Killer Instinct
Page 45

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.”
The 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.”