Killer Instinct
Page 52

It’s not just that, I thought in a moment of brutal honesty with myself. They come back when I’m stressed. When things are changing.
This wasn’t just about Redding. It was about Michael and Dean, but most of all, it was about me. Sloane had asked me once, in a game of Truth or Dare, how many people I loved. Not just romantic love—any kind of love. At the time, I’d wondered if growing up with only my mother for company—and then losing her the way I had—had cut my ability to love other people off at the knees.
My answer had been one.
But now…
You want to know why you, in particular, concern me, Cassie? Agent Sterling’s words rang in my ears. You’re the one who really feels things. You won’t ever be able to stop caring. It will always be personal.
I cared about the victims we fought for—the Mackenzie McBrides and the nameless girls at coffee shops. I cared about the people in this house—not just Michael and Dean, but Sloane and Lia. Lia, who would have thrown herself on an open flame for Dean.
Lia, who’d flung herself in the middle of my moment with Michael with that same determination.
I tried to lull my mind into silence and myself back to sleep.
Mackenzie McBride. The girl in the coffee shop. My thoughts circled back. Why? I turned my head to the side on my pillow. My chest rose and fell with steady, even breaths.
The FBI had gotten Mackenzie McBride’s case wrong. They’d missed the villain hiding in plain sight. But we hadn’t missed anything on this case. Christopher Simms was the villain. They’d caught him in the act. He’d had supplies in his truck—bindings for the girl’s ankles and wrists, a knife, the brand.
The girl in the coffee shop. That was what I kept coming back to. Who was Christopher’s intended victim? Redding had known that someone was scheduled to die. He’d told us to expect it.
How do you choose who dies?
I don’t.
Clark had chosen Emerson.
Christopher had chosen his mother.
Fogle had been nothing but a complication that needed to be dealt with.
So who chose the girl?
There was no getting away from that question. Maybe it was nothing, but I slipped out of my bed, out of the room. The house was silent, but for the sound of my own light footsteps as I made my way down the stairs. The door to the study—Agent Sterling’s temporary lodging—was open a crack. The faint glow of lamplight from inside the room told me that she wasn’t asleep, either.
I hovered at the door. I couldn’t quite bring myself to knock. Suddenly, the door flew inward. Agent Sterling stood on the other side, her brown hair loose and messy, her face free of makeup, and her gun at the ready. When she saw me, she let out a breath and lowered the weapon.
“Cassie,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” I responded automatically.
“You live directly outside my door?”
“You’re on edge, too,” I told her, reading that much in her behavior, the fact that she’d answered the door with a gun. “You can’t sleep. Neither can I.”
She shook her head in chagrin—though whether that emotion was directed at herself or at me, I couldn’t tell—and then she took a step back, inviting me into the room. I crossed the threshold, and she shut the door behind me, flipping on the overhead light.
I’d forgotten that Briggs’s study was full of taxidermy—predators, posed seconds before they struck. “No wonder you can’t sleep,” I told her.
She bit back a smile. “He’s always had a flair for the dramatic.” She sat down on the end of the folded-out couch. With her hair loose, she looked younger. “Why can’t you sleep?” she asked. “Ankle tracker giving you problems?”
I glanced down at my feet, bewildered, as if they had only just appeared on my body. The constant weight on my right ankle should have been more bothersome than it was, but there’d been so much going on the past few days, I’d barely even noticed it.
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’d love for you to take it off, but that’s not why I’m up. It’s about the girl, the one that Christopher Simms was meeting at the coffee shop. The one he was planning to abduct.”
I didn’t specify what else Christopher had been planning on doing to that girl, but I knew Agent Sterling well enough by now to know that her mind would go there, the same as mine.
“What about her?” Sterling’s voice was slightly hoarse. I wondered how many nights she’d spent like this one, unable to sleep.
“Who was she?” I asked. “Why was she meeting Christopher?”
“She worked at the coffee shop,” Sterling replied. “She’d been conversing with someone on an online dating site. He used a fake name and only accessed the account from public computers, but it stands to reason that it was Christopher, taking things to the next level with victim selection. His mother was dead. He’d killed Emerson—that could have given him a taste for college-aged girls.”
Strangers on a train, I thought. “Christopher had an alibi for his mother’s murder. Clark had one for Emerson’s.” I swallowed. My mouth had gone so dry, I had to work to push out the next words. “Maybe that was it. Maybe now that Clark’s dead, Christopher was on his own—but Redding knew that someone was going to die soon, besides Clark. It was planned. And if it was part of the plan…”
I sat down next to Agent Sterling, willing her to understand what I was saying, even though I wasn’t sure I was making any kind of objective sense.
“What if Christopher wasn’t the one communicating with this girl online? What if he didn’t choose her?”
Clark chose Emerson.
Christopher chose his mother.
They both had ironclad alibis for the murders of the women they had chosen. What if they weren’t the only ones?
“You think there’s a third.” Sterling put the possibility into words. That made it real. I braced the heels of my hands against the edge of the bed, steadying myself.
“Did Christopher confess to Emerson’s murder?” I asked. “Is there any physical evidence tying him to the scene? Any circumstantial evidence? Anything, other than the fact that he was planning to kill another girl?”
Agent Sterling’s phone rang. The sound was garish, jarring in contrast with my quiet questions. Phone calls at two in the morning never brought good news.
“Sterling.” Her posture changed when she answered the phone. This wasn’t the woman with tousled hair, sitting on the edge of her bed. This was the agent. “What do you mean, ‘he’s dead’?” Short pause. “I know the literal meaning of the word, Dad. What happened? When did you get the call?”
Someone was dead. That knowledge weighed me down and set my heart to beating a vicious rhythm against my rib cage. The way she’s talking means it’s someone we know. As that realization occurred to me, a plea wrenched its way through me, taking over my thoughts, silencing everything else in its wake. Please don’t let it be Briggs.
“No, this isn’t a blessing,” Agent Sterling said sharply. “This case isn’t closed.”
Not Briggs, I thought. Director Sterling would never have referred to the death of his former son-in-law as a blessing.
“Are you listening to me, Dad? Director, we think there might be—” She cut off. “‘Who’s we?’ Does it matter who we is? I’m telling you—”
She wasn’t telling him anything, because he wasn’t listening.
“I know it would be to your advantage, politically, if this case was closed, if it never had to go to trial because our first killer took out our second killer and then strung himself up by the bedsheets once he was caught. That’s neat, and it’s tidy. It’s convenient. Director?” She paused. “Director? Dad?” She punched her thumb viciously onto her touch screen and threw down her phone.
“He hung up on me,” she said. “He told me that he’d gotten a call from the prison, that Christopher Simms had been found dead in his cell. He hung himself—or at least, that’s the going theory.”