The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct Read online

  I took a seat at the table and waited for Dean and Briggs to sit down beside me.

  They stayed standing, hovering over my shoulder like a pair of Secret Service agents flanking the president. The door to the room opened with a creak, and it took everything in me not to turn and track Daniel Redding’s progress from the door to the table. Agent Vance fixed the chains, tested them, and then stepped back.

  “So,” Redding said, eyes only for me. “You’re the girl.”

  There was a musical quality to his voice that hadn’t come across in the recordings.

  “You’re quiet,” Redding commented. “And pretty.” He flashed me a subtle smile.

  “Not that pretty,” I said.

  He tilted his head to the side. “You know, I think you believe that.” He paused. “Modesty is such a refreshing trait for someone in your generation. In my experience, most young people overestimate their traits and abilities. They get too confident too quickly.”

  The DNA under Trina Simms’s nails, I thought. There was no way that Redding could know about that—and yet, I was aware that there were two layers to this conversation: the obvious and what lay underneath.

  Agent Briggs put a hand on my shoulder, and I turned my attention to the list of questions in front of me—Agent Sterling’s list.

  “I have some questions,” I said. “If I ask them, will you answer them?”

  “I’ll do you one better,” Redding told me. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

  We’d see about that. Or, more specifically, Lia would see about that from her position behind the two-way mirror.

  “Let’s talk about your partner,” I said.

  “Partner isn’t the word I would have chosen.”

  I knew that—and I’d used it on purpose. Agent Sterling had suggested that it was to our benefit if Redding thought he was in charge. Let him think me an ordinary girl, not an adversary.

  “What word would you use?”

  “Let’s go with apprentice.”

  “Is your apprentice a college student?” I asked.

  Redding didn’t hesitate, not even for a second. “Yes.”

  “Is your apprentice someone who’s never been to college?”

  If Redding thought it odd that I was asking two versions of the same question, he gave no indication of it. “Yes.”

  “Is your apprentice under the age of twenty-one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is your apprentice over the age of twenty-one?”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “Is your apprentice someone you met through the mail?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is your apprentice someone you met in person?”

  “Yes.”

  There were more questions. I asked them. He answered in similar fashion. When I reached the end of Sterling’s questions, I spent a second hoping that Lia would be able to tell us which answer in each pair had been true and which had been the lie.

  “Any other questions?” Redding asked.

  I swallowed. I was supposed to say no. I was supposed to get up and walk out of this room, but I couldn’t. “Are you trying to replace Dean?” I asked. It was hard to look at him and not see Locke and the way she’d fixated on me.

  “No. A man does not simply replace his finest work.” Redding smiled. “My turn: do you care for my son?”

  “Yes.” I kept my answer short. “Why did you want me to come here?”

  “Because if you’re a part of Dean’s life, you’re a part of mine.” There was something about the look in Redding’s eyes that was chilling. “Do you know what he’s done? What he is?”

  I could feel Dean stiffening behind me, but I didn’t give in to the urge to turn around. “I know about Veronica Sterling. I know about Gloria, and all the others.”

  That wasn’t quite true—but I let Redding think that Dean had told me everything.

  “And you don’t care?” Redding said, tilting his head to one side and staring at me, into me. “You’re drawn to darkness.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m drawn to Dean, and I do care, because I care about him. My turn—and you owe me two questions.”

  “Ask away.”

  My instincts were telling me that Briggs wouldn’t let this go on for much longer. I had to choose my questions carefully.

  “How do you choose who dies?” I asked.

  Redding put his palms flat on the table. “I don’t.”

  He was lying. He had to be. The only connection between Trina Simms and Emerson Cole was that they both had a connection to Redding.

  “I believe I owe you one more answer.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Redding chuckled. “I like you,” he said. “I do.”

  I waited. Give him enough rope, I thought, and he’ll hang himself.

  “Something you don’t know,” Redding mused. “Okay. Let’s try this one: you will never find the man who murdered your mother.”

  I couldn’t reply. I couldn’t breathe. My mouth was cotton-dry. My mother? What did he know about my mother?

  “That’s enough,” Dean said sharply.

  “Oh, but we’re having such a nice little chat,” Redding said. “We prisoners do a lot of that, you know. Chatting.”

  He wanted me to believe that he’d heard something through the prison grapevine about what had happened to my mother. That meant that he knew who I was—or at least, knew enough about me to know that I had a mother who was missing, presumed dead.

  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 psycho
path 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.”

  A breath caught in my throat. Lia slumped back against the mirror.

  Clark.

  Briggs and Sterling didn’t take us to the crime scene. They dropped us off at the house, then went themselves. No matter how many lines they crossed, there were still limits. They wouldn’t risk anyone—including the killer—seeing us at the crime scene. Not when they could, at least theoretically, bring us pictures that would work just as well.

  We waited. By the time Briggs and Sterling got back, a restless pallor had settled over the house.

