The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  “Daniel Redding’s emotions are flat.” Michael dangled his legs over the edge of the couch, and I knew that—like me—he was avoiding the elephant in the room. “He doesn’t feel fear, ever. He can feel pleasure, but not happiness. No regret. No remorse. Most of the time, his expression is dominated by more cerebral emotions: self-satisfaction, curiosity, amusement, a desire to twist the knife. He’s calculated, restrained, and the only thing that gets real emotion out of him is Dean.”

  My every impression of Dean’s father had been confirmed. Redding was possessive. He’d snapped every time Dean had denied their relationship. He’d done everything he could to make Dean think that they were the same—to separate him from everyone else, starting with Agent Briggs.

  “Did Briggs know?” I asked. “About…what Redding said at the end? About Dean?”

  I couldn’t put more than that into words.

  “He knew.” Agent Sterling spoke for the first time since we’d started watching the videos. Without elaborating, she walked over to Lia, grabbed the remote, and pressed play. A third interview started a moment later.

  A guard—one I’d never seen before—escorted Sterling into the room. Instead of taking a seat across from Redding, she remained standing.

  “Veronica Sterling.” Dean’s father said those words like the beginning of some kind of incantation. “I have to say, I’m surprised your dearest husband—excuse me, ex-husband—allowed you in such close quarters with the devil incarnate.”

  Sterling shrugged. “You’re just a man. A pathetic little man living in a cage.”

  “Briggs doesn’t know you’re here, does he?” Redding asked. “What about your father? No, he doesn’t know, either, does he? So tell me, Ms. Sterling, why are you here?”

  “You know why I’m here.”

  “That pesky little case of yours?” Redding said. “I’m afraid I’ve told your Agent Briggs and my Dean everything I know.”

  “Liar.” Sterling said the word on the screen at the exact same time that Lia muttered the word beside me.

  Redding responded. “I’m hurt—and here I thought we had a very special relationship.”

  “Because I’m the one that got away?” Sterling asked. A muscle in Redding’s cheek twitched.

  “Direct hit,” Michael murmured.

  Redding recovered quickly. “Have the scars faded? The knife wounds were shallow enough—it was the boy’s first time taking the lead, you know. But the brand—the brand won’t fade, will it? You’ll have my initial stamped into your flesh for the rest of your life. Can you still smell your scorching skin? Can you feel it?”

  “No,” Agent Sterling said, taking a seat. To my surprise, she reached up and lowered her shirt, exposing the scar. Redding’s lips parted.

  “Correction,” Michael commented, “there are two things that bring out real emotion in Daniel Redding.”

  I wasn’t the expert Michael was with emotions, but I could see it, too—the way the convicted killer was singing hallelujah with his eyes.

  Agent Sterling let her own lips part and traced the letter on her chest. For the first time, she was firmly in control of this interview. He should have seen the steel in her expression, but he didn’t.

  “This isn’t your initial,” she said, dropping her voice to just above a whisper. “This is Dean’s initial. We knew you were listening. We knew you’d be back to check his work, and that the only way you’d believe that he didn’t have ulterior motives was if there was proof.” Her finger made another loop of the R. “I told him to do it. I begged him to, I made him promise to, and he did—no matter how sick it made him, no matter how much it has haunted him ever since, he did it. And it worked.”

  “No.”

  “You believed the act. You trusted him, because you wanted to believe that he was your son, that there was nothing of his mother in him. More fool, you.” Sterling righted her shirt. “I didn’t escape, Daniel. Dean let me go. He covered for me.”

  “You’re lying.” Redding could barely get the words out around clenched teeth.

  “He warned me away from you. I wasn’t listening. I didn’t understand, and when I came by without backup, when you jumped me—he was watching. He had a plan, and he executed that plan at all costs.” She smiled. “You should be proud. He’s just as brilliant as you are, smart enough, even, to pull one over on dear old dad.”

  Redding leaped for Agent Sterling, but she leaned back, and the chain caught him.

  “Like a dog on a leash,” she said.

