She was his wife, I thought. Past tense—meaning that she’s not his wife anymore.
“She’s Briggs’s ex-wife?” I said incredulously. “And the director sent her
here? That can’t be ethical.”
Lia rolled her eyes. “Any more unethical than an off-the-books FBI program that uses underage prodigies to catch serial killers?” She smirked. “Or what about sending his own daughter to replace Agent Locke? Clearly, nepotism and shadiness are alive and well at FBI headquarters.”
Sloane looked up from making some adjustments to her catapult. “As of 1999, the FBI had no written policies on interoffice dating,” she rattled off. “Intercompany marriages between supervisors, agents, and support staff aren’t uncommon, though they constitute a minority of employee marital unions.”
Lia gave me a look and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “If the FBI doesn’t have an official dating policy, I doubt they have one for divorce. Besides, we’re talking about Director Sterling here. The man who basically bought Michael from his father by promising to make the IRS look the other way.” She paused. “The man who had the FBI haul me in off the streets and told me my other option was juvie.”
This was the first time I’d ever heard Lia mention her past before the program. Juvie?
“Briggs and Sterling both worked my father’s case.” Dean volunteered that information, using his own past to change the subject from Lia’s, which told me that she’d been telling the truth and he wanted to protect her from questions. “Briggs was the strategist,” Dean continued. “He was driven, competitive—not with her, but with any UNSUB they hunted. Briggs didn’t just want to catch killers. He wanted to win.”
It was easy to forget, when Dean said the word UNSUB, that his father had never been an Unknown Subject to him. Dean had lived with a killer—a true psychopath—day in, day out, for years.
“Sterling was impulsive.” Dean stuck to describing the agents. I doubted he would mention his father again. “Fearless. She had a hot temper, and she followed her gut, even when that wasn’t the smart thing to do.”
I’d suspected that Agent Sterling’s personality had undergone some major changes in the past five years, but even so, it was hard to see the connection between the short-tempered, instinct-driven woman Dean was describing and the Agent Sterling in the kitchen now. The additional data sent my brain into overdrive, connecting the dots, looking at the trajectory between past and present.
“Briggs has a case.” Michael liked to make an entrance. “He just got the call.”
“But his team just got back.” Sloane loaded her catapult again. “The FBI has fifty-six field offices, and the DC field office is the second-largest in the country. There are dozens of teams who could take this case. Why assign it to Briggs?”
“Because I’m the most qualified for the job,” Briggs said, coming into the room. “And,” he added under his breath, “because somewhere along the way, the universe decided I needed to suffer.”
I wondered if that last bit was about the case—or about the fact that Agent Sterling was on his heels. Now that I knew they’d been married, I
doubted his irritation with her when he’d sent me out of the room had been entirely professional. She was playing in his sandbox—and they clearly had issues.
“I’m going with Agent Briggs.” Sterling pointedly ignored her ex- husband and addressed those words to us. “If any of you hope to come within ten feet of a training exercise or cold case this month, you’ll have those practice GEDs finished when I get back.”
Lia threw her head back and laughed.
“You think I’m joking, Ms. Zhang?” Agent Sterling asked. It was the first time I’d ever heard Lia’s last name, but Lia didn’t bat an eye.
“I don’t think anything,” Lia said. “I know that you’re telling the truth. But I also know that the FBI brass isn’t going to let you ground their secret assets from doing their jobs. They didn’t bring us here to take the GED. They brought us here because we’re useful. I’ve met your daddy dearest, Agent Sterling. He only plays by the rules when it’s useful for him to do so, and he definitely didn’t go to the trouble of blackmailing me into this program to let you clip my wings.” Lia leaned back against the sofa and stretched out her legs. “If you think otherwise,” she added, her lips parting in a slow, deliberate smile, “you’re lying to yourself.”
Agent Sterling waited to reply until she was certain she had Lia’s full attention. “You’re only useful as long as you aren’t a liability,” she said calmly. “And given your individual histories—some of them criminal—it wouldn’t take much for me to convince the director that one or two of you might be a bigger risk than you’re worth.”
Dean was the son of a serial killer. Michael had anger management issues and a father who’d traded him to the FBI for immunity from prosecution on white-collar crimes. Lia was a compulsive liar—and apparently had some kind of juvie record. Sloane had her catapult aimed at Agent Sterling’s head.
And then there was me.
“Lia, just humor her and take the test.” Agent Briggs sounded very much like someone whose head was beginning to pound.
“Humor me?” Agent Sterling repeated. “You’re telling her to humor me?” Sterling’s voice went up a decibel.
