The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (20 page)

Snapshots uploaded by other people gave me a candid look at a person. How self-conscious were they? Were they at the center of group pictures, or at the edge? Did they make the same facial
expression in every picture, rigidly controlling what they showed to the world? Did they stare down the camera or look away? What kind of clothes did they wear? Where were the pictures taken?

Bit by bit, I could build a model of someone’s life from the ground up—which would have been more useful if I’d actually been the one to profile the UNSUB, rather than just
being given a list of boxes to check off.

Okay,
I told myself after my eyes had gone blurry from scrolling through too many profiles, very few of which set off my spidey senses.
Sterling and Briggs gave you a few key things to
look for. So do what you always do. Take a handful of details and get to the big picture.

Sterling thought the UNSUB was young, but not adolescent. Why? He’d chosen a college sophomore as his first victim. Someone who desperately longed to dominate other people would start with
easy prey—a laughing, smiling young girl who wasn’t physically imposing in the least. He was probably at least a couple of years older than she was, and since a quick glance at
Emerson’s profile told me that she was twenty, that explained the lower end of Sterling’s estimated age range. How had she determined that the UNSUB wasn’t an older man, like the
professor?

You imitate another man’s kills. You admire him. You want to be like him.
I let that thought sit for a moment.
But you also risked getting caught to display your kill in a very
public location—something Daniel Redding wouldn’t have done. You brought black rope with you to hang her, but the news report said you strangled her with the antenna from her own
car.

To put it in terms of the textbook Dean and I had read, this was an organized kill, but there was something disorganized about it, too. The attack had obviously been planned, but there was also
something impulsive about it.

Did you plan to leave her on the president’s lawn? Or was that something you thought of once your adrenaline started pumping?

Displaying the victim in public suggested a need for recognition. But recognition from whom? From the public? From the press?

From Daniel Redding?
That was a possibility I couldn’t shake, and somehow, other pieces of Sterling’s profile began to make sense. An impulsive copycat who idolized Redding
would be younger than the man was himself, probably by a decade or more.

You’ve felt powerless, and you admire his power. You’ve felt invisible, and you want to be seen.

SUVs and trucks were large. They sat up higher on the road. German shepherds were also large. They were intelligent, strong—and often police dogs.

You don’t just want power. You want authority,
I thought.
You want it because you’ve never had it. Because the people in your life who do have it make you feel weak. You
didn’t feel weak when you killed Emerson.

I thought about the professor and wished again that I knew how he’d died.
If you were in Fogle’s class, you admired the professor—at first. But later, you resented him for
being all talk and no show. For not paying enough attention to you. For paying too much to Emerson.

Organized killers frequently chose victims they did not know to reduce the chances that the crime could be traced back to them. But my gut was telling me that it wasn’t a coincidence that
Emerson had been in a relationship with the professor and now they were both dead. These victims weren’t chosen randomly. They weren’t chosen by a stranger.

“Hey, Sloane?”

Sloane didn’t look up from her computer. She held up the index finger on her right hand and continued typing rapidly with her left. After a few more seconds, she stopped typing and looked
up.

“Can you compare the other students’ schedules to Emerson’s and see how much overlap there is?” I asked. “I’m thinking that if our UNSUB was fixated on
Emerson, this might not be the only class they shared.”

“Sure.” Sloane didn’t move to reach for any of the files. She just sat there, her hands now folded into her lap, a bright smile on her face.

“Could you do it now?” I asked.

She held up the index finger on her right hand again. “I am doing it now.” Sloane had an incredible memory. The same skill set that allowed her to rebuild the crime scene apparently
meant she didn’t need to go back over the data to analyze it.

“Emerson was an English major,” she rattled off. “She was taking Professor Fogle’s class as an elective. All of her other classes counted toward her major, except for
Geology, which I assume fulfills some kind of natural science requirement. Most of the other students in Fogle’s class were psychology, pre-law, or sociology majors, and as a result, they
shared very few classes with Emerson, with the exception of two students.”

If my instincts were right, if Emerson hadn’t been a random target, then I was very interested to know who those two students were.

Sloane thumbed expertly through the stack of files on the counter and handed me two of them. “Bryce Anderson and Gary Clarkson.”

Michael looked up from whatever he was doing at the sound of Bryce’s name. “Bryce didn’t mention that she and Emerson had any other classes together.”

I went back to my computer and searched for Gary Clarkson’s profile. Unlike most of his peers, the profile itself was set to private, so all I could see was the profile picture.

“Gary Clarkson,” I said, turning my computer around so the others could see. “He goes by Clark.”

Clark had known Emerson. He’d known she was sleeping with the professor. He was angry. And we were staring at a picture of him wearing an orange hunting vest, holding a gun.

Y
ou were in most of Emerson’s classes.
I slipped into Clark’s mind without even thinking about it.
You liked watching her.
She was nice to you. You thought she was perfect. And if you found out she wasn’t…

“You got something?” Michael asked me from his spot across the room.

I caught my bottom lip in my teeth. “Maybe.”

I could see Clark targeting Emerson, but if he’d been the one to attack her, I would have expected it to be messier. I’d thought it myself the day before: if Clark was a killer,
he’d be a disorganized killer. Emerson wasn’t murdered on an impulse. The UNSUB never lost emotional control.

And yet…

A phone rang, breaking me from my thoughts. It took me a second to realize that the ringtone was mine. I reached for my phone, but Lia beat me there. She snatched it and held it just out of
reach.

“Give it here, Lia.”

