The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (18 page)

“Next time,” Lia told her.

“There’s not going to be a next time!” Dean exploded. He took a deep breath, calming himself. “Tell me you didn’t go to Colonial.”

“We didn’t go to Colonial,” Lia replied without missing a beat.

Dean stared at her for a few seconds, then turned to me. Clearly, I was easier prey. “You went to a college campus
knowing
that a murder had just been committed there, wearing
two-fifths of a dress and looking for people who might be connected to the killer?”

“If it’s any consolation,” Michael told Dean, “I went along for the ride.”

Dean went very still. For a second, I thought he might actually hit Michael. “Why in the world would that be a consolation?”

“Because,” Michael replied, a glint in his eyes, “if I hadn’t been there, Cassie would have gone off
alone
with a college senior who has an unhealthy fascination
with your dad’s case.”

“Michael!” I said.

“Cassie!” Dean turned a thunderous look on me.

I threw Lia under the bus. “At least I didn’t actually go off by myself with
two
strange guys in Fogle’s class.”

Dean turned back to Lia.

“I have no idea what she’s talking about.” Lia’s innocent act was as good as they came. Dean threw his hands up in the air.

“Do you all have a death wish?” he asked.

“No!” I couldn’t hold the objection back. “We all wanted to help
you
.”

Those were the very last words I should have said. The whole point of not telling Dean had been to keep him from feeling responsible for our actions. From the moment he’d come back from
the interview with his father, he’d been pulling away, and I’d just given him the final shove.

He left. When Lia tried to follow him, he said something to her, his voice so low that I couldn’t make out the words. She blanched, the blood draining completely from her face, and stood
there, frozen in place as Dean stalked off. After several seconds of shocked silence, Lia fled, too.

Michael looked at Sloane and then at me. He strolled toward the door. “I think that went well.”

S
loane and I were the only ones left in the basement. “I thought you weren’t supposed to be down here,” she said abruptly. Her
terseness surprised me, until I remembered the look on her face when she’d mentioned us sneaking out without her.

“I’m not,” I said.

Sloane didn’t respond. She walked over to a bathroom set and stood just outside the shower. She stared at it, like I wasn’t even there.

“Are we okay?” I asked her.

Dean was furious. Michael had taken off for parts unknown. When the dust settled, Lia would probably blame this whole mess on me. I needed Sloane cheerful and spouting statistics. I needed not
to be alone.

“You’re okay, and I’m okay. It would seem to follow logically that we’re okay.” Sloane’s gaze settled on the shower drain. It took me a moment to realize she
was counting—counting the holes in the drain, counting the tiles on the shower floor.

“We didn’t mean to leave you out,” I told her.

“I’m used to it.”

With the way Sloane’s brain worked, she’d probably spent her whole life before the program on the outside looking in. I was her roommate, and I was a profiler—I should have
known better.

“Dean is my friend, too.” Sloane’s voice was small, but fierce. She looked up from the floor, but still didn’t turn to face me. “I’m not good at mingling, or
at parties. I say the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing. I know that—but even numbers are better than odd, and if I’d been there, Lia wouldn’t have had to go off alone.”
Sloane paused and bit her lip. “She didn’t even ask.” She swallowed hard. “Before you came, Lia might have asked me.” Sloane finally turned to look at me.
“There’s only a seventy-nine-point-six percent chance, but she might have.”

“Next time,” I told Sloane, “
I
will ask you.”

Sloane considered my words carefully, then accepted them with a nod. “Are we going to hug now?” she asked. The question was absolutely clinical. I slipped an arm around her shoulder
and squeezed.

“Statistically,” Sloane told me, sounding more like her usual self, “the bathroom is the deadliest room in the house.”

I found Michael working on his car. Or, more specifically, I found him holding some kind of power sander and staring at his car with a diabolical expression.

“Judd let you play with the power tools?” I asked.

Michael turned the sander on and off experimentally, then he smiled. “Judd is a man of discerning tastes and good sense.”

“Meaning that Judd doesn’t know that you’re playing with the power tools,” I concluded.

“I’m going to have to plead the Fifth on that one,” Michael told me.

There was a beat of silence, and then I asked the question I really wanted an answer to. “Are we okay?”

“Why wouldn’t we be?” Michael turned the power sander on and attempted to attack the rust on the car’s front bumper, drowning out all conversation.

I’d thought that I could keep things from changing, but they were changing anyway. With Michael and me. With Dean and me.

“Michael,” I said, my voice soft enough that he couldn’t hear it over the sound of metal on metal.

Michael turned the sander off. Then he turned to me. I felt naked, the way I always did when I knew my face was giving me away. Why couldn’t he just be a normal boy, one who couldn’t
take one look at me and know exactly which emotions were churning around in my gut?

“We’re fine, Cassie. It’s just that sometimes, when you’re in the business of being devastatingly handsome and admirably patient, you need an outlet. Or two. Or
seven.”

He was taking his frustrations with me out on this car.

“Nothing happened between Dean and me,” I said.

“I know that,” he replied.

“Nothing is going to happen between Dean and me,” I said.

“I know that, too.” Michael leaned back against the car. “Better than you do. You look at Redding and see all the ways the two of you are the same. I look at him, and I see
someone who’s so angry and so terrified of that anger that there’s not room for anything else. Or any
one
else.”

I realized, suddenly: “That’s your problem with Dean.”

“That he’s incapable of romancing a female?” Michael smirked. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s his best quality.”

“No,” I said, turning the thought over in my mind. “That he’s angry and holding it in.” In Dean’s shoes, I would be angry, too. I understood why he
wouldn’t let himself express it, why he’d fight tooth and nail against throwing a punch. He couldn’t risk flipping that switch and not being able to turn it off.

