Killer Instinct (The Naturals 2)

Briggs ended the call and tossed his phone down. Sterling caught it. “If I remember correctly,” she said dryly, “throwing phones was more my area than yours.”

Agent Sterling was the one who had been tortured by Daniel Redding, but she was the only one of the three of them holding it together in the wake of this visit.

“Did Redding say anything about the professor being involved with Emerson Cole?” Agent Sterling’s question snapped both Dean and Briggs out of it, if only for a second.

“Care to share your source on that one?” Briggs asked tightly. I could practically hear him thinking that Sterling was following leads behind his back.

“Why don’t you ask Cassie?” Sterling suggested. “Apparently, she’s been doing some extracurricular digging.”

“Excuse me?” Briggs spat out.

Dean turned his head slowly away from the window to face me. “What kind of extracurricular digging?” he asked me, his voice low and haggard. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Just you?” Dean asked. I didn’t reply. He closed his eyes, his entire face taut. “Of course it’s not just you. You wouldn’t be lying to me about it if it were. I’m assuming Lia’s involved. Sloane? Townsend?”

I didn’t reply.

“This gives us motive,” Agent Sterling told Briggs in the front seat. “The professor might have killed the girl to keep the truth from coming out.”

“Emerson,” Dean said, his voice tight. “Her name was Emerson.”

“Yes,” Agent Sterling said, ignoring the fury in Dean’s voice. “It was. And whether you believe it or not, Dean, the information you got out of your father today, no matter how insignificant it seems, will help us find Emerson’s killer. Now you just have to let us do our job.” She paused. “You both do. No more digging. No more field trips.”

At the phrase field trips, Briggs pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and killed the engine. “You,” he said, turning around and pinning me with a look. “Out of the car.” With those words, Briggs got out of the car himself.

I tried not to flinch as I joined him. Briggs might have been willing to take calculated risks, like bringing Dean to see his father, but he was only okay with those risks if the calculations were his.

“Am I to understand that you left the house, went on some kind of field trip, and directly interfered with an ongoing FBI investigation?” Briggs never raised his voice, but he put so much force behind each word that he might as well have been yelling.

“Yes?”

Briggs ran his hands through his hair. “Who went with you?”

That, I couldn’t tell him.

“I know you want to help,” he told me through clenched teeth. “What this case is doing to Dean isn’t fair. Bringing him here to talk to his father—that wasn’t fair of me. But I didn’t have a choice. Dean didn’t really have a choice, but you do. You can choose to trust me. You can choose not to give Agent Sterling any more ammunition against this program. You can choose not to behave like an irresponsible, shortsighted teenager who can’t be trusted to follow rules put in place for her own safety!”

Now, he was yelling.

Dean opened his car door. He didn’t get out. He didn’t even look at me. Briggs exhaled. I could practically see him counting to ten in his head. “I’m not going to ask where you went,” he told me, each word measured and full of warning. “I’m not going to tell you that it was stupid and reckless, although I am certain that it undoubtedly was. I’m going to ask you—once and only once, Cassandra—who told you about the professor and the girl?”

I swallowed, hard. “My source’s name was Derek. He was working on a group project with Emerson in Professor Fogle’s class. There were two other students in the group—a girl named Bryce and a boy named Clark.”

Briggs’s gaze shifted briefly to Dean.

“What?” I said. I caught the significance of the look that passed between the two of them, but couldn’t figure out its meaning.

Dean was the one who answered, as Briggs headed back for the car.

“My father said that if we were looking for a copycat, we were wasting our time with the professor.” Dean ran a hand roughly through his hair, closing his fingers into a fist and pulling at his roots. “He said that the only truly remarkable letters he’d received were from a student in that class.”

By the time Briggs pulled up to the house, the silence in the car was clawing at me. Dean hadn’t said a word since he’d told us about the letters.

We wanted to protect you, I thought, willing him to profile me and see that. But it was like someone had flipped a switch, and Dean had gone into lockdown mode. He wouldn’t even look at me. And the worst part was that I knew he was sitting there thinking about the day the two of us had spent together and what a mistake it had been for him to have believed, even for a second, that he could let someone in.

“Dean—”

“Don’t.” He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t sound anything.

I was the first one out of the car once Briggs put it into park. I started toward the house, then slowed when I saw a heap of junk in the driveway. Calling the mound of metal a car would have been generous. It had three wheels, no paint, and a spattering of rust along the bumper. The hood—if you could call it a hood—was popped. I couldn’t make out the person inspecting the engine, but I could make out his jeans. His well-worn, formfitting, oil-smudged jeans.

Michael?

When I’d first met Michael, he’d changed his clothing style every day to keep me guessing. But this Michael—wearing jeans and a ratty old T-shirt, buried elbow-deep in a junkyard car—was new.

He stood up, wiping a hand across his brow. He saw me looking at him, and for a split second, his expression hardened.

Not you, too, I thought. I couldn’t deal with Michael being mad at me, too.

“I’ve decided to take up restoring cars,” he called out, answering the question I hadn’t asked and giving me some hope that I’d imagined the look on his face a moment before. “In case something happens to my Porsche.”

The reference to my proposed threat did not go unnoticed.

You saw Dean and me in the kitchen, I thought, slipping into his perspective. You got sick of watching us together. You left.…