Despite the way my heart pounded in my chest, I was suddenly possessed of an unnatural calm. “Tell me something I don’t know about this case,” I said.
“Allow me to share my master plan,” Redding said wryly. His tone was joking, but his eyes were dead. “I’m going to sit in my cell and wait, and while I wait, two more people are going to die. Agent Briggs will get the call about one of them any minute, and the other is going to die sometime tomorrow. Then the victims will start piling up. Body after body after body, because Briggs and Sterling aren’t good enough.” Redding lifted his gaze from my face to Briggs’s. “Because you aren’t smart enough.” He let his eyes travel to Dean. “Because you’re weak.”
I pushed my chair back from the table, bumping into Dean as I did. He kept his balance, and I stood up.
We’re done here, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. Single file, Briggs, Dean, and I walked out of the room, leaving Dean’s father chained to the table alone.
We joined the rest of the team in the observation room. Sloane was sitting cross-legged on top of a nearby desk, her blond hair barely contained in a messy ponytail, her posture unnaturally straight. Agent Sterling stood beside her, a few feet behind Lia, who was still staring at Redding through the two-way mirror, her arms crossed over her chest, painted fingernails resting on her elbows. On the other side of the mirror, Agent Vance entered to transfer the prisoner back to his cell.
A hand grazed my shoulder, and I turned. Michael didn’t say anything—he just studied my face.
I couldn’t turn my face away from his. I didn’t tell him I was fine or that Redding hadn’t gotten under my skin—whatever I was or wasn’t, Michael already knew. There was no use belaboring the point.
“Are you okay?” Agent Sterling actually verbalized the question. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to Dean.
I sidestepped the question for both of us. “Ignore the bit about my mother,” I told Lia. “Focus on the case. How much of what Redding told me in there was true?”
Lia finally managed to pull her eyes away from the mirror. For a few seconds, I thought she would ignore my instructions. I willed her not to. She’d said it herself: the best liars were magicians. Whether Dean’s father had been lying or telling the truth when he’d said I would never find my mother’s killer, I didn’t want to know. Misdirection. My mother’s case was five years old. Our UNSUB was out there killing now.
“Well?” I said. “What was everyone’s favorite psychopath lying about?”
Lia crossed the room and flopped down into an office chair, flinging a hand to each side. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” I repeated.
Lia slammed her palm into the side of the chair. “Nothing. I don’t even know how he’s doing this.” She shot to her feet again, vibrating with anger and too restless to stay still. “There were two versions of every question. I was supposed to be able to contrast his responses. That should have made things easy, but I would swear that every single answer was true.” She cursed—creatively and with impressive verve. “What is wrong with me?”
“Hey.” Dean reached out and grabbed her arm as she paced by him. “It’s not your fault.”
She jerked out of his grasp. “Then whose fault is it? The other deception reader in the room who is apparently completely useless?”
“What if you’re not?” Sloane interjected. Her eyes weren’t quite focused on the here and now. I could practically hear the gears in her head turning. “Not useless, I mean,” she said, haphazardly pushing white-blond bangs out of her eyes with the heel of her hand. “What if he was telling the truth, every single time?”
Lia shook her head hard enough to send her ponytail swishing. “That’s not possible.”
“It is,” Sloane said, “if there’s more than one apprentice.”
Is your apprentice a college student?
Is your apprentice someone who’s never been to college?
Is your apprentice over the age of twenty-one?
Is your apprentice under the age of twenty-one?
Oh, God.
Sloane was right. Redding could have answered every single question truthfully if he was working with two people on the outside—very different people on paper, but equally easy for Redding to manipulate, with equal tastes for violence and control.
Briggs weighed the possibility. “So Redding gives us answers specifically designed to make us think he’s just jerking us around, when in reality, he’s telling us exactly why this case has never added up.”
Why Emerson Cole’s murder had appeared to be the work of a primarily organized, extremely precise offender who left behind no evidence, while Trina Simms’s killer had killed her within earshot of her neighbors and left his DNA at the scene.
Briggs’s phone rang. The rest of us fell into silence. Redding’s promise that the bodies were going to start piling up echoed in my mind. Agent Briggs will get the call about one of them any minute.
Beside me, Michael watched Briggs out of the side of his eye, until the older man turned his back to us. I raised an eyebrow at Michael. He shook his head.
Whatever Briggs was feeling, it wasn’t good.
Keeping his voice low, Briggs stepped out into the hallway, allowing the door to slam shut behind him. In the silence that followed, none of us wanted to put the likely into words.
There’s been another murder.
I couldn’t just stand there, waiting for Briggs to come back and tell us that someone else was dead. I kept picturing the victims’ faces—Emerson’s lifeless eyes, Trina’s widening when she realized who Dean was.
Two killers, I thought, focusing on the UNSUBs and not the victims. I let the thought take hold. One killer who left evidence. One who didn’t. Both under Redding’s control.
Briggs came back into the room. He must have hung up, but he still had a death grip on his phone. “We have another body.”
“Where?” Agent Sterling asked.
The expression on Briggs’s face was grim. “Colonial University.”
My mind went straight to the people we’d met there, the others in Professor Fogle’s class.
“Anyone we know?” Michael managed to keep his tone neutral.
“The victim was nineteen.” Briggs was in full-on FBI mode—all business. “Male. According to his roommate, who discovered the body, his name was Gary Clarkson.”