Page 52 of The Naturals

“Don’t—” I started to say. My words fell on deaf ears. She plucked a plain white note card from the envelope and cleared her throat.

“From me, to you.” Lia arched an eyebrow and tossed the card back on the table. “How romantic.”

A chill crawled up my spine. My breath felt hot in my lungs, but my hands were freezing cold. The package, the ribbon, the bow tied just so…

Something isn’t right.

“Cassie?” Michael must have seen it on my face. He leaned toward me. I glanced at Lia, but for once, she had nothing to say. Slowly, I brought my hand up to the ribbon. I pulled, and it fell away into a graceful black heap on the table.

Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I hooked my fingers around the lid of the box. I pulled it off and set it gingerly to the side. White tissue paper, meticulously folded, lay inside.

“What is it?”

I ignored Lia’s question. I reached into the box. I unwrapped the tissue paper.

And then I screamed.

Nestled in the tissue paper was a lock of red hair.

It took Agent Briggs an hour to get to our house. It took him five seconds to get from the front door to the kitchen—and the box.

“Still think I’m jumping to conclusions when I say this case is related to my mother’s?” I asked him, my voice shaky. He ignored me and barked out commands to the team of agents he’d brought with him.

“Bag the packaging, the box, the ribbon, the card, everything—if there’s a speck of evidence on any of it, I want to know. Starmans, track the box—how it was sent, where it was mailed from, who paid for it. Brooks, Vance, we need DNA on the hair, and we need it yesterday. I don’t care who you have to threaten in the lab to get it done, rush it. Locke…”

Agent Locke crossed her arms over her chest and gave Briggs a look. To his credit, he lowered his voice to a more reasonable volume and pitch.

“If this is our UNSUB, it changes everything. We have no evidence that he’s ever made contact with a target prior to killing. This may be our chance to get ahead of him.”

“We don’t even know that this is our UNSUB,” Agent Locke pointed out. “It’s red hair. For all we know, it could be a prank.”

Her gaze drifted over to Lia the second she said the word prank. I whipped my head around to look at the Natural liar, too.

Lia tossed her black hair over her shoulder. “This is a little beyond the pale, even for me, Agent Locke.”

Locke glanced at me. “Gotten into any arguments lately?” she asked.

I opened my mouth, then glanced at Lia again. Remind me never to ask you for a favor again. The venom in her tone when she’d said those words had been palpable.

“Lia.” Agent Briggs barely managed to get the word out around his clenched jaw. “Tell me again how you found the present.”

Lia’s eyes flashed. “I went out to get the mail. There was a package with Cassie’s name on it. I opened said package. Inside, there was a box. I decided I wanted to see the look on Cassie’s face when she opened said box. I brought it into the kitchen. Cassie opened it. The end.”

Briggs turned to Locke. “If the DNA comes back as a match for one of our victims, you’ll have to completely rework the profile. If it doesn’t…”

He glanced back at Lia.

“Why does everyone keep looking at me?” she snapped. “I found the package. I didn’t send it. If the DNA on the hair doesn’t come back as a match, maybe you should think about asking Cassie some questions.”

“Me?” I asked incredulously.

“You wanted in on this case,” Lia retorted. “And now the killer contacts you out of the blue? How lucky for you.”

I couldn’t tell if Lia believed what she was saying or not. It didn’t matter, because Briggs had already turned his diamond-hard gaze on me.

“Cassie didn’t do this.”

I hadn’t even realized that Dean was in the room until he spoke. Clearly, neither had the agents. Briggs actually jumped.