The Naturals

“I hadn’t ever talked about this, not even with Mom, who’d taught me the parts of it that could be taught. People were people, but for better or worse, most days, they were just puzzles to me. Easy puzzles, hard puzzles, crosswords, mind-benders, sudoku. There was always an answer, and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing until I found it.”

Briggs is the first to verbalize Cassie’s talent, which forces her to confront how she sees people: not as people but as things to be interpreted and put into categories. This dehumanization facilitates her isolation and inability to connect with others. It also shows how the behaviors and beliefs we adopt in childhood become second nature and out of our control as we grow older.

“I cared about my grandmother. I did. And I knew how hard she and the rest of the family had tried to make me feel loved, no matter how I’d come to them or how much of my mother there was in me. But I’d never really belonged here. A part of me had never really left that fateful theater: the lights, the crowd, the blood. Maybe I never would, but Agent Briggs was offering me a chance to do something about it.”

Cassie’s experience with her father’s family shows how sometimes being family does not inherently give way to a familiar connection. Because her family has made an effort, she begins to wonder if she herself is incapable of forging that connection. She feels damaged by her past, and Briggs’s offer presents her with the opportunity to actively engage in her own life, whereas previously her choices have been made for her.

“I closed my eyes and pictured each of the Naturals who lived in this house. Michael. Dean. Lia. Sloane. None of them was what I’d expected. None of them fit a familiar mold. As I drifted into that half-awake, half-asleep state that was as close as I was going to get to a real night’s rest, I played a game I’d invented when I was little. I mentally peeled off my own skin and put on someone else’s. […] As the room came more into focus, I could feel my subconscious taking over, feel myself losing the real world in favor of this imaginary one I’d built in my head.”

Meeting the other Naturals challenges Cassie’s way of seeing the world. She has been accustomed to categorizing people based on behavior, but the others’ unpredictable and mysterious behavior teaches her that maybe not everyone is a predictable puzzle to be solved. This moment also shows how profiling has become a coping skill for Cassie to deal with reality by stepping into another one. Being in someone else’s mind helps her escape her own.

“I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I was used to starting with people: their posture, the way they talked, their clothes, their occupations, their gender, the way they arranged a napkin on their lap—that was my language. Starting with a car was like flying blind.”

When Locke asks Cassie to profile a person based on their car, she is stumped at first. Here we get more insight into how Cassie views her skills. They are how she engages with both people and the larger world around her. To Cassie, objects are merely part of the puzzle, but never the first piece. She must learn to refine her “language.”

“The biggest thing I’d figured out about Michael in the past week was that there was a very good chance that he’d been wearing masks for longer than he’d been working for the FBI—pretending to be something he wasn’t was second nature.”

Perhaps Cassie’s inability to profile Michael is the key to understanding him. He is hidden beneath layers of sarcastic personas, afraid of being true and vulnerable. Cassie assumes that this is a product of an abusive home life. She sees this characteristic in herself as well: Profiling is a mask she adopted in childhood to hide from the world after her mother’s death.

“Reading Friedman’s words—black ink typed onto the page—would have been bad enough, but the worst part was that after a few pages, I could hear the way he would have talked about the women he’d killed: excitement, nostalgia, longing—but no remorse. […] I realized suddenly that most people my age—most people any age—wouldn’t be able to take reading these interviews. They wouldn’t want to, and they certainly wouldn’t lose themselves in it, the way I would. The way I already had. Friedman’s interview was horrible and horrifying—but I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that wanted to understand.”

This moment shows how the transcribed prison interviews are a symbol for the way Cassie can instinctively get into the mind of a killer. The words on the page are like keys that grant her easier access, but the curiosity and desire to do so already exist in her. The interviews are yet another reminder of how she does not fit in with people her age, until she meets the Naturals.

“Dean was the only person in this house who shared my ability. Michael and Sloane might have been skeptical about my theory, but Dean had instincts like mine. He’d know if I was crazy, or if there was something to this.”

Cassie begins to see herself in Dean because of their shared skills and way of thinking. She is learning to trust him almost as much as she trusts her own instincts. Although Dean tries to keep her at a distance, their connection is out of their control.

“There it was: the ultimate threat. If I pushed this, Briggs could send me home. Back to Nonna and the aunts and the uncles and the constant awareness that I would never be like them, like anyone outside of these walls.”

In the Naturals program, Cassie is finally feeling like she fits in with people her own age, so the fear of losing that is significant. Although her “home” is technically back in Colorado, she has begun to see DC as her new home. She knows that her biological family will never truly understand her. She must struggle with the instinct to stay and the instinct to dig into the mystery of her mother’s murder, which Briggs has warned her against.

