Killer Instinct

Page 22

I heard the front door open and shut. I thought it might be Michael, getting out of the house and away from us, but then I heard footsteps coming our way—two sets, one heavier than the other.
Sterling and Briggs were back.
They appeared in the doorway just as Dean closed the textbook on the table in front of us.
“Cassie, can we talk to Dean alone for a minute?” Agent Briggs straightened his tie. This particular gesture, from this particular man, set off alarm bells in my mind. The tie was something Briggs only wore when he was on duty. Straightening it was an affirmation of sorts. Whatever he wanted to talk to Dean about, it was just business.
I trusted Briggs less when business was involved.
“She can stay,” Dean told Briggs. His words fell on the room like a thunderclap. For as long as I’d known Dean, he’d been pushing me away. Alone was the name of his game.
I caught his eye. Are you sure? I asked him silently.
Dean ran the heels of his hands over the fronts of his jean-clad thighs. “Stay,” he told me. Dean wants me here. He turned back to Briggs. “What do you need?”
Agent Sterling stiffened, her lips pressed into a grim line.
“The person who killed Emerson Cole is obsessed with your father,” Briggs said, ignoring the expression on his ex-wife’s face. “There’s a very real chance the UNSUB has written to him.”
“And let me guess,” Dean interjected. “Dear old dad destroys the letters once he gets them. They’re all up here.” Dean tapped a finger to the side of his head.
“He’s agreed to assist us,” Briggs said. “But only on one condition.”
The tension was back in Dean’s shoulders, his neck. Every muscle in his body was strung tight.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Agent Sterling cut in.
“I know what the condition is.” Dean’s eyes burned with an emotion I couldn’t identify: not quite hatred, not quite fear. “My father won’t tell you anything. The only person he’ll talk to is me.”
YOU
Daniel Redding is one of the greats. Infamous. Ingenious. Immortal. You chose him for a reason. When a man like Redding speaks, people listen. When Redding wants someone dead, they die. He is everything you want to be. Powerful. Sure of himself. And always, always in control.
“You were sloppy. Stupid. Lucky.” You banish the voice and run your fingers along the edges of a photograph of Emerson Cole standing next to a tree. Proof that for a moment, you were powerful. Sure of yourself. In control.
Just. Like. Him.
Daniel Redding is not your hero. He’s your god. And if you keep going down this path, you will slowly remake yourself in his image. The rest of the world will be as insignificant and powerless as ants. The police. The FBI. You’ll crush them under steel-toed boots.
What will be will be—in time.
Stone walls. Barbed wire. My impression of the maximum security prison that housed Dean’s father was fleeting. Dean and I were ensconced in the backseat of an FBI-issued black SUV. Agent Briggs was driving. Agent Sterling sat shotgun. From my position directly behind her, I couldn’t see anything but her forearm, resting on the armrest. At first glance, she seemed relaxed, but the pads of her fingertips were pressed flat and digging into the leather.
Beside me, Dean stared fixedly out the window. I laid my hand on the seat between us, palm up. He tore his gaze from the window and looked over, not at me, but at my hand. He laid his hand palm-down on the seat, inches away from mine.
I slid my hand closer to his. His dark eyes closed, his eyelashes casting a series of tiny shadows onto his face. After a small eternity, his hand began to move. He rotated it slowly clockwise until the back of his hand was flat against the seat, mere centimeters from mine. I slid my hand into his. His palm was warm. After several seconds, his fingers curled upward, closing around mine.
Moral support. That was why I was there, along for the ride.
Briggs pulled into a secured lot. He parked and cut the engine. “The guards will come out to let Dean and me in.” He glanced first at Sterling, then at me. “You two stay in the car. The fewer people who see another teenager here, the better.”
Briggs wasn’t happy I was here, but he hadn’t tried to leave me behind. They needed Dean, and Dean needed something—someone—to tether him to the here and now.
The back door to the prison opened. Two guards stood there. They were the exact same height. One was beefy and bald, the other younger and built like a runner.
Briggs climbed out of the car and opened Dean’s door. Dean set my hand lightly back into my lap. “I won’t be long.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. His eyes were emotionless and hard. He was born smiling. The words from Redding’s interview echoed in my head as Dean slammed the door.
Dean and Briggs approached the guards. The balding man shook Briggs’s hand. The younger guard took a step toward Dean, looking him up and down. A moment later, Dean was against a wall being frisked.
I looked away.
“Some people will always look at Dean and see his father,” Agent Sterling said from the front seat. “Daniel Redding isn’t exactly a favorite among the guards here. He has a certain fondness for mind games and a penchant for picking up information about the guards’ families. Briggs had to tell them that Dean was Redding’s son. It would have been impossible to get this visit approved otherwise, even with permission from on high.”
“Your father approved this visit?” I asked, sliding over in the seat so that I had a better angle to see her.
“It was his idea.” Sterling pursed her lips. She wasn’t happy about this.
“Your father wants this case closed.” I worked my way through the logic of the situation. “The Locke case made the papers. The last thing the FBI needs right now is more bad press. The director needs this case to go away quickly and quietly, and he’s not above using Dean to do it. But if it were up to you—”
“If it were up to me,” she cut in, “Dean would never have to come within a hundred yards of his father again.” She glanced out the window. Briggs, Dean, and the older guard had disappeared into the building. The younger guard—the one who’d frisked Dean—was walking toward our car. “Then again,” Sterling said, unlocking her car door, “if it were up to me, once we’d arrested Redding, Dean would have gotten his chance at a normal childhood.”
She opened the door and stepped out. “Can I help you?” she asked the guard. He looked down at Agent Sterling, a slight curl to his lips.
“You can’t stay in the car,” he told her. “This is a secure area.”
“I’m aware. And cleared to be here,” Sterling said coolly, arching one eyebrow. She had the manner of someone who’d spent her life in a series of old boys’ clubs. One prison guard on a power trip didn’t impress her.
I could practically see the guard debating whether getting into a pissing match with a female FBI agent—particularly this female FBI agent—was worth it.
“Warden’s on a security kick,” he told her, shoving the blame off on his superior. “You’ll have to move the car.”
“Fine.” Sterling went to climb back into the car, and the guard’s eyes landed on me. He held up a hand and motioned for me to open my door. I looked to Agent Sterling. She gave a brief nod. I opened the door and stepped out.
The guard barely spared a glance for me before turning his attention back to Agent Sterling. “She friends with that Redding kid?” he asked. His voice left no question on his feelings about Dean—and Dean’s father.
I was pretty sure Michael would have read it as disgust.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Sterling said firmly, “I’ll move the car.”
The guard eyed me, his earlier resolve not to get into it with Agent Sterling facing off with his dislike of Dean—and now me. He turned and said something into a handheld radio. After a few moments, he turned back around, a polite smile on his face, his eyes narrowed to cold and uncompromising slits. “I put a call into the warden. I’m afraid the two of you are going to have to come with me.”