As Briggs drove back past the gate and off prison grounds, the three of them settled into a tense silence. I put my hand on the seat, palm up. Dean turned toward the window, his fingers curling into fists.
I looked down at my hand, open and waiting, but couldn’t move it. I felt utterly out of place and useless. I’d accompanied them on this trip for Dean’s sake, but I didn’t need to be a profiler to know that he didn’t want me here now. With a single conversation, his father had jammed a wedge between Dean and the rest of the world, cutting him off as effectively as a blade severing a ruined limb. The unspoken closeness that had been building between Dean and me was a casualty of that blow—gone, as if it had never existed at all.
I’m in you, boy. In your blood, in your mind, in every breath you take.
In the front seat, Briggs pulled out his cell phone. Seconds after he dialed the number, he was barking out orders. “Redding gave us a location on the professor’s writing cabin. Catoctin.” Briggs paused. “No, I don’t know whose name the deed to the cabin is under. Try the professor’s parents, ex-wife, college roommates.…Try everyone and their damned dog, but find it.”
Briggs ended the call and tossed his phone down. Sterling caught it. “If I remember correctly,” she said dryly, “throwing phones was more my area than yours.”
Agent Sterling was the one who had been tortured by Daniel Redding, but she was the only one of the three of them holding it together in the wake of this visit.
“Did Redding say anything about the professor being involved with Emerson Cole?” Agent Sterling’s question snapped both Dean and Briggs out of it, if only for a second.
“Care to share your source on that one?” Briggs asked tightly. I could practically hear him thinking that Sterling was following leads behind his back.
“Why don’t you ask Cassie?” Sterling suggested. “Apparently, she’s been doing some extracurricular digging.”
“Excuse me?” Briggs spat out.
Dean turned his head slowly away from the window to face me. “What kind of extracurricular digging?” he asked me, his voice low and haggard. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Just you?” Dean asked. I didn’t reply. He closed his eyes, his entire face taut. “Of course it’s not just you. You wouldn’t be lying to me about it if it were. I’m assuming Lia’s involved. Sloane? Townsend?”
I didn’t reply.
“This gives us motive,” Agent Sterling told Briggs in the front seat. “The professor might have killed the girl to keep the truth from coming out.”
“Emerson,” Dean said, his voice tight. “Her name was Emerson.”
“Yes,” Agent Sterling said, ignoring the fury in Dean’s voice. “It was. And whether you believe it or not, Dean, the information you got out of your father today, no matter how insignificant it seems, will help us find Emerson’s killer. Now you just have to let us do our job.” She paused. “You both do. No more digging. No more field trips.”
At the phrase field trips, Briggs pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and killed the engine. “You,” he said, turning around and pinning me with a look. “Out of the car.” With those words, Briggs got out of the car himself.
I tried not to flinch as I joined him. Briggs might have been willing to take calculated risks, like bringing Dean to see his father, but he was only okay with those risks if the calculations were his.
“Am I to understand that you left the house, went on some kind of field trip, and directly interfered with an ongoing FBI investigation?” Briggs never raised his voice, but he put so much force behind each word that he might as well have been yelling.
“Yes?”
Briggs ran his hands through his hair. “Who went with you?”
That, I couldn’t tell him.
“I know you want to help,” he told me through clenched teeth. “What this case is doing to Dean isn’t fair. Bringing him here to talk to his father—that wasn’t fair of me. But I didn’t have a choice. Dean didn’t really have a choice, but you do. You can choose to trust me. You can choose not to give Agent Sterling any more ammunition against this program. You can choose not to behave like an irresponsible, shortsighted teenager who can’t be trusted to follow rules put in place for her own safety!”
Now, he was yelling.
Dean opened his car door. He didn’t get out. He didn’t even look at me. Briggs exhaled. I could practically see him counting to ten in his head. “I’m not going to ask where you went,” he told me, each word measured and full of warning. “I’m not going to tell you that it was stupid and reckless, although I am certain that it undoubtedly was. I’m going to ask you—once and only once, Cassandra—who told you about the professor and the girl?”
I swallowed, hard. “My source’s name was Derek. He was working on a group project with Emerson in Professor Fogle’s class. There were two other students in the group—a girl named Bryce and a boy named Clark.”