Page 1 of Twelve
YOU
There are names for what you do.
They cycle through your head as you stare at her body. The angle of her broken neck. The blood staining the ground beneath. There’s something about the moment after impact that sticks with you.
Has always stuck with you.
It shouldn’t be beautiful, but it is. You shouldn’t linger, but you do. You press your index and middle fingers to your lips.
There are names for what you do. But only one matters.
Release.
“Best, Worst, Most Improbable.” Sloane paused half of a half of a beat. “Go!”
Based on her energy level—and the fact that she’d spent the first thirty-two seconds of this phone call verbally calculating the incidence of poodle-related deaths in the southwestern United States—I inferred that Michael and Dean had failed to intercept Sloane’s coffee delivery that morning.
At the ripe old age of twenty-three, my former roommate still couldn’t hold her caffeine.
“Somebody start,” she said cheerfully, “or I will be forced to tell you the twelve most exciting wallaby statistics I know.”
This was Week 10 for my fellow Naturals at the FBI Academy.Not that I’m counting.Sometime around Week 7, a competition had developed between the NATs—New Agent Trainees—and the NIATs—New Intelligence Analyst Trainees—to see who could sneak “Sloane the Statistical Genius” the most coffee.
I was under the impression the NIATs were winning.
“You first, Colorado.” Michael Townsend sounded exactly the same on speakerphone as he did in person.
Dean sounded different. “Start with the best part of your week.” My boyfriend’s Southern accent had mellowed over the years, but in the past two months, I’d heard his drawl creeping back.
Quantico was home once.I fell back on an old habit, profiling Dean when I couldn’t read the expression on his face.It’s also too close to your father’s old hunting grounds for comfort.
“Best part of my week.” I focused on the task at hand. Phone calls didn’t last long these days, and I needed this as much or more than Dean did. “I found a pair of brothers in Texas.”
“Cover your ears, Redding,” Michael quipped. “Cassie is going to tell us more about these brothers.” I could practicallyhearhim winking on the other end of the line. “Are they more handsome than Dean? Less broody? More favorable to incorporating colors into their wardrobe?”
I rolled my eyes. Dean and I had been together since we were teenagers, and Michael had taken great joy in singing the same song nearly the whole time.
“One of the brothers fits our criteria,” I continued, pointedly ignoring him. “There’s definitely evidence of Natural-level ability there.”
In the past five years, we’d succeeded at identifying a handful of Naturals, but most had been adults. I’d sent a dozen or more to the FBI Academy, but only three had come to Colorado to be trained the way that Michael, Dean, Sloane, Lia, and I had been.
Off the books.
“The worst thing about my week,” I went on, leaning my back against the wall, “is that we’re still not surewhichof the brothers is the Natural.”
Every ability exists along a spectrum.That was how I’d start the conversation if we identified which brother had raised the flags in our system—and if my final analysis suggested that I could bring the kid in without doing him more harm than good.Every spectrum has two extremes: one with very low levels of that ability and one with very high. Naturals are one in a billion. I should know.
I was a Natural profiler.
“Are we playing Best, Worst, Most Improbable?” Lia Zhang, civilian FBI consultant, long-term thorn in my side, Natural, and—against all odds—one of my closest confidantes, appeared in the kitchen of our Colorado house.
Or, more specifically, our base of operations.
Lia plucked my cell phone from my hand, and set it to speaker. “I’m guessing Cassie told you guys about the boys in Texas.”
“Best part of her week,” Sloane confirmed. “And the worst.”
Lia arched an eyebrow at me. She was our resident deception detector, a Natural at picking out liesandtelling them.
