Sterling looked down. Her face absolutely expressionless, she righted her shirt. The scar was covered now, but I couldn’t stop staring.
Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.
The entire time we’d been in the observation room, she hadn’t taken her eyes off of Daniel Redding.
“My team was investigating the case,” Sterling said calmly. “I got a little too close, and I got sloppy. Redding had me for two days before I escaped.”
“That’s how you know Dean.” I’d wondered how they’d developed a relationship based only on the fact that she’d arrested his father. But if she’d been one of Redding’s victims…
“I’m not a victim,” Sterling said, following my line of thought so closely it was eerie. “I’m a survivor, and Dean is the reason that I survived.”
“Was this the case you were talking about before?” I couldn’t seem to find my voice. It came out cracked and hushed. “When you said that getting emotionally involved was a recipe for getting someone killed, were you talking about someone Daniel Redding murdered?”
“No, Cassie, I wasn’t. And that’s the last question I’m going to answer about Daniel Redding, my past, or the brand on my chest. Are we clear on that?” Sterling’s voice was so even, so utterly matter-of-fact, that I couldn’t do anything but nod.
The door to the prison opened, and Briggs and Dean exited. They were only accompanied by one guard, the older one. I watched as the guard handed something to Agent Briggs—a file. Beside them, Dean stood perfectly, unnaturally still. His shoulders were hunched. His head was down. His arms hung listlessly by his sides.
“Don’t ask Dean about any of this.” Agent Sterling issued those words as a command, desperate and fierce. “Don’t even tell him you saw the brand.”
“I won’t. Ask him. I won’t ask him anything.” I struggled to form sentences and fell silent as Dean and Briggs walked toward the car. Dean opened the car door and climbed in. He shut the door, but didn’t look at me. I forced myself not to reach for him. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the seat in front of me.
Briggs handed the file to Agent Sterling, slapping it down into her hand. “Visitor logs,” he said. “Redding wasn’t supposed to have visitors. The warden is out of his mind. I wouldn’t even bet on the logs being complete.”
Agent Sterling flipped open the file. She ran down the list of names. “Conjugal visits?” she asked.
Briggs spat out the answer. “Several.”
“You think our UNSUB is on this list?” Sterling asked.
“That would make sense,” Briggs replied tersely. “It would make our lives easy, so, no, Ronnie, I don’t think our UNSUB is on that list, because I don’t think this is going to make sense. It’s not going to be easy. We’re just not that lucky.”
I expected Sterling to snap back at him, but instead, she reached out and touched his forearm lightly with the tips of her fingers. “Don’t let him get to you,” she said quietly. Briggs relaxed slightly under her touch. “If you let him in,” she continued, “if you let him under your skin, he wins.”
“This is stupid.” Dean shook his head, his upper lip curling in disgust. “We knew what would happen if I came here. He promised he’d talk. Well,
he talked, and now we have no way of knowing how much of what he said was true and how much is just him leading us around, like dogs on ropes.”
It shouldn’t have been me behind that glass, I thought. It should have been Lia watching the interrogation. I didn’t care about the difference between active cases and cold cases. I cared about Dean.
Agent Sterling turned around in her seat. I expected to see the gentleness with which she’d just reproved Briggs, but instead, her eyes were glittering, hard as diamonds, as she addressed Dean. “Don’t,” she told him, jabbing a finger in his direction.
“Don’t what?” Dean shot back. I’d never heard him so angry.
“You really want to play this game with me?” Sterling asked him, her eyebrows nearly disappearing into her hairline. “You think I don’t know what it was like for you in there? You think I don’t know what he said, what you’re thinking? I am telling you, Dean, don’t. Don’t go there.”
As Briggs drove back past the gate and off prison grounds, the three of them settled into a tense silence. I put my hand on the seat, palm up. Dean turned toward the window, his fingers curling into fists.
I looked down at my hand, open and waiting, but couldn’t move it. I felt utterly out of place and useless. I’d accompanied them on this trip for Dean’s sake, but I didn’t need to be a profiler to know that he didn’t want me here now. With a single conversation, his father had jammed a wedge between Dean and the rest of the world, cutting him off as effectively as a blade severing a ruined limb. The unspoken closeness that had been building between Dean and me was a casualty of that blow—gone, as if it had never existed at all.
