The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (29 page)

“They’re everything.” This time, I could see a manic intensity in Redding’s eyes. He looked at Dean, and the only thing he saw was himself—a god, not subject to
man’s laws, above things like empathy and guilt. I thought about the card that Briggs had found in Trina’s pocket—the king of spades.

Redding wanted immortality. He wanted power. But more than anything, he wanted an heir.

Why now?
I thought.
Why is he doing all of this now?
He’d sat in that prison for five years. Had it taken that long to find someone to do his bidding on the outside, or had
something happened to push him into doing this?

On the screen, Dean’s father had just asked if there was a girl. Dean denied it. Redding called him “son,” and Dean said the five words that triggered the man to lash out.

“I am not your son.”

Even knowing it was coming, the sudden rush of violence took me off guard. Redding’s fists were buried in the front of Dean’s shirt. He jerked him close and told him that he was and
would always be his father’s son.

“You know it. You fear it.”

This time, I saw the instant Dean snapped, the moment when the anger that Michael had told me was always present beneath the surface bubbled up and overflowed. Dean’s face was like stone,
but there was something wild in his eyes as he grabbed his father, pulling him halfway across the table, as far as the other man’s chains would allow.

This time, as Briggs broke up the fight, I saw Redding smile. He’d gotten what he wanted. A hint of violence. A taste of Dean’s
potential
.

My eyes were riveted on the screen. This was the last thing I’d seen the first time around. Briggs waited a moment or two, to make sure Dean was finished, before he backed off—but I
noticed that this time, he didn’t sit, positioning himself just behind Dean.

“Where is the professor’s cabin?” Briggs asked.

Dean’s father smiled. “Catoctin,” he said. “I don’t know anything more specific than that.”

Dean asked two or three more questions, but his father didn’t have anything else useful to say.

“We’re done here,” Briggs said. Dean stood. His father remained sitting, perfectly relaxed. Briggs put a hand on Dean’s shoulder and began steering him out of the
room.

“Have you ever told Briggs precisely what you did to his wife, Dean?” Daniel Redding didn’t raise his voice, but the question seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
“Or does he still think it was me who drew the knife slowly down her shoulders and thighs, me who sank the brand into her flesh?”

Briggs’s grip on Dean tightened. If he’d been steering him toward the door before, he was shoving him now—anything to get Dean out of there. But Dean’s feet were suddenly
glued to the floor.

Go,
I told Dean silently.
Just go.

But he didn’t.

Redding relished the moment. “Tell your agent friend there what you did, Dean. Tell him how you came out to the barn where I had Veronica Sterling bound hand and foot. Tell him how I went
to cut her—how you took the knife from my hand, not to save her, but to do it yourself. Tell him how you made her bleed. Tell him how she screamed when you burned an
R
into her flesh.
Tell him how you asked me for her.” Redding closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the ceiling, like a man offering thanks to his gods. “Tell him she was your first.”

First victim. For Redding, that was the only
first
that mattered, no matter how much innuendo he might jam into the word.

Briggs slammed the door open. “Guard!”

A guard—the one who’d given Agent Sterling and myself a front-row seat to the first half of this show—appeared, disgust barely contained on his face. He went to restrain
Redding. “Even if you find the professor in his cabin,” Dean’s father called after him, his voice echoing, surrounded by metal walls, “you won’t find what you’re
looking for. The most interesting letters I’ve received, those that show rather remarkable
attention to detail
—those letters didn’t come from the professor. They came from
one of his students.”

T
he room fell into silence. Lia paused the DVD. I stood up and walked toward the door, my back to Michael and Lia. In the doorway, Agent Sterling
calmly met my eyes. She didn’t comment on the contents of the interviews.

Did Dean really brand you?
I asked her silently.
Did Dean—our Dean—torture you?

She had no answers for me.

“I only caught Redding in one lie.”

I turned back toward Lia, hoping that she’d tell me what I wanted to hear—that Redding had lied about Dean.

“When he told Briggs that he wasn’t interested in anything he had to say—that wasn’t true. He wanted to know everything about Emerson Cole’s murder. He was hungry
for the details, which means that he didn’t have them already. Whoever his protégé is, our UNSUB didn’t exactly record the nitty-gritty and send them to his good old
sensei.”

“That’s it?” I asked Lia. “Everything else he said was true?”

Lia looked down at the ground. “Everything.”

“That means that he did get some remarkable letters from a student in Fogle’s class,” I said. “To a man like Redding, ‘attention to detail’ probably means
some pretty explicit descriptions of violence.”

“And yet,” Michael chimed in, “every student in that class has an alibi.”

“Misdirection.” Lia said the word lightly, but I heard the bite buried in her tone. “You can deceive people without lying. Liars are like magicians: while you’re watching
the beautiful assistant, they’re slipping the rabbit out of a sleeve.”

Watching these interviews—particularly the one with Dean—had been almost physically painful. I refused to believe that we’d learned nothing about this case.

“So assume everything about the letters and the professor was the beautiful assistant,” I said. “What’s left? What did we learn?”
Other than the fact that
Redding claims that Dean tortured Agent Sterling himself.

“Daniel Redding’s emotions are flat.” Michael dangled his legs over the edge of the couch, and I knew that—like me—he was avoiding the elephant in the room.
“He doesn’t feel fear, ever. He can feel pleasure, but not happiness. No regret. No remorse. Most of the time, his expression is dominated by more cerebral emotions: self-satisfaction,
curiosity, amusement, a desire to twist the knife. He’s calculated, restrained, and the only thing that gets real emotion out of him is Dean.”

My every impression of Dean’s father had been confirmed. Redding was possessive. He’d snapped every time Dean had denied their relationship. He’d done everything he could to
make Dean think that they were the same—to separate him from everyone else, starting with Agent Briggs.

