Killer Instinct
Page 17
“Their attempt,” I said, trying to look like I found him intriguing—and not like I was thinking that there was a 40 percent chance he was a philosophy major and a 40 percent chance he was pre-law. “But not yours?”
“I’m more of a realist,” the boy said. “People die. Young people, pretty people, people who have their whole lives in front of them. The only real immortality is doing something worth remembering.”
Definitely a philosophy major. Any second, he was going to start quoting someone.
“‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’”
And there it was. The challenge to getting information out of this guy wouldn’t be getting him to talk; it would be getting him to actually say something.
“Did you know her?” I asked. “Emerson Cole?”
This guy wasn’t one of the students Michael had picked out, but I knew before he responded that the answer would be yes. He wasn’t mourning Emerson, but he’d known her all the same.
“She was in my class.” The boy adopted a serious expression and leaned back against the wall.
“Which class?”
“Monsters or Men,” the boy replied. “Professor Fogle’s class. I took it last year. Now I’m the TA. Fogle’s writing a book, you know. I’m his research assistant.”
I tried to catch Lia’s eye on the dance floor. Professor Fogle was a person of interest in Emerson’s murder. He taught a class on serial killers. And somehow, his teaching assistant had found me.
He likes being the pursuer, I thought, watching Lia dancing her way through the frat boys, listening for lies. Not the pursued.
“Did you know her?” the boy asked, suddenly turning the tables on me. “Emerson. Did you know her?”
“No,” I said, unable to keep from thinking of the lengths Dean had gone just to learn her name. “I guess you could say she was a friend of a friend.”
“You’re lying.” The boy reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. It took everything in me not to pull away. “I consider myself an excellent judge of character.”
You consider yourself excellent at everything, I thought.
“You’re right,” I said, fairly certain those were his favorite words. “I don’t even go to school here.”
“You saw the story on the news,” the boy said, “and you decided to come check it out.”
“Something like that.” I ran through everything I knew about him and settled on playing to his supposed expertise. “I heard that the professor’s a person of interest because of that class he’s teaching. Your class.”
The boy shrugged. “There was one lecture in particular….”
I took a step forward, and the boy’s eyes darted down to my legs. The outfit Lia had picked for me left very little to the imagination. Behind him, I caught sight of Michael, who pointed at the boy and raised his eyebrows. I didn’t nod to tell him that I had a promising lead. I didn’t have to. Michael saw the answer in my face.
“I could show you the lecture in question.” The boy lifted his gaze from my legs to my face. “I have all of Professor Fogle’s slides on my laptop. And,” he added, “I have a key to the lecture hall.” The boy dangled said key in front of me. “It’ll be just like sitting in on the class. Unless you’d rather stay here and drown your sorrows with the masses.”
I met Michael’s eyes over the boy’s head.
Follow me, I thought, hoping he’d somehow manage to read my intention in the set of my features. This is too good to pass up.
“Take a seat. I’ll get the lights.” The boy’s name was Geoffrey. With a G. That was how he’d introduced himself on the way to the lecture hall—like it would have been a tragedy if I’d mistakenly thought he was Jeffrey with a J.
I wasn’t about to turn my back on a boy who’d lured me away from a frat party, so I waited for Geoffrey with a G to turn the lights on, my back to the wall. The lights flickered overhead and then the auditorium was flooded with light. Hundreds of old-fashioned wooden desks sat in perfect rows. At the front of the room, there was a stage. Geoffrey walked backward down the aisle.
“Getting cold feet?” he asked me. “Criminology isn’t for everyone.” Most people would have stopped there. Geoffrey didn’t. “I’m pre-law.”
“Philosophy minor?” I couldn’t help asking.
He paused and gave me an odd look. “Double major.” Eyes on mine, Geoffrey climbed onto the stage and plugged his laptop into the projector.
Who brings their laptop to a frat party?
I answered my own question: a person who was planning on bringing a girl back here for the show all along. I took a seat, still on guard, but less wary. Geoffrey wasn’t our UNSUB. He was so high on himself that I couldn’t imagine him needing the validation of the kill.
Then again, I also hadn’t sensed that need in Locke.
“Hope we’re not late.” Michael’s voice echoed cheerfully through the auditorium. He’d followed me. Good. On the stage, Geoffrey frowned. I turned in my seat to see that Michael hadn’t come alone. There was a girl with him: pretty, blond, and curvy, with hipster glasses of her own.
“Geoffrey.”
“Bryce.”
Clearly, Geoffrey with a G and Hipster Girl knew each other. Geoffrey sighed. “Veronica, this is Bryce. Bryce, this is Veronica.”
