Agent Sterling and Agent Briggs sat in the interrogation room opposite Beau Donovan. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit. His wrists were handcuffed together. A public defender sat beside Beau, continually advising his client not to speak.
Back at the safe house, Lia, Michael, Dean, and I watched. Sloane had tried to watch, too, but she couldn’t.
She’d been wearing the shirt Aaron gave her for three days straight.
We needed a confession. We’d laid out enough evidence to convince the DA to press charges, but to avoid a trial, to be sure that Beau would pay, we needed a confession.
“My client,” the lawyer said forcefully, “is pleading the Fifth.” “You have nothing,” Beau told Briggs and Sterling, his eyes
simultaneously dead of emotion and strangely alight. “This is the second time you’ve tried to put me in this box. It won’t work. Of course it won’t.”
“My client,” the lawyer repeated, “is pleading the Fifth.”
“Nine bodies.” Agent Briggs leaned forward. “Every three years. On dates derived from the Fibonacci sequence.”
This was the final card we had to play.
“Keep going,” Michael told them, his words going to the earpiece both agents wore. “He’s surprised that you know about the others. And the way his eyes just darted toward his lawyer? Agitation. Anger. Fear.”
Beau’s lawyer was an outsider. He didn’t know why his client had done what he’d done. He didn’t know what had inspired him to kill. We were banking on the fact that Beau might not want the man to know.
One by one, Briggs started pulling pictures out of his file. Kills—but not Beau’s. “Drowning. Fire. Impaling. Strangling.”
Beau was getting visibly agitated.
“Knife.” Briggs paused. That was as far as Beau’s pattern had gone. “You would have beaten your sixth victim to death.” Another picture.
You weren’t expecting this. You weren’t expecting the FBI to know. Beau went pale. The FBI can’t know.
You only meant to hint at age-old secrets. To get their attention. To
make them see you.
You never meant for it to go this far.
“Number seven would have been poison,” Briggs continued. He laid the last picture down. In it, a woman with blond hair, green eyes, and a face that tended more toward quirky than cute lay on her back. Her mouth was crusted with blood. Her body was contorted. She’d ripped her own fingernails off.
I swallowed as I remembered what Judd had said about Nightshade’s poison. Undetectable. Incurable. Painful.
“She was my best friend.” Agent Sterling brought her fingers to the very edge of Scarlett’s picture. “Did they take someone from you, too?”
“They?” the lawyer said. “Who’s they?” He gestured angrily toward the pictures. “What is the meaning of this?”
Briggs locked his eyes onto Beau. “Should I answer that question?” he asked. “Should I tell him why we’re showing you these pictures?”
“No!” The word burst out of Beau as a snarl.
You don’t talk to outsiders. Lia’s insight into cult mentality rang in my head. You don’t tell them what they’re not blessed enough to know.
“Get out,” Beau told his lawyer. “I can’t just leave—”
“I’m the client,” Beau said. “And I said get out. Now.” The lawyer left.
“You’re under no obligation to speak with us without your lawyer present,” Briggs said. “But then, I’m not convinced you want him to hear about this. I’m not convinced you want anyone to hear about this.” Briggs
paused. “You’re right when you said we might not have enough for a conviction.”
Sterling picked up where Briggs left off. “But we do have enough for a trial.
“Twelve people on a jury,” Sterling said. I recognized her strategy of playing up the numbers, playing into his pattern of thinking. “Dozens of reporters. The victims’ families will want to be there, of course….”
“They will destroy you,” Beau said.
“Will they?” Sterling asked. “Or will they destroy you?”
Those words landed. I could see Beau straining against the handcuffs, straining to keep from turning back and looking over his shoulder.
“Tell him a story,” Dean instructed the agents. “Start with the day someone found him in the desert.”
Dean and I were used to using our abilities to catch killers. But profiling was just as useful in knowing how to break them.
“Let me tell you a story,” Briggs said on-screen. “It’s a story about a little boy who was found, half-dead, in the desert, when he was six years old.”
Beau’s breath was coming quicker now.
“No one knew where he’d come from,” Briggs continued.
“No one knew what he was,” I said. Briggs repeated my words to Beau.
We weren’t positive how Beau had spent those first six years, but Dean had a theory. I’d wondered, days ago, if Dean had seen any of himself when he looked at Beau. I’d thought that if the UNSUB was young, his profile wouldn’t be dissimilar from Daniel Redding’s apprentices’.
You didn’t just stumble across the pattern. You knew to look for it. You spent your whole life looking for it. And the reason you did that lies in those first six years.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Beau’s voice was no louder than a whisper, but it cut through the air. “You couldn’t possibly know.”
“We know they didn’t want you.” Sterling went for the kill. Beau’s murders had taken the cult’s pattern to the next level. He’d been appealing to them, attacking them, showing them just how worthy he was. “They left you to die. You weren’t good enough for them.” Sterling paused. “And they were right. Look at you. You got caught.” Her eyes trailed over his orange jumpsuit, his cuffs. “They were right.”
“You have no idea what I am,” Beau said, his voice shaking with emotion. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. Neither do they. No one knows.” His voice rose with each word. “I was born for this. The rest of them, they’re recruited as adults, but number nine is always born within their walls. The child of the brotherhood and the Pythia—blood of their blood. Nine.”
“Nine is a name to him,” Dean said. “A title. Tell him it’s not his. Tell him he doesn’t deserve it.”
“You’re not Nine,” Sterling said. “You’re never going to be Nine.”
Beau lifted cuffed hands to his own collar. He latched his fingers over his shirt and pulled it roughly off his shoulder. Underneath, etched onto his chest, was a series of jagged cuts, halfway healed and on their way to a scar.
Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.
I stopped breathing. That symbol—I knew that symbol.
“Seven Masters.” Beau’s face was taut, his voice full of fury. He ran his fingers around the outside of the heptagon. Seven circles. “The Pythia.” He pressed his finger into the wound and pulled it down the vertical line on the cross. His hand trembled as he went to do the same with the horizontal. “And Nine.”
The symbol. I know that symbol. Seven circles around a cross.
I’d seen it carved into the lid of a plain wooden coffin, uncovered at the crossroads on a country dirt road.
“You wish you were Nine,” Agent Sterling said, still pressing. I felt my limbs going numb. Blackness crept in on my field of vision.
“Dean,” I wheezed.
He was with me in an instant. “I see it,” he said. “I need you to breathe for me, Cassie. I see it.”
The symbol Beau had carved into his own flesh had also been carved into my mother’s coffin. Not possible. June twenty-first. Not a Fibonacci date. My mother died in June.
On-screen, Beau’s hands were still trembling. His fingers tensed. They clawed at his neck. His back arched. And then he fell to the floor, convulsing.
Screaming. I registered the sound as if it were coming from very far away. He’s screaming.
And then he was gargling, choking on blood as it poured from his lips, his fingernails clawing violently against his own body, against the floor.
Poison.
“Breathe,” Dean repeated.
“We need help in here!” Sterling was screaming. Beau is screaming, and Sterling is screaming—and finally, the convulsions stopped. Finally, Beau was still.
Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.
I forced myself to suck in a breath. And then another and another.
Beau’s cracked lips moved. He looked at Briggs in one final moment of clarity. “I don’t,” he struggled to say. “I don’t wish I was Nine.” He sounded like a child.
“You’ve been poisoned,” Briggs told him. “You need to tell us—”
“I don’t believe in wishing,” Beau murmured. And then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he died.
