“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?”