“Take a seat. I’ll get the lights.” The boy’s name was Geoffrey. With a G. That was how he’d introduced himself on the way to the lecture hall—like it
would have been a tragedy if I’d mistakenly thought he was Jeffrey with a J.
I wasn’t about to turn my back on a boy who’d lured me away from a frat party, so I waited for Geoffrey with a G to turn the lights on, my back to the wall. The lights flickered overhead and then the auditorium was flooded with light. Hundreds of old-fashioned wooden desks sat in perfect rows. At the front of the room, there was a stage. Geoffrey walked backward down the aisle.
“Getting cold feet?” he asked me. “Criminology isn’t for everyone.” Most people would have stopped there. Geoffrey didn’t. “I’m pre-law.”
“Philosophy minor?” I couldn’t help asking.
He paused and gave me an odd look. “Double major.” Eyes on mine, Geoffrey climbed onto the stage and plugged his laptop into the projector.
Who brings their laptop to a frat party?
I answered my own question: a person who was planning on bringing a girl back here for the show all along. I took a seat, still on guard, but less wary. Geoffrey wasn’t our UNSUB. He was so high on himself that I couldn’t imagine him needing the validation of the kill.
Then again, I also hadn’t sensed that need in Locke.
“Hope we’re not late.” Michael’s voice echoed cheerfully through the auditorium. He’d followed me. Good. On the stage, Geoffrey frowned. I turned in my seat to see that Michael hadn’t come alone. There was a girl with him: pretty, blond, and curvy, with hipster glasses of her own.
“Geoffrey.” “Bryce.”
Clearly, Geoffrey with a G and Hipster Girl knew each other. Geoffrey sighed. “Veronica, this is Bryce. Bryce, this is Veronica.”
Leave it to Michael to follow us and bring reinforcements.
Reinforcements who knew Geoffrey—and, unless I was mistaken, didn’t like him very much. Michael must have plucked her from the crowd the moment she saw Geoffrey leave with me.
“Nice to meet you,” I told Bryce. She wound her arm around Michael’s waist. Seeing her touch him was a thousand times worse than watching Michael with Lia.
At least Lia was ours.
“Geoff,” Bryce said, relishing having Michael on her arm and purposefully shortening Geoffrey’s name in a way designed to annoy him, “this is Tanner. We’re here for the show.”
I caught Michael’s eye and had to duck my head to keep from bursting out laughing. I’d chosen Agent Sterling’s first name as my alias, and Michael had chosen Agent Briggs’s.
“You weren’t invited,” Geoffrey told Bryce, his voice flat.
Bryce shrugged and flopped down in a seat across the aisle from me. “I doubt you’d want Professor Fogle to know that there was a show,” she said, in a way that left very little doubt that she’d been in my shoes, the recipient of Geoffrey’s little show, before.
“Fine,” Geoffrey said, capitulating. He turned to me. “Bryce is in my class,” he explained. Then, for Michael’s benefit, he added, “I’m the
teaching assistant.”
Michael smirked. “Nice.”
“Yeah,” Geoffrey replied tersely. “It is.”
“I was talking about your goatee.” Michael played casually with the tips of Bryce’s hair. I shot him a look. Challenging TA Geoff could work in our favor, but not if Geoff got annoyed enough to kick Michael out.
After a tense moment, Geoffrey decided to ignore Michael and Bryce and got on with the show. “Welcome to Psych 315: Monsters or Men: The Psychology of Serial Murder.” Geoffrey’s voice carried across the auditorium, and I could practically hear the man he was channeling.
Geoffrey’s expression changed as he walked across the stage and flipped from slide to slide.
Body. After body. After body.
The images flashed across the screen in rapid succession.
“People define humanity by its achievements, by the Mother Teresas and the Einsteins and the Everyday Joes playing hero in their own ways a thousand times a day. When tragedy strikes, when someone does something so awful that we can’t even wrap our minds around it, we pretend like that person isn’t human. Like there’s not a continuum from us to them, like the Everyday Joe isn’t a villain in a thousand small ways every day. There’s a reason we can’t look away from a train wreck, a reason we watch the news when a body turns up, a reason that the world’s most infamous serial killers get hundreds of thousands of letters every year.”
Geoffrey was reading the words. As well as he delivered them, he wasn’t the one who’d written this speech. I turned my attention to the man who had. I could tell, by listening to Geoffrey parrot his words, that Professor Fogle was a larger-than-life figure. Based on the size of this room, his class was a
popular one. He was a storyteller. And he had a fascination for the subject matter—a fascination he was convinced the rest of humanity shared.