  “I will kill you.” Redding’s voice was dull, but the words did not ring hollow—not at all. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. None at all.”

  Sterling didn’t reply. She walked back out of the room, and the screen went black.

  “You asked Dean to brand you?” Lia was the first one to find her voice.

  “We needed Redding to believe that Dean was going to kill me and that he didn’t need to be supervised.” Sterling met Lia’s gaze. “Sometimes you do what you have to in order to survive.”

  Lia knew that—the same way Dean knew it, the same way Michael knew it. I thought of Sloane counting holes in a shower drain and working obsessively through the night and me telling Locke that I’d killed my own mother—stalling so that Michael could kill her.

  You do what you need to do to survive.

  “Whatever,” Lia said. “I’m going to see how Sloane is doing,” She didn’t want to talk about survival, and I filed that away for future reference. Needing to get away, I followed Lia to the basement. We found Sloane sitting in the middle of a fake foyer, maps and geographical surveys spread out all around her.

  “Found anything?” I asked.

  Sloane lifted her head from the maps, but her eyes didn’t quite focus on us. She was still stuck in her head, calculating something, her thoughts loud enough that the rest of the world just faded away.

  Lia nudged her with the tip of her toe. Sloane snapped out of it and met Lia’s eyes. “Geographical profiling is surprisingly unsatisfying,” she said, sounding mildly disgruntled. She rearranged the papers in front of her and gestured for us to take a closer look. I knelt down.

  “Most killers target victims within a set radius of their home.” Sloane gestured to three sets of circles on the map, each with a different center. “Emerson Cole. Professor Fogle. Trina Simms. Fogle’s cabin is a three-hour drive from Colonial, which is just as far from Broken Springs.” Together, the three dots on the map resembled a piece of pie. “Even if you set the radius at a two-to three-hour drive, the overlap is still tiny.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” I ventured. “The smaller the overlap, the fewer places we have to look.”

  “But that’s just it,” Sloane said. “There’s really only one thing that jumps out about that small slice of the map.”

  Lia saw it before I did. “The prison where they’re keeping Dean’s dad.”

  “It makes sense,” I said. “Redding calls the shots. Redding is the focal point.”

  “But we already knew that!” Sloane was almost shouting. She bit her bottom lip, and I realized how helpless she felt down here: alone, unable to make a difference, no matter how many times she did the math.

  “Come on,” I said, hooking an arm through hers and making her stand up. “Let’s go fill Agent Sterling in.”

  Sloane looked like she might argue, but Lia preempted it.

  “It’s always the little things,” she told Sloane gently. “A tenth of a second, a single piece of information—you never know what will make a difference.”

  A second after we made it to the first floor, the front door slammed. For a moment, Lia, Sloane, and I froze, then we made a beeline for the entryway. Sterling and Michael met us on the way there. We all came to a standstill at once.

  Dean was taking off his coat. Briggs had his arms folded over his chest, waiting. Clearly, he’d expected the rush.

  “Anything?” he asked Lia.

  “Nothing other than the obvious
: he’s been dancing a long, slow waltz around the truth.”

  “You?” Sterling asked Briggs.

  “Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

  “Surprise me,” Sterling said dryly.

  “We have DNA.” Briggs allowed himself a brief smile—the FBI agent’s version of dancing a jig. “Trina Simms got our UNSUB with her fingernails.”

  Was it normal for an UNSUB to leave no evidence behind at the first two crime scenes and let his victim scratch him at the third? After all, practice made perfect—and Daniel Redding struck me as the type who valued perfection, planning, and attention to detail.

  “DNA doesn’t do us much good without a suspect to match it to,” Dean said under his breath.

  Michael arched an eyebrow. “I’m guessing that means you two didn’t get anything out of ye olde mastermind?”

  That was the first time in my memory that Michael hadn’t referred to Daniel Redding either as Dean’s father or by name. It was a subtle kindness coming from a boy who frequently called Dean by the last name he shared with the monster, just to get under his skin.