“The rest of the world will never understand. The FBI will never know the inner workings of your brain. They’ll never know how close you are. But Cassie—she’s going to know everything. The two of you are connected. Cassie is her mother’s daughter—and that’s as close as you’re ever going to get.”

The brief moments of insight into the killer’s mind are made visually distinct by their italicization and separation from the standard chapters in the novel. In this moment, the UNSUB, who we later learn is Lacey Locke, revels in her connection to Cassie. She knows how much of an outsider Cassie has felt all her life and uses this to her advantage in the end. Cassie later struggles with this biological and emotional connection to her aunt.

“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.”

This moment parallels the previous mirror scene in Chapter 1, when Cassie seemed to resent having her mother’s features as a constant reminder. As soon as she puts on makeup, namely the lipstick she remembers is her mother’s shade, she can see their resemblance more easily. Her new reflection is like looking at a ghost, and it shows how Cassie’s identity in relation to her mother is shifting the more she learns about herself and her mother’s murder.

“Guilt rose like nausea in the back of my throat. I pushed it down. I could process this later. I could hate the UNSUB—and myself—for the blood and bruises on this girl’s face later. But right now, I had to hold it together. I had to do something.”

Once again, Cassie is overcome by the need to act decisively. She compartmentalizes her grief and guilt for Genevieve’s abduction in order to focus on finding her. This is a mature reaction that shows her taking her new profiling work seriously. Profiling is no longer a “game” that she plays with random people around her; this time, it has real, deadly consequences.

“I couldn’t just sit back and watch this happen. Behavior. Personality. Environment. Victimology. MO. Signature. I was a Natural—and as sick as it was, I had a relationship with this UNSUB. If they brought me to the crime scene, I might see something the others had missed.”

Here Cassie explicitly accepts her role as a Natural. She recites everything she knows about profiling like a mantra to reassure herself. She also finally admits that she and the UNSUB have an unnatural connection after learning that the UNSUB is solely focused on her. This increases Cassie’s determination to catch them.

“That was the whole reason Briggs had started the Naturals program. The whole reason that he’d come to twelve-year-old Dean. No matter how long they did this job, or how much training they had, these agents would never have instincts as finely honed as ours.”

After not fitting in with others all her life and then feeling more comfortable working with the FBI, she acknowledges that sometimes not fitting in is a good thing. She has talents not even highly trained FBI agents have, making them the outsiders within the Naturals program. She has started to see her traumatic childhood as a strength rather than a weakness.

“‘Stay in control,’ he said, his voice steady and warm. ‘Every time you go back there, every time you see it—it’s just blood, just a crime scene, just a body.’ He dropped his hands to his sides. ‘That’s all it is, Cassie. That’s all you can let it be.’ I wondered which memories he relived over and over—wondered about the bodies and the blood. But right now, in this moment, I was just glad that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.”

The bond between Cassie and Dean continues to grow as they face new challenges in catching the UNSUB. Dean’s physical touch and his constant presence becomes reassuring for Cassie even as she still unconsciously tries to profile him. After being emotionally isolated all her life, especially since her mother’s murder, she finally has someone to rely on.

“This was never about me figuring out who this killer was. This was always, always about the UNSUB playing with me, forcing me to relive the worst day of my life. […] This is a game. I heard Dean’s voice echoing through my memory. It’s always a game. That was what he’d told Michael, and at the time, I’d agreed. To the killer, this was a game—and suddenly, I couldn’t help thinking that the good guys might not win this one. We might lose. I might lose.”

Unlike the low-stakes profiling games she has played with herself throughout her childhood or the training exercises with Locke, this “game” is high-stakes and personal for Cassie. She finally considers herself part of a group, one of the “good guys,” but her confidence in their ability to triumph is slipping. She is not only reliving the loss of her mother but also the feeling of inaction and lack of answers.

“‘Fine,’ I replied. It was a stock answer, perfected around the Sunday night dinner table. I was a survivor. Whatever life threw at me, I came out okay, and the rest of the world thought I was great. I’d been faking things for so long that, until the past few weeks with Michael, Dean, Lia, and Sloane, I’d forgotten what it was like to be real.”

Like Michael and Lia, Cassie has worn several masks around her family, pretending to be okay to avoid drawing attention to herself. With the Naturals, Cassie can not only be herself but let herself be vulnerable. Instead of challenging her independence, her fellow Naturals supplement her instinctive capacity to overcome setbacks.

