The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (7 page)

I couldn’t lie to her. “I don’t know.”

I
ended up in the library. Wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves held more books than I could read in two lifetimes. I hovered in the doorway. I
wasn’t here for a book.
Third shelf from the left, two up from the bottom.
I swallowed hard, then walked over to the correct shelf.
Interview twenty-eight, binder twelve.

My fingers closed around the correct binder, and I forced myself to pick it up. The last time I’d tried reading interview twenty-eight, I’d stopped when I’d registered the
interviewee’s last name.

Lia was right. I didn’t fully understand what Dean was going through—but I wanted to. I needed to, because if it had been me spiraling into the abyss, Dean would have understood.

Dean always understood.

I sat down on the floor, propping the binder up on my thighs and opening to the page I’d left off on weeks before. Briggs was the agent conducting the prison interview. He’d just
asked Dean’s father to verify the identity of one of his victims.

“Good reading?”

A voice snapped me back to the present. “Lia.”

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” There was an edge to Lia’s voice, but she didn’t sound as blindly furious with me as she had before.

“I’m sorry about earlier.” I took my life in my own hands and risked apologizing, knowing it might set her off. “You’re right. I don’t know what Dean’s
going through. The situation with Locke and me—it wasn’t the same.”

“Always so genuine,” Lia said, a hint of sharpness to her singsong tone. “Always willing to own up to her mistakes.” Her gaze locked on to the binder in my lap, and her
voice went flat. “Yet always so very ready to make the same mistakes, all over again.”

“Lia,” I said. “I’m not trying to get between the two of you—”

“God, Cassie. I told you this wasn’t about you. Do you really think it’s about
me
?”

I wasn’t sure what to think. Lia went out of her way to be difficult to profile. The one thing I was sure of was her loyalty to Dean.

“He wouldn’t want you reading those.” She sounded certain—but then again, Lia always sounded certain.

“I thought it might help,” I said. “If I
understood
, then I could—”

“Help?” Lia repeated, biting out the word. “That’s the problem with you, Cassie. Your intentions are always
so good
. You always just want to
help
. But at
the end of the day, you don’t help. Someone gets hurt, and that someone is never you.”

“I’m not going to hurt Dean,” I said vehemently.

Lia let out a bark of laughter. “It’s sweet that you believe that, but of course you are.” She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. “Briggs made me
listen to an audio recording of Redding’s interviews when I was fourteen.” She pulled her legs tight to her chest. “I’d been here a year at that point, and Dean didn’t
want me within a ten-foot pole of anything having to do with his father. But I was like you. I thought it might
help
, but it didn’t
help
, Cassie.” Each time she said
help
, her expression grew closer to a snarl. “Those interviews are the Daniel Redding show. He’s a liar. One of the best I’ve ever heard. He makes you think he’s
lying when he’s telling the truth, and then he’ll say things that can’t possibly be true.…” Lia shook her head, like she could rid herself of the memory with the
motion. “Reading anything Daniel Redding has to say is going to mess with your head, Cassie, and knowing that you’ve read it is going to mess with Dean’s.”

She was right. Dean wouldn’t want me reading this. His father had described him as a little boy who’d been born smiling, instantly lovable, effortlessly putting other people at ease,
but the Dean I knew always had his guard up.

Especially with me.

“Tell me I’m wrong, Cassie, and I’ll make you a pretty apology. Tell me that Daniel Redding hasn’t already gotten under your skin.”

I knew better than to lie to Lia. There was something inside me, the part of me that saw people as puzzles to be solved, that wanted answers, that needed to make things—awful things,
horrible
things, like what had happened to my mother, like what Daniel Redding had done to those women—make sense.

“Dean wouldn’t want me doing this,” I conceded, catching my bottom lip in between my teeth, before plowing on. “That doesn’t mean he’s right.”

My first week in the program, Dean had tried to send me running. He’d told me that profiling killers would ruin me. He’d also told me that by the time Agent Briggs had started coming
to him for help on cases, there was nothing left to ruin.

If our situations had been reversed, if I’d been the one drowning in all of this, Dean wouldn’t have backed off.

“I slept in Michael’s room last night.” Lia waited for those words to register before giving me a Cheshire cat grin. “I wanted a strip poker rematch, and
Monsieur
Townsend
was oh-so-happy to oblige.”

