Serial killers don’t just stop.
Agent Sterling had been the one to tell me that. I’d realized at the time
that she had been thinking about the UNSUB who had killed Scarlett Hawkins.
I just hadn’t realized that Scarlett was Nightshade’s ninth.
As Judd stood there, staring at and through me, my brain regurgitated everything I’d ever overheard about his daughter’s death. Briggs and Sterling had been assigned to the Nightshade case shortly after they’d arrested Dean’s father. They’d gone after the killer hard. And in retaliation, he’d come after them.
He’d killed their friend, a member of their team—one who was never supposed to be on the front lines—in her own lab.
They never caught him. I couldn’t stop the words from cycling through my mind, over and over again. And serial killers don’t just stop.
New York, eleven years ago. D.C., five and a half.
And now Vegas.
Dean came to stand beside Judd. Neither of them was much for words. I could see, in the way they stood, echoes of the man who’d lost his daughter and the twelve-year-old boy he’d put aside his grief to save.
“We need to look up the dates of the rest of Nightshade’s kills.” When Dean spoke, it wasn’t to offer comfort. Judd wasn’t the type you comforted.
You don’t want comfort. You never have. You want the man who killed your daughter, and you want him dead.
I understood that, better than most.
“We don’t need to look up anything.” Judd’s voice was hard. “I know the dates.” His chin wavered slightly, his lips curving inward toward his teeth. “March fourth. March fifth. March twenty-first.” I could hear the marine in his tone as he spoke, like he was reading a list of fallen comrades. “April second. April fourth.”
“Stop.” Sloane came over and grabbed his hand. “Judd,” she said, her heart in her eyes, “you can stop now.”
But he couldn’t. “April fifth. April twenty-third. May fifth.” He swallowed, and even as his face tightened, I could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “May eighth.”
The muscles in Judd’s arms tensed. For a moment, I thought he was going to push Sloane away, but instead, his fingers curved around hers. “The dates match?” he asked her.
Sloane nodded, and once she started, she couldn’t stop nodding. “I wish they didn’t,” she said fiercely. “I wish I’d never seen it. I wish—”
“Don’t,” Judd told her sharply. “Don’t you ever apologize for being what you are.”
He gently returned her hand to her side. Then he looked around at each of us, one by one. “I should be the one to tell Ronnie and Briggs,” he said. “And I should do it in person.”
“You go.” Lia beat me to responding. “We’ll be fine.” Lia rarely spoke in sentences that short. The look on her face reminded me that Judd had been taking care of Lia since she was thirteen years old.
“I don’t want you poking around in the Nightshade file.” Judd stared at Lia as he issued that order, but it was clear he was talking to all of us. “I know how you all work. I know the second I walk out the door, you’ll be wanting to have Sloane pull up the details so you can dive in headfirst, but I’m pulling rank.” Judd leveled a hard stare at each of us in turn. “You go near that file without my say-so, and I’ll have you on the next plane back to Quantico, this case be damned.”
There wasn’t a person in the room who thought Judd made idle threats.
Room service arrived fifteen minutes after Judd left. None of us touched the food.
“Judd was right,” Michael said, breaking the silence that had descended in Judd’s wake. “It’s too early in the day for champagne.” He walked over to the bar and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He got down five glasses.
“You really think this is the appropriate time to drink?” Dean asked him.
Michael stared at him. “Redding, I think this is the very definition of ‘an appropriate time to drink.’” He turned to the rest of us. I shook my head.
Lia held up two fingers.
“Sloane?” Michael asked. It was indicative of his personality that he rationed her caffeine intake, but didn’t bat an eye at the thought of offering her hard liquor.
“In Alaska, you can be criminally prosecuted for feeding alcohol to a moose.”
“I’m going to take that as a no,” Michael said.
“In America,” Dean pointed out, “you can be criminally prosecuted for underage drinking.” Lia and Michael ignored him. I knew Dean well enough to know that his mind wasn’t really on the bottle of whiskey. It was on Judd.
So was mine.
Without details, I could only sketch out the barest bones of a profile of the UNSUB who’d killed Judd’s daughter. The FBI came after you hard.
You went after them personally. That told me we were dealing with someone with no fear, who lived to put fear into others. Someone who saw killing as a game. Someone who liked to win. More likely male than female, even though the name Nightshade strongly suggested the killer’s weapon of choice had been poison, which was more typically associated with women.
Unable to get further than that, I took a step back and viewed this from the other side of the equation. I knew very little about Nightshade, but I knew a few things about Judd’s daughter. Months ago, Agent Sterling had told me a story. We’d been held captive at the time, and she’d told me that as a kid, her best friend, Scarlett, was continually coming up with ridiculously dire scenarios and brainstorming how to get out of them.
You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin with a sleeping cobra on your chest, she would say. What do you do?
On another occasion, Judd had indicated that a school-aged Scarlett had once convinced a young Veronica Sterling to accompany her on a “scientific expedition” that involved some minor (or possibly not-so-minor) cliff-scaling.
You were fearless and funny and too stubborn to be talked out of anything once your mind was set, I thought, reading between the lines of what I knew. Scarlett had grown up to work in the FBI labs. Were you working the Nightshade case? I asked her silently. Is that why you were in the lab that night? I thought of Sloane getting a puzzle on the brain and refusing to let go until the numbers made sense. Was that what you were like?
Without reading the file, there was no way for me to know. Did you see your killer, Scarlett? Did he watch you die? The questions kept coming, one after another. Was it fast, or was it slow? Did you call for help? Did you think about cobras and glass coffins? About Sterling and Briggs and Judd?
A knock at the door pulled me from my thoughts. I shivered. Like a kid saying Bloody Mary into a mirror, part of me felt like I might have pulled the dark thing toward me, just by thinking his name.
Dean stood and walked toward the door, Michael and Lia on his heels. Dean stared through the peephole. “What do you want?” Whoever was on the other side, Dean wasn’t feeling friendly.
“I have something for you.”
The voice was muffled slightly by the door, but I recognized it anyway. “Aaron?” Sloane came to stand beside Dean. For a split second, her face
lit up. I saw the exact moment she remembered that her half brother might not be all that different from the father they shared.
“Sloane.” Aaron spoke to her now, instead of Dean. “I know what you do for the FBI. My father told me.”
I didn’t trust Sloane’s father—and that made it very hard to trust Aaron. “I don’t like it,” Aaron continued. “This isn’t the kind of life I want for
you. This isn’t the conversation I want us to be having. But I need to get something to the FBI.”
Dean’s eyes darted to Lia. She nodded. Aaron was telling the truth. “Then give it to the police,” Dean barked back, still not inclined to open
the door.
“My father owns the police.” Aaron pitched his voice lower. I struggled to hear him. “And he wants Beau Donovan in jail.”
At the mention of Beau’s name, I took a step forward. What Aaron was saying fit with what Agent Briggs had said about the powers that be wanting a neat resolution to their little serial killer problem.
“Please,” Aaron said. “The longer I stand in the hallway, the better the chances someone catches me on a security feed, and then we’ll have bigger problems than the fact that you don’t trust me.”
Dean walked into the kitchen. He opened one drawer, then another. A moment later, he went back to the front door.
Carrying a butcher’s knife.
