadiness are alive and well at FBI headquarters.”

Sloane looked up from making some adjustments to her catapult. “As of 1999, the FBI had no written policies on interoffice dating,” she rattled off. “Intercompany marriages
between supervisors, agents, and support staff aren’t uncommon, though they constitute a minority of employee marital unions.”

Lia gave me a look and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “If the FBI doesn’t have an official dating policy, I doubt they have one for divorce. Besides, we’re talking about
Director Sterling here. The man who basically bought Michael from his father by promising to make the IRS look the other way.” She paused. “The man who had the FBI haul me in off the
streets and told me my other option was juvie.”

This was the first time I’d ever heard Lia mention her past before the program.
Juvie?

“Briggs and Sterling both worked my father’s case.” Dean volunteered that information, using his own past to change the subject from Lia’s, which told me that she’d
been telling the truth and he wanted to protect her from questions. “Briggs was the strategist,” Dean continued. “He was driven, competitive—not with her, but with any UNSUB
they hunted. Briggs didn’t just want to catch killers. He wanted to win.”

It was easy to forget, when Dean said the word
UNSUB
, that his father had never been an Unknown Subject to him. Dean had lived with a killer—a true psychopath—day in, day out,
for years.

“Sterling was impulsive.” Dean stuck to describing the agents. I doubted he would mention his father again. “Fearless. She had a hot temper, and she followed her gut, even when
that wasn’t the smart thing to do.”

I’d suspected that Agent Sterling’s personality had undergone some major changes in the past five years, but even so, it was hard to see the connection between the short-tempered,
instinct-driven woman Dean was describing and the Agent Sterling in the kitchen now. The additional data sent my brain into overdrive, connecting the dots, looking at the trajectory between past
and present.

“Briggs has a case.” Michael liked to make an entrance. “He just got the call.”

“But his team just got back.” Sloane loaded her catapult again. “The FBI has fifty-six field offices, and the DC field office is the second-largest in the country. There are
dozens of teams who could take this case. Why assign it to Briggs?”

“Because I’m the most qualified for the job,” Briggs said, coming into the room. “And,” he added under his breath, “because somewhere along the way, the
universe decided I needed to suffer.”

I wondered if that last bit was about the case—or about the fact that Agent Sterling was on his heels. Now that I knew they’d been married, I doubted his irritation with her when
he’d sent me out of the room had been entirely professional. She was playing in his sandbox—and they clearly had
issues
.

“I’m going with Agent Briggs.” Sterling pointedly ignored her ex-husband and addressed those words to us. “If any of you hope to come within ten feet of a training
exercise or cold case this month, you’ll have those practice GEDs finished when I get back.”

Lia threw her head back and laughed.

“You think I’m joking, Ms. Zhang?” Agent Sterling asked. It was the first time I’d ever heard Lia’s last name, but Lia didn’t bat an eye.

“I don’t
think
anything,” Lia said. “I
know
that you’re telling the truth. But I also know that the FBI brass isn’t going to let you ground
their secret assets from doing their jobs. They didn’t bring us here to take the GED. They brought us here because we’re useful. I’ve met your daddy dearest, Agent Sterling. He
only plays by the rules when it’s useful for him to do so, and he definitely didn’t go to the trouble of blackmailing me into this program to let you clip my wings.” Lia leaned
back against the sofa and stretched out her legs. “If you think otherwise,” she added, her lips parting in a slow, deliberate smile, “you’re lying to yourself.”

Agent Sterling waited to reply until she was certain she had Lia’s full attention. “You’re only useful as long as you aren’t a liability,” she said calmly.
“And given your individual histories—some of them
criminal
—it wouldn’t take much for me to convince the director that one or two of you might be a bigger risk than
you’re worth.”

Dean was the son of a serial killer. Michael had anger management issues and a father who’d traded him to the FBI for immunity from prosecution on white-collar crimes. Lia was a compulsive
liar—and apparently had some kind of juvie record. Sloane had her catapult aimed at Agent Sterling’s head.

And then there was me.

“Lia, just humor her and take the test.” Agent Briggs sounded very much like someone whose head was beginning to pound.

“Humor me?” Agent Sterling repeated. “You’re telling her to
humor me
?” Sterling’s voice went up a decibel.

“Lia already took the test.” Dean spoke up before Agent Briggs had a chance to reply. Everyone in the room turned to look at him. “She’s a human lie detector. She can do
multiple choice questions in her sleep.”

Detecting lies was as much about the words people used as the way they said them. If there was a pattern to the way the test makers wrote the questions, a subtle difference between the true
answers and the false ones, a deception detector would find it.

Lia shot Dean a dirty look. “You never let me have any fun,” she muttered.

Dean ignored her and directed his next words at Agent Sterling. “You have a case? Work your case. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

I got the feeling that what he was really saying was
I’ll be fine
. For all her talk about liabilities, Agent Sterling seemed to need to hear that.

You and Briggs caught Daniel Redding,
I thought, watching Agent Sterling carefully.
You saved Dean.
Maybe Briggs’s ex wasn’t okay with the idea that she’d saved
Dean for
this
. We lived in a house where serial killers’ pictures dotted the walls. There was an outline of a dead body sketched on the bottom of our pool. We lived and breathed death
and destruction, Dean and I even more than the others.

