“I’m a man of many mysteries,” Michael said, disrupting my thoughts. He always knew when I was profiling him and never let me get away with it for long. “And you,” he added, his gaze flitting over my face, “are…not happy.”
“All of you, inside!” Briggs snapped.
Dean headed for the house, hunched, his eyes locked straight ahead as he brushed by us. Michael tracked Dean’s movements, then glanced back at me.
I looked down and started walking. I made it halfway to the front door before Michael caught up with me. He put a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey,” he said softly. I stopped, but still didn’t look at him. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” The hand on my shoulder traced the edge of a tensed muscle, then turned me to face him. “What did Dean do?”
“Nothing,” I said. Dean had a right to be angry. He had a right to want nothing to do with me.
Putting two fingers below my chin, Michael angled my face toward his. “He did something, if you’re looking like that.”
“It’s not his fault,” I insisted.
Michael dropped his hand to his side. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Colorado, but I’m getting really tired of watching you make excuses for him.”
“Enough.” Briggs put one hand on Michael’s shoulder and one on mine and steered the two of us into the house. “Get Lia,” he said. “And Sloane. I want all of you in the living room in five minutes.”
“Or else,” Michael intoned in a whisper.
“Move!” Agent Briggs’s voice edged up on a yell. Michael and I moved.
Five minutes later, we were gathered in the living room—Michael, Lia, Sloane, and I on the coach, Dean seated on the edge of the fireplace. Briggs loomed over us. Sterling stood back and watched.
“Tell me something: in the history of this program, have any of you ever been authorized to approach witnesses?” Briggs’s voice had become deceptively pleasant.
Lia processed that question, then turned to me. “Seriously, Cassie, are you the single least stealthy person on the face of the planet, or do you just habitually want to get caught?”
“Lia!” Briggs said sharply. “Answer the question.”
“Fine,” Lia said, her voice silky. “No, we’ve never been authorized to approach witnesses. We’ve never been authorized to do anything of interest. We stay locked in the metaphorical tower while you run out and catch the bad guys. Satisfied?”
“Do I look satisfied to you?” A vein in Briggs’s forehead throbbed. “Dean went to see his father today.”
Nothing Briggs could have said would have had a bigger impact on Lia. Her eyes flickered over to Dean’s. She sat there, frozen.
“Dean went through hell because I asked him to,” Briggs continued mercilessly. “Because it was crucial for this case. I want this solved as badly as any of you, but unlike you, I’m not playing games here.”
“We weren’t—” I started to say.
Briggs cut off my objection. “Every second I have to spend policing you, making sure that you’re not taking matters into your own hands and compromising this entire investigation, is a second that I could be spending catching this killer. Right now, I should be following up a lead on the professor’s writing cabin, but instead I’m here, because you seem to need a reminder about what this program is and what it isn’t.”
Lia finally managed to look away from Dean. She turned to Briggs, her eyes flashing, her fingers curled into fists. “You’re reading us the riot act for trying to put our abilities to use, but letting that SOB play with Dean’s head in exchange for whatever table scraps of information you can get your hands on, that’s okay?”
“Enough.” Dean didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. Lia turned to him. For five or six seconds, they just sat there, staring at each other.
“No, Dean. It’s not enough.” Her voice was soft, until she turned back to Briggs. “You need to let me watch the tape of your interview with Redding. Don’t even try to tell me you didn’t tape it. You tape every conversation you have with the man. The question isn’t if he’s lying—it’s what he’s lying about, and we both know that I’m your best chance at answering that question.”
“You’re not helping,” Briggs told Lia. He held her gaze, and I realized that he wasn’t just denying her request. He was telling her that we really weren’t helping the situation, that everything we’d done up until this point had hurt Dean.
Maybe he was right, but I couldn’t help thinking that Lia was right, too. What if she could see something in the interview that the rest of us had missed?
Briggs’s phone rang. He answered it, turning his back on the rest of us. Agent Sterling stepped forward.
Dean preempted whatever she was going to say. “I’ll stay out of it.” His tone was expressionless, but there was something bitter in his eyes. “That’s what I excel at, isn’t it? Staying out of things until it’s too late.”
I thought of the R burned into Agent Sterling’s chest.
Briggs pocketed his phone and turned back to Sterling. “We’ve got a possible address for the professor’s cabin.”
“Go on, then.” Judd spoke up from behind us. I wondered how long he’d been there. “You two, get out of here,” he said to Briggs and Sterling. “I may be old, but I’m still capable of making sure none of these miscreants leave the house.”
We miscreants didn’t leave the house. We convened in the basement.
“I want to know exactly where Cassie got the information she gave Briggs,” Dean said. The fact that he was talking about me and not to me cut deeper than it should have.
“Well, I want to know why you thought that being in the same room with your father was anything but the worst idea ever,” Lia retorted.
“He knew something,” Dean told her.
“Or he wanted you to think he knew something. You shouldn’t have gone. And if you had to go, you should have taken me with you.” Lia turned her back on Dean, but not before I realized that she wasn’t just angry. She was hurt. Dean had gone to see his father for the first time in five years. I’d gone with him. She hadn’t.
“Lia,” Dean said softly.
“No,” she snapped without turning back around. “I watch your back. You watch mine. He’s hard to read, but he’s not impossible, Dean. I could have listened in. I could have helped.”