Page 69 of The Naturals

“I told you,” Lia said, “I bought it.”

I hadn’t recognized the lie the first time around.

“Where did you get it, Lia?”

Lia opened her mouth to dish out a retort, then closed it again. Her eyes studied mine. “It was a gift,” she said quietly. “I don’t know from who. Someone left a bag of makeup on my bed last week. I just assumed I had a makeup fairy.” She paused. “Honestly, I thought it might be from Sloane.”

“I haven’t stolen makeup in months.” Sloane’s eyes were wide. My stomach lurched.

There was a chance that the UNSUB knew about the program.

The only people who would have been able to reconstruct my mother’s crime scene so exactly, the only people who would have known about the blood on the light switch, were people who had access to the crime-scene photos.

And someone had left a tube of my mother’s favorite lipstick on Lia’s bed.

Inside our house.

“Cassie?” Lia was the first one to break the silence. “Are you okay? You look…not good.”

I was going to go out on a limb and guess that was about as diplomatic as Lia got.

“I need to call Agent Briggs,” I said, and then I paused. “I don’t have his number.”

Dean fished his phone out of his pocket. “There are only four numbers in my contacts,” he said. “Briggs is one of them.”

The other three were Locke, Lia, and Judd. My hands shaking, I dialed Agent Briggs.

No answer.

I called Locke.

Please answer. Please answer. Please, please answer.

“Dean?”

Like Agent Briggs, Locke didn’t bother with hello.

“No,” I said. “It’s me.”

“Cassie? Is everything okay?”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

“Are you alone?”

“No.”

Locke must have heard something in my voice, because she flipped into agent mode in a heartbeat. “Can you talk openly?”

I heard steps in the hallway. Agent Starmans opened the door without knocking, glared pointedly at Lia, then resumed standing guard, right outside the door.

“Cassie,” Locke said sharply. “Can you talk?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t know anything except for the fact that there was a very real possibility that the killer had been inside our house—for all I knew, the killer could be inside the house now. If the UNSUB had access to FBI files, if he had access to us…

“Cassie, I need you to listen to me. Hang up the phone. Tell whoever’s around you that I’m in the middle of something and I’ll stop by the house as soon as I’m done. Then take the phone, go to the bathroom, and call me back.”