“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.”