Jennifer Barnes - The Naturals

I started to open my mouth to ask how exactly he’d determined that my father worried , but Briggs held up a hand.

“I don’t walk into a situation like this blind, Cassie. Once you were flagged in the system as a potential recruit, I did my homework.”

“Flagged?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “For what?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t the one who flagged you, and quite frankly, the details of your recruitment are moot unless you’re interested in my offer. Say the word if you’re not, and I’ll leave Denver tonight.”

I couldn’t do that—and Agent Briggs probably knew it before he asked.

He picked up the capless pen and scrawled some notes on the edge of one of his papers. “If you have questions, you can ask Michael. I have no doubt he’ll be painfully honest with you about his experience in the program so far.” Briggs rolled his eyes heavenward in a gesture of exasperation so universal that I almost forgot about the badge and the suit. “And if there are any questions that I could answer for you …”

He trailed off and waited. I took the bait and started pressing him for details. Fifteen minutes later, my mind was reeling. The program—that was how he referred to it, again and again—was small, still in its trial stages. Their agenda was twofold: first, to educate those of us selected to participate and hone our natural skills, and second, to use those skills to aid the FBI from behind the scenes. I was free to leave the program at any time. I would be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

“There’s one question you haven’t asked, Cassie.” Agent Briggs folded his hands in front of him again. “So I’ll answer it for you. I know about your personal history. About your mother’s case. And while I have no new information for you, I can say that after what you’ve been through, you have more reasons than most to want to do what we do.”

“And what is that?” I asked, my throat tightening at the mere mention of the m -word. “You said that you’ll provide training, and that in exchange I’ll be consulting for you. Consulting on what, exactly? Training for what?”

He paused, but whether he was assessing me or adding emphasis to his answer, I wasn’t sure.

“You’ll be helping on cold cases. Ones the Bureau hasn’t been able to close.”

I thought of my mother—the blood on the mirror and the sirens and the way I used to sleep with a phone, hoping so desperately that it would ring. I had to force myself to keep breathing normally, to keep from closing my eyes and picturing my mom’s impish, smiling face.

“What kind of cold cases?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat. My lips felt suddenly dry; my eyes felt wet.

Agent Briggs had the decency to ignore the emotion now evident on my face. “The exact assignments vary, depending on your specialty. Michael’s a Natural at reading emotions, so he spends a great deal of time going over testimony and interrogation tapes. With his background, I suspect he’ll ultimately be a good fit for our white-collar crime division, but a person with his skill set can be useful in any kind of investigation. One of the other recruits in the program is a walking encyclopedia who sees patterns and probabilities everywhere she looks. We started her out on crime scene analysis.”

“And me?” I asked.

He was silent for a moment, measuring. I glanced at the papers on his desk and wondered if any of them were about me.

“You’re a Natural profiler,” he said finally. “You can look at a pattern of behavior and figure out the personality of the perpetrator, or guess how a given individual is likely to behave in the future. That tends to come in handy when we have a series of interrelated crimes, but no definite suspect.”

I read in between the lines of that statement, but wanted to be sure. “Interrelated crimes?”

“Serial crimes,” he said, choosing a different word and letting it hang in the air around us. “Abductions. Arson. Sexual assault.” He paused, and I knew what the next word out of his mouth was going to be before he said it. “Murder.”

The truth he’d been dancing around for the past hour was suddenly incredibly clear. He and his team, this program—they didn’t just want to teach me how to hone my skills. They wanted to use them to catch killers.

Serial killers.

You look at the body and feel a rush of anger. Rage. It’s supposed to be sublime . You’re supposed to decide . You’re supposed to feel the life go out of her. She isn’t supposed to rush you .

She shouldn’t be dead yet, but she is .

She should be perfect now, but she’s not .

She didn’t scream enough, and then she screamed too much, and she called you names. Names that He used to call you. And you got angry.

It was over too fast, too soon, and it wasn’t your fault, damn it. It was hers. She’s the one who made you angry. She’s the one who ruined it.

You’re better than this. You’re supposed to be looking at her body and feeling the power, the rush. She’s supposed to be a work of art.

But she’s not .

You drive the knife into her stomach again and again, blinded to anything else. She’s not perfect. She’s not beautiful. She’s nothing.

You’re nothing .

But you won’t stay nothing for long .

I gave Agent Briggs the go-ahead to talk to my father. My father called me. Less than a week after I told my dad this was what I wanted, I got word that Briggs had obtained the necessary permissions. My paperwork had gone through. That night, I quit my job at the diner. I took a shower, changed into my pajamas, and prepared for World War III.

I was going to do this. I’d known that from almost the moment that Agent Briggs had started speaking. I cared about my grandmother. I did. And I knew how hard she and the rest of the family had tried to make me feel loved, no matter how I’d come to them or how much of my mother there was in me. But I’d never really belonged here. A part of me had never really left that fateful theater: the lights, the crowd, the blood. Maybe I never would, but Agent Briggs was offering me a chance to do something about it.

I might never solve my own mother’s murder, but this program would turn me into the kind of person who could catch killers, who could make sure that another little girl, in another life, with another mother, would never have to see what I had seen.

It was morbid and horrifying and the very last life the family would have imagined for me—and I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything.

I combed my fingers through my hair. Wet, it looked dark enough to pass for brown instead of auburn. The steam from the shower had brought some color into my cheeks. I looked like the type of girl who could belong here, with this family.

With wet hair, I didn’t look so much like my mother.

“Chicken.” I leveled the insult at my own reflection and then pushed back from the mirror. I could stay here until my hair dried—in fact, I could stay here until my hair went gray—and that wouldn’t make the conversation I was about to have any easier.

Downstairs, Nonna was curled up in a recliner in the living room, reading glasses perched on her nose and a large-print romance novel open in her lap. She looked up the second I stepped in the room, her eagle eyes sharp.

“You are ready for bed early,” she said, no small amount of suspicion in her voice. Nonna had successfully raised eight children. If I’d been the type to make trouble, there would have been none that I could have stirred up that she hadn’t already seen.