But I’d never thought about the effect that being around a person like Dean would have on someone like Michael.

Michael gave me a look. “You’re profiling me.”

I shrugged. “You read my emotions all the time.”

He paused for a moment. “What do you see?”

That was as close to permission to poke around inside his head as I was going to get. “You grew up in a house where everything seemed perfect—you had every advantage that money could
buy. But it wasn’t perfect.” Michael had told me that much, but I pushed forward, tiptoeing into more dangerous waters. “You learned to read emotions because your father was hard
to read, and you needed to be able to tell when he was angry.”

No response.

“Even if there was a smile on his face, even if he was laughing, if he was angry, you needed to see it.” I swallowed the ball of emotion rising in my throat. “You needed to
avoid it.”

To avoid getting hit.

“Dean said pretty much the same thing to me once.” Michael crossed his arms, his eyes on mine. “Only he wasn’t nearly as nice about it.”

When I’d met Michael, he’d had an ingrained distrust of profilers—and a strong personal dislike of Dean. It had never occurred to me that Dean might have done something
to
Michael to justify those feelings.

“What did he say to you?” I asked, my throat going suddenly dry.

“Does it matter?” Michael glanced over at the house. “He’s got dibs on the screwed-up childhood, right? He’s the one with the get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Michael smiled, but there was an edge to it. “No pun intended.”

“Tell me,” I said.

Michael took a casual stroll around the car, examining it from all angles. When he spoke, it wasn’t to answer my question. “Anger,” he said offhandedly. “This might come
as a surprise, Cassie, but I don’t always react well to it.” An edge crept into his voice. “In fact, I tend to have a very particular reaction.”

I thought about Michael making veiled comments about
The Bad Seed
in Dean’s hearing. Michael letting Lia use him to get a rise out of Dean.

“You’re the guy who waves the red flag in front of the bull.”

“If you can’t keep them from hitting you,” Michael said, “you
make
them hit you. At least that way, you’re ready. At least that way, it’s not a
surprise.”

It was easy to see now, what it must have been like when Michael was drafted to join the program. He wasn’t happy about coming here, but at least he’d escaped living with a ticking
time bomb. And then he’d arrived to find Dean, who had every reason in the world to be angry and was fighting that rage every step of the way.

“One night, Lia and I stayed out until sunrise.” Michael never hid the fact that he had a history with Lia. I was so focused on the picture he was painting for me that I barely
noticed. “Believe me when I say
that
had nothing to do with Dean. But when we got back that morning, he was waiting for us, practically vibrating, holding it in check, but just
barely.”

I could see it: Michael being Michael, and Lia being Lia, both of them self-destructive with a taste for chaos and a desire to cause the FBI a little trouble. And I could see Dean, worrying
about Lia out all night with an unknown entity that neither one of them had a reason to trust.

“So you said something to push Dean that much closer to the edge.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know
what
Michael had said.

“I took a metaphorical swing,” Michael told me. “Redding hit back.”

“But not with his fists,” I clarified. Dean’s gift was like mine. We knew exactly what to say to hurt someone the most. We knew what people’s weak spots were. And
Michael’s was his father. The idea that Dean might have used that to get at Michael made my stomach twist sharply.

“I punched him,” Michael added in the kind of casual tone most people reserved for chatting about the weather. He took a step toward me, giving me that patented Michael smile.
“I get it, you know.”

“Get what?”

“You. Redding. I get it. I get that he’s going through something, and I get that you need to be there. That’s who you are, Cassie. You care about people. You need to help.
Believe me when I say that I am trying to step back and let you do whatever it is you need to do. But it’s not easy.” Michael tore his eyes from mine and picked the power sander back
up. “I haven’t had a lot of practice at being a decent person. It’s not something at which I particularly excel.”

Before I could reply, Michael turned the sander on, drowning out the sounds of the night. I stood there for a couple of minutes watching him. Agent Sterling’s car eventually pulled into
the driveway. It was getting dark enough that I couldn’t make out much of her posture or the look on her face, but as she cut across the lawn, Michael tilted his head to the side. He turned
the sander back off.

“What?” I said.

“She’s not happy,” he told me. “Brisk pace, no bounce to her step, hands glued to her sides. I’m guessing the exploration of the professor’s writing cabin did
not go particularly well.”

My stomach dropped. I could suddenly hear the sound of my own breathing, my own heartbeat.

Now it was Michael’s turn to ask: “What?”

I’d been so focused on Dean when I’d been on the other side of that observation glass that I hadn’t spent much time thinking about his father. I hadn’t let myself really
dissect him or the things he’d said. But now, all I could think was that Redding had—at great cost to Dean—finally given the FBI a tip about where the professor might be
hiding.

As an organized killer, Daniel Redding was a man who thrived on mind games. On misdirection. On power. If Redding had thought, even for a moment, that the professor was the killer, he
wouldn’t have told Briggs where to find him. The only way Redding would have really told Briggs where to find the professor was if Redding suspected, based on the letters he’d received,
that finding the professor would remind Briggs—and Sterling and everyone else at the FBI—that they weren’t nearly as smart as they thought they were.

The only truly remarkable letters were from students.

When I didn’t respond, Michael called after Agent Sterling. “Professor’s cabin a bust?”

She didn’t answer him. She went into the house and shut the door behind her. And that, as much as anything else, told me that I was right.

“It wasn’t a bust,” I told Michael. “I think they found the professor.” I swallowed. “We should have seen this coming.”