You sent Clark after Trina, I thought. Who did you send after Emerson?
The nagging feeling that there was something I wasn’t seeing intensified. I sat very still, and then suddenly, all the inconsequential details melted away until there was only one thing left. One detail.
One question.
“Lia,” I said urgently, “you’re sure that Redding didn’t lie in response to any of my questions?”
She inclined her head slightly—clearly, she didn’t think the question merited a verbal response.
“I asked him how he chose the victims.” I looked around the room to see if anyone’s mind would take the same path mine had. “I said, how do you choose who dies, and do you remember what he said?”
“He said I don’t.” Dean was the one who answered. I doubted he’d forgotten a single word his father had uttered in that meeting—in any of their meetings.
“If he doesn’t choose the victims,” I said, looking from Dean to Sterling to Briggs, “who does?”
There was a beat of silence.
“They do.”
I hadn’t expected the answer to come from Michael, but maybe I should have. He and Lia had met Clark, and he was the one who’d recognized the anger in the other boy.
She wasn’t like that, Clark had said when it had come out that Emerson had been sleeping with their professor—but he hadn’t believed the words he was saying. And that meant that he had believed that Emerson was like that. That she was less and worthy of scorn. That she deserved to be degraded.
He’d had pictures of her hidden under his bed.
Clark had been obsessed with Emerson. He’d loved her, and he’d hated her, and she’d turned up dead. The only reason he hadn’t been a viable suspect in her murder was that he had an alibi.
“Redding had the UNSUBs choose victims for each other.” Michael was still talking—and his thoughts were in sync with mine. “Clark chose Emerson, but someone else killed her. It’s Strangers on a Train.”
“Alfred Hitchcock,” Sloane chimed in. “1951 film. One hour and forty-one minutes long. The movie postulates that the most foolproof way to get away with murder is for two strangers to take out each other’s targets.”
“That way,” Briggs said softly, “each killer has an alibi when their target dies.”
Like Clark had been in a room with hundreds of others taking a test when Emerson had been killed.
The dominoes fell, one by one in my head.
Like Christopher Simms was in a meeting with Briggs when someone killed his mother.
I sat on the stairs, waiting. The FBI had been attempting to locate Christopher Simms for the past fourteen hours. Daniel Redding had promised us another body today, and all I could do was wait—to see if we were right, to see if they caught him in time. I couldn’t go up the stairs. I couldn’t go down them. I couldn’t do anything but sit there, halfway in between, obsessing over the evidence and praying that when the phone rang, it would be to tell us they had apprehended the suspect, not to inform us that we had a fifth victim.
No matter how many times I went over the case, the details stayed the same. Clark had chosen Emerson, and someone else had killed her at a time when Clark’s alibi was ironclad. That person had then chosen a victim—Trina Simms.
I could still see the look in Christopher’s eyes when he’d grabbed my arm and wrenched me off the couch. He was sick of being under his mother’s thumb. What better payback than to see her killed—in a roundabout way—by the man she fancied herself in love with?
It all came back to Daniel Redding. Christopher may have chosen Trina to die, but Redding had been the one to choose Christopher as an apprentice. Dean’s father had probably used Trina to get to her son. He’d almost certainly told Clark to hold off on killing Trina until she’d received a visit from Dean.
How long has he been planning this? How many moving parts did he set in motion before Emerson’s body was found on that lawn? I turned to my left and glanced at the wall. The stairway was lined with portraits—serial killers decorating our walls like they were family.
The irony did not escape me.
In my hand, I held the Rose Red lipstick. I took the cap off and turned the bottom of the tube until the dark red color peeked over the edge of the plastic casing.
You will never find the man who murdered your mother. Redding’s words were there in the back of my mind, mocking me.
“Mind if I keep you company while we wait?”
I glanced back over my shoulder at Dean, who was standing near the top of the stairs.
“Grab a seat,” I told him. Instead of sitting on one of the steps above me, he walked until he reached my step and lowered himself down next to me. The staircase was wide enough that there was still space between us, but narrow enough that there wasn’t much. His eyes fell on the tube of lipstick in my hands.