The Naturals (7 page)

“So, Cassie, are you ready for your first day of How to Crawl into the Skulls of Bad Guys 101?” Lia set the cereal box down and headed for the fridge. Her head disappeared into the refrigerator as she started digging around. Her pajama bottoms left very little to the imagination.

“I’m ready,” I said, averting my eyes.

“Cassie was born ready,” Michael declared. Over in the refrigerator, Lia stopped rummaging for a moment. “Besides,” Michael continued, “whatever Agent Locke has her doing, it has to be better than watching foreign-language films. Without the subtitles.”

I bit back a smile at the aggrieved tone in Michael’s voice. “Is that what they had you do on your first day?”

“That,” Michael said, “is what they had me do for my first
month
. ‘Emotions aren’t about what people say,’” he
mimicked, “‘they’re about posture, facial expressions, and culture-specific instantiations of universal phenomenological experiences.’”

Lia exited the refrigerator with empty hands, shut the door, and opened the freezer. “Poor baby,” she told Michael. “I’ve been here for almost three years, and the only thing they’ve taught me is that psychopaths are really good liars, and FBI agents are really bad ones.”

“Have you met many?” I asked.

“FBI agents?” Lia feigned ignorance as she retrieved a carton of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream from the freezer.

I gave her a look. “Psychopaths.”

She grabbed a spoon out of the drawer and brandished it like a magic wand. “The FBI hides us away in a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood in a nice little town. Do you really think Briggs is going to let me tag along on prison interviews? Or go into the field, where I might actually get to
do
something?”

Michael put Lia’s words in slightly more diplomatic terms. “The Bureau has tapes,” he said. “And reels and transcripts. Cold cases, mostly. Things that other people haven’t ever been able to solve. And for every cold case they bring us, there are dozens of cases that they’ve already solved. Tests to see if we really are as good as Agent Briggs says we are.”

“Even when you give them the answer they’re looking for,” Lia continued, picking up right where Michael left off,
“even when the Powers That Be know that you’re right, they want to know why.”

Why what?
This time, I didn’t ask the question out loud—but Michael answered it anyway.

“Why we can do it and they can’t.” He reached over and snagged another bite of my Cheerios. “They don’t just want to train us. They don’t just want to use us. They want to
be
us.”

“Absolutely,” a new voice concurred. “Deep down, in my heart of hearts, all I really want is to be Michael Townsend.”

Agent Locke strolled into the kitchen and went straight for the fridge. Clearly she was at home here, even if she lived somewhere else.

“Briggs left files for you two”—Agent Locke gestured to Michael and Lia—“in his study. He’s going to run a new simulation with Sloane today, and
I’m
going to start catching Cassie up to speed.” She heaved a larger-than-life sigh. “It’s not as glamorous as being a jaded seventeen-year-old boy with parental issues and a hair-gel dependency, but
c’est la vie.”

Michael reached up to scratch the side of his face—and oh-so-subtly flipped Agent Locke off in the process.

Lia twirled her spoon around her finger, a tiny, ice-cream-laden baton. “Lacey Locke, everybody,” she said, like the FBI agent was a comedian and Lia the announcer.

Locke grinned. “Doesn’t Judd have a rule about you
wearing lingerie in the kitchen?” she asked, eyeing Lia’s pajamas. Lia shrugged, but something about Agent Locke’s presence seemed to subdue her. Within minutes, my fellow Naturals had scattered. Neither Lia nor Michael seemed anxious to spend time in the company of an FBI profiler.

“I hope they’re not making life too difficult on you,” Locke said.

“No.” In fact, for a moment there, eating with the two of them, talking to them, had felt natural.

No pun intended.

“Neither Michael nor Lia was given much of a choice about joining the program.” Locke waited for that to sink in. “That tends to put a chip on a person’s shoulder.”

“They’re not the type to respond well to being strong-armed,” I said slowly.

“No,” Agent Locke replied. “They aren’t. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but that wasn’t one of mine. Briggs lacks a certain amount of …
finesse
. Guy never met a square peg he didn’t want to pound into a round hole.”