If she’s got something against this program, why would the director draft her as Locke’s replacement?
Something about this entire situation just didn’t add up.

Briggs’s phone vibrated. He looked to Sterling. “If you’re done here, the local PD is contaminating our crime scene as we speak, and some idiot thought it would be a bright
idea to talk to the press.”

Agent Sterling cursed viciously under her breath, and I changed my mind about the makeup and the nail polish, the way she was dressed, the way she talked. None of it was about presenting an
image of professionalism to the rest of the world. It wasn’t a protective layer to keep the rest of the world out.

She did it, all of it, to keep the old Veronica Sterling—the one Dean had described—
in
.

As I turned that thought over in my head, Briggs and Sterling took their leave. The moment the front door closed behind them, Lia, Michael, and Sloane bolted for the TV control. Sloane got there
first. She flipped the television on to a local news channel. It took me a moment to realize why.

Some idiot thought it would be a bright idea to talk to the press.

Agent Briggs wouldn’t tell us anything about an active case. The Naturals program was only authorized to work on cold cases. But if the press had gotten wind of whatever it was that had
sent Briggs’s team out on a new assignment, we wouldn’t
have
to rely on Briggs for information.

“Let’s see what Mommy and Daddy are up to, shall we?” Lia said, eyeing the TV greedily and waiting for the fireworks to commence.

“Lia, I will give you one thousand dollars to never refer to Sterling and Briggs as Mommy and Daddy again.”

Lia gave Michael a speculative look. “Technically true,” she said, assessing his promise. “But you don’t come into your trust fund until you turn twenty-five, and
I’m not much of a believer in delayed gratification.”

I hadn’t even known that Michael
had
a trust fund.

“Breaking news.” All conversation in the room ceased as a female reporter came onto the screen. She was standing in front of a building with a Gothic spire. Her hair was
wind-whipped, her expression serious. There was an odd energy to the moment, something that would have made me stop and watch even if I didn’t already have some idea of what was coming.

“I’m standing here outside of Colonial University in northern Virginia, where today, the sixty-eight hundred students who comprise the Colonial student body saw one of their own
brutally murdered—and gruesomely displayed on the university president’s lawn.”

The screen flashed to a picture of a plantation-style house.

“Sources say that the girl was bound and tortured before being strangled with the antenna of her own car and displayed on the hood. The car and the body were found parked on Colonial
president Larry Vernon’s front lawn early this morning. The police are currently investigating every lead, but a source within the police department has been quoted as saying that this man,
Professor George Fogle, is a person of interest.”

Another picture flashed briefly onto the screen: a man in his late thirties, with thick, dark hair and an intense gaze.

“Professor Fogle’s courses include the popular Monsters or Men: The Psychology of Serial Murder, the syllabus for which promises that students will become ‘intimately familiar
with the men behind the legends of the most horrific crimes ever committed.’”

The reporter held her hand to her ear and stopped reading from the teleprompter. “I’ve gotten word that a video of the body, taken from a student phone shortly after the police
arrived at the scene, has been leaked online. The footage is said to be graphic. We’re awaiting a statement from local police on both the crime itself and the lack of security that allowed
such footage to be taken. This is Maria Vincent, for Channel Nine News.”

Within seconds, the television was muted and Sloane had located the leaked footage on her laptop. She positioned the screen so that we could see it and hit play. A handheld camera zoomed in on
the crime scene.
Graphic
was an understatement.

Not one of the five of us looked away. For Lia and Michael, it might have been morbid curiosity. For Sloane, crime scenes were data: angles to be examined, numbers to be crunched. But for Dean
and for me, it wasn’t about the scene.

It was about the body.

There was an intimate connection between a killer and the person they’d killed. Bodies were like messages, full of symbolic meanings that only a person who understood the
needs
and
desires
and
rage
that went into snuffing out another life could fully decode.

This isn’t a language anyone should want to speak.
Dean was the one who’d told me that, but beside me, I could feel his eyes locked on to the screen, the same as mine.

The corpse had long blond hair. Whoever had taken the video hadn’t been able to get close, but even from a distance, her body looked broken, her skin lifeless. Her hands appeared to be
bound behind her back, and based on the fact that her legs weren’t splayed apart, I was guessing her feet had been bound as well. The bottom half of her body was hanging off the front of the
car. Her shirt was covered in blood. Even with the questionable camera work, I could make out a noose around her neck. Black rope stood out against the white car, going all the way up to the
sunroof.

“Hey!” On the video, a police officer noticed the student holding the phone. The student cursed and ran, and the footage cut out.

Sloane closed the laptop. The room went silent.

“If it’s just one murder,” Michael said finally, “that means it’s not serial. Why call in the FBI?”

“The person of interest teaches a class on serial killers,” I replied, thinking out loud. “If the professor’s involved, you might want someone with expertise in the
field.” I looked to Dean to see if he agreed, but he was just sitting there, staring at the silent TV screen. Somehow, I doubted he was enthralled by the weather report.