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I’d figured that if I didn’t know what my hand held, there was no way for Michael or Lia to figure it out, either.
“She was also his wife.”
I’ve met your daddy dearest, Agent Sterling. He only plays by the rules when it’s useful for him to do so, and he definitely didn’t go to the trouble of blackmailing me into this program to let you clip my wings.”
Maybe Briggs’s ex wasn’t okay with the idea that she’d saved Dean for this.
Dean could have stopped there, but he didn’t. Each syllable was hard-won, and my gut twisted as I realized just how much it was costing him to form these words.
I understood, the way I always did, without even having to think about it, that Sloane reading articles about lie detection was her way of trying to connect with Lia. The rest of us inherently understood people.
“You deserve better.” “Better than a game?” I asked. Or better than you?
I tried to catch Sloane’s eye, telegraphing that she should not, under any circumstances, tell her what Dean had told us about his father. Sloane met my eyes and nodded. I relaxed slightly, then Sloane turned back to Agent Sterling. “Dean told us this case looks a lot like his father’s,”
The difference between Michael’s gift and mine was as obvious as it had been playing poker. He saw so much that Sterling was trying to hide. But why she was hiding it—that was a question for me.
“On active cases, people cross lines.” Judd took his time with the words. “Everything is urgent, everything is life-anddeath.”
nubile
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.’”
You consider yourself excellent at everything,
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.
Quite frankly, I thought that tools who lived in tool houses probably shouldn’t throw stones.
“When I say that the professor knew Emmie, I mean that he really knew her,” Derek said. “Biblically.”
“He said that as a child, people knew there was something wrong with him, but for as long as I could remember, he was well-liked.
All the instincts in the world are worthless if you can’t work within the system.
When Agent Sterling had removed her jacket, she’d dislodged her shirt slightly. It gapped in the front, giving me a view of the skin underneath. There was a scar just under her collarbone. A brand, in the shape of the letter R.
And she was only wearing two-fifths of a dress.”
You look at Redding and see all the ways the two of you are the same. I look at him, and I see someone who’s so angry and so terrified of that anger that there’s not room for anything else. Or anyone else.”
“We’re dealing with what I like to call an organized killer,” Geoffrey intoned. “Highly intelligent and hard to catch.”
You wanted someone to get underneath Daniel Redding’s skin. You don’t need Dean for that. I’m the one who got away, Director. You know what that means to a man like Redding.”
This is a mistake. This is right. Those thoughts came on the heels of each other, playing in stereo.
“Fine,” Dean capitulated. “We go in as a group. I’ll tell her you’re my friends.” “A clever ruse,” Michael commented.
At first glance, I’d put his age at close to ours, but as he came closer, I realized that he was at least a few years older.
“Daniel would never do something so rash, so sloppy.
subjugated
“You want me to tell you what you feel. I want you to know.”
“And then my social worker found her. Alive.”
You see, a serial killer’s son paid his mother a visit this afternoon, and Mr. Simms believes the boy might be violent.”
“The victim is Trina Simms, and neighbors heard screaming and called 911 while her son Christopher was at the police station with Briggs.”
Trina Simms was always shrill, deluded, demanding. She’s not so demanding now.
“I think my father has a partner.”
“Organized. Disorganized. When a crime scene has the hallmarks of both, you’re either dealing with an inexperienced UNSUB who’s refining his technique—or you’re dealing with two UNSUBs.”
“The person we’re looking for isn’t a partner,” I said finally. “It’s an apprentice.”
“I told him to do it. I begged him to, I made him promise to, and he did—no matter how sick it made him, no matter how much it has haunted him ever since, he did it. And it worked.”
a nice contrast to what Agent Sterling and I had dealt with on our last visit.
When I reached the end of Sterling’s questions, I spent a second hoping that Lia would be able to tell us which answer in each pair had been true and which had been the lie.
Let’s try this one: you will never find the man who murdered your mother.”
“Male. According to his roommate, who discovered the body, his name was Gary Clarkson.”
He was painting by numbers and still couldn’t manage to stay in the lines.
Like Christopher Simms was in a meeting with Briggs when someone killed his mother.
“I never activated the tracker. I thought wearing it was deterrent enough.”
“Ten bucks says that wasn’t his car.”
“I’m going to untie you,” you say, just to watch the surprise flicker through their eyes. “You’re going to run. I’ll even give you a two-minute head start.” Take them. Free them. Track them. Kill them.
“How was federally mandated psychological evaluation?”
“The probability of your return was quite low.”
“When the odds are bad,” she said, removing something from one of them, “you change the rules.”
Agent Sterling had blown the whistle on the Naturals program.
