Sloane’s search hadn’t yielded one case. Or two. Or three. “How many are there?” I asked, my throat dry.
“Going back to the 1950s,” Sloane replied, “almost a dozen. All serial murder, all unsolved.”
I leaned back against the counter, my hands gripping the edge. “Nine kills each time?”
“I set the search to return anything over six,” Sloane said. “With the thought that some victims may not have been discovered or linked to the same UNSUB.”
“But all of the victims in each case were killed on one of the twenty- seven Fibonacci dates you identified,” Dean said.
Sloane nodded. Without waiting for another question, she began skimming the files. “All over the country,” she reported. “Three in Europe. Stabbings, beatings, poison, arson—it’s all over the map.”
“I need pictures,” I said. “Anything you can get, from any file that’s not Nightshade’s.” Judd had forbidden us to go anywhere near the Nightshade case. But the others…
All of those victims. All of those families…
I had to do something. Nothing I did could possibly be enough. “This many cases,” I told Dean, “going back that far…”
“I know.” He met my eyes. Dean’s father was one of the most prolific serial killers of our time. But this was so far beyond even him.
All over the world, going back sixty years—the chances that we were dealing with a single UNSUB were dwindling by the second.
“How good is this program?” Lia asked Sloane.
“It’s only returning files that fit the parameters.” Sloane sounded mildly insulted.
“No,” Lia said. “What’s the return rate?” Every muscle in her face was tight. “How many is it missing?”
The numbers lie, I realized, following Lia’s train of thought. Oh, God.
Sloane closed her eyes, her lips moving rapidly as she went over the numbers. “When you take into account the number of databases I don’t have access to, the likelihood of old records being digitalized, the role the FBI has played in the investigation of serial murders over the years…” She rocked slightly in her chair. “Half,” she said. “At best, I might have gotten about half of the cases from 1950 until now.”
Almost a dozen had been unfathomable. Twice that? Not possible. “How many?” I said. “Total victims, how many are we talking?” “At minimum?” Sloane whispered. “One hundred and eighty-nine.”
One hundred and eighty-nine dead bodies. One hundred and eighty-nine lives snuffed out. One hundred and eighty-nine families who had lost what I’d lost. Lost like I’d lost.
One hundred and eighty-nine families who had never gotten answers. Dean called Agent Sterling. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on
Judd’s face when he’d talked about Scarlett’s murder. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and the blood on her dressing room walls and the nights I’d spent waiting for the police to call. They never did. I waited, and they never called—and when they finally did, it wasn’t any better. The days since they’d found the body—they weren’t any better.
One hundred and eighty-nine.
It was too much.
I can’t do this.
I did it anyway, because that was what I’d signed up for. That was what profilers did. We lived through horror. We submerged ourselves in it again and again and again. The same part of me that let me compartmentalize my
mother’s case would let me do this, and the same part of me that couldn’t always fight the memories meant I would pay for it.
Profiling came with a cost.
But I would pay it again and again and again to make it so that even just one child never came home to blood on the walls.
Our in-suite printer nearly ran out of ink printing off the pictures of the bodies—and that was only for the case files Sloane had managed to fully access.
Mapping out the progression over time, several things became clear. Old and young, male and female. The victims ran the gamut. The only group not represented was children.
No kids. I wanted to cling to that, but I couldn’t.
The next thing that became clear, to my profiler’s eye, was that some sets of victims were more homogeneous than others. One case might involve only female victims with long blond hair; another might show clear signs that the murders had been those of opportunity, with no patterning to the victim choice at all.
“Multiple killers.” Dean hadn’t looked at the spread for more than thirty seconds when he said the words. “And it’s not just a shift over time. Even back-to-back cases have totally different signatures.”
To some of you, choosing the victims is paramount. To others, the target is beside the point.
Eleven cases. Eleven different killers. Nightshade didn’t kill those people in New York. Viewed in the context of the larger pattern, it was easier to see. Nine victims, killed on Fibonacci dates. Everything else— everything that told us who the killer was—was different. It was like looking at eleven people writing the same sentence, over and over again. Different handwriting, same words.
So where did that leave our Vegas killer?
“Seven different methods of murder.” Sloane’s voice broke into my thoughts. Like her, I counted. One set of victims had been strangled. The New York killer had slit his victims’ throats; another had also used a knife but showed a preference for stabbing. Two sets of victims had been impaled through the heart—one with metal bolts and another with whatever happened to be on hand at the scene. Two sets had been beaten to death. A case in Paris featured victims who were burned alive.
The most recent case—only two and a half years old—was the work of an UNSUB who broke into homes and drowned the inhabitants in their own bathtubs.
And then there were the ones who’d been poisoned.
Sloane stood, staring down at the pictures. “The closest cases are three years apart.” Sloane squatted and began pulling out photos—one from each case for which we had them. With the same efficiency with which she’d organized the glass objects on the shelf in our room, she began ordering them, spacing some closer together than others. She waved for paper, and Michael supplied it.
What does Michael see when he looks at these pictures? The thought struck me suddenly and violently. Is there any emotion on a dead person’s face?
Beside me, Sloane scribbled on sheets of paper, making notes about the cases we didn’t have pictures for. She integrated those in with the others on the floor.
There’s a pattern. I didn’t need her to tell me that. To these killers— however many of them there were, whatever they were doing—the pattern was everything.
Sloane kept tearing pages off the notepad. The sound of her ripping sheet after sheet off was the only one in the room. She placed the blank pages in open gaps.
“Assume a three-year interval between each case and the one that follows,” Sloane murmured, “and you can extrapolate where we’re missing data.”
Three years, I thought. Three is the number.
“It repeats.” Sloane jerked back, like she was afraid the papers might infect her, like she was afraid they already had. “Every twenty-one years, the pattern repeats. Impaled, strangled, knifed, beaten, poisoned, drowned, burned alive.” She made her way down the row, filling in methods for the blank pages. When she started over, her voice went up an octave. “Impaled, strangled, knifed, beaten, poisoned, drowned, burned alive. Impaled—”
Her voice broke. Michael caught her and held her still, his arms wrapping around her and pulling her back to his chest. “I’ve got you,” he said.
He didn’t tell her it was okay. We all knew it wasn’t.
Dean crouched over the pattern Sloane had pulled out. “Cassie,” he said.
I knelt. Dean tapped one of the photos. Drowning. Starting there, I realized why Dean had called me over and not Sloane. Drowning, burning alive, impaled through the heart—
Alexandra Ruiz. Sylvester Wilde. Eugene Lockhart.
Our UNSUB was going in order.
