Redding obliged. “You look like your mother,” he said, drinking in Dean’s features like a dying man in the desert. “Except for the eyes—those are mine.”
The way Redding said the word mine made my stomach roll.
“I didn’t come here to talk about my mother.”
“If she were here, she’d tell you to get your hair cut. Sit up straight. Smile every once in a while.”
Dean’s hair fell into his face, his eyes narrowed to slits beneath it. “There’s not much to smile about.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve lost the taste for life already, Dean. The boy I knew had so much potential.”
A muscle in Dean’s jaw twitched. He and Redding sat staring at each other. After a full minute of silence ticked by, Dean’s eyes narrowed, and he said, “Tell me about the letters.”
This was where Agent Sterling and I had come in the first time around. It was harder to watch the second time: Dean trying to get his father to part with some scrap of information, Daniel Redding sparring with him verbally, bringing the topic back to Dean again and again.
“I want to know about you, Dean. What have those hands been doing the past five years? What sights have those eyes seen?”
You knew Briggs would come to see you as soon as the first body turned up. You knew that Dean would come if you refused to talk to anyone else. You planned this, step by step.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” On the screen, Dean’s voice was getting louder, more intense. “There’s nothing to talk about. Is that what you want to hear? That these hands, these eyes—they’re nothing?”
“They’re everything.” This time, I could see a manic intensity in Redding’s eyes. He looked at Dean, and the only thing he saw was himself—a god, not subject to man’s laws, above things like empathy and guilt. I thought about the card that Briggs had found in Trina’s pocket—the king of spades.
Redding wanted immortality. He wanted power. But more than anything, he wanted an heir.
Why now? I thought. Why is he doing all of this now? He’d sat in that prison for five years. Had it taken that long to find someone to do his bidding on the outside, or had something happened to push him into doing this?
On the screen, Dean’s father had just asked if there was a girl. Dean denied it. Redding called him “son,” and Dean said the five words that triggered the man to lash out.
“I am not your son.”
Even knowing it was coming, the sudden rush of violence took me off guard. Redding’s fists were buried in the front of Dean’s shirt. He jerked him close and told him that he was and would always be his father’s son.
“You know it. You fear it.”
This time, I saw the instant Dean snapped, the moment when the anger that Michael had told me was always present beneath the surface bubbled up and overflowed. Dean’s face was like stone, but there was something wild in his eyes as he grabbed his father, pulling him halfway across the table, as far as the other man’s chains would allow.
This time, as Briggs broke up the fight, I saw Redding smile. He’d gotten what he wanted. A hint of violence. A taste of Dean’s potential.
My eyes were riveted on the screen. This was the last thing I’d seen the first time around. Briggs waited a moment or two, to make sure Dean was finished, before he backed off—but I noticed that this time, he didn’t sit, positioning himself just behind Dean.
“Where is the professor’s cabin?” Briggs asked.
Dean’s father smiled. “Catoctin,” he said. “I don’t know anything more specific than that.”
Dean asked two or three more questions, but his father didn’t have anything else useful to say.
“We’re done here,” Briggs said. Dean stood. His father remained sitting, perfectly relaxed. Briggs put a hand on Dean’s shoulder and began steering him out of the room.
“Have you ever told Briggs precisely what you did to his wife, Dean?” Daniel Redding didn’t raise his voice, but the question seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room. “Or does he still think it was me who drew the knife slowly down her shoulders and thighs, me who sank the brand into her flesh?”
Briggs’s grip on Dean tightened. If he’d been steering him toward the door before, he was shoving him now—anything to get Dean out of there. But Dean’s feet were suddenly glued to the floor.
Go, I told Dean silently. Just go.
But he didn’t.
Redding relished the moment. “Tell your agent friend there what you did, Dean. Tell him how you came out to the barn where I had Veronica Sterling bound hand and foot. Tell him how I went to cut her—how you took the knife from my hand, not to save her, but to do it yourself. Tell him how you made her bleed. Tell him how she screamed when you burned an R into her flesh. Tell him how you asked me for her.” Redding closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the ceiling, like a man offering thanks to his gods. “Tell him she was your first.”
First victim. For Redding, that was the only first that mattered, no matter how much innuendo he might jam into the word.