The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  I was used to making profiles. Doing the reverse—trying to figure out the specific pieces of evidence that had led Sterling to those conclusions—was harder. A dark-colored SUV and a large-breed dog suggested a need for power and domination. I wasn’t sure where firearms came in—unless the professor had been shot?—but there must have been something about Emerson’s murder that suggested both a need for control and a lack of confidence on the killer’s part. The presentation of the body and the methodical way Emerson had been killed were both characteristic of an organized killer. So where was Sterling getting the lack of confidence?

  The fact that he’s copying another killer’s MO? Victim selection? Did the UNSUB’s initial attack come from behind? Did he drug her?

  I tried to figure out how Sterling had arrived at her conclusions, but operating with a tiny subset of the relevant case details was like trying to swim with a cinder block tied to each knee and a squirrel stuffed in your pocket. I’d seen Emerson’s body on the news, but that wasn’t enough.

  “How was the professor killed?” I asked.

  The director, Sterling, and Briggs all turned to stare at me. So did Dean. I realized belatedly that no one had ever said that the professor was dead. That was information that we weren’t supposed to know. It was a guess.

  Based on their reactions, I knew I’d guessed right.

  “You don’t need to know the details,” Briggs replied curtly. “Consider this nothing more than another training exercise. Find whatever internet profiles you can for each of the students on the class list. Check out their status updates or likes or whatever it is college kids are doing online these days, and let us know if you run into anything suspicious.”

  Lia narrowed her eyes at Briggs. “You don’t think we’ll find anything.” She punctuated her words by drumming her fingers, one by one, against the arm of the sofa. “Interesting.”

  “You don’t think the UNSUB is a student.” Dean picked up where Lia left off. “But you can’t rule out the possibility, because that’s what my father does: he doles out tiny kernels of truth and dresses them up like lies.” Dean looked at Sterling, then at Briggs. “He wants you questioning your instincts about everything.”

  “I’m not questioning anything,” Briggs said, a muscle tensing in his jaw. “If there’s something to his comment about the students in that class, there will be red flags. If there are red flags, the five of you will find them.”

  “And if there aren’t,” Dean said, filling in the blanks, “you won’t have wasted your time.”

  Every hour we spent wading through social media sites was an hour Briggs’s team was free to hunt down other leads. That’s why you agreed to this, I thought, focusing in on Briggs. If Redding lied, you haven’t lost anything. If he’s telling the truth, we’ll see it. Either way, he’s not the one calling the shots. You are.

  I thought about what Dean had said about Briggs’s competitive streak and what Judd had said about crossing lines. You were all for keeping us out of this, I thought, and then you found the professor’s body.

  “Dean, if you’d rather sit this one out, that would be fine.” The director straightened the front of his suit as he gave Dean a tight, close-lipped smile.

  “You mean that you would rather I sat this one out.” Dean stayed hunched over on the fireplace, but he lifted his eyes to meet the director’s. “Because I’m ‘too close to it,’ but really, because you don’t trust me.” Dean waited a bit, but the director didn’t contradict him. “Not on this case,” Dean continued. “Not with my father.” He stood. “Not with your daughter.”

  You killed Emerson Cole. You killed the professor. You liked it.

  As I waded through online profiles, those words were never far from my mind. Spread out around me, Michael, Lia, and Sloane were focused on their respective laptops. Dean’s absence was palpable.

  I tried to focus on the profile Agent Sterling had given us. Early twenties, I reminded myself. Commutes from home. No father in the picture. May have acquired a stepfather sometime in the past few years. Comfortable around firearms.

  Those weren’t exactly the kinds of things that a person advertised on social media sites. I could pick up the gist of an individual’s personality from their favorites—favorite books, favorite movies, favorite quotes—but the most reliable information came from the pictures and status updates. How often did they update? Did they converse with friends? Were they in a relationship? Sloane had developed some kind of method for screening pictures for dark-colored trucks and SUVs, but I was more interested in the stories the pictures told.

  Snapshots uploaded by other people gave me a candid look at a person. How self-conscious were they? Were they at the center of group pictures, or at the edge? Did they make the same facial expression in every picture, rigidly controlling what they showed to the world? Did they stare down the camera or look away? What kind of clothes did they wear? Where were the pictures taken?

  Bit by bit, I could build a model of someone’s life from the ground up—which would have been more useful if I’d actually been the one to profile the UNSUB, rather than just being given a list of boxes to check off.

  Okay, I told myself after my eyes had gone blurry from scrolling through too many profiles, very few of which set off my spidey senses. Sterling and Briggs gave you a few key things to look for. So do what you always do. Take a handful of details and get to the big picture.

  Sterling thought the UNSUB was young, but not adolescent. Why? He’d chosen a college sophomore as his first victim. Someone who desperately longed to dominate other people would start with easy prey—a laughing, smiling young girl who wasn’t physically imposing in the least. He was probably at least a couple of years older than she was, and since a quick glance at Emerson’s profile told me that she was twenty, that explained the lower end of Sterling’s estimated age range. How had she determined that the UNSUB wasn’t an older man, like the professor?