  “My father,” Dean said, negating Michael’s efforts, “refused to see us. We forced a meeting, and he wouldn’t talk.”

  “That’s not true.” Lia shot Dean an apologetic look, but preemptively waved off any protests. “He did say something.”

  “Nothing that bears repeating.” Dean met Lia’s eyes, daring her to call him a liar again.

  “Nothing you want to repeat,” she corrected quietly.

  Briggs cleared his throat. “Redding said that he didn’t feel like talking today. He said he might feel like talking tomorrow. We’ve got him in complete isolation—no visitors, no phone calls, no mail, no contact with other prisoners. But we have no idea what instructions he’s already communicated to his partner.”

  He might feel like talking tomorrow. Briggs’s words echoed in my mind, and I whipped my head to look at Dean. “You think that someone else is going to die tomorrow.”

  That was just Redding’s style, to refuse to talk until he had something else to gloat about. The refusal to see Dean, though—that would have surprised me if I hadn’t just seen Agent Sterling clueing Daniel Redding in to the fact that his son had betrayed him. Dean’s father would want to punish him for that, almost as much as he wanted to punish Agent Sterling for having the gall not just to live, but to steal from him the one thing that mattered most.

  His son.

  “What else?” I asked. I knew that Dean and Briggs were leaving something out. Redding wouldn’t have let Dean walk out of that room without doing something to reestablish his power—to hurt Dean, to make him suffer for betraying his father.

  Briggs exhaled loudly. Then he turned to me. “There was one other thing.”

  “No.” Dean’s objection was immediate and absolute.

  “Dean—”

  “I said no.”

  “That’s not your decision to make,” Briggs told Dean. “The hardest part of this job isn’t being willing to put yourself on the line—your safety, your sanity, your reputation. The hardest part is letting people you care about do the same.”

  Dean turned toward the kitchen. I thought he would walk away, but he didn’t. He stood there, his back to the rest of us, as Agent Briggs told us about Redding’s parting shot.

  “He said that if we wanted to talk to him sooner, rather than later, that Dean wouldn’t come alone next time.”

  “He wasn’t alone,” I replied, wondering if Redding had been angling for another visit from Sterling.

  “If you’re going to tell them, you may as well tell them exactly what he said.” Dean turned back around. He tried to look at Michael, at Sterling, at Briggs—anywhere but at me.

  He failed. “He said, Next time, bring the girl.”

  YOU

  A mistake.

  That’s what this is. Not the fact that Trina Simms is dead—that was part of the plan. But leaving evidence behind?

  Sloppy. Stupid. Unworthy.

  It won’t happen again. You’ll make sure of that. There won’t be any more mistakes.

  Hidden in the shadows, you slide your finger along the flat side of the knife. You cut the perfect length of rope. The brand is heavy in your hand. You swing it once, through the air, like a baseball bat. You imagine the satisfying thunk of metal hitting skull—

  No.

  That’s not how it’s done. That’s not what you’re going to do in five…four…three…two…

  “What are you doing here?”

  You take a swing with the brand. Down your quarry goes, and you don’t regret it.

  Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.

  No one said you couldn’t knock them out first.

  You toss the brand to the ground and take out the zip ties. Emerson Cole was an assignment, but this—this is going to be fun.

  “How does Redding even know there is a girl?” Director Sterling paced the length of the kitchen, past Briggs, past his daughter, past all of us until he came to a stop in front of Dean.

  “He asked,” Dean answered flatly. “I told him there was no one.”

  From the kitchen table, Judd kept watch over Director Sterling as the director’s weighty gaze settled on Dean.

  “So either Redding didn’t believe you, he knows something, or he’s playing the odds.” The director considered those possibilities. “I don’t like the idea of bringing any of the others into an interrogation. If the wrong people got wind of it…” He trailed off.

  You already brought Dean into an interrogation, I thought, but if anyone found out you’d used Dean to get information out of his father, you could explain.

  “Can’t say I’m too fond of the idea of putting any of you in a room with a serial killer, either,” Judd commented, nursing his coffee. “Not that anyone asked.”

