The Naturals

send. It would be simpler to kill her in the shop, to drive a knife through each palm and leave her body on display, but you’ve worked so hard this week.

You deserve a little treat.

Taking her is easy. You’re a ghost. A stranger with candy. A sympathetic ear. When Madame Selene wakes up in the warehouse, she won’t believe that you’re the one who’s done this to her.

Not at first.

But eventually, she’ll see.

You smile, thinking about the inevitability of it all. You touch the tips of her brown hair and pick up the handy box of Red Dye Number 12. You hum under your breath, a children’s song that takes you back to the beginning, back to the first.

The palm reader’s eyes flicker open. Her hands are bound. She sees you. Then she sees the hair dye, the knife in your left hand, and she realizes.—

You are the monster.

And this time, you deserve to take things slow.

CHAPTER 17

When Agent Locke showed up Monday morning, she had dark circles under her eyes. Belatedly, I remembered that while we’d been watching TV and playing Truth or Dare, she and Briggs had been out working a case. A real case, with real stakes.

A real killer.

For a long time, Locke didn’t say anything. “Briggs and I hit a brick wall this weekend,” she said finally. “We’ve got three bodies, and the killer is escalating.” She ran a hand through hair that looked like it had been only haphazardly brushed. “That’s not your problem. It’s mine, but this case has reminded me that the UNSUB is only half the story. Dean, what can you tell Cassie about victimology?”

Dean stared holes in the countertop. I hadn’t seen him since Truth or Dare, but it was like nothing had changed between us, like we’d never kissed.

“Most killers have a type,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s a physical type. For others, it may be a matter of convenience—maybe you focus on hikers, because no one reports them missing for a few days, or students, because it’s easy to get ahold of their class schedules.”

Agent Locke nodded. “Occasionally the victims may be serving as a substitute for someone in the UNSUB’s life. Some killers kill their first girlfriend or their wife or their mother, over and over again.”

“The other thing victimology tells us,” Dean continued, flicking his eyes over to Agent Locke, “is how the victim would have reacted to being abducted or attacked. If you’re a killer …” He paused, searching for the right words. “There’s a give-and-take between you and the people you kill. You choose them. You trap them. Maybe they fight. Maybe they run. Some try to reason with you, some say things that set you off. Either way, you react.”

“We don’t have the luxury of knowing every last detail about the UNSUB’s personality,” Agent Locke cut in, “but the victim’s personality and behavior account for half of the crime scene.”

The moment I heard the phrase crime scene, I flashed back to opening the door to my mother’s dressing room. I’d always thought that I knew so little about what had happened that day. By the time I’d gotten back to the dressing room, the killer was gone. My mother was gone. There was so much blood. …

Victimology, I reminded myself. I knew my mother. She would have fought— nail-scratching, breaking-lamps-over-his-head, struggling-for-the-knife fought. And there were only two things that could have stopped her: dying or the realization that I was due back in the room at any second.

What if she went with him? The police had assumed she was dead—or at the very least unconscious—when the UNSUB had removed her from the room. But my mother wasn’t a small woman, and the dressing room was on the second floor of the theater. Under normal circumstance, my mother wouldn’t have just let a killer waltz her out the door—but she might have done anything to keep her assailant away from me.

“Cassie?” Agent Locke said, snapping me back to the present.

“Right,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes. “Right what?”

“Sorry,” I told Locke. “Could you repeat what you just said?”

She gave me a long, appraising look, then repeated herself. “I said that walking through a crime scene from a victim’s perspective can tell you a lot about the killer. Say you go into a victim’s house and you find out that she compulsively writes to-do lists, color-codes her clothes, and has a pet fish. This woman is the third victim, but she’s the only one of the three who doesn’t have defensive wounds. The killer normally keeps his victims alive for days, but this woman was killed by a strong blow to the head on the day she was taken. Her blouse was buttoned crookedly when they found her.”

Putting myself into the killer’s head, I could imagine him taking women. Playing with them. So why would he let this one off easy? Why end his game early, when she showed no signs of fighting back?

Because she showed no signs of fighting back.

I switched perspectives, imagining myself as the victim. I’m organized, orderly, and type A in the extreme. I want a pet, but can’t bring myself to get one that would actually disrupt my life, so I settle for a fish instead. Maybe I’ve read about the previous murders in the paper. Maybe I know how things end for the women who fought back.

So maybe I don’t fight back. Not physically.

The things Locke had told me about the victim said that she was a woman who liked to stay in control. She would have tried reasoning with her killer. She would have resisted his attempts to control her. She might have even tried to manipulate him. And if she’d succeeded, even for an instant …

“The UNSUB killed the others for fun,” I said, “but he killed her in a fit of rage.”

Their interaction would have been a game of control for him, too—and she was just enough of a control freak to disrupt that.

“And?” Agent Locke prompted.

I drew a blank.

“He buttoned her shirt,” Dean said. “If she’d buttoned it, it wouldn’t have been crooked.”

That observation sent my mind whirring. If he’d killed her in a rage, why would he have dressed her afterward? If he’d undressed her, I could understand it—the final humiliation, the final assertion of control.

You know her, I thought.

“The UNSUB’s first two victims were chosen randomly.” Agent Locke met my eyes, and for a second, it felt like she was reading my mind. “We assumed the third victim was as well. We were wrong.” Locke rocked back on her heels. “That’s why you need both sides of the coin. Checks and balances, victims and UNSUBs—because you’ll always be wrong about something. You’ll always miss something. What if there’s a personal connection? What if the UNSUB is older than you thought? What if he is a she? What if there are two UNSUBs working as a pair? What if the killer is just a kid himself?”

I knew suddenly that we weren’t talking about the type A woman and the man who’d killed her anymore. We were talking about the doubts plaguing Locke right now, the assumptions she’d made on her current case. We were talking about an UNSUB that Locke and Briggs hadn’t been able to catch.

“Ninety percent of all serial killers are male.” Sloane announced her presence, then walked up to join us. “Seventy-six percent are American, with a substantial percentage of serial murders concentrated in California, Texas, New York, and Illinois. The vast majority of serial killers are Caucasian, and over eighty-nine percent of victims of serial crimes are Caucasian as well.”