  You imitate another man’s kills. You admire him. You want to be like him. I let that thought sit for a moment. But you also risked getting caught to display your kill in a very public location—something Daniel Redding wouldn’t have done. You brought black rope with you to hang her, but the news report said you strangled her with the antenna from her own car.

  To put it in terms of the textbook Dean and I had read, this was an organized kill, but there was something disorganized about it, too. The attack had obviously been planned, but there was also something impulsive about it.

  Did you plan to leave her on the president’s lawn? Or was that something you thought of once your adrenaline started pumping?

  Displaying the victim in public suggested a need for recognition. But recognition from whom? From the public? From the press?

  From Daniel Redding? That was a possibility I couldn’t shake, and somehow, other pieces of Sterling’s profile began to make sense. An impulsive copycat who idolized Redding would be younger than the man was himself, probably by a decade or more.

  You’ve felt powerless, and you admire his power. You’ve felt invisible, and you want to be seen.

  SUVs and trucks were large. They sat up higher on the road. German shepherds were also large. They were intelligent, strong—and often police dogs.

  You don’t just want power. You want authority, I thought. You want it because you’ve never had it. Because the people in your life who do have it make you feel weak. You didn’t feel weak when you killed Emerson.

  I thought about the professor and wished again that I knew how he’d died. If you were in Fogle’s class, you admired the professor—at first. But later, you resented him for being all talk and no show. For not paying enough attention to you. For paying too much to Emerson.

  Organized killers frequently chose victims they did not know to reduce the chances that the crime could be traced back to them. But my gut was telling me that it wasn’t a coincidence that Emerson had been in a relationship with the professor and now they were both dead. These victim
s weren’t chosen randomly. They weren’t chosen by a stranger.

  “Hey, Sloane?”

  Sloane didn’t look up from her computer. She held up the index finger on her right hand and continued typing rapidly with her left. After a few more seconds, she stopped typing and looked up.

  “Can you compare the other students’ schedules to Emerson’s and see how much overlap there is?” I asked. “I’m thinking that if our UNSUB was fixated on Emerson, this might not be the only class they shared.”

  “Sure.” Sloane didn’t move to reach for any of the files. She just sat there, her hands now folded into her lap, a bright smile on her face.

  “Could you do it now?” I asked.

  She held up the index finger on her right hand again. “I am doing it now.” Sloane had an incredible memory. The same skill set that allowed her to rebuild the crime scene apparently meant she didn’t need to go back over the data to analyze it.

  “Emerson was an English major,” she rattled off. “She was taking Professor Fogle’s class as an elective. All of her other classes counted toward her major, except for Geology, which I assume fulfills some kind of natural science requirement. Most of the other students in Fogle’s class were psychology, pre-law, or sociology majors, and as a result, they shared very few classes with Emerson, with the exception of two students.”

  If my instincts were right, if Emerson hadn’t been a random target, then I was very interested to know who those two students were.

  Sloane thumbed expertly through the stack of files on the counter and handed me two of them. “Bryce Anderson and Gary Clarkson.”

  Michael looked up from whatever he was doing at the sound of Bryce’s name. “Bryce didn’t mention that she and Emerson had any other classes together.”

  I went back to my computer and searched for Gary Clarkson’s profile. Unlike most of his peers, the profile itself was set to private, so all I could see was the profile picture.

  “Gary Clarkson,” I said, turning my computer around so the others could see. “He goes by Clark.”

  Clark had known Emerson. He’d known she was sleeping with the professor. He was angry. And we were staring at a picture of him wearing an orange hunting vest, holding a gun.

  You were in most of Emerson’s classes. I slipped into Clark’s mind without even thinking about it. You liked watching her. She was nice to you. You thought she was perfect. And if you found out she wasn’t…

  “You got something?” Michael asked me from his spot across the room.

  I caught my bottom lip in my teeth. “Maybe.”

  I could see Clark targeting Emerson, but if he’d been the one to attack her, I would have expected it to be messier. I’d thought it myself the day before: if Clark was a killer, he’d be a disorganized killer. Emerson wasn’t murdered on an impulse. The UNSUB never lost emotional control.

  And yet…

  A phone rang, breaking me from my thoughts. It took me a second to realize that the ringtone was mine. I reached for my phone, but Lia beat me there. She snatched it and held it just out of reach.

  “Give it here, Lia.”

  Selectively deaf, she turned the phone around so I could see the caller’s name. TA GEOFF flashed across the screen. What the…He’d given me his number. I’d plugged it into my phone, but I’d never given him mine.

  “The two of you have been texting,” Lia informed me pertly. “You’ve really grown quite close.”

  I made a mental note to change the password on my phone.

  “Shall we see what he has to say?” Lia didn’t wait for a response before she answered the call.

  “Geoffrey. I was just talking about you.” She smiled at whatever he said in response, then put the phone on speaker and laid it on the coffee table between us, daring me to hang up.

  I didn’t.

  “Did you hear about the professor?” Geoffrey asked, his voice grave. “It’s all over the news.”