  “However,” the director continued, ignoring Judd, “I could put another call into the warden. If we can install our own people as security and clear the cell block of prisoners and guards, I’m willing to entertain the idea of sending one of the girls in.”

  “Me,” I said, speaking for the first time since Briggs had told us about Redding’s request. “It has to be me.”

  I was the one who’d gone with Dean to Broken Springs. If the UNSUB had managed to communicate that to Redding, I was the one he wanted.

  “I could do it.” Lia didn’t bother prefacing those words with anything else. “Daniel said he’d talk if you brought the girl. He never said which one.”

  “Lia.” Dean said her name quietly. She turned around in her seat to face him. “If I don’t want Cassie in a room with him, what makes you think I would be any happier putting you on the chopping block?”

  “I can take care of myself.” Lia sounded remarkably like Dean—the words were simple and soft, with none of her normal flare.

  “And I can’t?” I asked, insulted.

  “Maybe I should go,” Sloane said thoughtfully.

  “No,” everyone in the room—including the director—said at once.

  “I know jujitsu,” Sloane cajoled. “And besides, from what I’ve gathered, this particular witness specializes in mind games and subtle suggestion, and that won’t work on me. I get numbers and facts and the literal meanings of words. Subtle gets lost in translation.”

  No one could argue with Sloane’s logic.

  “I can probably offend him without even trying to!” Sloane was sounding altogether too enthusiastic now. “If things get too intense, I’ll tell him some statistics about domesticated ferrets.”

  “That’s…errr…a very generous offer, Sloane, but I’d prefer you stay behind the scenes.” The director’s voice came out somewhat strangled. “There’s a two-way mirror. Once we’ve secured the area, there’s no reason the rest of you can’t observe.”

  “I can think of a few.” Judd set his coffee down.

  “With all due respect, Judd,” the director replied tightly, “this is FBI business.
” And Judd wasn’t FBI. After a tense moment of silence, our caretaker stood and walked out of the room.

  “Cassie, Dean, and Briggs will go in,” the director declared in the resulting silence.

  “Why?” Dean took a step toward the director. “Why send anyone in? We haven’t gotten a thing out of him, and we’re not going to. He’s going to play with us, and someone else is going to die. We’re wasting time. We’re doing exactly what he wants.”

  “He’s on edge.” Agent Sterling responded before the director could. “He’s a narcissist. If we give him enough rope, he’ll hang himself, Dean.”

  “I guess that’s why he was so easy to catch the first time,” Dean retorted.

  “I went to see him. I riled him up, and that’s going to work to our advantage.” Agent Sterling took a step toward Dean. “He doesn’t just want to win this game. He wants to win in a way that haunts us—and that means that if he thinks he’s got the upper hand, he will tell us something. There will be clues, because he will want me up at night five years from now, wondering why I didn’t see it.”

  “You won’t have to see it,” Michael interjected. He looked at Lia. “If we’re on the other side of that glass, we will.”

  “What happened to keeping us out of this case?” Dean appealed to Agent Sterling, his voice hard. “Wasn’t that what you wanted—for us to be normal and safe?”

  That was a low blow.

  “If I could give you normal, I would.” Agent Sterling’s voice was sharp. “But I can’t, Dean. I can’t erase the things that have happened to you. I can’t make you—any of you—want normal. I tried to keep you out of it. I’ve tried treating you all like kids, and it doesn’t work. So, yes, I’m an enormous hypocrite, but if the five of you can help us stop that man from taking even one more life, I’m not going to fight you on it.” She looked at her father. “I’m done fighting you on it.”

  The interrogation room was smaller than it had looked on-screen and more claustrophobic than it had felt from the other side of the mirror. Dean, Briggs, and I arrived first. One of the agents on Briggs’s team, who I recognized as Agent Vance, went to get Dean’s father from the prison officials. Once the director had pointed out that Redding’s involvement in this case had happened under the warden’s nose, the warden had been accommodating—a nice contrast to what Agent Sterling and I had dealt with on our last visit.