“The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that anyone who fought monsters had to fight becoming a monster himself. ‘If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’” Geoffrey paused on a slide that included dozens of pictures—not of bodies, but of men. I recognized some of them—they lined our walls at home, smiling out at us from frames, a constant reminder that the kind of monster we hunted could be anyone. Your neighbor. Your father. Your friend.
Your aunt.
“Charles Manson. John Wayne Gacy. Son of Sam.” Geoffrey paused for effect. “Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. These names mean something to us.
This semester, we’ll touch on all of the above, but we’re going to start closer to home.”
The other pictures disappeared, replaced by a man with dark brown hair and eyes the exact same shade. He looked normal. Nondescript. Harmless.
“Daniel Redding,” Geoffrey said. I stared at the picture, looking for a resemblance to the boy I knew. “I’ve studied the Redding case for the past four years,” Geoff continued.
“And by I, he means the professor,” I heard Bryce stage-whisper to Michael. Geoffrey with a G ignored her.
“Redding is responsible for a minimum of a dozen murders over a five- year period, beginning with his wife’s desertion, days before his twenty- ninth birthday. The bodies were recovered from Redding’s farm over a three- day excavation period subsequent to his arrest. Three more victims fitting his MO were identified across state lines.”
A crime scene photo flashed up onto the screen. A woman, long dead, hung from a ceiling fan. I recognized the rope—black nylon. Her arms were bound behind her back. Her legs were bound together. The floor beneath her
was soaked with blood. Her shirt was torn, and underneath it, I could see cuts—some long and deep, some shallow, some short. But the thing that drew my eyes was the burn on her shoulder, just under her collarbone.
The skin was an angry red: welted, blistered, and raised in the shape of an R.
This was what Dean’s father had done to those women. This was what he’d made Dean watch.
“Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.” Geoffrey clicked through a series of enlarged images of the woman’s body. “That was Redding’s modus operandi, or MO.”
Listening to Geoffrey use the technical terms made me want to smack him. He didn’t know what he was talking about. These were just pictures to him. He didn’t know what it was like to discover a loved one missing, or to crawl into the mind of a killer. He was a little boy playing at something he didn’t understand.
“Coincidentally,” Bryce cut in, “that’s also the title of Professor Fogle’s book.”
“He’s writing a book?” I asked.
“On the Daniel Redding case,” Geoffrey answered. Clearly, he wasn’t about to let his spotlight be usurped. “You can see why he’s a person of interest in Emerson’s murder. She was branded, you know.”
“You said she was in this class. You knew her.” My voice was flat. The fact that Geoffrey could talk so casually about the murder of a girl he knew made me reconsider my earlier analysis—maybe he would have been capable of murder.
Geoffrey met my eyes. “People mourn in different ways,” he said. I might have been imagining it, but I saw the barest hint of a smile around the edges of his lips.
“She was in my small group,” Bryce volunteered. “For our end-of- semester project. The professor assigned the groups. Emerson was…nice. Perky, even. I mean, who’s perky in a class about serial killers? But Emerson was. She was nice to everyone. One of the guys in our group, you should see him—he’s like a roly-poly. You say anything to him, and he just curls into a metaphorical ball. But Emerson could actually get him to talk. And Derek— the other boy in our group—he’s that guy. You know, the obnoxious, if-you- don’t-know-who-that-guy-is-in-your-section-then-chances-are-good-that- you-are-that-guy guy? That’s Derek, but Emerson could actually get him to shut up, just by smiling.”
Bryce couldn’t match Geoffrey’s detached tone. She was upset about what had happened to Emerson. This wasn’t just a performance to her. She leaned into Michael.
“Emerson didn’t show up for our exam.” Geoffrey closed his laptop. “Professor Fogle was out sick. I printed off the tests that morning, one for every student in the class. Emerson was the only one who didn’t show. I thought she was…” Geoff cut off. “Never mind.”
“You thought she was what?” Michael asked. Geoffrey narrowed his eyes. “What does it matter?”
It mattered, but before I could come up with a rational explanation for needing the information, Michael’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out, read a text, and then stood. “Sorry, Bryce,” he said. “I have to go.”
Bryce shrugged. Clearly, she wasn’t going to be pining away for him anytime soon. Michael turned toward the door, catching my eye as he passed. Lia, he mouthed.
“I should go, too,” I said. “This was…intense.”
“You’re leaving?” Geoffrey sounded genuinely surprised. Apparently, he’d been under the impression that he had this one in the bag. Dead girl.
Freaky lecture. Sensitive eyes. Clearly, I was supposed to be his for the taking.
“Tell you what,” I told him, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
