You killed Emerson Cole. You killed the professor. You liked it.
As I waded through online profiles, those words were never far from my mind. Spread out around me, Michael, Lia, and Sloane were focused on their respective laptops. Dean’s absence was palpable.
I tried to focus on the profile Agent Sterling had given us. Early twenties, I reminded myself. Commutes from home. No father in the picture. May have acquired a stepfather sometime in the past few years. Comfortable around firearms.
Those weren’t exactly the kinds of things that a person advertised on social media sites. I could pick up the gist of an individual’s personality from their favorites—favorite books, favorite movies, favorite quotes—but the most reliable information came from the pictures and status updates. How often did they update? Did they converse with friends? Were they in a relationship? Sloane had developed some kind of method for screening pictures for dark-colored trucks and SUVs, but I was more interested in the stories the pictures told.
Snapshots uploaded by other people gave me a candid look at a person. How self-conscious were they? Were they at the center of group pictures, or at the edge? Did they make the same facial expression in every picture, rigidly controlling what they showed to the world? Did they stare down the camera or look away? What kind of clothes did they wear? Where were the pictures taken?
Bit by bit, I could build a model of someone’s life from the ground up—which would have been more useful if I’d actually been the one to profile the UNSUB, rather than just being given a list of boxes to check off.
Okay, I told myself after my eyes had gone blurry from scrolling through too many profiles, very few of which set off my spidey senses. Sterling and Briggs gave you a few key things to look for. So do what you always do. Take a handful of details and get to the big picture.
Sterling thought the UNSUB was young, but not adolescent. Why? He’d chosen a college sophomore as his first victim. Someone who desperately longed to dominate other people would start with easy prey—a laughing, smiling young girl who wasn’t physically imposing in the least. He was probably at least a couple of years older than she was, and since a quick glance at Emerson’s profile told me that she was twenty, that explained the lower end of Sterling’s estimated age range. How had she determined that the UNSUB wasn’t an older man, like the professor?
You imitate another man’s kills. You admire him. You want to be like him. I let that thought sit for a moment. But you also risked getting caught to display your kill in a very public location—something Daniel Redding wouldn’t have done. You brought black rope with you to hang her, but the news report said you strangled her with the antenna from her own car.
To put it in terms of the textbook Dean and I had read, this was an organized kill, but there was something disorganized about it, too. The attack had obviously been planned, but there was also something impulsive about it.
Did you plan to leave her on the president’s lawn? Or was that something you thought of once your adrenaline started pumping?
Displaying the victim in public suggested a need for recognition. But recognition from whom? From the public? From the press?
From Daniel Redding? That was a possibility I couldn’t shake, and somehow, other pieces of Sterling’s profile began to make sense. An impulsive copycat who idolized Redding would be younger than the man was himself, probably by a decade or more.
You’ve felt powerless, and you admire his power. You’ve felt invisible, and you want to be seen.
SUVs and trucks were large. They sat up higher on the road. German shepherds were also large. They were intelligent, strong—and often police dogs.
You don’t just want power. You want authority, I thought. You want it because you’ve never had it. Because the people in your life who do have it make you feel weak. You didn’t feel weak when you killed Emerson.
I thought about the professor and wished again that I knew how he’d died. If you were in Fogle’s class, you admired the professor—at first. But later, you resented him for being all talk and no show. For not paying enough attention to you. For paying too much to Emerson.
Organized killers frequently chose victims they did not know to reduce the chances that the crime could be traced back to them. But my gut was telling me that it wasn’t a coincidence that Emerson had been in a relationship with the professor and now they were both dead. These victims weren’t chosen randomly. They weren’t chosen by a stranger.
“Hey, Sloane?”
Sloane didn’t look up from her computer. She held up the index finger on her right hand and continued typing rapidly with her left. After a few more seconds, she stopped typing and looked up.
“Can you compare the other students’ schedules to Emerson’s and see how much overlap there is?” I asked. “I’m thinking that if our UNSUB was fixated on Emerson, this might not be the only class they shared.”
“Sure.” Sloane didn’t move to reach for any of the files. She just sat there, her hands now folded into her lap, a bright smile on her face.
“Could you do it now?” I asked.
She held up the index finger on her right hand again. “I am doing it now.” Sloane had an incredible memory. The same skill set that allowed her to rebuild the crime scene apparently meant she didn’t need to go back over the data to analyze it.
“Emerson was an English major,” she rattled off. “She was taking Professor Fogle’s class as an elective. All of her other classes counted toward her major, except for Geology, which I assume fulfills some kind of natural science requirement. Most of the other students in Fogle’s class were psychology, pre-law, or sociology majors, and as a result, they shared very few classes with Emerson, with the exception of two students.”
If my instincts were right, if Emerson hadn’t been a random target, then I was very interested to know who those two students were.
Sloane thumbed expertly through the stack of files on the counter and handed me two of them. “Bryce Anderson and Gary Clarkson.”
Michael looked up from whatever he was doing at the sound of Bryce’s name. “Bryce didn’t mention that she and Emerson had any other classes together.”
I went back to my computer and searched for Gary Clarkson’s profile. Unlike most of his peers, the profile itself was set to private, so all I could see was the profile picture.
“Gary Clarkson,” I said, turning my computer around so the others could see. “He goes by Clark.”