  So the story about the professor’s death had broken.

  “This must be so hard for you,” Lia said, putting her feet up on the coffee table. Her tone oozing sympathy, she gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

  “You have no idea,” Geoffrey said in response. “The professor didn’t deserve this.”

  And Emerson did? I bit back the question.

  “First that girl, now the professor,” Lia said, sounding every inch the tragedy groupie, ready to hang on Geoffrey’s every word. “Who do you think it is?”

  “We’re dealing with what I like to call an organized killer,” Geoffrey intoned. “Highly intelligent and hard to catch.”

  I didn’t know what was more off-putting: the way Geoffrey was acting like he’d invented the phrase “organized killer”—while demonstrating only the smallest fraction of understanding of what that really meant—or the fact that “highly intelligent” was probably a descriptor he’d use to describe himself.

  “I’ll probably have to take over the class now that Fogle is gone,” Geoffrey added. “I don’t know what will happen to his book, Bind Them, Brand Them, Cut Them, Hang Them: The Daniel Redding Story.”

  Geoffrey couldn’t resist dropping the book’s title. Listening to him talk, I thought back to the way Dean had looked, saying those same words: eyes unseeing, face pale.

  “Do you think it could be someone in the class?” Lia asked. “Your class?”

  She was so good at changing the direction of the conversation that Geoffrey didn’t even realize she’d done it.

  “If there were a student in this class with the potential for that kind of thing,” Geoffrey said, his tone saturated with smugness, “I think I would know it.”

  My first reaction to those words was that of course he thought he’d recognize a killer. But my second reaction sat heavier in my stomach. He’d used the word potential.

  Potential as in capability, or potential as in talent?

  “What about the kid who’s setting the curve in the class?” Lia gave Geoffrey another verbal nudge.

  “No way,” Geoffrey scoffed. “Gary something. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Gary Clarkson. As in Clark. I wouldn’t have pegged him as the curve-setting type, and that disturbed me. Maybe he was more of a planner, more type A, more organized than I’d realized.

  Lia snatched the phone up and abruptly hung up. The sudden movement jerked me out of my thoughts and I tracked her gaze. Dean was standing in the hallway behind me.

  He didn’t comment on what he’d overheard. He didn’t threaten to tell Briggs we’d broken the rules. Again. He just turned and walked, his footsteps heavy, toward the stairs.

  I snatched my phone back. Lia didn’t stop me. It rang. I expected it to be Geoffrey calling back, but it wasn’t.

  “There’s someone I need you to look up,” Briggs said, forgoing the customary greeting.

  “Same to you,” I told him. “Gary Clarkson. He’s comfortable with guns, shared a high percentage of Emerson’s classes, and was setting the curve in Fogle’s class.” I hesitated just a second, then plowed on. “You should also check out the professor’s TA.”

  The FBI hadn’t given us a file for Geoffrey, but that was an oversight on their part. He wasn’t a student in the class, but he was a student at the university—and it would be just like Dean’s father to get off on telling the FBI something misleading, but true.

  “I’ll look into it,” Briggs promised, “but right now, I need you to see what you can find out about a Conrad Mayler. He’s a senior who took Fogle’s class two years ago.”

  “Why am I looking him up?”

  There was silence on the other end. For a moment, I thought Briggs wouldn’t answer the question, but after a second’s hesitation, he did. “He’s the one who posted the video of the crime scene.”

  Briggs had a way of punctuating the end of sentences that shut the door completely on further conversation.

  “Okay,” I said. “Conrad Mayler. Got it.”

  Twenty minutes later, I’d discover
ed everything there was to online-know about Conrad Mayler. He was a journalism major. He claimed to listen only to indie bands. His favorite movies were documentaries. He had a blog where he wrote snarky recaps of a variety of reality shows. According to his profile, he’d attended a private high school and worked part-time at the student radio station.

  His relationship status was “It’s complicated.” The girl implicated in said relationship was Bryce Anderson.

  Your name just keeps coming up. I pictured the blond girl in my mind. I’d made the error once before of erroneously assuming an UNSUB was male. No matter what my gut was telling me this time, I couldn’t risk making the same mistake twice.

  Scrolling through Conrad’s status updates and profiles, it wasn’t hard to see that he fancied himself a journalist. He’d probably claim that he’d taken the video of Emerson’s body and posted it anonymously online because the public had a right to know. I was half-surprised he hadn’t actually posted it to his profile.

  Seemingly in answer to my thoughts, the page in front of me updated itself. Conrad had posted a new video. Preparing myself for the worst, I clicked play, but instead of a corpse, I saw rows of wooden seats, filled with students. The time stamp on the video read 7:34 A.M.

  “Professor George Fogle once said that he scheduled his class for 7:30 in the morning as a way of separating the students who were taking his class on a lark from those who were serious about the study of criminology.” The camera panned the room, and I recognized the auditorium.

  I’d been there before.

  “Three days ago, three hundred and seven serious students took the first of three Monsters or Men exams. The three hundred and eighth student, Emerson Cole, was found dead that morning.”