The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (15 page)

Beside me, Dean stared fixedly out the window. I laid my hand on the seat between us, palm up. He tore his gaze from the window and looked over, not at me, but at my hand. He laid his hand
palm-down on the seat, inches away from mine.

I slid my hand closer to his. His dark eyes closed, his eyelashes casting a series of tiny shadows onto his face. After a small eternity, his hand began to move. He rotated it slowly clockwise
until the back of his hand was flat against the seat, mere centimeters from mine. I slid my hand into his. His palm was warm. After several seconds, his fingers curled upward, closing around
mine.

Moral support.
That was why I was there, along for the ride.

Briggs pulled into a secured lot. He parked and cut the engine. “The guards will come out to let Dean and me in.” He glanced first at Sterling, then at me. “You two stay in the
car. The fewer people who see another teenager here, the better.”

Briggs wasn’t happy I was here, but he hadn’t tried to leave me behind. They needed Dean, and Dean needed something—some
one
—to tether him to the here and now.

The back door to the prison opened. Two guards stood there. They were the exact same height. One was beefy and bald, the other younger and built like a runner.

Briggs climbed out of the car and opened Dean’s door. Dean set my hand lightly back into my lap. “I won’t be long.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. His eyes were emotionless and hard.
He was born smiling.
The words from Redding’s interview echoed in my head as Dean slammed the door.

Dean and Briggs approached the guards. The balding man shook Briggs’s hand. The younger guard took a step toward Dean, looking him up and down. A moment later, Dean was against a wall
being frisked.

I looked away.

“Some people will always look at Dean and see his father,” Agent Sterling said from the front seat. “Daniel Redding isn’t exactly a favorite among the guards here. He has
a certain fondness for mind games and a penchant for picking up information about the guards’ families. Briggs had to tell them that Dean was Redding’s son. It would have been
impossible to get this visit approved otherwise, even with permission from on high.”

“Your father approved this visit?” I asked, sliding over in the seat so that I had a better angle to see her.

“It was his idea.” Sterling pursed her lips. She wasn’t happy about this.

“Your father wants this case closed.” I worked my way through the logic of the situation. “The Locke case made the papers. The last thing the FBI needs right now is more bad
press. The director needs this case to go away quickly and quietly, and he’s not above using Dean to do it. But if it were up to you—”

“If it were up to me,” she cut in, “Dean would never have to come within a hundred yards of his father again.” She glanced out the window. Briggs, Dean, and the older
guard had disappeared into the building. The younger guard—the one who’d frisked Dean—was walking toward our car. “Then again,” Sterling said, unlocking her car door,
“if it were up to me, once we’d arrested Redding, Dean would have gotten his chance at a normal childhood.”

She opened the door and stepped out. “Can I help you?” she asked the guard. He looked down at Agent Sterling, a slight curl to his lips.

“You can’t stay in the car,” he told her. “This is a secure area.”

“I’m aware. And cleared to be here,” Sterling said coolly, arching one eyebrow. She had the manner of someone who’d spent her life in a series of old boys’ clubs.
One prison guard on a power trip didn’t impress her.

I could practically see the guard debating whether getting into a pissing match with a female FBI agent—particularly
this
female FBI agent—was worth it.

“Warden’s on a security kick,” he told her, shoving the blame off on his superior. “You’ll have to move the car.”

“Fine.” Sterling went to climb back into the car, and the guard’s eyes landed on me. He held up a hand and motioned for me to open my door. I looked to Agent Sterling. She gave
a brief nod. I opened the door and stepped out.

The guard barely spared a glance for me before turning his attention back to Agent Sterling. “She friends with that Redding kid?” he asked. His voice left no question on his feelings
about Dean—and Dean’s father.

I was pretty sure Michael would have read it as disgust.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Sterling said firmly, “I’ll move the car.”

The guard eyed me, his earlier resolve not to get into it with Agent Sterling facing off with his dislike of Dean—and now me. He turned and said something into a handheld radio. After a
few moments, he turned back around, a polite smile on his face, his eyes narrowed to cold and uncompromising slits. “I put a call into the warden. I’m afraid the two of you are going to
have to come with me.”

“Don’t say a word,” Agent Sterling told me under her breath. “I’ll take care of this.”

The guard walked us down a hallway. Agent Sterling whipped out her phone.

“I can put you in the visitor’s room,” the guard offered. “Or you can wait in the offices out front.”

Whoever Sterling was calling didn’t answer. She turned her attention to the guard. “Mr….” She trailed off, waiting for him to provide his last name.

“Webber,” he said.

“Mr. Webber, there is a reason you and your colleague were asked to meet Agent Briggs at the
back
door. There is a reason that Agent Briggs is not meeting with Daniel Redding in the
visitor’s room. This case is sensitive and need-to-know. And
no one
needs to know that the FBI has been here to see Redding.”

Prison guards held a position of power inside these walls, and this one relished his. Webber didn’t like being reminded that Sterling was FBI. He didn’t like her. He didn’t
like being talked down to.

And he really didn’t like Dean. Or Redding. Or me.

This was not going to end well.

“Unless you have somewhere we can wait that is both
secured
and
private
,” Agent Sterling continued, “I suggest you call your supervisor and—”

“Secured and private?” the guard said, congenial and polite enough to send chills down my spine. “Why didn’t you say so?”

We ended up in an observation room. On the other side of a two-way mirror, Agent Briggs and Dean sat across from a man with dark hair and dark eyes.

Dean’s eyes.

I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be seeing this.

But thanks to a prison guard with a chip on his shoulder, I was. Dean and his father sat in silence, and I couldn’t keep from wondering: how long had they been sitting there, staring at
each other? What had we missed?