I’m in you, boy. In your blood, in your mind, in every breath you take.
In the front seat, Briggs pulled out his cell phone. Seconds after he dialed the number, he was barking out orders. “Redding gave us a location on the professor’s writing cabin. Catoctin.” Briggs paused. “No, I don’t know
whose name the deed to the cabin is under. Try the professor’s parents, ex- wife, college roommates.…Try everyone and their damned dog, but find it.”
Briggs ended the call and tossed his phone down. Sterling caught it. “If I remember correctly,” she said dryly, “throwing phones was more my area than yours.”
Agent Sterling was the one who had been tortured by Daniel Redding, but she was the only one of the three of them holding it together in the wake of this visit.
“Did Redding say anything about the professor being involved with Emerson Cole?” Agent Sterling’s question snapped both Dean and Briggs out of it, if only for a second.
“Care to share your source on that one?” Briggs asked tightly. I could practically hear him thinking that Sterling was following leads behind his back.
“Why don’t you ask Cassie?” Sterling suggested. “Apparently, she’s been doing some extracurricular digging.”
“Excuse me?” Briggs spat out.
Dean turned his head slowly away from the window to face me. “What kind of extracurricular digging?” he asked me, his voice low and haggard. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Just you?” Dean asked. I didn’t reply. He closed his eyes, his entire face taut. “Of course it’s not just you. You wouldn’t be lying to me about it if it were. I’m assuming Lia’s involved. Sloane? Townsend?”
I didn’t reply.
“This gives us motive,” Agent Sterling told Briggs in the front seat. “The professor might have killed the girl to keep the truth from coming out.”
“Emerson,” Dean said, his voice tight. “Her name was Emerson.”
“Yes,” Agent Sterling said, ignoring the fury in Dean’s voice. “It was.
And whether you believe it or not, Dean, the information you got out of your father today, no matter how insignificant it seems, will help us find Emerson’s killer. Now you just have to let us do our job.” She paused. “You both do. No more digging. No more field trips.”
At the phrase field trips, Briggs pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road and killed the engine. “You,” he said, turning around and pinning me with a look. “Out of the car.” With those words, Briggs got out of the car himself.
I tried not to flinch as I joined him. Briggs might have been willing to take calculated risks, like bringing Dean to see his father, but he was only okay with those risks if the calculations were his.
“Am I to understand that you left the house, went on some kind of field trip, and directly interfered with an ongoing FBI investigation?” Briggs never raised his voice, but he put so much force behind each word that he might as well have been yelling.
“Yes?”
Briggs ran his hands through his hair. “Who went with you?” That, I couldn’t tell him.
“I know you want to help,” he told me through clenched teeth. “What this case is doing to Dean isn’t fair. Bringing him here to talk to his father— that wasn’t fair of me. But I didn’t have a choice. Dean didn’t really have a choice, but you do. You can choose to trust me. You can choose not to give Agent Sterling any more ammunition against this program. You can choose not to behave like an irresponsible, shortsighted teenager who can’t be trusted to follow rules put in place for her own safety!”
Now, he was yelling.
Dean opened his car door. He didn’t get out. He didn’t even look at me. Briggs exhaled. I could practically see him counting to ten in his head. “I’m
not going to ask where you went,” he told me, each word measured and full of warning. “I’m not going to tell you that it was stupid and reckless, although I am certain that it undoubtedly was. I’m going to ask you—once and only once, Cassandra—who told you about the professor and the girl?”
I swallowed, hard. “My source’s name was Derek. He was working on a group project with Emerson in Professor Fogle’s class. There were two other students in the group—a girl named Bryce and a boy named Clark.”
Briggs’s gaze shifted briefly to Dean.
“What?” I said. I caught the significance of the look that passed between the two of them, but couldn’t figure out its meaning.
Dean was the one who answered, as Briggs headed back for the car. “My father said that if we were looking for a copycat, we were wasting
our time with the professor.” Dean ran a hand roughly through his hair, closing his fingers into a fist and pulling at his roots. “He said that the only truly remarkable letters he’d received were from a student in that class.”
