I ended up in the library. Wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor shelves held more books than I could read in two lifetimes. I hovered in the doorway. I
wasn’t here for a book. Third shelf from the left, two up from the bottom. I swallowed hard, then walked over to the correct shelf. Interview twenty- eight, binder twelve.
My fingers closed around the correct binder, and I forced myself to pick it up. The last time I’d tried reading interview twenty-eight, I’d stopped when I’d registered the interviewee’s last name.
Lia was right. I didn’t fully understand what Dean was going through— but I wanted to. I needed to, because if it had been me spiraling into the abyss, Dean would have understood.
Dean always understood.
I sat down on the floor, propping the binder up on my thighs and opening to the page I’d left off on weeks before. Briggs was the agent conducting the prison interview. He’d just asked Dean’s father to verify the identity of one of his victims.
Redding: You’re asking the wrong questions, son. It’s not who they are, it’s what they are.
Briggs: And what are they? Redding: They’re mine.
Briggs: Is that why you bound them with zip ties? Because they were yours?
Redding: You want me to say that I bound them so they’d stay. Your fancy FBI psychologists would salivate to hear me talk about all the women who’ve left me. About my mother and the mother of my son. But did you ever think that maybe I just like the way a woman’s skin looks when she struggles against the hold of the plastic? Maybe I liked watching white lines appear on their wrists and ankles, watching their hands and feet go numb. Maybe the way their muscles tensed and some of them fought themselves bloody while I sat there and watched…Can you imagine, Agent Briggs? Can you?
Briggs: And branding them? Are you going to tell me that wasn’t a mark of ownership? That owning them, dominating them, controlling them
—that wasn’t the point?
Redding: The point? Who says there’s a point? Growing up, people never took to me. Teachers said I was sullen. My grandfather raised me, and he was always telling me not to look at him like that, not to look at my grandmother like that. There was just something about me, two shades off. I had to learn how to hide it, but my son? Dean? He was born smiling. People would take one look at him and they’d smile, too. Everybody loved that boy. My boy.
Briggs: Did you? Love him?
Redding: I made him. He was mine, and if it was in him to charm, to put people at ease, it was in me.
Briggs: Your son taught you how to blend in, how to be liked, how to be trusted. What did you teach your son?
Redding: Why don’t you ask your wife? Pretty little thing, isn’t she? But the mouth on that one…mmmm, mmm, mmmmm.
“Good reading?”
A voice snapped me back to the present. “Lia.”
“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” There was an edge to Lia’s voice, but she didn’t sound as blindly furious with me as she had before.
“I’m sorry about earlier.” I took my life in my own hands and risked apologizing, knowing it might set her off. “You’re right. I don’t know what Dean’s going through. The situation with Locke and me—it wasn’t the same.”
“Always so genuine,” Lia said, a hint of sharpness to her singsong tone. “Always willing to own up to her mistakes.” Her gaze locked on to the binder in my lap, and her voice went flat. “Yet always so very ready to make the same mistakes, all over again.”
“Lia,” I said. “I’m not trying to get between the two of you—”
“God, Cassie. I told you this wasn’t about you. Do you really think it’s about me?”
I wasn’t sure what to think. Lia went out of her way to be difficult to profile. The one thing I was sure of was her loyalty to Dean.
“He wouldn’t want you reading those.” She sounded certain—but then again, Lia always sounded certain.
“I thought it might help,” I said. “If I understood, then I could—” “Help?” Lia repeated, biting out the word. “That’s the problem with you,
Cassie. Your intentions are always so good. You always just want to help. But at the end of the day, you don’t help. Someone gets hurt, and that someone is never you.”
“I’m not going to hurt Dean,” I said vehemently.
Lia let out a bark of laughter. “It’s sweet that you believe that, but of course you are.” She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor. “Briggs made me listen to an audio recording of Redding’s interviews when I was fourteen.” She pulled her legs tight to her chest. “I’d been here a year
at that point, and Dean didn’t want me within a ten-foot pole of anything having to do with his father. But I was like you. I thought it might help, but it didn’t help, Cassie.” Each time she said help, her expression grew closer to a snarl. “Those interviews are the Daniel Redding show. He’s a liar. One of the best I’ve ever heard. He makes you think he’s lying when he’s telling the truth, and then he’ll say things that can’t possibly be true.…” Lia shook her head, like she could rid herself of the memory with the motion. “Reading anything Daniel Redding has to say is going to mess with your head, Cassie, and knowing that you’ve read it is going to mess with Dean’s.”
She was right. Dean wouldn’t want me reading this. His father had described him as a little boy who’d been born smiling, instantly lovable, effortlessly putting other people at ease, but the Dean I knew always had his guard up.
Especially with me.
“Tell me I’m wrong, Cassie, and I’ll make you a pretty apology. Tell me that Daniel Redding hasn’t already gotten under your skin.”
I knew better than to lie to Lia. There was something inside me, the part of me that saw people as puzzles to be solved, that wanted answers, that needed to make things—awful things, horrible things, like what had happened to my mother, like what Daniel Redding had done to those women
—make sense.
“Dean wouldn’t want me doing this,” I conceded, catching my bottom lip in between my teeth, before plowing on. “That doesn’t mean he’s right.”
My first week in the program, Dean had tried to send me running. He’d told me that profiling killers would ruin me. He’d also told me that by the time Agent Briggs had started coming to him for help on cases, there was nothing left to ruin.
If our situations had been reversed, if I’d been the one drowning in all of this, Dean wouldn’t have backed off.
“I slept in Michael’s room last night.” Lia waited for those words to register before giving me a Cheshire cat grin. “I wanted a strip poker rematch, and Monsieur Townsend was oh-so-happy to oblige.”
I felt like she’d stabbed an icicle straight through my chest. I went very still, trying not to feel anything at all.
Lia reached over and snatched the binder off my lap. She snorted. “Honestly, Cassie, you’re too easy. If and when I choose to spend the night with Michael again, you’ll know it, because the next morning, you’ll be invisible, and Michael won’t be looking at anything but me. In the meantime…” Lia snapped the binder shut. “You’re welcome, because this is officially the second time in the past five minutes that I’ve saved you from going someplace you really don’t want to go.” Her eyes bore into mine. “You don’t want to crawl into Daniel Redding’s mind, Cassie.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder. “If you make me go for intervention number three, I’ll be forced to get creative.”
With those rather concerning words, she left the room—taking the binder and everything it contained with her.
Can she do that? I sat there, staring after her. Eventually, I snapped out of it and told myself that she was right, that I didn’t need to know the details of Dean’s father’s case to be there for Dean now, but even knowing that, even believing it, I couldn’t stop wondering about the parts of the interview I hadn’t gotten the chance to read.
What did you teach your son? Agent Briggs had asked.
I’d never even seen a picture of Dean’s father, but I could imagine the smile spreading over his face when he’d replied. Why don’t you ask your wife?
