The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  Lia sat in the front seat beside him. She was leaning back, the leather seat caressing her cheek, her long hair whipping in the wind. She’d rolled down her window and showed no signs of wanting to roll it back up. Every once in a while, her gaze flitted over to Michael. I wished I could read the inscrutable expression on Lia’s face. What was she thinking?

  When she looked at Michael, what did she feel?

  Michael kept his eyes locked on the road.

  As hard as I tried not to profile the two of them, I kept thinking that Lia was the one who’d asked Michael to join us on this ill-advised outing, and that he’d agreed to help her. Why?

  Because opportunities for trouble were not to be missed. Because he owed her. Because as much as Michael enjoyed jabbing at Dean, he didn’t like watching him bleed. The answers flooded my brain, and Michael caught my gaze in the rearview mirror. He’d told me once that when I was profiling someone, my eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.

  “We’ll want to make a quick detour,” Lia said. Michael glanced over at her, and she gestured with the tip of one dark purple nail. “Pull off at the next exit.” She glanced back at me. “Enjoying the ride?”

  She was in the front seat. I was in the back. “I’m not doing this for enjoyment,” I told her.

  She let her gaze trail from me to Michael and then back again. “No,” she agreed. “You’re not doing this for enjoyment. You’re doing it for Dean.”

  Lia lingered on Dean’s name just slightly longer than the other words in that sentence. Michael’s hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel. Lia wanted him to know I was doing this for Dean. She wanted him dwelling on that fact.

  “Gas station,” Lia directed, her hair whipping in the wind. He pulled in and threw the car into park. Lia smiled. “You two wait here.”

  It was just like her to stir things up and then leave. No matter how well he masked it, I knew Michael was sitting there asking himself what—exactly—had led me to do this for Dean. The same way I’d spent the ride wondering why Michael had said yes to Lia.

  “Ta,” Lia said, sounding fairly satisfied with herself. In an impressive feat of flexibility, she snaked her body out the open window without ever opening the door.

  “This is a bad idea,” I said as Lia sauntered toward the mini-mart.

  “Almost certainly,” Michael agreed. From the backseat, I couldn’t see his face, but it was all too easy to imagine the unholy glint in his eyes.

  “We snuck out of the house to go to a frat party,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure this isn’t a dress.”

  Michael turned around in his seat, took in the view, and smiled. “Green’s a good color for you.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Now it’s your turn to say something about the way this shirt really brings out my eyes.” Michael sounded so serious that I couldn’t help cracking a smile.

  “Your shirt is blue. Your eyes are hazel.”

  Michael leaned toward me. “You know what they say about hazel eyes.”

  Lia opened the passenger door and flopped back into her seat. “No, Michael. What do they say about hazel eyes?” She smirked.

  “Did you get what you needed?” Michael asked her.

  Lia handed a brown paper bag back to me. I opened it. “Red Gatorade and cups?”

  Lia shrugged. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When at a frat party, drink questionable fruit punch out of a red Solo cup.”

  Lia was right about the punch. And the cups. It was dark enough in the dimly lit frat house that no one noticed that our drinks were a slightly different shade of red.

  “What now?” I asked Lia over the deafening music.

  She began to move her hips, and her upper body followed suit in a way that made it fairly clear that she’d excel at limbo. She eyed a trio of boys at the edge of the room and shoved Michael toward a blond girl with red-rimmed eyes.

  “Now,” she said, “we make friends.”

  A profiler, an emotion reader, and a lie detector went to a party….

  An hour later, Michael had identified the people in the room who seemed hardest hit by the murder that had rocked the campus. We’d found a few partyers who were upset for other reasons—including, but not limited to, unrequited crushes and backstabbing roommates—but there was a certain combination of sorrow, fascination, and fear that Michael had zeroed in on as marking someone a person of interest.

  Unfortunately, most of our persons of interest had nothing interesting to say.

  Lia had danced with at least half the boys in the room and spotted at least three dozen lies. Michael was playing sympathetic ear to the female half of the student population. I stuck to the edges, nursing my fake punch and turning a profiler’s eye on the college students crammed into the frat house like jelly beans in a Guess How Many jar. It felt like Colonial’s entire student body had showed up—and based on the general lack of sobriety, I was certain that none of them were drinking Gatorade.

  “People mourn in their own ways.” A boy sidled up next to me. He was just shy of six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. There was a hint of a goatee on his chin, and he was wearing plastic-rimmed glasses that I deeply suspected weren’t prescription. “We’re young. We’re not supposed to die. Getting wasted on cheap alcohol is their misguided attempt at reclaiming the illusion of immortality.”

  “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.”

  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.”