Leave it to Michael to follow us and bring reinforcements. Reinforcements who knew Geoffrey—and, unless I was mistaken, didn’t like him very much. Michael must have plucked her from the crowd the moment she saw Geoffrey leave with me.
“Nice to meet you,” I told Bryce. She wound her arm around Michael’s waist. Seeing her touch him was a thousand times worse than watching Michael with Lia.
At least Lia was ours.
“Geoff,” Bryce said, relishing having Michael on her arm and purposefully shortening Geoffrey’s name in a way designed to annoy him, “this is Tanner. We’re here for the show.”
I caught Michael’s eye and had to duck my head to keep from bursting out laughing. I’d chosen Agent Sterling’s first name as my alias, and Michael had chosen Agent Briggs’s.
“You weren’t invited,” Geoffrey told Bryce, his voice flat.
Bryce shrugged and flopped down in a seat across the aisle from me. “I doubt you’d want Professor Fogle to know that there was a show,” she said, in a way that left very little doubt that she’d been in my shoes, the recipient of Geoffrey’s little show, before.
“Fine,” Geoffrey said, capitulating. He turned to me. “Bryce is in my class,” he explained. Then, for Michael’s benefit, he added, “I’m the teaching assistant.”
Michael smirked. “Nice.”
“Yeah,” Geoffrey replied tersely. “It is.”
“I was talking about your goatee.” Michael played casually with the tips of Bryce’s hair. I shot him a look. Challenging TA Geoff could work in our favor, but not if Geoff got annoyed enough to kick Michael out.
After a tense moment, Geoffrey decided to ignore Michael and Bryce and got on with the show. “Welcome to Psych 315: Monsters or Men: The Psychology of Serial Murder.” Geoffrey’s voice carried across the auditorium, and I could practically hear the man he was channeling. Geoffrey’s expression changed as he walked across the stage and flipped from slide to slide.
Body.
After body.
After body.
The images flashed across the screen in rapid succession.
“People define humanity by its achievements, by the Mother Teresas and the Einsteins and the Everyday Joes playing hero in their own ways a thousand times a day. When tragedy strikes, when someone does something so awful that we can’t even wrap our minds around it, we pretend like that person isn’t human. Like there’s not a continuum from us to them, like the Everyday Joe isn’t a villain in a thousand small ways every day. There’s a reason we can’t look away from a train wreck, a reason we watch the news when a body turns up, a reason that the world’s most infamous serial killers get hundreds of thousands of letters every year.”
“I’m more of a realist,” the boy said. “People die. Young people, pretty people, people who have their whole lives in front of them. The only real immortality is doing something worth remembering.”
Definitely a philosophy major. Any second, he was going to start quoting someone.
“‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’”
And there it was. The challenge to getting information out of this guy wouldn’t be getting him to talk; it would be getting him to actually say something.
“Did you know her?” I asked. “Emerson Cole?”
This guy wasn’t one of the students Michael had picked out, but I knew before he responded that the answer would be yes. He wasn’t mourning Emerson, but he’d known her all the same.
“She was in my class.” The boy adopted a serious expression and leaned back against the wall.
“Which class?”
“Monsters or Men,” the boy replied. “Professor Fogle’s class. I took it last year. Now I’m the TA. Fogle’s writing a book, you know. I’m his research assistant.”
I tried to catch Lia’s eye on the dance floor. Professor Fogle was a person of interest in Emerson’s murder. He taught a class on serial killers. And somehow, his teaching assistant had found me.
He likes being the pursuer, I thought, watching Lia dancing her way through the frat boys, listening for lies. Not the pursued.
“Did you know her?” the boy asked, suddenly turning the tables on me. “Emerson. Did you know her?”
“No,” I said, unable to keep from thinking of the lengths Dean had gone just to learn her name. “I guess you could say she was a friend of a friend.”
“You’re lying.” The boy reached out and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. It took everything in me not to pull away. “I consider myself an excellent judge of character.”
You consider yourself excellent at everything, I thought.
“You’re right,” I said, fairly certain those were his favorite words. “I don’t even go to school here.”
“You saw the story on the news,” the boy said, “and you decided to come check it out.”
“Something like that.” I ran through everything I knew about him and settled on playing to his supposed expertise. “I heard that the professor’s a person of interest because of that class he’s teaching. Your class.”
The boy shrugged. “There was one lecture in particular….”
I took a step forward, and the boy’s eyes darted down to my legs. The outfit Lia had picked for me left very little to the imagination. Behind him, I caught sight of Michael, who pointed at the boy and raised his eyebrows. I didn’t nod to tell him that I had a promising lead. I didn’t have to. Michael saw the answer in my face.
