Killer Instinct

Page 18

Geoffrey was reading the words. As well as he delivered them, he wasn’t the one who’d written this speech. I turned my attention to the man who had. I could tell, by listening to Geoffrey parrot his words, that Professor Fogle was a larger-than-life figure. Based on the size of this room, his class was a popular one. He was a storyteller. And he had a fascination for the subject matter—a fascination he was convinced the rest of humanity shared.
“The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that anyone who fought monsters had to fight becoming a monster himself. ‘If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’” Geoffrey paused on a slide that included dozens of pictures—not of bodies, but of men. I recognized some of them—they lined our walls at home, smiling out at us from frames, a constant reminder that the kind of monster we hunted could be anyone. Your neighbor. Your father. Your friend.
Your aunt.
“Charles Manson. John Wayne Gacy. Son of Sam.” Geoffrey paused for effect. “Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. These names mean something to us. This semester, we’ll touch on all of the above, but we’re going to start closer to home.”
The other pictures disappeared, replaced by a man with dark brown hair and eyes the exact same shade. He looked normal. Nondescript. Harmless.
“Daniel Redding,” Geoffrey said. I stared at the picture, looking for a resemblance to the boy I knew. “I’ve studied the Redding case for the past four years,” Geoff continued.
“And by I, he means the professor,” I heard Bryce stage-whisper to Michael. Geoffrey with a G ignored her.
“Redding is responsible for a minimum of a dozen murders over a five-year period, beginning with his wife’s desertion, days before his twenty-ninth birthday. The bodies were recovered from Redding’s farm over a three-day excavation period subsequent to his arrest. Three more victims fitting his MO were identified across state lines.”
A crime scene photo flashed up onto the screen. A woman, long dead, hung from a ceiling fan. I recognized the rope—black nylon. Her arms were bound behind her back. Her legs were bound together. The floor beneath her was soaked with blood. Her shirt was torn, and underneath it, I could see cuts—some long and deep, some shallow, some short. But the thing that drew my eyes was the burn on her shoulder, just under her collarbone.
The skin was an angry red: welted, blistered, and raised in the shape of an R.
This was what Dean’s father had done to those women. This was what he’d made Dean watch.
“Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.” Geoffrey clicked through a series of enlarged images of the woman’s body. “That was Redding’s modus operandi, or MO.”
Listening to Geoffrey use the technical terms made me want to smack him. He didn’t know what he was talking about. These were just pictures to him. He didn’t know what it was like to discover a loved one missing, or to crawl into the mind of a killer. He was a little boy playing at something he didn’t understand.
“Coincidentally,” Bryce cut in, “that’s also the title of Professor Fogle’s book.”
“He’s writing a book?” I asked.
“On the Daniel Redding case,” Geoffrey answered. Clearly, he wasn’t about to let his spotlight be usurped. “You can see why he’s a person of interest in Emerson’s murder. She was branded, you know.”
“You said she was in this class. You knew her.” My voice was flat. The fact that Geoffrey could talk so casually about the murder of a girl he knew made me reconsider my earlier analysis—maybe he would have been capable of murder.
Geoffrey met my eyes. “People mourn in different ways,” he said. I might have been imagining it, but I saw the barest hint of a smile around the edges of his lips.
“She was in my small group,” Bryce volunteered. “For our end-of-semester project. The professor assigned the groups. Emerson was…nice. Perky, even. I mean, who’s perky in a class about serial killers? But Emerson was. She was nice to everyone. One of the guys in our group, you should see him—he’s like a roly-poly. You say anything to him, and he just curls into a metaphorical ball. But Emerson could actually get him to talk. And Derek—the other boy in our group—he’s that guy. You know, the obnoxious, if-you-don’t-know-who-that-guy-is-in-your-section-then-chances-are-good-that-you-are-that-guy guy? That’s Derek, but Emerson could actually get him to shut up, just by smiling.”
Bryce couldn’t match Geoffrey’s detached tone. She was upset about what had happened to Emerson. This wasn’t just a performance to her. She leaned into Michael.
“Emerson didn’t show up for our exam.” Geoffrey closed his laptop. “Professor Fogle was out sick. I printed off the tests that morning, one for every student in the class. Emerson was the only one who didn’t show. I thought she was…” Geoff cut off. “Never mind.”
“You thought she was what?” Michael asked.
Geoffrey narrowed his eyes. “What does it matter?”
It mattered, but before I could come up with a rational explanation for needing the information, Michael’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out, read a text, and then stood. “Sorry, Bryce,” he said. “I have to go.”
Bryce shrugged. Clearly, she wasn’t going to be pining away for him anytime soon. Michael turned toward the door, catching my eye as he passed. Lia, he mouthed.
“I should go, too,” I said. “This was…intense.”
“You’re leaving?” Geoffrey sounded genuinely surprised. Apparently, he’d been under the impression that he had this one in the bag. Dead girl. Freaky lecture. Sensitive eyes. Clearly, I was supposed to be his for the taking.
“Tell you what,” I told him, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. “Why don’t you give me your number?”
Lia’s text didn’t lead us back to the party. Apparently, she hadn’t been quite as cautious as I was about going off with her quarry alone.
“What exactly did Lia say?” I asked.
Michael held up his phone for my inspection. There was an off-center picture of Lia with two college boys: one tall, one round, both slightly out of focus.
“‘Having a fascinating chat,’” I read the accompanying text. “‘Heron Hall, roof.’” I paused. “What’s she doing on the roof of some random building?”
“Interrogating suspects who don’t know they’re being interrogated?” Michael suggested, an edge creeping into his voice.
“Any chance the boys in the picture aren’t suspects?” I wanted to believe that Lia wouldn’t go off alone with someone she thought might be capable of murder. “Maybe they’re just friends of Emerson’s.”
“She sent a picture,” Michael replied flatly.
In case something happens, I filled in. Lia had sent us a picture of the boys she was talking to, in case we got to the roof of Heron Hall and she was gone.
We shouldn’t have left her at that party alone. I’d been so caught up in getting information out of Geoffrey that I hadn’t even told Lia I was leaving.
Lia did a very good impression of someone who could take care of herself—but Lia could do a good impression of just about anything.
Dean wouldn’t have left her, I thought, unable to stop myself. That was why he was the one person in this world that she’d walk through fire for, and Michael and I didn’t make the cut.
I walked faster.
“She’d mock us for worrying,” Michael said, as much to himself as to me. “Either that or she’d take it as a personal insult.” He picked up his own pace. With each step, I imagined the ways that this could go badly.
Lia was ours. She had to be okay. Please be okay. Finally, we made it to Heron Hall. The towerlike building was clearly Gothic in design—and just as clearly, it was closed and locked down for the evening.
NO TRESPASSING.
Michael didn’t miss a beat at the sign. “Do you want to trespass first, or should I?”
I heard Lia laughing before I saw her. It was a light, almost bell-like sound, musical and delighted—and almost certainly a lie.