I felt like she’d stabbed an icicle straight through my chest. I went very still, trying not to feel anything at all.

Lia reached over and snatched the binder off my lap. She snorted. “Honestly, Cassie, you’re too easy. If and when I choose to spend the night with Michael again, you’ll know
it, because the next morning, you’ll be invisible, and Michael won’t be looking at anything but me. In the meantime…” Lia snapped the binder shut. “You’re
welcome, because this is officially the second time in the past five minutes that I’ve saved you from going someplace you really don’t want to go.” Her eyes bore into mine.
“You don’t want to crawl into Daniel Redding’s mind, Cassie.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder. “If you make me go for intervention number three, I’ll be
forced to get creative.”

With those rather concerning words, she left the room—taking the binder and everything it contained with her.

Can she
do
that?
I sat there, staring after her. Eventually, I snapped out of it and told myself that she was right, that I didn’t need to know the details of Dean’s
father’s case to be there for Dean now, but even knowing that, even
believing
it, I couldn’t stop wondering about the parts of the interview I hadn’t gotten the chance to
read.

What did you teach your son?
Agent Briggs had asked.

I’d never even seen a picture of Dean’s father, but I could imagine the smile spreading over his face when he’d replied.
Why don’t you ask your wife?

D
ean skipped dinner. Judd fixed a plate for him and put it in the refrigerator. I wondered if Judd was used to Dean disappearing for hours on end.
Maybe, when Dean had first come here, that had been a normal thing. I found myself thinking more and more about that Dean—the twelve-year-old whose father had been arrested for serial
murder.

You knew what he was doing.
I slipped into Dean’s perspective without even meaning to.
You couldn’t stop it.

Empathizing with Dean: his feelings toward his father, what staring at that girl’s corpse must have done to him—I couldn’t tuck that away in a separate section of my psyche. I
could feel it bleeding over into my own thoughts. Right now, Dean was almost certainly thinking about the fact that he had a killer’s blood in his veins. And I had Locke’s in mine.
Maybe Lia was right. Maybe I couldn’t really understand what Dean was going through—but being a profiler meant I couldn’t stop trying to. I couldn’t keep from feeling his
pain and recognizing in it an echo of my own.

After dinner, I meant to go upstairs, but my feet carried me toward the garage. I stopped, just outside the door. I could hear the muted sound of flesh hitting something—over and over,
again and again. I brought my hand up to the doorknob, then pulled it back.

He doesn’t want you here,
I reminded myself. But at the same time, I couldn’t keep from thinking that maybe shutting the rest of us out was less about what Dean wanted and
more about what he wouldn’t let himself want. There was a chance—a good one—that Dean didn’t
need
to be alone so much as he thought being alone was what he
deserved.

Of its own volition, my hand reached out again. This time, I turned the knob. The door opened a crack, and the sound of heavy breathing added itself to the rhythmic
thwack thwack thwack
I’d heard before. A breath hitching in my throat, I pushed the door open. Dean didn’t see me.

His blond hair was beaded with sweat and stuck to his forehead. A thin white undershirt clung to his torso, soaked and nearly transparent. I could make out the lines of his stomach, his chest.
His shoulders were bare, the muscles so tense that I thought they might snap like rubber bands or fight their way out from underneath his tanned skin.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

His fists collided with a punching bag. It came back at him, and he fought harder. The rhythm of hits was getting faster, and with each punch, he put more and more of his body into it. His fists
were bare.

I wasn’t sure how long I stood there, watching him. There was something animal about the motions, something feral and vicious. My profiler’s eye saw each punch layered with meaning.
Losing control, controlled. Punishment, release.
He’d welcome the pain in his knuckles. He wouldn’t be able to stop.

I took a few steps closer, but stayed out of range. This time, I didn’t make the mistake of trying to touch him. His eyes were locked on the bag, unseeing. I wasn’t sure who he was
striking out at—his father or himself. All I knew was that if he didn’t stop, something was going to give—the bag, his hands, his body, his mind.

He had to snap out of it.

“I kissed you.” I wasn’t sure what possessed me to say that, but I had to say
something
. I could see the moment the words broke through to him. His movements became
slightly more measured; I could feel him regaining awareness of the world around him.