“Lia already took the test.” Dean spoke up before Agent Briggs had a chance to reply. Everyone in the room turned to look at him. “She’s a human lie detector. She can do multiple choice questions in her sleep.”
Detecting lies was as much about the words people used as the way they said them. If there was a pattern to the way the test makers wrote the questions, a subtle difference between the true answers and the false ones, a deception detector would find it.
Lia shot Dean a dirty look. “You never let me have any fun,” she muttered.
Dean ignored her and directed his next words at Agent Sterling. “You have a case? Work your case. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”
I got the feeling that what he was really saying was I’ll be fine. For all her talk about liabilities, Agent Sterling seemed to need to hear that.
You and Briggs caught Daniel Redding, I thought, watching Agent Sterling carefully. You saved Dean. Maybe Briggs’s ex wasn’t okay with the idea that she’d saved Dean for this. We lived in a house where serial killers’ pictures dotted the walls. There was an outline of a dead body sketched on the bottom of our pool. We lived and breathed death and destruction, Dean and I even more than the others.
If she’s got something against this program, why would the director draft her as Locke’s replacement? Something about this entire situation just didn’t add up.
Briggs’s phone vibrated. He looked to Sterling. “If you’re done here, the local PD is contaminating our crime scene as we speak, and some idiot
thought it would be a bright idea to talk to the press.”
Agent Sterling cursed viciously under her breath, and I changed my mind about the makeup and the nail polish, the way she was dressed, the way she talked. None of it was about presenting an image of professionalism to the rest of the world. It wasn’t a protective layer to keep the rest of the world out.
She did it, all of it, to keep the old Veronica Sterling—the one Dean had described—in.
As I turned that thought over in my head, Briggs and Sterling took their leave. The moment the front door closed behind them, Lia, Michael, and Sloane bolted for the TV control. Sloane got there first. She flipped the television on to a local news channel. It took me a moment to realize why.
Some idiot thought it would be a bright idea to talk to the press.
Agent Briggs wouldn’t tell us anything about an active case. The Naturals program was only authorized to work on cold cases. But if the press had gotten wind of whatever it was that had sent Briggs’s team out on a new assignment, we wouldn’t have to rely on Briggs for information.
“Let’s see what Mommy and Daddy are up to, shall we?” Lia said, eyeing the TV greedily and waiting for the fireworks to commence.
“Lia, I will give you one thousand dollars to never refer to Sterling and Briggs as Mommy and Daddy again.”
Lia gave Michael a speculative look. “Technically true,” she said, assessing his promise. “But you don’t come into your trust fund until you turn twenty-five, and I’m not much of a believer in delayed gratification.”
I hadn’t even known that Michael had a trust fund.
“Breaking news.” All conversation in the room ceased as a female reporter came onto the screen. She was standing in front of a building with a Gothic spire. Her hair was wind-whipped, her expression serious. There was
an odd energy to the moment, something that would have made me stop and watch even if I didn’t already have some idea of what was coming.
“I’m standing here outside of Colonial University in northern Virginia, where today, the sixty-eight hundred students who comprise the Colonial student body saw one of their own brutally murdered—and gruesomely displayed on the university president’s lawn.”
The screen flashed to a picture of a plantation-style house.
“Sources say that the girl was bound and tortured before being strangled with the antenna of her own car and displayed on the hood. The car and the body were found parked on Colonial president Larry Vernon’s front lawn early this morning. The police are currently investigating every lead, but a source within the police department has been quoted as saying that this man, Professor George Fogle, is a person of interest.”
Another picture flashed briefly onto the screen: a man in his late thirties, with thick, dark hair and an intense gaze.
“Professor Fogle’s courses include the popular Monsters or Men: The Psychology of Serial Murder, the syllabus for which promises that students will become ‘intimately familiar with the men behind the legends of the most horrific crimes ever committed.’”
The reporter held her hand to her ear and stopped reading from the teleprompter. “I’ve gotten word that a video of the body, taken from a student phone shortly after the police arrived at the scene, has been leaked online. The footage is said to be graphic. We’re awaiting a statement from local police on both the crime itself and the lack of security that allowed such footage to be taken. This is Maria Vincent, for Channel Nine News.”
Within seconds, the television was muted and Sloane had located the leaked footage on her laptop. She positioned the screen so that we could see it and hit play. A handheld camera zoomed in on the crime scene. Graphic was an understatement.
Not one of the five of us looked away. For Lia and Michael, it might have been morbid curiosity. For Sloane, crime scenes were data: angles to be examined, numbers to be crunched. But for Dean and for me, it wasn’t about the scene.
It was about the body.