Beside me, Sterling’s eyes were locked on Redding.

Dean’s father wasn’t a big man, but sitting there, a slight smile gracing even and unremarkable features, he commanded attention. His dark hair was thick and neat. There was a slight
trace of stubble on his chin and cheeks.

“Tell me about the letters.” Dean didn’t phrase those words as a question or as a request. Whatever conversation had passed between the two of them before we’d gotten
here, Dean was a man on a mission now.

Get the information he needed and get out.

“Which letters?” his father asked amiably. “The ones that curse me to hell and back? The ones from the families, describing their journeys toward forgiveness? The ones from
women proposing marriage?”

“The ones from the professor,” Dean countered. “The one who’s writing the book.”

“Ah,” Redding said. “Fogle, I believe it was? Healthy mop of hair, deep, soulful eyes, overly fond of Nietzsche?”

“So he’s been to visit.” Dean wasn’t affected by his father’s theatrics. “What did he ask you?”

“There are only two questions, Dean. You know that.” Redding smiled fondly. “
Why
and
how
.”

“And what kind of person was the professor?” Dean pressed. “Was he more interested in the why or the how?”

“Little of column A, little of column B.” Redding leaned forward. “Why the sudden interest in my professorial colleague? Afraid he might not get your part right when he tells
our story?”

“We don’t have a story.”

“My story is your story.” An odd light came into Redding’s eyes, but he managed to tamp down on it and dial the intensity in his voice back a notch. “If you want to know
what the professor was writing and what he’s capable of, I suggest you ask him yourself.”

“I will,” Dean said. “As soon as you tell me where to find him.”

“For heaven’s sake, Dean, I don’t have the man on speed dial. We aren’t
friends
. He interviewed me a few times. Generally, he asked the questions and I answered
them, not the other way around.”

Dean stood to leave.

“But,” Redding added coyly, “he did mention that he does most of his writing in a cabin in the mountains.”

“What cabin?” Dean asked. “What mountains?”

Redding gestured with his manacled hands toward Dean’s seat. After a long moment, Dean sat.

“My memory may need some refreshing,” Redding said, leaning forward slightly, his eyes making a careful study of Dean’s.

“What do you want?” Dean’s voice was completely flat. Redding either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“You,” the man said, his eyes roving over Dean, drinking in every detail, like an artist surveying his finest work. “I want to know about you, Dean. What have those hands been
doing the past five years? What sights have those eyes seen?”

There was something disconcerting about listening to Dean’s father break his body down into parts.

Dean is just a thing to you,
I thought.
He’s hands and eyes, a mouth. Something to be molded. Something to own.

“I didn’t come here to talk about me.” Dean’s voice never wavered.

His father shrugged. “And I can’t seem to remember if the professor’s cabin was near Catoctin or Shenandoah.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” Dean’s eyes bore into his father’s. “There’s nothing to talk about. Is that what you want to hear? That these
hands, these eyes—they’re
nothing
?”

“They’re everything,” Redding replied, his voice vibrating with intensity. “And there is so much more you could do.”

Beside me, Agent Sterling stood. She took a step closer to the glass. Closer to Redding.

“Come now, Dean-o, there must be something worth talking about in your life.” Redding was perfectly at ease, immune—maybe even unaware—of the enmity rolling off Dean.
“Music. Sports. A motorcycle. A girl.” Redding cocked his head to the side. “Ah,” he said. “So there is a girl.”

“There’s no one,” Dean bit out.

“Methinks you doth protest too much, son.”

“I am not your son.”

Redding’s hands shot out. In a flash, he was on his feet. Dean must have been leaning forward, because somehow, Redding managed to get hold of his shirt. Father jerked son to his feet.
“You are my son, more than you were ever your whore mother’s. I’m in you, boy. In your blood, in your mind, in every breath you take.” Redding’s face was close to
Dean’s now, close enough that Dean would have felt the heat from his breath with each word. “You know it. You fear it.”

One second Dean was just standing there, and the next, his hands were fisted in his father’s orange jumpsuit, and Daniel Redding was being pulled bodily across the table.

“Hey!” Briggs came between the two of them. Redding let go of Dean first. He held his hands up in submission.

You never really submit,
I thought.
You never give in. You get what you want—and you want Dean.

Agent Sterling’s hand clamped around my elbow. “We’re going,” she told me. The guard tried to stop her, but she turned the full force of her glare on him. “One more
word, one more step, and I swear to God, I will have your job.”

I looked back at Dean. Briggs put a hand on his chest and pushed, hard. Like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened, Dean jerked backward, dropping his hold on his father. He looked at the two-way
mirror, and I would have sworn that he could see me standing there.

“Cassandra,” Agent Sterling snapped. “We’re going. Now.”

The last thing I heard before I left was Dean’s voice, empty and hard. “Tell me about the professor’s cabin.”

“T
his was a mistake.” Sterling waited until the two of us were ensconced in the car before saying those words.

“Going with the guard?” I asked.

“Bringing you here. Bringing
Dean
here. Staying in that room, watching that. All of it.” When Sterling said
all of it
, I got the sense that she wasn’t just
talking about the way that Briggs and the director had chosen to handle this case. She meant the life Dean was living. The Naturals program.
All of it.

“It isn’t the same,” I told her. “What we do as a team, and what they’re having Dean do in there with his father—it’s not the same.” Putting Dean
in a room with Daniel Redding ripped open all the old scars, every wound that man had inflicted on Dean’s psyche.

That wasn’t what this program was. That wasn’t what we
did
.