You were in most of Emerson’s classes. I slipped into Clark’s mind without even thinking about it. You liked watching her. She was nice
to you. You thought she was perfect. And if you found out she wasn’t… “You got something?” Michael asked me from his spot across the room. I caught my bottom lip in my teeth. “Maybe.”
I could see Clark targeting Emerson, but if he’d been the one to attack her, I would have expected it to be messier. I’d thought it myself the day before: if Clark was a killer, he’d be a disorganized killer. Emerson wasn’t murdered on an impulse. The UNSUB never lost emotional control.
And yet…
A phone rang, breaking me from my thoughts. It took me a second to realize that the ringtone was mine. I reached for my phone, but Lia beat me there. She snatched it and held it just out of reach.
“Give it here, Lia.”
Selectively deaf, she turned the phone around so I could see the caller’s name. TA GEOFF flashed across the screen. What the…He’d given me his number. I’d plugged it into my phone, but I’d never given him mine.
“The two of you have been texting,” Lia informed me pertly. “You’ve
really grown quite close.”
I made a mental note to change the password on my phone.
“Shall we see what he has to say?” Lia didn’t wait for a response before she answered the call.
“Geoffrey. I was just talking about you.” She smiled at whatever he said in response, then put the phone on speaker and laid it on the coffee table between us, daring me to hang up.
I didn’t.
“Did you hear about the professor?” Geoffrey asked, his voice grave. “It’s all over the news.”
So the story about the professor’s death had broken.
“This must be so hard for you,” Lia said, putting her feet up on the coffee table. Her tone oozing sympathy, she gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes.
“You have no idea,” Geoffrey said in response. “The professor didn’t deserve this.”
And Emerson did? I bit back the question.
“First that girl, now the professor,” Lia said, sounding every inch the tragedy groupie, ready to hang on Geoffrey’s every word. “Who do you think it is?”
“We’re dealing with what I like to call an organized killer,” Geoffrey intoned. “Highly intelligent and hard to catch.”
I didn’t know what was more off-putting: the way Geoffrey was acting like he’d invented the phrase “organized killer”—while demonstrating only the smallest fraction of understanding of what that really meant—or the fact that “highly intelligent” was probably a descriptor he’d use to describe himself.
“I’ll probably have to take over the class now that Fogle is gone,” Geoffrey added. “I don’t know what will happen to his book, Bind Them, Brand Them, Cut Them, Hang Them: The Daniel Redding Story.”
Geoffrey couldn’t resist dropping the book’s title. Listening to him talk, I thought back to the way Dean had looked, saying those same words: eyes unseeing, face pale.
“Do you think it could be someone in the class?” Lia asked. “Your class?”
She was so good at changing the direction of the conversation that Geoffrey didn’t even realize she’d done it.
“If there were a student in this class with the potential for that kind of thing,” Geoffrey said, his tone saturated with smugness, “I think I would know it.”
My first reaction to those words was that of course he thought he’d recognize a killer. But my second reaction sat heavier in my stomach. He’d used the word potential.
Potential as in capability, or potential as in talent?
“What about the kid who’s setting the curve in the class?” Lia gave Geoffrey another verbal nudge.
“No way,” Geoffrey scoffed. “Gary something. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Gary Clarkson. As in Clark. I wouldn’t have pegged him as the curve- setting type, and that disturbed me. Maybe he was more of a planner, more type A, more organized than I’d realized.
Lia snatched the phone up and abruptly hung up. The sudden movement jerked me out of my thoughts and I tracked her gaze. Dean was standing in the hallway behind me.
He didn’t comment on what he’d overheard. He didn’t threaten to tell Briggs we’d broken the rules. Again. He just turned and walked, his footsteps heavy, toward the stairs.
I snatched my phone back. Lia didn’t stop me. It rang. I expected it to be Geoffrey calling back, but it wasn’t.
“There’s someone I need you to look up,” Briggs said, forgoing the customary greeting.
“Same to you,” I told him. “Gary Clarkson. He’s comfortable with guns, shared a high percentage of Emerson’s classes, and was setting the curve in Fogle’s class.” I hesitated just a second, then plowed on. “You should also check out the professor’s TA.”
The FBI hadn’t given us a file for Geoffrey, but that was an oversight on their part. He wasn’t a student in the class, but he was a student at the university—and it would be just like Dean’s father to get off on telling the FBI something misleading, but true.
“I’ll look into it,” Briggs promised, “but right now, I need you to see what you can find out about a Conrad Mayler. He’s a senior who took Fogle’s class two years ago.”
“Why am I looking him up?”
There was silence on the other end. For a moment, I thought Briggs wouldn’t answer the question, but after a second’s hesitation, he did. “He’s the one who posted the video of the crime scene.”
Briggs had a way of punctuating the end of sentences that shut the door completely on further conversation.