“Michael didn’t ask me to elaborate, and I realized how much of our conversation happened in silence, with him reading my face and me knowing exactly how he’d respond. […] I didn’t know why I felt like I was missing something, but I did. If Michael had seen some hint of that in my facial expression…Maybe my body knew something that I didn’t.”

In the moment before they kiss, Cassie acknowledges her emotional connection to Michael. Their abilities allow them to communicate nonverbally. Whereas her profiling skills have kept her apart from others all her life, now they help her build relationships. This scene also shows how emotions can manifest physically as well as mentally. With Michael’s special talent for reading physical gestures, Cassie can gain more insight into her body’s reflection of how her mind processes information. Her instincts go deeper than she realizes.

“[Cassie] doesn’t understand who you are or what she is to you. But Dean does. You see the exact moment that everything falls into place for the boy you trained. The lessons you taught them, the little hints you dropped along the way. The way you are with Cassie, grooming her in your own image. The resemblance between the two of you. Your hair is red, too.”

Once again, we get a glimpse into the mind of the UNSUB, now revealed to be Locke herself. The switch in perspective gives us an outside view of how Dean and Cassie profile, while giving us a closeup of how Locke sees herself in relation to them. Her almost motherly behavior toward Dean and Cassie is justified and clever in her eyes. The significance of red hair now becomes as clear as it has been for Locke this whole time.

“One second she was standing there, looking exactly like the woman I knew, full of life, a force of nature who was very good at getting her own way, and the next she was on top of me. I saw a blur of silver and heard the impact of her gun with my cheekbone.”

The two contrasting identities of Locke are clashing, reflected in the sudden physical violence she inflicts on Cassie. Cassie must now reconcile these two versions of Locke: her savvy mentor and the cold-blooded killer they have been hunting. Cassie has experience categorizing patterns and identities, but Locke’s seemingly split identity challenges Cassie’s understanding of profiling itself.

“‘If I’m going to do this, I want it to be mine.’ I was speaking her language, telling her what she wanted to hear: that I was like her, that we were the same, that I understood that this was about anger and control and having the power to decide who lived and who died.”

Cassie has previously stated that profiling people is her own language, her way of engaging with the world. She now uses this to her advantage to communicate with Locke in a way that her killer’s mind will understand. In playing into Locke’s need for godlike control, Cassie effectively takes control of the situation herself.

“I had less than a second to think of an answer, but growing up the daughter of a woman who made her living by pretending to be psychic hadn’t just taught me the BPEs. For better or worse, I’d learned to put on a show, so I said the one thing I could think of that would keep Lacey Hobbes’s attention focused solely and 100 percent on me.”

Cassie’s mother was con artist who performed the role of psychic, and Cassie accepts that she too has learned to perform, as she used to pretend to fit in with her family. However, Cassie quickly realizes that she is not like Lia, the expert liar. Locke also has innate profiling abilities and sees right through Cassie’s performance as her mother’s killer. Still, Cassie’s “show” is a sleight of hand meant only to distract Locke for a moment—she is only pretending to believe that Locke might accept her story—making her a true con artist like her mother.

“Michael had months of rehabilitation ahead of him. The doctors said he might never walk without a limp again. Dean had barely said a word to me. Sloane couldn’t talk about anything other than the absolute unlikelihood of a serial killer being able to pass the psych evals and background check necessary to join the FBI, even under an assumed name. And I was dealing with the fact that Lacey Locke, née Hobbes, was my aunt.”

After the scene at the safe house, the Naturals are left to confront their new feelings of vulnerability. They fall back on their usual methods of coping, which reveals more about their personalities and behaviors. Cassie has gained and lost a member of her family who she never knew existed. Her grief is compounded and conflicted with the knowledge that her aunt was a killer. The irony becomes clear here: In many ways, Locke the FBI agent and mentor was more family to Cassie than Lacey the long-lost aunt.

“Weeks ago, Lia had told me that every person in this house was fundamentally screwed up to the depths of our dark and shadowy souls. We all had our crosses to bear. We saw things that other people didn’t—things that other people our age should never have to see. Dean would never just be boy. He’d always be the serial killer’s son. Michael would always be the person who’d put a round of bullets in my aunt. And part of me would never leave my mother’s blood-soaked dressing room, just like another part would always be at the safe house, with Lacey and her knife. We would never be like other people.”

Even more so than at the beginning of the novel, Cassie realizes her status as an outsider. However, she can finally accept this because she has friends to rely on now. Her relationship with each of the Naturals is complicated, but they are together in their struggle to survive.