The Naturals

taking refuge in the numbers.

Most killers have a type, I thought, falling back on my own lessons. “Do any of the other victims have ties to the psychic community, astrology, or the occult?”

Michael turned back to the two reports in his hand. “Lady of the Evening,” he said, “another Lady of the Evening, and a telemarketer … who worked at a psychic hotline.”

I glanced down at the two files in my hand. “I’ve got a nineteen-year-old runaway and a medium working out of Los Angeles.”

“Two different kinds of victims,” Michael observed. “Prostitutes, drifters, and runaways in column A. People with a tie to the occult in column B.”

I fished Before photos of the victims out of my files and gestured for the others to do the same.

You pick them for a reason, I thought, looking at the women one by one. You cut their faces, slice your knife down through skin and tissue, until you hit the bone. This is personal.

“They’re all young,” I said, studying them and searching for commonalities. “Between eighteen and thirty- five.”

“Those three have red hair.” Michael separated out the victims with no ties to the psychic community.

“The palm reader had red hair, too,” Sloane interjected.

I was staring directly at the palm reader’s Before picture. “The palm reader was a blonde.”

“No,” Sloane said slowly. “She was a natural blonde. But when they found her, she looked like this.”

Sloane slid a second, gruesome picture toward us. True to Sloane’s words, the corpse’s hair was a deep, unmistakable red.

A recent dye job, I thought. So did she dye her hair … or did you?

“Two classes of victims,” Michael said again, lining the redheads up in one column and the psychics in another, with the palm reader from Dupont Circle between the two. “You think we’re looking for two different killers?”

“No,” I said. “We’re only looking for one killer.”

My companions could make observations. Sloane could generate relevant statistics. If there’d been witness testimony, Michael could have told us who was exhibiting signs of guilt. But here, now, looking at the pictures, this was my domain. I would have had to backtrack to explain how I knew, to figure out how I knew—but I was certain. The pictures, what had been done to these women, it was the same. Not just the details, but the anger, the urges …

All of these women had been killed by the same person.

You’re escalating, I thought. Something happened, and now you need more, faster.

I stared at the photos, my mind whirring, picking up each detail of the pictures, the files, until only three things stood out.

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

That was the moment that the ground disappeared from underneath me. I lost the ability to blink. My eyes got very dry. My throat was worse. My vision blurred, and all of the photographs got very fuzzy except for one.

The nineteen-year-old runaway.

The hair, the facial structure, the freckles. Through blurred vision, she looked like …

Knife.

Redhead.

Psychic.

“Cassie?” Michael took my hands in his. “You’re freezing.”

“The UNSUB is killing redheads,” I said, “and he’s killing psychics.”

“That’s not a pattern,” Sloane said peevishly. “That’s two patterns.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not. I think …”

Knife. Redhead. Psychic.

I couldn’t say the words. “My mother …” I took a short breath and brutally expelled it. “I don’t know what my mother’s body looked like,” I said finally, “but I do know that she was attacked with a knife.”

Michael and Sloane stared at me. I got up and walked over to my dresser. I opened the top drawer and found what I was looking for.

A picture.

Don’t look at it, I thought.

Directing my gaze at anything but the picture in my hand, I stooped and tapped my fingers on the palm reader’s photograph. “I don’t think she dyed her hair red,” I said. “I think the killer did.”

You kill psychics. You kill redheads. But one or the other isn’t enough anymore. It’s never enough.

Glancing up at Michael and Sloane, I laid my mother’s picture down between the two columns.

Sloane studied it. “She looks like the other victims,” she said, nodding to the column of redheads.

“No,” I said. “They look like her.”

These women had all been killed in the past nine months. My mother had been missing for five years.

“Cassie, who is that?” Michael had to have known the answer to that question, but he asked it anyway.

“That’s my mother.” I still couldn’t let myself look at the picture. “She was attacked with a knife. Her body was never found.” I paused, just for a second. “My mother made her living by convincing people she was psychic.”

Michael looked at me—and into me. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

I was saying that Briggs and Locke were tracking an UNSUB who killed women with red hair and people who claimed to be psychic. It could have been a coincidence. I should have assumed it was a coincidence.

But I didn’t.

“I’m saying this killer has a very specific type: people who resemble my mother.”

YOU

Last night, you woke up in a cold sweat, and the only voice in your head was your father’s. The dream seemed real. It always seems real. You could feel the sticky sheets, smell the urine, hear the whistle of His hand tearing through the air. You woke up shaking, and then you realized—

The bed was wet.

No, you thought. No. No. No.

But there wasn’t anyone there to punish you. Your father’s dead, and you’re not.

You’re the one who does the punishing now.

But it’s never enough. The neighbor’s dog. The whores. Even the palm reader wasn’t enough. You open the bathroom cabinet. One by one, you run your hands over each of the tubes of lipstick, remember each of the girls.

It’s calming.

Soothing.

Exciting.

You stop when you get to the oldest tube. The first. You know what you want. What you need. You’ve always known.