Briggs had brought me here so that I could understand—and move on, as much as a person could move on after something like this.
It took me hours to go through it all. There was a picture of Emerson Cole tucked into the side of a journal. Webber’s writing—all capital letters, angled to one side—marked the pages, telling me his story in horrific, nauseating detail. I read it, sifting through those details, absorbing them and building a profile.
Six months ago, you transferred onto Redding’s cell block. You were fascinated with him, mesmerized by the way he played the other prisoners, the guards. The prison was the only place you had any power, any control, and when another rejection came in from the police academy, that wasn’t enough anymore.
You wanted a different kind of power. Intangible. Undeniable. Eternal.
Webber had become obsessed with Redding. He’d thought he was successfully hiding that obsession until Redding had offered him a very special job.
He recognized your potential. You needed to prove yourself—to prove that you were smarter and better and more than everyone who looked down on you, rejected you, and shoved you to the side.
Redding had asked Webber to do two things: keep tabs on Agent Briggs and find Dean. Webber had proven himself on both fronts. He’d followed Agent Briggs. He’d found the house where Dean was living. He’d reported back.
That was the turning point. That was the moment when you knew that to eclipse that mewling little brat in Redding’s eyes, you’d have to do more.
There was a newspaper article folded up and stuck between two of the pages in the journal—an article Webber had given Daniel Redding to read, then hidden away in his work room.
An article about FBI Special Agent Lacey Locke. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A killer who was one of the Bureau’s own.
Shortly after that, Redding had said that you were ready. You were his student. He was your master. And if there were others competing for your role, well, you’d take care of them in time.
I flipped from one page to the next and back again, rereading, building a time line in my mind. Redding had begun laying the groundwork for this series of “tests” for his apprentices—or, as Webber liked to refer to it, what would be—the day after he’d read the article about the Locke murders.
Don’t you think it’s weird? I’d asked what seemed like an eternity ago. Six weeks ago, Locke was reenacting my mother’s murder, and now someone’s out there playing copycat to Dean’s dad?
Sitting there, re-creating the series of events that had led to the murder of Emerson Cole, I realized that it wasn’t weird. It wasn’t a coincidence.
Daniel Redding had started this after reading about the Locke murders. Dean understood killers because of his father; it went without saying that Daniel Redding understood them, too. And if he understood Locke—what drove her, what motivated her, what she wanted—if he’d had Webber keeping tabs on Dean, if he knew who I was and what had happened to my mother…
Locke killed those women for me, and Redding stepped up to the challenge.
There were still so many questions: how Redding had known who I was; how he’d drawn the connections he must have drawn to figure out what had happened with Locke; what—if anything—he knew about my mother’s murder. But Webber’s journal didn’t hold those answers.
Once the test started, Webber’s writing became less focused on Redding.
You worshipped him—but then you became him. No, you became something better. Something new.
Five people were dead. By his own confession in these pages, Webber had killed four of them: Emerson, the professor, and both of his competitors. The original plan—laid out by Redding to each of the three, with Webber enabling the communication—had been for each of the three to choose one victim and kill one of the others’.
In your mind, there was never room for any others.
There were pages in this journal describing Webber’s fantasies of what it would have been like if he’d been the one to kill Trina Simms. He’d pictured it, he’d imagined it, and Clark had died for the sin of not doing it right. Christopher’s days were numbered the second he got caught.
And then there was one.
“Cassie?” Briggs said my name, and I looked up at him from my spot on the floor. “You okay?”
I’d been here for hours. Briggs had achieved his objective: when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t caught back up in the horror of being hunted like an animal. I didn’t feel Webber looming over me, or his arm cutting off the air in my throat. Those memories weren’t gone. They would never be gone. But for minutes, hours, maybe even days at a time, I could forget.
“Yeah,” I said, closing the journal and tearing the gloves off first one hand and then the other. “I’m good.”