The Naturals

won’t, but I want to.”

I waited to see if she was finished. She didn’t say anything else.

“As far as advice goes, that kind of sucked.”

Lia executed an elaborate bow. “I try.” Her eyes flitted back to the binder in my hand. “Do me a favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

Lia gestured to the binder. “If you’re going to read those,” she said, “don’t say anything about them to Dean.”

* * *

For the next four days, Locke and Briggs were away working on their case, and other than avoiding Michael and Dean and weeding the flower beds for Judd, there was nothing for me to do but read. And read. And read. A thousand pages of interviews later, I got sick of being cooped up in the library and decided to take a little field trip. I took a walk through town and ended up plopping down by the Potomac River, enjoying the view and reading interview twenty-seven, binder twelve. The 1990s had given way to the twenty-first century, and SSA Kent had been replaced by a series of other agents—among them, Agent Briggs.

“Enjoying a bit of light reading?”

I looked up to see a man around my dad’s age. He had a five-o’clock shadow and a friendly smile on his face.

I shifted so that my arm covered my reading material in case he decided to look. “Something like that.”

“You looked pretty absorbed.”

Then why did you interrupt me? I wanted to ask. Either he’d sought me out specifically, or he was the kind of person who didn’t see the contradiction in interrupting someone’s reading to tell her she looked absorbed in the text.

“You live at Judd’s place, right?” he said. “He and I go way back.”

I relaxed slightly, but still had no intention of getting sucked into a conversation about my reading material—or anything else. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said in my best waitress voice, hoping he’d sense a false note under the cheerfulness in my voice and leave me to my own devices.

“Enjoying the weather?” he asked me.

“Something like that.”

“I can’t take you anywhere.” Michael appeared on my other side and eased himself onto the ground next to me. “She’s too gregarious for her own good,” he told the man standing next to us. “Always chatting up complete strangers. Frankly, I think she over-shares. It’s embarrassing.”

I put the heel of my hand on Michael’s shoulder and shoved, but couldn’t push down the stab of gratitude I felt that I was no longer suffering through Small Town Talk Time alone.

“Well,” the man said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted to say hello.”

Michael nodded austerely. “How do you do?”

I waited until our visitor was out of earshot before I turned to him. “‘How do you do’?” I repeated incredulously.

Michael shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m in a social pickle, I like to ask myself, WWJAD?” I raised an eyebrow, and he explained. “What Would Jane Austen Do?”

If Michael read Jane Austen, I was the heir to the British throne.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Rescuing you,” he answered blithely. “What are you doing here?”

I gestured to the binder. “Reading.”

“And avoiding me?” he asked.

I repositioned my body and hoped the glare from the sun would compromise his view of my face. “I’m not avoiding anyone. I just wanted to be alone.”

Michael brought his hand up to his face to shield it from the sun. “You wanted to be alone,” he repeated. “To read.”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said defensively. “That’s why we’re all here. To learn.”

Not to obsess over the fact that I’ve kissed more boys in the past week than I have in my entire life, I added silently. To my surprise, Michael didn’t comment on the emotions I had to be broadcasting. He just reclined next to me and held up some reading material of his own.

“Jane Austen,” I said, disbelieving.

Michael gestured toward my binder. “Carry on.”

For fifteen or twenty minutes, the two of us read in silence. I finished interview twenty-seven and started in on number twenty-eight.

REDDING, DANIEL

JANUARY 15–18, 2007

VIRGINIA STATE PENITENTIARY, RICHMOND, VA

I almost missed it, would have missed it had the name not been printed over and over again, documenting this particular serial killer’s every word.

Redding.

Redding.

Redding.

The interviewer was Agent Briggs. The subject’s name was Redding, and he’d been incarcerated in Virginia. I stopped breathing. My mouth went suddenly dry. I flipped through the pages, faster and faster, skimming at warp speed until Daniel Redding asked Briggs a question about his son.

Dean.

CHAPTER 20

Dean’s father was a serial killer. While I was traveling the country with my mom, Dean had been living twenty yards away from the shack where his father tortured and killed at least a dozen women.

And Dean had never said a word to me: not when we were working our way through Locke’s puzzles and bouncing ideas off each other; not when he caught me swimming in the pool that first time; not after we’d kissed. He’d told me that spending time inside the minds of killers would ruin me, but hadn’t breathed a word about his past.

Suddenly, everything fell into place. The tone in Lia’s voice when she’d said the pictures on the stairwell were there for Dean’s benefit. The fact that Agent Briggs had gone to Dean for help on a case when he was twelve. Michael introducing Dean by telling me that he knew more about the ways that killers thought than just about anyone. Lia asking me, as a favor, not to say anything about these interviews to Dean. The Bad Seed.

I stood up and shoved the binder back into my bag. Michael said my name, but I ignored him. I was halfway back to the house before I’d even registered the fact that I was running.

What was I doing?

I didn’t have an answer to that question. And yet, I couldn’t turn around. I kept going until I reached the house. I climbed the stairs, heading for my room, but Dean was waiting for me at the top, like he’d known today would be the day.

“You’ve been reading the interviews,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied softly. “I have.

“Did you start with Friedman?” Dean asked.

I nodded, waiting for him to name the awful unspoken something that hung in the air between us.

“That’s the guy with the panty hose, right? Did you get to the part where he talks about watching his older sister get dressed? Or what about that bit with the neighbor’s dog?”

I’d never heard Dean sound like this—so flippant and cruel.