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.”