“I could show you the lecture in question.” The boy lifted his gaze from my legs to my face. “I have all of Professor Fogle’s slides on my laptop. And,” he added, “I have a key to the lecture hall.” The boy dangled said key in front of me. “It’ll be just like sitting in on the class. Unless you’d rather stay here and drown your sorrows with the masses.”
I met Michael’s eyes over the boy’s head.
Follow me, I thought, hoping he’d somehow manage to read my intention in the set of my features. This is too good to pass up.
“Take a seat. I’ll get the lights.” The boy’s name was Geoffrey. With a G. That was how he’d introduced himself on the way to the lecture hall—like it would have been a tragedy if I’d mistakenly thought he was Jeffrey with a J.
I wasn’t about to turn my back on a boy who’d lured me away from a frat party, so I waited for Geoffrey with a G to turn the lights on, my back to the wall. The lights flickered overhead and then the auditorium was flooded with light. Hundreds of old-fashioned wooden desks sat in perfect rows. At the front of the room, there was a stage. Geoffrey walked backward down the aisle.
“Getting cold feet?” he asked me. “Criminology isn’t for everyone.” Most people would have stopped there. Geoffrey didn’t. “I’m pre-law.”
“Philosophy minor?” I couldn’t help asking.
He paused and gave me an odd look. “Double major.” Eyes on mine, Geoffrey climbed onto the stage and plugged his laptop into the projector.
Who brings their laptop to a frat party?
I answered my own question: a person who was planning on bringing a girl back here for the show all along. I took a seat, still on guard, but less wary. Geoffrey wasn’t our UNSUB. He was so high on himself that I couldn’t imagine him needing the validation of the kill.
Then again, I also hadn’t sensed that need in Locke.
“Hope we’re not late.” Michael’s voice echoed cheerfully through the auditorium. He’d followed me. Good. On the stage, Geoffrey frowned. I turned in my seat to see that Michael hadn’t come alone. There was a girl with him: pretty, blond, and curvy, with hipster glasses of her own.
“Geoffrey.”
“Bryce.”
Clearly, Geoffrey with a G and Hipster Girl knew each other. Geoffrey sighed. “Veronica, this is Bryce. Bryce, this is Veronica.”
Leave it to Michael to follow us and bring reinforcements. Reinforcements who knew Geoffrey—and, unless I was mistaken, didn’t like him very much. Michael must have plucked her from the crowd the moment she saw Geoffrey leave with me.
“Nice to meet you,” I told Bryce. She wound her arm around Michael’s waist. Seeing her touch him was a thousand times worse than watching Michael with Lia.
At least Lia was ours.
“Geoff,” Bryce said, relishing having Michael on her arm and purposefully shortening Geoffrey’s name in a way designed to annoy him, “this is Tanner. We’re here for the show.”
I caught Michael’s eye and had to duck my head to keep from bursting out laughing. I’d chosen Agent Sterling’s first name as my alias, and Michael had chosen Agent Briggs’s.
“You weren’t invited,” Geoffrey told Bryce, his voice flat.
Bryce shrugged and flopped down in a seat across the aisle from me. “I doubt you’d want Professor Fogle to know that there was a show,” she said, in a way that left very little doubt that she’d been in my shoes, the recipient of Geoffrey’s little show, before.
“Fine,” Geoffrey said, capitulating. He turned to me. “Bryce is in my class,” he explained. Then, for Michael’s benefit, he added, “I’m the teaching assistant.”
Michael smirked. “Nice.”
“Yeah,” Geoffrey replied tersely. “It is.”
“I was talking about your goatee.” Michael played casually with the tips of Bryce’s hair. I shot him a look. Challenging TA Geoff could work in our favor, but not if Geoff got annoyed enough to kick Michael out.
After a tense moment, Geoffrey decided to ignore Michael and Bryce and got on with the show. “Welcome to Psych 315: Monsters or Men: The Psychology of Serial Murder.” Geoffrey’s voice carried across the auditorium, and I could practically hear the man he was channeling. Geoffrey’s expression changed as he walked across the stage and flipped from slide to slide.
Body.
After body.
After body.
The images flashed across the screen in rapid succession.
“People define humanity by its achievements, by the Mother Teresas and the Einsteins and the Everyday Joes playing hero in their own ways a thousand times a day. When tragedy strikes, when someone does something so awful that we can’t even wrap our minds around it, we pretend like that person isn’t human. Like there’s not a continuum from us to them, like the Everyday Joe isn’t a villain in a thousand small ways every day. There’s a reason we can’t look away from a train wreck, a reason we watch the news when a body turns up, a reason that the world’s most infamous serial killers get hundreds of thousands of letters every year.”
