“Thank you for having us,” I managed to say.
Trina reached a hand out and touched my face. “Such a sweet girl,” she told Dean. “Your father would approve.”
“Here.” Michael tossed his keys to Dean. Dean caught them. “You drive,” Michael said, sauntering over to the passenger side of the car. “You look like you could use it.”
Dean’s grip tightened on the keys, and I wondered what game Michael was playing. He never let anyone else drive his car—and Dean was the last person he’d make an exception for. Dean was probably thinking the same thing, but he accepted the offer with a nod.
Michael climbed into the backseat with me. “So,” he said as Dean pulled away from the house, “Christopher Simms: understandably upset that his mom has a thing for serial killers, or budding psycho himself?”
“He grabbed Cassie.” Dean let that statement hang in the air for a moment. “He could have gone for me. He could have gone for you. But he went for Cassie.”
“And when you threatened him,” I added, “he left.”
You shouldn’t have come here. I went back over Christopher’s words. This is sick. You’re all sick.
“What’s the holdup?” Michael asked. For a second, I thought he was talking to me, but then I realized the comment was aimed at Dean. The car wasn’t moving. We were sitting at a stop sign.
“Nothing,” Dean replied, but his eyes were locked on the road, and suddenly, I realized Michael hadn’t just let Dean drive on a whim. This was the town Dean had grown up in. This was his past, a place he never would have chosen to go if it weren’t for this case.
“What’s down that road?” I asked Dean.
Michael caught my eye and shook his head slightly. Then he leaned back in his seat. “So, Dean, are we headed back to the house, or are we taking a detour?”
After a long moment, Dean turned down the road. I could see his knuckles tightening over the steering wheel. I glanced at Michael. He shrugged, as if he hadn’t planned this. As if he hadn’t seen something on Dean’s face on the way into town that had made him want to let Dean drive on the way out.
We ended up parked on the pavement next to a dirt road that snaked back into the woods. Dean turned the car off and got out. My gaze caught on a mailbox. Somewhere, buried in those woods, at the end of that road, there was a house.
Dean’s old house.
“You wanted him to come here,” I whispered furiously to Michael, watching Dean from inside the car. “You gave him the keys—”
“I gave him a choice,” Michael corrected. “I’ve seen Dean angry. I’ve seen him disgusted and drowning in guilt, scared of himself and what he’s capable of, scared of you.” Michael let that sink in for a moment. “But until today, I’ve never once seen him raw.” Michael paused. “It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart like that, Cassie. It’s the good ones.”
We fell into a momentary silence. Outside, Dean started walking down the dirt road. I watched him go, then I turned back to Michael. “Did you give him the keys because he needed to come here, or because once upon a time, he threw your past in your face?”
Coming here might help Dean—but it would, without question, hurt, too.
“You’re the profiler,” Michael replied. “You tell me.”
“Both,” I said. Pseudo-rivals. Pseudo-siblings. Pseudo-something else. Michael and Dean had a complicated relationship, one that had nothing to do with me. Michael had arranged this to help Dean and to hurt him.
“Do you want to go after him?” Michael’s question took me by surprise.
“You’re the emotion reader,” I retorted. “You tell me.”
“That’s the problem, Colorado,” Michael replied, leaning toward me. “You want me to tell you what you feel. I want you to know.”
Slowly, my hand crept toward the door handle. Michael leaned across the seat toward me. “You were always going to go after him,” he told me, his lips so close to mine that I thought at any minute he might close the gap. “The thing you need to figure out is why.”
I could still feel Michael’s breath on my face when he leaned across me and pushed open the car door.
“Go on,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”
But this time, I heard an underlying edge in his voice—something that told me Michael wouldn’t be waiting for long.
I caught up to Dean outside a picket fence. It might have been white once, but now it was dirt-stained and weatherworn. The siding on the house behind it was the same color. A bright yellow tricycle lay on its side in the yard, a stark contrast to everything around it. I followed Dean’s gaze to a patch of bare grass just outside the fence.
“They tore down the toolshed,” Dean commented, like he was talking about the weather and not the building where his father had tortured and murdered all those women.
I stared at the tricycle on the lawn, wondering about the people who had bought this place. They had to know its history. They had to know what had once been buried in this yard.
Dean started walking again, halfway around the side of the house. He knelt next to the fence, his fingers searching for something.
“There,” he said. I knelt beside him. I moved his hand so I could see. Initials. His and someone else’s.
MR.
“Marie,” Dean said. “My mother’s name was Marie.”
The front door to the house opened. A toddler came barreling toward the tricycle. The little boy’s mother stayed on the front porch, but when she saw us, her eyes narrowed to slits.
Teenagers. Strangers. On her property.
“We should go,” Dean said quietly.
We were halfway back down the dirt road before he spoke again.
“We used to play Go Fish.” He stared straight ahead as he spoke, walking at the same steady pace. “Old Maid, Uno, War—anything with cards.”
We. As in Dean and his mother.
“What happened to her?” That was a question I’d never asked. Daniel Redding had told Briggs that his wife had left—but I hadn’t processed the fact that she hadn’t just left Daniel Redding. She’d left Dean, too.
