“Michael!” Briggs pulled him off Dean. At the last second, Dean lunged forward and grabbed Michael, reversing their positions and wedging his elbow underneath Michael’s throat.
Dean lowered his voice to a whisper. “I never said this was a game to me, Townsend.”
It was a game to the UNSUB. I was the prize. And if we weren’t careful, Michael and Dean were going to kill each other.
“Enough.” Locke put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. He stiffened, and for a second, I thought he might hit her.
“Enough,” Dean echoed, expelling a breath. He let Michael go and took a step back. Then he just kept walking backward until his back hit the opposite wall. He was a person who didn’t lose control, who couldn’t afford to, and he’d come close enough with Michael just now that it scared him.
“So what do we do now?” I asked, pulling everyone’s attention from Dean and giving him a second to recover.
Briggs jabbed his index finger in my direction. “You’re still not working this case. Either of you.” He spared a glare for Dean before returning that laser focus to me. “I’ve assigned a team to watch the house. I’ll introduce you all to Agents Starmans, Vance, and Brooks. Until further notice, none of you will be leaving this residence, and Cassie is never alone.”
Closing ranks around me wasn’t going to bring us any closer to this UNSUB.
“You should take me with you,” I told Briggs. “If this guy wants me, we should use that. Set a trap.”
“No!” Michael, Dean, and Briggs responded at the exact same time. I turned beseeching eyes to Agent Locke.
She looked like she was on the verge of agreeing with me, but at the last second, she bit her lip and shook her head. “The UNSUB has only made contact once. He’ll try again, whether you’re here or elsewhere, and at least here, we have the home court advantage.”
I’d been taught that there was no such thing as the home court advantage, but my mother’s lessons had been geared toward reading people, not playing cat and mouse with killers.
“The UNSUB is breaking pattern.” Locke reached out and touched the side of my face softly. “As scary as it is, that’s a good thing. We know what he wants, and we can keep him from getting it. The more riled up he gets, the more likely he is to make a mistake.”
“I can’t just do nothing.” I locked my eyes onto my mentor’s, willing her to understand.
“You can do something,” she said finally. “You can make a list. Everyone you’ve spoken to, everyone you’ve met, every place you’ve been, every person who’s spent even a second looking at you since you got here.”
My mind went immediately to the man who’d interrupted my reading that afternoon by the Potomac—without telling me his name. Was that him? Was it nothing?
It was hard not to be paranoid, given what I knew now.
“The UNSUB mailed the package,” Lia pointed out, jarring me from my thoughts. “He doesn’t have to be local.”
Dean jammed his hands into his pockets. “He’d want to see her,” he said, his own gaze flicking toward my face, just for a second.
“We weren’t able to trace the package,” Locke said grimly. “Busy post office, busy day, less than observant mail clerk, and no security cameras. Our UNSUB paid cash, and the return address is obviously faked. This guy is good, and he’s playing with us. At this point, I wouldn’t rule anything out.”
CHAPTER 29
For the next three days, I could barely manage to go to the bathroom without someone else following me in. And every time I looked out the window, I knew that the FBI was out there, watching and waiting, hoping the killer would try again.
“There are approximately thirty thousand working morticians in the United States.”
Sloane—who was the only person in the house I couldn’t justify throwing out of my room, since it was her room, too—had pulled Cassie babysitting duty when I’d tried to sneak away for some time alone.
“Morticians?” I repeated. I eyed her suspiciously. “Did someone give you coffee?”
Sloane very pointedly did not answer the coffee question. “I thought you could use a distraction.”
I plopped down on my bed. “Don’t you have any more cheerful statistics?”
Sloane frowned in contemplation. “Are balloon animals cheerful?”
Oh dear lord.
“Balloonists are more likely than other circus performers to suffer from subconjunctival hemorrhages.”
“Sloane, subconjunctival hemorrhages are not cheerful.”
She shrugged. “If you had a balloon, I could make you a dachshund.”
Another few days of this and I might willingly serve myself up to the UNSUB. Who would have thought my fellow Naturals would take Briggs’s decree that I not be left alone so seriously? Dean and Michael could barely stand to be in the same room with each other, but the second I stepped out of my bedroom, one or both of them would be there waiting for me. The only thing that could have made this whole situation more awkward was if Lia hadn’t magnanimously decided to stay out of the fray.
“Knock, knock!”
So much for Lia’s magnanimousness.
“What do you want?” I asked her, not bothering to sugarcoat my words.
“My, but we’re cranky today.”
If looks could kill, Lia would have been dead on the floor, and I would have been on trial for murder.
“I suppose,” Lia said, with the air of someone making a most generous concession, “that the argument you had with Dean about his father wasn’t entirely your fault, and since this whole hair-in-a-box thing seems to have given him a renewed purpose in life, I’m not morally obligated to make you miserable anymore.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Thank you?”
“I thought you could use a distraction.” Lia smiled. “If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s distractions.”
The last time I’d let Lia dictate our plans, I’d ended up kissing Dean and Michael in a span of less than twenty-four hours, but after three days of house arrest and way too many statistics about dachshunds, I was desperate.
“What kind of distraction did you have in mind?”
Lia tossed a bag on my bed. I opened it.
“Did you rob a cosmetics store?”
Lia shrugged. “I like makeup—and nothing says distraction like a makeover. Besides …” She reached in the bag and pulled out a lipstick. Smiling wickedly, she uncapped it and twisted the bottom. “This is definitely your color.”
I eyed the lipstick. The color was dark—halfway between red and brown. Way too sexy for me—and strangely familiar.
“What do you say?” Lia didn’t actually wait for an answer. She pushed me into a sitting position on the bed. She leaned into my personal space and tilted my chin back. And then she dragged the lipstick across my lips.
“Kleenex!” Lia barked.
Sloane supplied the Kleenex, a goofy grin on her face.
“Blot,” Lia ordered.
I blotted.
“I knew that would be a good color on you,” Lia told me, her voice smug and self-satisfied. Without another word, she turned her attention to my eyes. When she was finally finished, I pushed her off me and walked over to the mirror.
“Oh.” I couldn’t keep the sound from escaping my mouth. My blue eyes looked impossibly big. My lashes had been thoroughly mascara-ed, and the color on my lips was dark against my porcelain skin.
I looked like my mother. My features, the way they came together on my face—everything.
Blue dress. Blood. Lipstick.
A series of images flashed through my mind, and I realized with sudden clarity why the color of this lipstick had seemed so familiar. I turned back to the bed and scavenged through the bag of makeup until I found it. I turned the tube upside down, looking for the color’s name.