If the evidence was to be believed, Clark was a killer—and Redding’s other apprentice had killed him.
Sibling rivalry. The thought was misplaced, but I couldn’t shake it. Two young men who idolized Redding, who had somehow developed relationships with him—how much had they known about each other?
Enough for our remaining UNSUB to kill Clark.
“Clark killed Trina?” Michael couldn’t hide the disbelief in his voice. “I knew there was anger there—about Emerson, about the professor, but still.”
I tried to picture it. Had Clark forced his way into Trina’s house? Did she let him in? Had he mentioned Redding?
“Clark was a loner,” I said, thinking out loud. “He never fit in. He wasn’t aggressive, but he wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to be around, either.”
Dean shot a sideways glance at Agent Sterling. “Just how disorganized was Trina Simms’s murder?”
I saw the logic to Dean’s question immediately: Clark fit the profile for a disorganized killer almost exactly.
“He followed the MO,” Agent Sterling said. “He just didn’t do it well.”
That’s why you killed him, I thought, addressing the words to our remaining UNSUB. You were both playing at the same game, but he messed
up. He was going to get himself caught. Maybe he was going to get you caught, too.
“Did they know each other?” I asked. “Clark and our UNSUB—I’m betting they knew about each other, but had they actually met?”
“He’d want to keep them as separate as possible.” Dean didn’t specify who he was. Under the circumstances, he didn’t have to. “The less interaction they have with each other, the more control he has over the situation. This is his game, not theirs.”
It wasn’t enough to profile Clark or our UNSUB. At the end of the day, this all came back to Redding. I pictured him sitting across the table from me. I heard myself asking the questions, heard his replies. I walked through them, step by step, thinking all the while that I was missing something.
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.