“Did Briggs know?” I asked. “About…what Redding said at the end? About Dean?”

I couldn’t put more than that into words.

“He knew.” Agent Sterling spoke for the first time since we’d started watching the videos. Without elaborating, she walked over to Lia, grabbed the remote, and pressed play. A
third interview started a moment later.

A guard—one I’d never seen before—escorted Sterling into the room. Instead of taking a seat across from Redding, she remained standing.

“Veronica Sterling.” Dean’s father said those words like the beginning of some kind of incantation. “I have to say, I’m surprised your dearest husband—excuse
me,
ex
-husband—allowed you in such close quarters with the devil incarnate.”

Sterling shrugged. “You’re just a man. A pathetic little man living in a cage.”

“Briggs doesn’t know you’re here, does he?” Redding asked. “What about your father? No, he doesn’t know, either, does he? So tell me, Ms. Sterling, why are
you here?”

“You know why I’m here.”

“That pesky little case of yours?” Redding said. “I’m afraid I’ve told your Agent Briggs and my Dean everything I know.”

“Liar.” Sterling said the word on the screen at the exact same time that Lia muttered the word beside me.

Redding responded. “I’m hurt—and here I thought we had a very special relationship.”

“Because I’m the one that got away?” Sterling asked. A muscle in Redding’s cheek twitched.

“Direct hit,” Michael murmured.

Redding recovered quickly. “Have the scars faded? The knife wounds were shallow enough—it was the boy’s first time taking the lead, you know. But the brand—the brand
won’t fade, will it? You’ll have my initial stamped into your flesh for the rest of your life. Can you still smell your scorching skin? Can you feel it?”

“No,” Agent Sterling said, taking a seat. To my surprise, she reached up and lowered her shirt, exposing the scar. Redding’s lips parted.

“Correction,” Michael commented, “there are two things that bring out real emotion in Daniel Redding.”

I wasn’t the expert Michael was with emotions, but I could see it, too—the way the convicted killer was singing hallelujah with his eyes.

Agent Sterling let her own lips part and traced the letter on her chest. For the first time, she was firmly in control of this interview. He should have seen the steel in her expression, but he
didn’t.

“This isn’t your initial,” she said, dropping her voice to just above a whisper. “This is
Dean
’s initial. We knew you were listening. We knew you’d be
back to check his work, and that the only way you’d believe that he didn’t have ulterior motives was if there was proof.” Her finger made another loop of the
R
. “I
told him to do it. I begged him to, I made him
promise
to, and he did—no matter how sick it made him, no matter how much it has haunted him ever since,
he did it
. And it
worked.”

“No.”

“You believed the act. You trusted him, because you wanted to believe that he was
your
son, that there was nothing of his mother in him. More fool, you.” Sterling righted her
shirt. “I didn’t
escape
, Daniel. Dean let me go. He covered for me.”

“You’re lying.” Redding could barely get the words out around clenched teeth.

“He warned me away from you. I wasn’t listening. I didn’t understand, and when I came by without backup, when you jumped me—he was watching. He had a plan, and he
executed that plan at all costs.” She smiled. “You should be proud. He’s just as brilliant as you are, smart enough, even, to pull one over on dear old dad.”

Redding leaped for Agent Sterling, but she leaned back, and the chain caught him.

“Like a dog on a leash,” she said.

“I will kill you.” Redding’s voice was dull, but the words did not ring hollow—not at all. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. None at all.”

Sterling didn’t reply. She walked back out of the room, and the screen went black.

“You asked Dean to
brand you
?” Lia was the first one to find her voice.

“We needed Redding to believe that Dean was going to kill me and that he didn’t need to be supervised.” Sterling met Lia’s gaze. “Sometimes you do what you have to
in order to survive.”

Lia knew that—the same way Dean knew it, the same way Michael knew it. I thought of Sloane counting holes in a shower drain and working obsessively through the night and me telling Locke
that I’d killed my own mother—stalling so that Michael could kill her.

You do what you need to do to survive.

“Whatever,” Lia said. “I’m going to see how Sloane is doing,” She didn’t want to talk about survival, and I filed that away for future reference. Needing to
get away, I followed Lia to the basement. We found Sloane sitting in the middle of a fake foyer, maps and geographical surveys spread out all around her.

“Found anything?” I asked.

Sloane lifted her head from the maps, but her eyes didn’t quite focus on us. She was still stuck in her head, calculating something, her thoughts loud enough that the rest of the world
just faded away.

Lia nudged her with the tip of her toe. Sloane snapped out of it and met Lia’s eyes. “Geographical profiling is surprisingly unsatisfying,” she said, sounding mildly
disgruntled. She rearranged the papers in front of her and gestured for us to take a closer look. I knelt down.

“Most killers target victims within a set radius of their home.” Sloane gestured to three sets of circles on the map, each with a different center. “Emerson Cole. Professor
Fogle. Trina Simms. Fogle’s cabin is a three-hour drive from Colonial, which is just as far from Broken Springs.” Together, the three dots on the map resembled a piece of pie.
“Even if you set the radius at a two-to three-hour drive, the overlap is still tiny.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” I ventured. “The smaller the overlap, the fewer places we have to look.”

“But that’s just it,” Sloane said. “There’s really only one thing that jumps out about that small slice of the map.”

Lia saw it before I did. “The prison where they’re keeping Dean’s dad.”

“It makes sense,” I said. “Redding calls the shots. Redding is the focal point.”

“But we already
knew
that!” Sloane was almost shouting. She bit her bottom lip, and I realized how helpless she felt down here: alone, unable to make a difference, no matter
how many times she did the math.