There was an intimate connection between a killer and the person they’d killed. Bodies were like messages, full of symbolic meanings that only a person who understood the needs and desires and rage that went into snuffing out another life could fully decode.
This isn’t a language anyone should want to speak. Dean was the one who’d told me that, but beside me, I could feel his eyes locked on to the screen, the same as mine.
The corpse had long blond hair. Whoever had taken the video hadn’t been able to get close, but even from a distance, her body looked broken, her skin lifeless. Her hands appeared to be bound behind her back, and based on the fact that her legs weren’t splayed apart, I was guessing her feet had been bound as well. The bottom half of her body was hanging off the front of the car. Her shirt was covered in blood. Even with the questionable camera work, I could make out a noose around her neck. Black rope stood out against the white car, going all the way up to the sunroof.
“Hey!” On the video, a police officer noticed the student holding the phone. The student cursed and ran, and the footage cut out.
Sloane closed the laptop. The room went silent.
“If it’s just one murder,” Michael said finally, “that means it’s not serial.
Why call in the FBI?”
“The person of interest teaches a class on serial killers,” I replied, thinking out loud. “If the professor’s involved, you might want someone with expertise in the field.” I looked to Dean to see if he agreed, but he was
just sitting there, staring at the silent TV screen. Somehow, I doubted he was enthralled by the weather report.
“Dean?” I said. He didn’t respond.
“Dean.” Lia reached her foot out and shoved him with her heel. “Earth to Redding.”
Dean looked up. Blond hair hung in his face. Brown eyes stared through us. He said something, but the words were garbled in his throat, caught halfway between a grunt and a whisper.
“What did you say?” Sloane asked.
“Bind them,” Dean said, his voice still rough, but louder this time. “Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.” He shut his eyes, and his hands curled into fists.
“Hey.” Lia was beside him in a second. “Hey, Dean.” She didn’t touch him, but she stayed by his side. The look on her face was fiercely protective
—and terrified.
Do something, I thought.
Taking my cue from Lia, I crouched by Dean’s other side. I reached a hand out to touch the back of his neck. He’d done the same for me, more than once, when I’d first started learning to climb into the minds of killers.
The second my hand made contact, he flinched. His arm shot out, and my wrist was suddenly caught in a painfully tight grip. Michael jumped to his feet, his eyes flashing. With a jerk of my head, I told him to stay put. I could take care of myself.
“Hey,” I said, repeating Lia’s words. “Hey, Dean.”
Dean blinked rapidly, three or four times. I tried to concentrate on the details of his face and not the death grip he had on my wrist. His eyelashes weren’t black. They were brown, lighter than his eyes. Those eyes stared at me now, round and dark. He let go of my wrist.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“She’s fine,” Lia answered for me, her eyes narrowed to slits, daring me to disagree with her.
Dean ignored Lia and fixed his eyes on me. “Cassie?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I was. I could feel the place where his hand had been a moment before, but it didn’t hurt anymore. My heart was pounding. I refused to let my hands shake. “Are you okay?”
I expected Dean to shut me down, to refuse to answer, to walk away.
When he responded, I saw it for what it was—penance. He’d force himself to say more than he was comfortable saying to punish himself for losing control.
To make it up to me.
“I’ve been better.” Dean could have stopped there, but he didn’t. Each syllable was hard-won, and my gut twisted as I realized just how much it was costing him to form these words. “The professor they’re looking for, the one who teaches the Monsters or Men class? I’d bet a lot of money that the reason he’s a person of interest is that one of the killers he lectures about in his class is my father.” Dean swallowed and stared holes into the carpet. “The reason Briggs and Sterling were called in is that they were the original agents on my father’s case.”
I remembered what it had felt like to walk through a crime scene, knowing it had been patterned after my mother’s murder. Dean had been there with me. He’d been there for me.
“Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them,” I said softly. “That was how your father killed his victims.” I didn’t phrase it as a question, because I knew. Just by looking at Dean, I knew.
“Yes,” Dean said, before lifting his eyes to look at the still-muted TV. “And I’m almost certain that’s what was done to this girl.”
YOU
The president’s lawn was a nice touch. You could have dumped her anywhere. You didn’t have to risk being seen.
“No one saw me.” You murmur the words with a self-satisfied hum. “But they saw her.”
They saw the lines you carved into her body. They saw the noose you slipped around her neck. Just thinking about it, about the way her eyes bulged as the life drained out of her, fragile little arms tensing against the restraints, pale skin dyed with dainty rivulets of red…
Your lips curve into a smile. The moment has passed, but the game—the game is long. Next time, you won’t be so eager. Next time, you’ll have nothing to prove. Next time, you’ll take it slow.