Selectively deaf, she turned the phone around so I could see the caller’s name.
TA GEOFF
flashed across the screen.
What the…
He’d given me his
number. I’d plugged it into my phone, but I’d never given him mine.

“The two of you have been texting,” Lia informed me pertly. “You’ve really grown quite close.”

I made a mental note to change the password on my phone.

“Shall we see what he has to say?” Lia didn’t wait for a response before she answered the call.

“Geoffrey. I was
just
talking about you.” She smiled at whatever he said in response, then put the phone on speaker and laid it on the coffee table between us, daring me to
hang up.

I didn’t.

“Did you hear about the professor?” Geoffrey asked, his voice grave. “It’s all over the news.”

So the story about the professor’s death had broken.

“This must be so hard for you,” Lia said, putting her feet up on the coffee table. Her tone oozing sympathy, she gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

“You have no idea,” Geoffrey said in response. “The professor didn’t deserve this.”

And Emerson did?
I bit back the question.

“First that girl, now the professor,” Lia said, sounding every inch the tragedy groupie, ready to hang on Geoffrey’s every word. “Who do you think it is?”

“We’re dealing with what I like to call an
organized killer
,” Geoffrey intoned. “Highly intelligent and hard to catch.”

I didn’t know what was more off-putting: the way Geoffrey was acting like he’d invented the phrase “organized killer”—while demonstrating only the smallest fraction
of understanding of what that really meant—or the fact that “highly intelligent” was probably a descriptor he’d use to describe himself.

“I’ll probably have to take over the class now that Fogle is gone,” Geoffrey added. “I don’t know what will happen to his book,
Bind Them, Brand Them, Cut Them,
Hang Them: The Daniel Redding Story
.”

Geoffrey couldn’t resist dropping the book’s title. Listening to him talk, I thought back to the way Dean had looked, saying those same words: eyes unseeing, face pale.

“Do you think it could be someone in the class?” Lia asked. “
Your
class?”

She was so good at changing the direction of the conversation that Geoffrey didn’t even realize she’d done it.

“If there were a student in this class with the potential for that kind of thing,” Geoffrey said, his tone saturated with smugness, “I think I would know it.”

My first reaction to those words was that
of course
he thought he’d recognize a killer. But my second reaction sat heavier in my stomach. He’d used the word
potential
.

Potential as in
capability
, or potential as in
talent
?

“What about the kid who’s setting the curve in the class?” Lia gave Geoffrey another verbal nudge.

“No way,” Geoffrey scoffed. “Gary something. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Gary Clarkson. As in Clark.
I wouldn’t have pegged him as the curve-setting type, and that disturbed me. Maybe he was more of a planner, more type A, more
organized
than
I’d realized.

Lia snatched the phone up and abruptly hung up. The sudden movement jerked me out of my thoughts and I tracked her gaze. Dean was standing in the hallway behind me.

He didn’t comment on what he’d overheard. He didn’t threaten to tell Briggs we’d broken the rules. Again. He just turned and walked, his footsteps heavy, toward the
stairs.

I snatched my phone back. Lia didn’t stop me. It rang. I expected it to be Geoffrey calling back, but it wasn’t.

“There’s someone I need you to look up,” Briggs said, forgoing the customary greeting.

“Same to you,” I told him. “Gary Clarkson. He’s comfortable with guns, shared a high percentage of Emerson’s classes, and was setting the curve in Fogle’s
class.” I hesitated just a second, then plowed on. “You should also check out the professor’s TA.”

The FBI hadn’t given us a file for Geoffrey, but that was an oversight on their part. He wasn’t a student in the class, but he
was
a student at the university—and it
would be just like Dean’s father to get off on telling the FBI something misleading, but true.

“I’ll look into it,” Briggs promised, “but right now, I need you to see what you can find out about a Conrad Mayler. He’s a senior who took Fogle’s class two
years ago.”

“Why am I looking him up?”

There was silence on the other end. For a moment, I thought Briggs wouldn’t answer the question, but after a second’s hesitation, he did. “He’s the one who posted the
video of the crime scene.”

Briggs had a way of punctuating the end of sentences that shut the door completely on further conversation.

“Okay,” I said. “Conrad Mayler. Got it.”

Twenty minutes later, I’d discovered everything there was to online-know about Conrad Mayler. He was a journalism major. He claimed to listen only to indie bands. His
favorite movies were documentaries. He had a blog where he wrote snarky recaps of a variety of reality shows. According to his profile, he’d attended a private high school and worked
part-time at the student radio station.

His relationship status was “It’s complicated.” The girl implicated in said relationship was Bryce Anderson.

Your name just keeps coming up.
I pictured the blond girl in my mind. I’d made the error once before of erroneously assuming an UNSUB was male. No matter what my gut was telling me
this time, I couldn’t risk making the same mistake twice.

Scrolling through Conrad’s status updates and profiles, it wasn’t hard to see that he fancied himself a journalist. He’d probably claim that he’d taken the video of
Emerson’s body and posted it anonymously online because the public had a right to know. I was half-surprised he hadn’t actually posted it to his profile.

Seemingly in answer to my thoughts, the page in front of me updated itself. Conrad had posted a new video. Preparing myself for the worst, I clicked play, but instead of a corpse, I saw rows of
wooden seats, filled with students. The time stamp on the video read 7:34
A.M.

“Professor George Fogle once said that he scheduled his class for 7:30 in the morning as a way of separating the students who were taking his class on a lark from those who were serious
about the study of criminology.” The camera panned the room, and I recognized the auditorium.