The clock was ticking. Instinct and theories weren’t enough. Being sure
wasn’t enough.
We needed evidence.
You plan. You wait, and you plan, and you execute those plans with mathematical precision. I could see Beau in my mind, his lips upturned in something like a smile. Waiting for our time to run out. Waiting for the FBI to let him go.
Sloane sat in front of the television, a tablet plugged into the side. She wasn’t crying now. She wasn’t even blinking. She was just watching the moment her brother’s corpse had been discovered, again and again.
“Sloane.” Judd stood in the doorway. “Sweetheart, turn that off.”
Sloane didn’t even seem to hear him. She watched the camera footage shake as an agent ran toward Aaron’s body.
“Cassie. Turn it off.” Judd issued the order to me this time.
You want to protect us, I thought, knowing quite well where Judd’s need to do that came from. You want us to be safe and well and warm.
But Judd couldn’t protect Sloane from this.
“Dean.” Judd turned his attention to my fellow profiler.
Before Dean could reply, Sloane spoke up. “Six cameras, but none of them are stationary. I can extrapolate Beau’s position, but the margin of error in calculating his trajectory is bigger than I would like.” She paused
the footage over Aaron’s corpse. For a moment, she lost herself to the image of her brother’s blood-spattered body, her gaze hollow. “The killer was right-handed. Spatter is consistent with a single wound, left to right across the victim’s neck. The blade was angled slightly upward. Killer’s height is roughly seventy-point-five inches, plus or minus half an inch.”
“Sloane,” Judd said sharply.
She blinked, then turned away from the screen. It’s easier, I thought, slipping from Judd’s perspective into Sloane’s, when the body belongs to “the victim.” Easier when you don’t have to think Aaron’s name.
Sloane shut off the television. “I can’t do this.”
For a moment, Judd looked relieved. Then Sloane got out her laptop. “I need stationary footage. Higher resolution.” Seconds later, her fingers were flying over the keys.
“Hypothetically speaking,” Lia said to Judd, “if Sloane were hacking the Majesty’s security feed, would you want to know?”
Judd looked at Sloane for several seconds. Then he walked over to her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. She won’t stop. She can’t. You know that.
His mouth set into a firm line, Judd turned back to Lia. “No,” he grunted. “If Sloane were illegally hacking her father’s casino, I would not want to know.” Then he glanced back at Dean and Michael and me. “But, hypothetically speaking, what can I do to help?”
You had less than a minute to do what needed to be done.
As Sloane watched the security footage she’d hacked, murmuring numbers under her breath, I slipped into Beau’s perspective, trying to imagine what he’d been thinking and feeling in those moments.
You knew exactly where your target was standing. You knew Aaron wouldn’t panic when the lights went off. Aaron Shaw was at the top of the food chain. You knew it would never occur to him that he might be your prey.
“Suspect was walking toward the stage at a rate of one-point-six meters per second. Victim was twenty-four meters away, at a forty-two-degree angle to suspect’s last marked trajectory.”
You knew exactly where you were going, exactly how to get there.
Sloane froze the footage and did a screen capture, the second before the lights went out. She repeated the process when the lights came back on.
Before. After. Before. After. Sloane toggled back and forth between the still images. “In fifty-nine seconds, the suspect moved forward six-point-two meters, still facing the stage.”
“His pupils were dilated,” Michael put in. “Before the lights went off, his pupils were already dilated—alertness, psychological arousal.”
“If I can do this,” Dean murmured, “I’m invincible. If I can do this, I’m worthy.”
Aaron was the Majesty’s golden son, the heir apparent. Killing him was an assertion of power. This is your inheritance. This is what you are. This is what you deserve.
“Beau’s posture changes,” Michael continued. “It’s subtle, but it’s there, beneath the poker face.” Michael indicated first one image, then the other. “Anticipation before. And after: elation.” He swung his eyes back to the first photo. “Look how he’s holding his shoulders.” He glanced at Sloane. “Play the footage.”
Sloane brought up the video and let it play.
“Restricted motion,” Michael said. “He’s fighting tension in his shoulders. He’s walking, but his arms are still by his sides.”
“The knife,” Dean murmured beside me, his eyes locked on the screen. “I had it on me. I could feel it. That’s why my arms aren’t moving. The knife is weighing me down.” Dean swallowed, shifting his eyes to me. “I have the knife,” he said, his voice pitched unnaturally low. “I am the knife.”
On-screen, everything went black. Seconds ticked by in silence.
Adrenaline surged through your veins. I imagined being Beau. I imagined sidling up behind Aaron in the dark. No hesitation. He’s stronger than you are. Bigger. All you have is the element of surprise.
All you have is a holiness of purpose.
I imagined sliding the blade across Aaron’s throat. I imagined letting it drop to the floor. I imagined walking back, through the dark. I imagined knowing, with an unworldly, overwhelming certainty that death was power. My power.
On-screen, the lights came back on, jarring me from the brief instant when I’d stopped talking to Beau and let myself be him. I could feel the heat from Dean’s body beside me—I could feel the dark place he’d been the moment before.
The place I’d gone, too.
“Look at his arms,” Michael said, gesturing to Beau.
They swing slightly as you walk. You’re lighter now. Balanced. Perfect.
“I’ve done what needed to be done.” Dean looked down at his hands. “And I got rid of the knife.”
“The knife was found less than a meter away from the body.” Sloane spoke at a stilted, uneven pace. “Killer dropped it. He would have backed away. Couldn’t risk stepping in Aaron’s blood.” There was something brittle in her voice, something fragile. “Aaron’s blood,” she repeated.
Sloane looked at crime scenes and saw numbers—spatter patterns and probability and signs of rigor mortis. But no matter how hard she tried, Aaron would never just be number five to her.
“The suspect’s not wearing gloves.” Lia was the one who made the observation. “I doubt he left fingerprints on the knife. So what gives?” Sloane closed her eyes. I could feel her cataloging the possibilities,
going through the physical evidence again and again, hurting and hurting and pushing through it—
“Plastic.” Judd had never weighed in on one of our cases before. He wasn’t FBI. He wasn’t a Natural. But he was a former marine. “Something disposable. You wrap the knife in it, dispose of it separately.”
That’s it. My heart skipped a beat. That’s our smoking gun.
“So where did I dispose of it?” Dean asked.
Not a trash can—the police might look there. I forced myself to back up, to walk through it step by step. You make your way through the crowd— to Aaron. You come up behind him. You slice the knife across his neck— quick. No hesitation. No remorse. You peel the plastic off, drop the blade.
Thirty seconds.
Forty seconds.
How long has it been? How long do you have to make your way back to where you were when the lights went out?
You push your way through the crowd.
“The crowd,” I said out loud.
Dean understood before the others. “If I’m a killer who thinks of every contingency, I don’t throw the evidence away. I let someone else do it for me….”
“Preferably after they get home,” I finished.
“He planted the evidence on someone,” Lia translated. “If I’m his mark, and I get home and find a plastic bag in my pocket? I throw it away.”
“Unless it has blood on it,” Sloane said. “A drop, a smear…”
I saw the web of possibilities, the way this played out. “Depending on who you are, you might call the police.” I considered a second possibility. “Or you might burn it.”
There was a beat of saturated silence, brimming with the things none of us would say. If we don’t find it, if we don’t find the person who has it…
Our killer would win.