“She got bored.” Dean walked like a soldier, eyes straight ahead, pace never faltering. “Bored with him. Bored with me. He’d brought her back to this small town, cut off all contact with her family.” He swallowed once. “One day I came home and she was gone.”
“Did you ever think—”
“That he killed her?” Dean stopped and turned to face me. “I used to. When the FBI dug up the bodies, I kept waiting for them to tell me that she hadn’t just left. That she was still there, in the ground.” He started walking again, slower this time, like his body was weighed down with cement. “And then my social worker found her. Alive.”
“But…” That one word escaped my mouth before I managed to clamp down on the question on the tip of my tongue. I refused to say what I was thinking—that if Dean’s mother was alive and they knew where she was, how had Dean ended up in foster care? Why was it that the director claimed that if it weren’t for this program, he wouldn’t have anywhere else to go?
“She was dating someone.” Dean scuffed a foot into the dirt. “I was Daniel Redding’s son.”
He stopped there—nine words to explain something I couldn’t even fathom.
You were her son, too, I thought. How could a person look at their own child and just say “No, thanks”? Go Fish and Old Maid and carving their initials into the fence. I knew then that Marie Redding was the reason Dean had come back here.
It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It’s the good ones.
“What was she like?” The question felt like sandpaper in my mouth, but if this was what he’d come here for, I could listen. I would make myself listen.
Dean didn’t answer my question until we’d made our way back to the car. Michael was sitting in the driver’s seat. Dean walked around to the passenger side. He put his hand on the door, then looked up at me.
“What was sh
e like?” he repeated softly. He shook his head. “Nothing like Trina Simms.”
When we got back, Judd was sitting on the front porch, waiting for us. Not good. I spent about five seconds wondering if we could claim to have spent the day in town. Judd held up his hand and stopped the words before I could form them.
“I always believed, you give kids enough space, they make their own mistakes. They learn.” Judd said nothing for several seconds. “Then one time, my daughter was about ten. She and her best friend got it into their minds that they were going to go on a scientific expedition.”
“You have a daughter?” Michael said.
Judd continued on as if he’d never spoken. “Scarlett was always getting ideas like that one. She’d get it in her brain that she was going to do something, and there was no talking her out of it. And her little friend—well, if Scarlett was in it for the science, her friend was the expedition type. The scale-down-the-side-of-a-cliff-for-a-sample type. They damn near got themselves killed.” Judd fell into silence again. “Sometimes, some kids, they need a little help with the learning.”
Judd never raised his voice. He didn’t even look angry. But suddenly, I was very sure that I did not want Judd’s “help.”
“It was my fault.” Dean’s voice was a perfect complement for Judd’s, and I realized that some of his mannerisms were the older man’s as well. “Michael and Cassie only went with me so I wouldn’t go alone.”
“Is that right?” Judd asked, giving the three of us one of those stares that only someone who’d been a parent could manage, the one that—when your own parent made it—reminded you that they’d changed your diapers and could recognize your BS, even now.
“I needed to do this.” Dean didn’t say any more than that. Judd crossed his arms over his chest.
“Maybe you did,” he allowed. “But I’d think of a better excuse in the next five seconds, son, because you’re going to need it.”
I heard the sound of heels on tile. An instant later, Agent Sterling appeared in the doorway behind Judd. “Inside,” she barked. “Right now.”
We went inside. So much for not getting caught. Sterling herded us into Briggs’s office. She gestured to the couch. “Sit.”
I sat. Dean sat. Michael rolled his eyes, but took a seat on the arm of the couch.
“It was Dean’s fault,” Michael announced solemnly. “He needed to do this.”
“Michael!” I said.
“Do you know where Briggs is right now?” Agent Sterling’s question wasn’t what I expected. My mind started searching for reasons that Briggs’s location might be relevant to this discussion, to what we’d done. Was he out looking for us? Meeting with the director to do damage control?
“Briggs,” Agent Sterling said tautly, “is at the Warren County police station, meeting with a man who thinks he has information about the Emerson Cole murder. You see, a serial killer’s son paid his mother a visit this afternoon, and Mr. Simms believes the boy might be violent.” She paused. “The gentleman has a bruise on his neck to back up the claim.”
Christopher Simms had reported Dean to the police? I hadn’t seen that one coming.
“Luckily,” Agent Sterling continued, making the word sound more like an indictment than an expression of luck, “Briggs had asked the locals to route anything relevant to this case through him, so he’s the one who took the statement. He’s still there, taking the statement. As it turns out, Christopher Simms has quite a lot to say—about Dean, about the rest of you, about his mother’s relationship with Daniel Redding. He’s just a fount of information.”
“He drives a black truck.” I stared at my hands, but couldn’t keep from speaking up. “He has a connection to Daniel Redding. His mother berates him constantly. He lost his temper while I was there and grabbed me, so you’ve got impulsivity, but his movements and mannerisms are also controlled.”
“You slammed Christopher into the wall when he grabbed Cassie?” Agent Sterling asked Dean. Of everything I’d said, it figured that she’d latch on to that.
