While Briggs and Sterling went to track down Thomas Wesley, the rest of us were left to entertain ourselves. Michael took out his earpiece and tossed it onto the carpet with no more care than one might use to throw away a crumpled napkin. “Call me when the show’s back on,” he said,
reclaiming his flask and heading for his room. Lia shot me a look that said,
I told you we were at issue capacity. See?
Yes, I thought, watching Michael go. I do.
“I’ll go check on Sloane,” I said. Michael wouldn’t want my concern.
Sloane, at least, might be glad for the company.
When I got to our room, I was greeted by the sound of upbeat techno music. I opened the door, half expecting Sloane to be wearing goggles and on the verge of blowing something up. It helps me think, Sloane had explained to me once, like explosives were an alternative form of meditation.
Luckily, however, in the absence of her basement lab, she’d taken a different—and less explosive—tack. She was lying upside down on the bed, the upper half of her body hanging over the end. Blueprints, schematics, and hand-drawn maps lay three-deep, covering the floor around her.
“Thirteen hours.” Sloane yelled the words over the music, still hanging upside down. I went to turn the music down, and she continued, her voice
softer, more vulnerable. “If our UNSUB is killing one a day, we have a maximum of thirteen hours until he kills again.”
Briggs had told Sloane that he needed her to figure out where the UNSUB would strike next. She had clearly taken that request to heart. You want to be needed. You want to be useful. You want to matter, even a little.
I tiptoed around the papers and lay down on the bed next to Sloane.
Hanging upside down, side-by-side, we turned to look at each other.
“You can do this,” I told her. “And even if you can’t, we’ll love you just the same.”
There was a beat of silence.
“She was wearing a dress,” Sloane whispered after a moment. “The little girl.” She shook her head slightly, then picked up a pen and began marking off distances on one of her maps, as easily as if the whole thing were right-side up.
My chest tightened. The grip Sloane had on the pen told me that even sinking herself into a project like this one wasn’t enough to burn from her mind the memory of the doting father and his little girl.
“She was wearing a white dress.” Sloane’s voice was very small. “It was clean. Did you notice?”
“No,” I said softly.
“Children stain white clothes within an hour of putting them on at least seventy-four percent of the time,” Sloane rattled off. “But not her. She didn’t ruin it.”
The way Sloane said the word ruin told me that she wasn’t just talking about children staining their clothing. She was talking about herself. And clothing was just the tip of the iceberg.
“Sloane—”
“He brought her to the bar to get a cherry.” Her hand stilled, and she turned to look at me again. “He brought me cherries,” she said. “Just once.”
Sloane could have told me the number of cherries, the exact day and time, the number of hours that had passed since—I could see that information, repeating itself over and over again in her head.
“Does it help if I hate him for you?” I asked. Him. As in her father. “Should it?” Sloane asked, wrinkling her forehead and sitting up. “I
don’t hate him. I think that maybe, someday, when I’m older, he could not- hate me.”
When you’re older—and better and normal and good, my brain filled in. Sloane had told me once that she said and did the wrong thing over eighty-four percent of the time. The fact that her biological father had played a role in teaching her that lesson—the fact that she still hoped that he might develop even the barest hint of affection for her someday, if only she could do things right—physically hurt me.
I sat up and latched my arms around her. Sloane leaned into the hug and rested her head on my shoulder for a few seconds. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “About the cherries.”
“I won’t.”
She waited a moment longer, then pulled back. “Al Capone once donated a pair of cherry trees to a hospital as thanks for treating his syphilis.” With those memorable words, Sloane lay back down, hanging upside down off the end of the bed and staring out at the maps and schematics she’d collected. “If you don’t leave,” she warned me, “there’s a high probability that I’m going to tell you some statistics about syphilis.”
I rolled off the bed. “So noted.”
Back in the living room, Michael had apparently seen fit to return. For reasons I could not begin to fathom, he and Lia were arm wrestling.
“What—” I started to say, but before I could finish, Dean spoke up. “Show’s back on,” he said.
Lia took advantage of Michael’s distraction and slammed his hand down. “I win!” Before Michael could complain, she resumed her spot on the back of the couch. I sat next to Dean. Michael stared at us for a second or two, then picked his earpiece up off the floor and went to stand behind Lia.
On-screen, I saw a hand—probably Briggs’s—reach out and knock on a hotel room door. I fit my earpiece back into my ear just in time to hear Thomas Wesley’s assistant answer the door.
“May I help you?”
“Agents Sterling and Briggs,” I heard Sterling say from off-screen. “FBI. We’d like a word with Mr. Wesley.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Wesley isn’t available at the moment,” the assistant said.
The look on Lia’s face called BS on that one.
“I would be happy to pass along a message or to put you in touch with Mr. Wesley’s legal counsel.”
“If we could just have a few minutes of Mr. Wesley’s time—” Briggs tried again.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible.” The assistant smiled daggers at Briggs. “It’s fine, James,” a voice called. A second later, Thomas Wesley
appeared on-screen. His salt-and-pepper hair was slightly mussed. He was wearing a teal silk robe and very little else. “Agent Sterling. Agent Briggs.” Wesley greeted them each with a nod, like a monarch graciously acknowledging his subjects. “What can I do for you?”
“We have just a few questions,” Agent Sterling said, “concerning your relationship with Camille Holt.”
“Of course.”
“Mr. Wesley,” the assistant—James—said, his voice tinged with displeasure. “You are under no obligation to—”
“Answer any questions I do not want to answer,” Wesley finished. “I know. It just so happens I want to answer the agents’ questions. And,” he said, turning his attention back toward the screen, “I’m a man who’s used to doing what he wants.”
I had the oddest sensation, then, that he was addressing those words less to Agent Briggs than to the camera.
“You switched hotels,” Agent Briggs said, dragging the man’s gaze up. “Why?”
A benign question whose sole purpose was to keep the man from looking too closely at the pen in Agent Briggs’s pocket.
“Bad juju at the other one,” Wesley replied, “what with that whole murder business.” His tone sounded flippant, but—
Michael filled in the blanks. “He’s more disturbed than he wants to let on.”
“You do realize,” Agent Sterling replied to Wesley, “that there was—” “Also a murder here at the Desert Rose?” Wesley said glibly. He
shrugged. “Four bodies in four days at four different casinos. Given the choice between staying at a fifth casino on day five and staying at one of the four, I decided I liked my odds better at the latter.”
You always play the odds, I thought, studying Wesley. And based on your background in business, you usually win.
“Can we come in?” Sterling was the one who asked that question. She must have been playing the odds herself—specifically, that Wesley, a self-
professed womanizer, was less likely to turn down a request from a female agent.
“Mr. Wesley actually has several commitments this morning,” the assistant started to say.
“James, go organize the liquor cabinet,” Wesley ordered lazily. “Alphabetically this time.”
With one last dark look at the agents, Wesley’s assistant did as he was bidden. Wesley opened the door to his suite wider and gestured. “Please,” he said. “Do come in. I have an excellent view of the pool.”
Three seconds later, Briggs and Sterling were inside the suite. I heard the door shut behind them. And then the feed went black.
