She stood back up. My mouth was dry. I couldn’t force out an objection.
“You have good instincts,” Sterling told me. “You have a good eye. Someday, you could be a very good agent.”
The tracker was lighter than it looked, but the added weight, however slight, made my entire body feel heavy. Knowing I couldn’t leave, knowing that I couldn’t do anything—I hated it. I felt useless and weak and very, very young.
Sterling stood up. “But that day, Cassandra, is not today.”
YOU
You can picture Trina Simms’s last moments perfectly in your mind. In fact, now that the deed is done, you can’t stop picturing it, over and over again.
Hands bound together. Plastic biting into fleshy wrists. Knife. Blood.
Your brain re-creates the moment in bright, Technicolor detail. Her skin isn’t unblemished. It isn’t smooth. The brand sinks in, in, in….
Burning flesh smells the same whether or not it’s supple, whether or not it’s young. Just thinking about the brand sinking in, you can smell it. With each breath, you picture—
Rope around her neck. Dull, lifeless eyes.
Trina Simms was always shrill, deluded, demanding. She’s not so demanding now.
Every lead we’d managed to turn up in this case had ended with a brick wall. We’d discovered that Emerson was having an affair with her professor, and then he’d turned up just as dead as she was. We’d sifted through the students’ internet profiles only to find that every single one of them had an alibi. Michael, Dean, and I had gone to talk to Trina Simms. We’d been able to rule her out as a suspect, but hadn’t realized that the killer had her in his sights.
If my instincts are so good, I wondered, then why didn’t I see this coming? Why was I so focused on Christopher Simms?
I was supposed to be a Natural. I was supposed to be good at this. Yeah, right. So good that I hadn’t realized Locke was a killer. So good that for all I knew, while I’d been profiling Christopher and talking myself into suspicions, the UNSUB might have been lurking nearby, just waiting for us to leave.
Nothing we’d done on this case had turned out the way it was supposed to, and now I’d been put on an electronic leash. Like a criminal.
“As far as accessories go, it leaves something to be desired.” Lia’s response to the tracker secured around my ankle was predictably blasé. “Although that exact shade of black plastic does bring out the color of your eyes.”
“Shut up.”
“Cranky, cranky.” Lia waggled a finger at me. I smacked her hand away. “You have to admit that it’s deliciously ironic,” she said, stowing her waggling finger safely away.
I didn’t have to admit anything.
“Of all of us,” Lia continued, “you’re the least likely to be arrested. In fact, you might be the only one of us who hasn’t been arrested. And yet…” She gestured toward my ankle.
“Yuk it up,” I told her. “You might be next. Agent Sterling probably orders these things in bulk.”
“Bit of a double standard, don’t you think? The boys sneak out and get sentenced to each other’s company. You sneak out, and—”
“Enough,” I told Lia. “Sitting around and talking about it isn’t going to change anything. Besides, this isn’t our biggest problem.”
Somebody still had to tell Dean what had happened to Trina Simms.
“We went to see her, and now she’s dead.” Dean summarized the entire situation in a single sentence.
“Temporal proximity doesn’t imply causation,” Sloane said, patting him on the shoulder—the Sloane version of a comforting there, there.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Michael cut in. The five of us were gathered in the room the boys were now—apparently—sharing. Michael leaned back against the doorjamb and crossed one ankle over the other. “Was Trina already in the killer’s sights, or did our visit somehow set the UNSUB off?”
Dean considered the question. “Emerson’s murder was fairly well-planned.” Flipping into profiler mode kept him from getting dragged back under to the dark place, but even when Dean was trying to distance himself from what had happened, he never stopped referring to Emerson by name. “The presentation of her corpse was precise. Based on our interactions with Sterling and Briggs over the last few days, I’m guessing they don’t have much in the way of physical evidence. We’re looking at someone with a high level of attention to detail—all of which suggests that our killer would be methodical in selecting his victims.”
I closed my eyes and willed the tangled mass of thoughts in my mind to sort themselves out. “If the UNSUB is doing this because he identifies with Daniel Redding,” I said, working through the logic as I spoke, “it makes sense that he would seek out someone who actually knows Redding for victim number two.”
“Victim number three,” Sloane reminded me. “You forgot the professor.”
She was right. I’d left out the professor, because even though Briggs and Sterling hadn’t said a single thing about how he’d died, my gut didn’t believe that the UNSUB had tortured the professor the way he’d tortured the females. Daniel Redding’s original victims had all been female. Binding the women, branding them—that was about ownership. An UNSUB who identified with the method and brutality of this particular MO wouldn’t relish the death of an older male the same way. The women were the main event; Fogle was just in the way.
Some things you do because you want to, I thought, and some things you do because you need to.
Dean didn’t say anything about my omission of the professor from the victim list. He had tunnel vision of his own. “Emerson was twenty years old, blond, friendly, and well-liked by her classmates. Trina was in her late forties, brunette, neurotic, and based on her reaction to having visitors, socially isolated, except for two people: my father and her son.”
Most killers had a type. What did Trina Simms and Emerson Cole have in common?
“Emerson’s young. She’s pretty.” Dean’s voice took on an odd hum. “She’s sleeping with a man who fancies himself an expert on Daniel Redding. Maybe that’s why I chose her.”
When I profiled an UNSUB, I used the word you. When Dean profiled killers, he said I.
“Or maybe,” Dean said, his lids heavy, his eyes nearly closed, “I chose a girl who wouldn’t sleep with me, and then one who was sleeping with the man I’m emulating.” Dean’s voice was eerily reflective. I could feel him sinking deeper and deeper into the possibilities. “If Redding weren’t in prison, he would have killed Trina Simms himself. He would have sliced her up and strung her up and laughed every time she screamed.”