The Naturals

“I don’t want to talk about Friedman,” I said.

“Right,” Dean replied. “You want to talk about my father. Did you read the whole interview? On day three, Briggs bribed him to talk about his childhood. You know what he bribed him with? Pictures of me. And when that didn’t work, pictures of them. The women he killed.”

“Dean—”

“What? Isn’t this what you wanted? To talk about it?”

“No,” I said. “I want to talk about you.”

“Me?” Dean couldn’t have sounded more incredulous if he’d tried. “What else is there to say?”

What was there to say?

“I don’t care.” My breath was still ragged from running. I was saying this wrong. “Your father—it doesn’t change who you are.”

“What I am,” he corrected. “And yes, it does. Why don’t you go ask Sloane what the statistics say about psychopathy and heredity? And then why don’t you ask her what they say about growing up in an environment where it’s the only thing you know.”

“I don’t care about the statistics,” I said. “We’re partners. We work together. You knew I was going to find out. You could have told me.”

“We’re not partners.”

The words hurt me—and he meant for them to.

“We won’t ever be partners,” Dean said, his voice razor-sharp and unrepentant. “And do you want to know why? Because as good as you are at getting inside normal people’s heads, I don’t even have to work to get inside a killer’s. Doesn’t that bother you? Didn’t you ever notice how easy it was for me to be the monster when we were ‘working’ together?”

I’d noticed—but I’d attributed it to the fact that Dean had more experience at profiling killers. I hadn’t realized that that experience was firsthand.

“Did you know about your father?” I regretted the question the moment I asked it, but Dean didn’t bat an eye.

“No,” he said. “Not at first, but I should have.”

Not at first?

“I told you, Cassie. By the time Briggs started coming by with questions on cases, there was nothing left to ruin.”

“That’s not true, Dean.”

“My father was in prison. I was in foster care, and even back then, I knew that I wasn’t like the other kids. The way my mind worked, the things that made sense to me …” He turned his back on me. “I think you should go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“I. Don’t. Care.” He let out a shuddery breath. “Just leave me alone.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone.” And there it was, something I hadn’t even let myself think since Truth or Dare.

“How exactly was I supposed to tell you?” Dean asked, still facing away from me. “‘Hey, guess what? Your mom was murdered, and my dad is a killer.’”

“This isn’t about my mom.”

“What do you want me to say, Cassie?” Dean finally turned back around to face me. “Just tell me, and I’ll say it.”

“I just want you to talk to me.”

Dean’s fingers curled into fists at his sides. I could barely see his eyes behind the hair that fell in his face. “I don’t want to talk to you,” he said. “You’re better off with Michael.”

“Dean—”

A hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. Hard.

“He said he didn’t want to talk to you, Cassie.” Lia’s face was a mask of calm. Her tone was anything but. “Don’t turn back to look at him. Don’t say another word to him. Just go. And one more thing?” She leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “Remind me never to ask you for a favor again.”

CHAPTER 21

I walked slowly back down the stairs, trying to figure out what had just happened. What was I thinking, confronting Dean? He was allowed to have secrets. He was allowed to be angry that Locke had assigned me to read those interviews, knowing that one of them was his father’s. I shouldn’t have gone up there. I should have left him alone.

“Lia or Dean?”

I looked up and saw Michael standing near the front door.

“What?”

“The look on your face,” he replied. “Lia or Dean?”

I shrugged. “Both?”

Michael nodded, as if my answer were a foregone conclusion. “You okay?”

“You’re the emotion reader,” I said. “You tell me.”

He took that as an invitation to come closer. He stopped a foot or two away and studied my face. “You’re confused. Madder at yourself than you are at either of them. Lonely. Angry. Stupid.”

“Stupid?” I sputtered.

“Hey, I just call it like I see it.” Michael was apparently in the mood to be blunt. “You feel stupid. Doesn’t mean you are.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I sat down on the bottom step, and after a few seconds, Michael sat down beside me, stretching his legs out on the hardwood floor. “Why make thinly veiled comments about The Bad Seed instead of just telling me the truth?”

“I thought about telling you.” Michael leaned back on his elbows, his casual posture contradicting the tension unmistakable in his voice. “Every time I saw the two of you hunched over one of Locke’s little puzzles, I thought about telling you. But what would you have said if I did?”

I tried to imagine hearing about Dean’s father from Michael, who could barely manage a civil word where Dean was concerned.

“Exactly.” Michael reached forward to tap the edge of my lips, like that was the precise spot that had tipped him off to what was going on inside my mind. “You wouldn’t have thanked me for telling you. You would have hated me for it.”

I swatted Michael’s hand away from my face. “I wouldn’t have hated you.”

Michael gestured in the general direction of my forehead, but refrained from actually touching my face this time. “Your mouth says one thing, but your eyebrows say another.” He paused, and his own mouth twisted into a lazy grin. “You might not realize this, Colorado, but you can be a little sanctimonious.”

This time, I didn’t bother letting my face do the talking for me. I slugged him in the shoulder—hard.

“Fine.” Michael held his palms up in surrender. “You’re not sanctimonious. You’re honorable.” He paused and trained his eyes straight ahead. “Maybe I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I’m not.”

For a split second, Michael let those words—that confession—hang in the air.

“Besides,” he continued, “if I’d told you that between Redding and myself I was the safe option, I would have lost all of that carefully built-up bad-boy cred.”

From self-loathing to sardonic in under two seconds.

“Trust me,” I said lightly, “you don’t have any cred.”

“Oh, really?” Michael said. When I nodded, he stood up and took my hand. “Let’s fix that, then, shall we?”

A wiser person would have said no. I took a deep breath. “What did you have in mind?”

* * *