  They didn’t come bearing pictures. They came with news.

  “Forensics is still processing the evidence, but they won’t find any trace of the killer,” Agent Sterling said. “This UNSUB bludgeoned the victim with an iron brand, but followed the rest of Redding’s MO down to the tiniest detail. He was confident, not frantic. He enjoyed himself.”

  He’s learning, I thought.

  “It sounds more like the UNSUB who killed Emerson Cole than the one who killed Trina Simms,” I said out loud, my mind flipping into high gear. Two UNSUBs. UNSUB 1 was organized. He’d killed Emerson and Clark—and quite possibly the professor. UNSUB 2 was disorganized. He’d murdered Trina Simms right after we’d gone to visit her.

  “What’s the connection?” Dean asked. “How does someone go from targeting Emerson to targeting Clark?”

  “They were in the same group in Fogle’s class,” Lia offered. “Clark was head over heels for the girl.”

  “His dorm room was full of pictures of her,” Briggs confirmed. “Thousands of them, under his bed.”

  “What about the other two people in their group?” I asked. “Derek and Bryce. Think UNSUB 1 could be going after them next?”

  First Emerson. Then Clark. Meanwhile, UNSUB 2 kills Trina Simms….

  My thoughts were interrupted by the ding of incoming texts—one from Sterling’s phone and one from Briggs’s.

  “Forensics?” Michael guessed.

  Sloane naysayed him. “It’s too soon. Even if results are being rushed, they can’t have run more than one or two tests—”

  “The tests were rushed,” Briggs interrupted. “But the only thing they’ve managed to do so far is take a sample of our victim’s DNA.”

  “Why did that merit simultaneous texting?” Lia asked suspiciously.

  “Because a match came up in the system.” Briggs shrugged off his suit jacket and folded it neatly over one arm. It was a restrained action, one that didn’t match the look in his eyes in the least. “Clark’s DNA matches the sample found under Trina Simms’s fingernails.”

  I took a moment to process the implication. Sloane was obliging enough to put it into words.

  “So what you’re saying,” she replied, “is that Gary Clarkson isn’t just victim number four. He’s also our second UNSUB.”

  YOU

  You can still see the look in that pudgy, pathetic little hanger-on’s eyes when you dug the point of the knife into his chest.

  “This is how you’re supposed to do it,” you’d told him, zigging and zagging your way down his abundant flesh. “Every moment, perfect control. No evidence. No chances.”

  After you’d received word that Trina Simms was dead, you’d imagined how it should have gone down. You’d pictured every detail—how you would have done it. The pleasure you would have gotten from hearing her scream.

  But this imitation, this pretender—he’d done it wrong.

  He’d had to pay.

  Sweat and tears had mingled on his face. He’d struggled, but you took your time. You were patient. You explained to him that you were acquainted with Trina Simms and that she deserved better.

  Or worse, depending on your perspective.

  You’d showed that pale imitation, that copy of a copy, what patience really was. The only shame was that you had to gag him—couldn’t risk Joe College next door coming over to see what the little pig was squealing about.

  You smile in memory as you clean the tools of your trade. Redding didn’t tell you to kill the pretender. He didn’t have to. You’re a species apart, you and the boy yo
u just dispatched to hell.

  He was weak.

  You’re strong.

  He was painting by numbers and still couldn’t manage to stay in the lines.

  You’re a developing artist. Improvisation. Innovation. A rush of power works its way through your body just thinking about it. You thought you wanted to be like Redding. To be Redding.

  But now you’re starting to see—you could be so much more.

  “Not yet,” you whisper. There’s one more person who has to go first. You hum a song and close your eyes.

  What will be will be—even if you have to help it along.

  If the evidence was to be believed, Clark was a killer—and Redding’s other apprentice had killed him.

  Sibling rivalry. The thought was misplaced, but I couldn’t shake it. Two young men who idolized Redding, who had somehow developed relationships with him—how much had they known about each other?

  Enough for our remaining UNSUB to kill Clark.

  “Clark killed Trina?” Michael couldn’t hide the disbelief in his voice. “I knew there was anger there—about Emerson, about the professor, but still.”

  I tried to picture it. Had Clark forced his way into Trina’s house? Did she let him in? Had he mentioned Redding?

  “Clark was a loner,” I said, thinking out loud. “He never fit in. He wasn’t aggressive, but he wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to be around, either.”

  Dean shot a sideways glance at Agent Sterling. “Just how disorganized was Trina Simms’s murder?”

  I saw the logic to Dean’s question immediately: Clark fit the profile for a disorganized killer almost exactly.

  “He followed the MO,” Agent Sterling said. “He just didn’t do it well.”

  That’s why you killed him, I thought, addressing the words to our remaining UNSUB. You were both playing at the same game, but he messed up. He was going to get himself caught. Maybe he was going to get you caught, too.