“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.
“Come on,” I said, hooking an arm through hers and making her stand up. “Let’s go fill Agent Sterling in.”
Sloane looked like she might argue, but Lia preempted it.
“It’s always the little things,” she told Sloane gently. “A tenth of a second, a single piece of information—you never know what will make a difference.”
A second after we made it to the first floor, the front door slammed. For a moment, Lia, Sloane, and I froze, then we made a beeline for the entryway. Sterling and Michael met us on the way there. We all came to a standstill at once.
Dean was taking off his coat. Briggs had his arms folded over his chest, waiting. Clearly, he’d expected the rush.
“Anything?” he asked Lia.
“Nothing other than the obvious: he’s been dancing a long, slow waltz around the truth.”
“You?” Sterling asked Briggs.
“Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”
“Surprise me,” Sterling said dryly.
“We have DNA.” Briggs allowed himself a brief smile—the FBI agent’s version of dancing a jig. “Trina Simms got our UNSUB with her fingernails.”
Was it normal for an UNSUB to leave no evidence behind at the first two crime scenes and let his victim scratch him at the third? After all, practice made perfect—and Daniel Redding struck me as the type who valued perfection, planning, and attention to detail.
“DNA doesn’t do us much good without a suspect to match it to,” Dean said under his breath.
Michael arched an eyebrow. “I’m guessing that means you two didn’t get anything out of ye olde mastermind?”
That was the first time in my memory that Michael hadn’t referred to Daniel Redding either as Dean’s father or by name. It was a subtle kindness coming from a boy who frequently called Dean by the last name he shared with the monster, just to get under his skin.
“My father,” Dean said, negating Michael’s efforts, “refused to see us. We forced a meeting, and he wouldn’t talk.”
“That’s not true.” Lia shot Dean an apologetic look, but preemptively waved off any protests. “He did say something.”
“Nothing that bears repeating.” Dean met Lia’s eyes, daring her to call him a liar again.
“Nothing you want to repeat,” she corrected quietly.
Briggs cleared his throat. “Redding said that he didn’t feel like talking today. He said he might feel like talking tomorrow. We’ve got him in complete isolation—no visitors, no phone calls, no mail, no contact with other prisoners. But we have no idea what instructions he’s already communicated to his partner.”
He might feel like talking tomorrow. Briggs’s words echoed in my mind, and I whipped my head to look at Dean. “You think that someone else is going to die tomorrow.”
That was just Redding’s style, to refuse to talk until he had something else to gloat about. The refusal to see Dean, though—that would have surprised me if I hadn’t just seen Agent Sterling clueing Daniel Redding in to the fact that his son had betrayed him. Dean’s father would want to punish him for that, almost as much as he wanted to punish Agent Sterling for having the gall not just to live, but to steal from him the one thing that mattered most.
His son.
“What else?” I asked. I knew that Dean and Briggs were leaving something out. Redding wouldn’t have let Dean walk out of that room without doing something to reestablish his power—to hurt Dean, to make him suffer for betraying his father.
Briggs exhaled loudly. Then he turned to me. “There was one other thing.”
“No.” Dean’s objection was immediate and absolute.
“Dean—”
“I said no.”
“That’s not your decision to make,” Briggs told Dean. “The hardest part of this job isn’t being willing to put yourself on the line—your safety, your sanity, your reputation. The hardest part is letting people you care about do the same.”