That description fit with my impression of Agent Briggs exactly. Agent Locke was speaking my language, but I didn’t have time to relish that fact.

Because Dean was standing in the doorway.

Agent Locke saw him and nodded. “Right on time.”

“On time for what?” I asked.

Dean answered on Agent Locke’s behalf, but unlike
the red-haired agent, he wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t friendly. He didn’t want to be there—and unless I was mistaken, he didn’t like me.

“For your first lesson.”

I
f Dean was unhappy at the prospect of spending the morning with me, he was even less pleased when Agent Locke’s plan for my first day required us to take a little field trip. Clearly, he’d expected a pen-and-paper lesson, or possibly a simulation in the basement, but Agent Locke just tossed him the keys to her SUV.

“You’re driving.”

Most FBI agents wouldn’t have insisted a seventeen-year-old boy drive—but it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Lacey Locke wasn’t most agents. She took the front passenger seat, and I slid into the back.

“Where to?” Dean asked Agent Locke as he backed out of the driveway. She gave him an address, and he murmured a reply. I tried to diagnose the slight twinge of an accent I heard in his voice.

Southern
.

He didn’t say a single word for the rest of the drive. I tried to get a read on him. He didn’t seem shy. Maybe he was the type of person who saved his words for those rare occasions when he really had something to say. Maybe he kept to himself and used silence as a way of keeping other people at arm’s length.

Or maybe he just had zero desire to converse with Locke and me.

He’s a Natural profiler
, I thought, wondering if his brain was churning, too, assimilating details about me the way I was assessing him.

He was a careful driver.

His shoulders tensed when someone cut him off.

And when we arrived at our destination, he got out of the car, shut the door, and held the keys out to Agent Locke—all without ever looking at me. I was used to fading into the background, but somehow, coming from Dean, it felt like an insult. Like I wasn’t worth profiling, like he didn’t have the slightest interest in figuring me out.

“Welcome to Westside Mall,” Agent Locke said, snapping me out of it. “I’m sure this isn’t what you were expecting for your first day, Cassie, but I wanted to get a sense of what you can do with normal people before we dive into the abnormal end of the spectrum.”

Dean flicked his eyes sideways.

Locke called him on it. “Something you’d like to add?”

Dean stuffed his hands into his pockets. “It’s just been a long time,” he said, “since someone asked me to think about
normal.”

Five minutes later, we had a table in the food court.

“The woman in the purple fleece,” Agent Locke said. “What can you tell me about her, Cassie?”

I sat and followed her gaze to the woman in question. Midtwenties. She was wearing running shoes and jeans in addition to the fleece. Either she was sporty and she’d thrown on the jeans because she was coming to the mall, or she wasn’t, but wanted people to think that she was. I said as much out loud.

“What
else
can you tell me?” Agent Locke asked.

My gut told me that Agent Locke didn’t want details. She wanted the big picture.

Behavior. Personality. Environment
.

I tried to integrate Purple Fleece into her surroundings. She’d chosen a seat near the edge of the food court, even though there were plenty of tables available closer to the restaurant where she’d purchased her meal. There were several people sitting near her, but she stayed focused on her food.

“She’s a student,” I said finally. “Graduate school of some kind—my money’s on med school. She’s not married, but has a serious boyfriend. She comes from an upper-middle-class family, heavy emphasis on the
upper
. She’s a runner, but not a health nut. She most likely gets up early, likes
doing things that other people find painful, and if she has any siblings, they’re either younger than she is or they’re all boys.”

I waited for Agent Locke to reply. She didn’t. Neither did Dean.

To fill the silence, I added one last observation. “She gets cold really easily.”

There was no other excuse for wearing a fleece—even indoors—in July.

“What makes you think she’s a student?” Agent Locke asked finally.

I met Dean’s eyes and knew suddenly that he saw it, too. “It’s ten thirty in the morning,” I said, “and she’s not at work. It’s too early for a lunch break, and she’s not dressed like someone who’s on the job.”