“Okay,” I said. “Conrad Mayler. Got it.”
Twenty minutes later, I’d discovered everything there was to online-know about Conrad Mayler. He was a journalism major. He claimed to listen only to indie bands. His favorite movies were documentaries. He had a blog where he wrote snarky recaps of a variety of reality shows. According to his profile, he’d attended a private high school and worked part-time at the student radio station.
His relationship status was “It’s complicated.” The girl implicated in said relationship was Bryce Anderson.
Your name just keeps coming up. I pictured the blond girl in my mind. I’d made the error once before of erroneously assuming an UNSUB was male. No matter what my gut was telling me this time, I couldn’t risk making the same mistake twice.
Scrolling through Conrad’s status updates and profiles, it wasn’t hard to see that he fancied himself a journalist. He’d probably claim that he’d taken the video of Emerson’s body and posted it anonymously online because the public had a right to know. I was half-surprised he hadn’t actually posted it to his profile.
Seemingly in answer to my thoughts, the page in front of me updated itself. Conrad had posted a new video. Preparing myself for the worst, I clicked play, but instead of a corpse, I saw rows of wooden seats, filled with students. The time stamp on the video read 7:34 A.M.
“Professor George Fogle once said that he scheduled his class for 7:30 in the morning as a way of separating the students who were taking his class on a lark from those who were serious about the study of criminology.” The camera panned the room, and I recognized the auditorium.
I’d been there before.
“Three days ago, three hundred and seven serious students took the first of three Monsters or Men exams. The three hundred and eighth student, Emerson Cole, was found dead that morning.”
“There’s no white noise,” Sloane commented, sidling up behind me. “Whoever taped the narration has decent equipment. The video, on the other hand, was taken by some kind of smartphone. At least 1080p resolution, maybe higher.”
The video cut from the auditorium scene to familiar footage—the clip of Emerson’s body. The narration continued, but I tuned it out.
“I’d ask if this kid was serious,” Michael said, coming to join us, “but I can tell that he is. He thinks this is cutting-edge journalism. On his profile page.”
“He didn’t kill Emerson,” I said tiredly. Conrad didn’t fit the profile. Our killer didn’t have a snarky blog. He didn’t have a girlfriend like Bryce— even if it was complicated. And the person who’d killed Emerson, who’d displayed her like a dog dropping a dead bird at the feet of his master, would never have started his “video coverage” of the event with footage of the class.
For the UNSUB, the rest of the class would have been beside the point. “Play it again,” Sloane ordered. “From the beginning.”
I did. Sloane shoved me gently out of the way and took over, using keyboard shortcuts to pause the video, play it, pause it. Her eyes flitted back and forth over the screen. “The voice-over was right,” she said finally. “There are three hundred and seven students in that classroom taking that test. Including your suspect,” she told me, pointing to an unmistakable face
—round, with dull eyes—in the third row. Clark. He was sitting two seats away from Bryce, a row behind Derek.
“Who’s filming the test?” I asked. “And why?”
“I don’t know.” Sloane’s tongue darted out in between her lips in a look of intense concentration. “The news report said that Emerson’s body was discovered early that morning,” she said finally. “The question is how early?”
I followed her line of thought. According to the time stamp, this footage was taken at 7:34 A.M.
“Time of death.” I said the obvious out loud. “We need the time of death.”
Sloane grabbed my phone and dialed a number from memory. When no one answered, she called again. And again. And again.
“What?” Irritation made Briggs’s voice loud enough that I could hear it from a distance.
“It’s considered impolite to talk above seventy-five decibels,” Sloane sniffed. “I believe it’s called shouting.”
I couldn’t hear Briggs’s reply.
“Is the autopsy in on Emerson Cole?” Sloane held the phone to her ear with her shoulder and used her free hands to pull her hair out of its ponytail and refasten it. “We need time of death. Cause of death would also be helpful.”
I was fairly certain Briggs wouldn’t want to part with that information.
There was quite a bit of distance between profiling college students on social media and being read in to the nitty-gritty of a classified autopsy.
“You’re at seventy-eight decibels,” Sloane said, unfazed by Briggs’s objections. “And we still need time of death.” She paused again. “Because,” Sloane said, drawing out the word as if she were talking to a very small, very slow child, “we’re sitting here looking at a video that was taken at 7:34 that morning. If I’m remembering the campus maps correctly—and you know I am—Davies Auditorium is a twenty-five-minute walk and a ten-minute drive from the president’s house. Which means that if the death of Emerson Cole (a) required the UNSUB’s presence and (b) took place after 7:25 A.M. and before the end of that test, then every single student in that class has an alibi.”
Sloane was quiet for longer this time. Then she hung up the phone. “What did he say?” Michael asked her.
Sloane closed her laptop and pushed it away. “He said that the body was found at 8:15 that morning. Time of death was estimated at 7:55.”
