Page 45 of The Naturals

“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.