The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (12 page)

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.”

“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?”

L
ia’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.

A step in front of me, Michael opened the door onto the roof. “After you,” he said. My stomach muscles unknotted themselves slowly as I stepped out and into the moonlit night. My
eyes searched for Lia. Once I’d seen for myself that she was okay, I registered the fact that her flair for fashion apparently extended to her choice of rendezvous points. Not just a tower,
not just a locked tower, but the roof of a locked tower. From here, we could see the entire campus stretched out below, a splattering of lights in the darkness.

From the other side of the roof, Lia spotted us. There were two people with her, both of them male. “You made it,” she said, weaving on her feet toward us in a way that would have
made me nervous even if we’d been on solid ground.

“Don’t worry,” Lia whispered, throwing her arms around me like the very happiest of drunks. “I’m on the clock. Nothing but Gatorade since we arrived. And if anyone
asks, my name is Sadie.”

Lia turned back toward the boys. I followed her, unable to keep from thinking that Sadie
was
Lia’s real name. None of us knew why she’d changed it.

Only Lia would use the name she’d been born with as her
fake
name.

“Derek, Clark, this is…” Lia hiccuped, and Michael took that cue to take over the introductions.

“Tanner,” he said, sticking out his hand to shake the others’. “And this is Veronica.”

The boy on the left was tall and preppy, with politician hair and classically handsome features. There was a distinct chance that he was flexing his pecs. “I’m Derek,” he said,
slipping his hand into mine.

Definitely flexing,
I thought.

Derek elbowed the boy on the right, hard enough that the boy actually stumbled. Once he regained his footing, he held out his hand. “Clark,” he mumbled.