Dean shrugged unapologetically. Agent Sterling took that as a yes.
Sterling turned to Michael. I expected her to ask him something, but instead she just held out her hand. “Keys.”
“Spatula,” Michael replied. She narrowed her eyes at him. “We aren’t just saying random nouns?” he asked archly.
“Give me your keys. Now.”
Michael dug his keys out of his pocket and tossed them blithely to her. She turned back to Dean.
“I told my father that I trusted you,” she said. “I told him I could handle this.”
Her words dug their way under Dean’s skin. He pushed back. “I never asked you to handle me.”
Sterling actually flinched. “Dean…” She looked like she was about to apologize, but she stopped herself. The expression on her face hardened. “From this point on, you’re not alone,” she told Dean sharply. She gestured to Michael. “You two are bunking together. If you’re not with Michael, you’re with someone else. Now that you’ve flung yourself onto the local PD’s radar, if and when our UNSUB strikes again, you might need an alibi.”
Agent Sterling couldn’t have devised a better punishment for Dean. He was a solitary person by nature, and after the day’s events, he’d want to be alone.
“You’re dismissed.” Agent Sterling’s voice was crisp. All three of us were on our feet in an instant. “Not you, Cassie.” Sterling fixed me in place with her stare. “You two,” she told the boys, “out!”
Michael and Dean glanced at each other, then at me.
“I won’t ask you again.”
Agent Sterling waited until the door shut behind the boys before she spoke. “What were you and Dean doing out at the old Redding house?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Was there nothing she didn’t know?
“Christopher Simms wasn’t the only one who contacted the police,” Sterling informed me. “The local police hear ‘teenage prowlers’ out on Redding’s old property, mere minutes after someone files a complaint about Dean, and one guess where their minds go.”
Even I had to admit this didn’t look good.
“He needed to go back,” I said, my voice soft but unwavering. “Just to see it.”
Sterling’s jaw clenched, and I wondered if she was thinking of the time she’d spent on that property, bound hand and foot in a toolshed that no longer existed.
“Dean needing to go back there, it wasn’t about his father.” I paused to let that sink in. “This visit, it had nothing to do with Daniel Redding.”
Sterling turned that over in her mind. “His mother?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. After another tense moment of silence, a question burst out of my mouth. “Has anyone talked to her?” I just kept thinking that my mother had had many faults, but she never would have left me. And Dean’s mother hadn’t just left—she’d had a chance to get him back, and she’d said no. “If our UNSUB is obsessed with Redding, Dean’s mother could be a target,” I continued. There were reasons to talk to Marie that had nothing to do with wanting to shake some sense into her—or at the very least, make her face what she’d done to Dean.
“I talked to her,” Sterling said shortly. “And she’s not a target.”
“But how could you—”
“Dean’s mother lives in Melbourne,” Sterling said. “As in Australia—halfway across the world and well out of the reach of this killer. She didn’t have any information relevant to the case and has asked that we leave her alone.”
Like she left Dean?
“Did she even ask about him?” I asked.
Sterling pursed her lips. “No.”
Given what I knew about Agent Sterling and her relationship with Dean, I was betting that she’d gone into that call the same way I would have: hating Marie for what she’d done, but halfway convinced that if she just said the right thing or asked the right question, she could undo it. Agent Sterling hadn’t ever wanted
to believe that the Naturals program was Dean’s best option, but now I could practically hear her thinking, If it weren’t for this program, he’d have nowhere else to go.
“You should add Christopher Simms to your suspect list,” I said. When she didn’t immediately shut me down, I continued, “He’s not a small person, but he doesn’t have the kind of presence you’d expect from someone his size. He moves slowly, talks slowly, not because he’s unintelligent or uncoordinated, but because he’s deliberate. He’s inhibited. Not shy, not awkward, just holding something in.”
“Cassie—” She was going to tell me to stop, but I didn’t give her the chance.
“Christopher was outside when we approached the house. If I had to guess, I’d say he does all the outdoor chores. The lawn was overgrown—maybe it’s his way of striking out at his mother, even as he does her bidding in everything else. He’s pulling at the bit, but he’s old enough that if he really wanted to, he could move out.” The words were pouring out of my mouth, faster and faster. “His mother mentioned that he has plenty of friends, and I saw nothing to make me think that he was antisocial or particularly inept. So why doesn’t he move out?” I answered my own question. “Maybe he thinks she needs him. Maybe he wants her approval. Maybe she guilts him into it. I don’t know. But I do know that when he snapped, it happened in an instant, and he didn’t go for Michael or Dean. He went for me.”
I finally stopped for a breath. For a few seconds, Sterling just stood there.
“You said that the UNSUB was comfortable with firearms, but less sure of himself when it came to unarmed confrontations. I was the easy target in that room, and I was the one he went for.”
Maybe Christopher had reached for me because I was the one talking. Maybe he’d been actively trying not to start a fight and thought that I was the only one of the three of us who wouldn’t respond with a punch.
Or maybe he was the kind of guy who liked asserting himself against women.
“Were there any firearms in the house?” Sterling asked. I got the sense that the question had slipped out. She hadn’t meant to ask it.
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