Agent Locke raised an eyebrow. “Maybe she works from home. Or maybe she’s between jobs. Maybe she teaches elementary school and she’s on summer vacation.”

Those objections were perfectly valid, but somehow—to me—they still felt wrong. It was hard to explain; I thought of Michael warning me that the FBI would never stop trying to figure out how I did what I did.

I thought about Agent Locke saying she’d learned profiling the hard way—one class at a time.

“She’s not even looking at them.”

To my shock, Dean was the one who came to my rescue.

“Pardon?” Agent Locke turned her attention to him.

“The other people here in her age range.” Dean nodded toward a couple of young moms with small children, plus several department store employees lined up for coffee. “She’s not looking at them. They aren’t her peers. She doesn’t even realize they’re the same age. She pays more attention to college students than to other adults, but she clearly doesn’t consider herself one of them, either.”

And that was the feeling I hadn’t been able to put into words. It was like Dean could see into my head, make sense of the information bouncing around my brain—but, of course, that wasn’t it. He hadn’t needed to get into my head, because he’d been thinking the exact same thing.

After a long moment of silence, Dean flicked his eyes over to me. “Why med school?”

I glanced back at the girl. “Because she’s a runner.”

Dean smiled, ever so slightly. “You mean she’s a masochist.”

Across the room, the girl we’d been talking about rose, and I was able to make out the bags in her hand, the stores she’d shopped at. It fit. Everything fit.

I wasn’t wrong.

“What makes you think she has a boyfriend?” Dean asked, and under his quiet drawl I could hear curiosity—and maybe even admiration.

I shrugged in response to his question—mainly because
I didn’t want to tell him that the reason I’d been sure this girl wasn’t single was the fact that the entire time we’d been there, she hadn’t so much as glanced at Dean.

From a distance, he would have looked older.

Even in jeans and a faded black T-shirt, you could see the muscles tensing against the fabric of his sleeves. And the muscles not covered by his sleeves.

His hair, his eyes, the way he stood, and the way he moved—if she’d been single, she would have looked.

— — —

“New game,” Agent Locke said. “I point to the car, you tell me about the person who owns it.”

We’d been at the mall for three hours. I’d thought coming out to the parking lot had signaled the end of today’s training, but apparently I was wrong.

“That one, Cassie. Go.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I was used to starting with people: their posture, the way they talked, their clothes, their occupations, their gender, the way they arranged a napkin on their lap—that was my language. Starting with a car was like flying blind.

“In our line of work,” Agent Locke told me as I stared at a white Acura, debating whether it belonged to a shopper or someone who worked at the mall, “you don’t get to meet the suspect before you profile the crime. You go to the scene and you rebuild what happened. You take physical evidence,
you turn it into behavior, and then you try to narrow down the range of suspects. You don’t know if you’re looking for a man or a woman, a teenager or an old man. You know how they killed, but you don’t know why. You know how they left the body, but you have to figure out how they found the victim.” She paused. “So, Cassie. Who owns this car?”

The make and model weren’t telling me much. This car could have belonged to either a man or a woman, and it was parked in front of the food court, which meant that I had no idea what the owner’s destination inside the mall was. The parking space wasn’t a good one, but it wasn’t bad. The parking job left a little to be desired.

“They were in a hurry,” I said. “The parking job is crooked, and they didn’t bother cruising for a better space.” That also told me that the driver didn’t have the kind of ego that would push a person to hunt for a prime spot, as if getting a great parking place at the mall was an indicator of personal worth. “No car seat, so no young children. No bumper stickers, relatively recently washed. They’re not here for food—no reason to hurry for that—but they parked at the food court, so either they don’t know where they’re going once they get inside the mall or their store of choice is close by.”

I paused, waiting for Dean to pick up where I had left off, but he didn’t. Instead, Agent Locke gave me a single piece of advice.

“Don’t say
they.”

“I didn’t mean
they
as in plural,” I said hastily. “I just haven’t decided yet if it’s a man or a woman.”

Dean glanced at the mall entrance and then back at me. “That’s not what she means.
They
keeps you on the outside. So do
he
and
she.”

“So what word am I supposed to use?”