If Lia had done to Michael what she’d just done to me, he would have lashed back at her. If she’d done it to Sloane, Sloane would have been crushed—but I wasn’t. Sooner or later, my grief would catch up to me. But Lia had given me a reason to fight it for that much longer. She wasn’t
wrong about Michael. She wasn’t wrong about Sloane. Someone had to hold them together. Someone had to hold us together.
And I needed that person to be me.
My gut said Lia knew that. You could have been nicer about it, I thought
—but if she had been, she wouldn’t be Lia.
I stayed out on the balcony for another ten minutes after Lia sauntered off. When I finally made my way back inside, Michael, Lia, and Dean were gathered around the kitchen table—and so was Agent Briggs. He was dressed in plain-clothes, which told me the FBI was making an effort at keeping these visits on the down low. The fact that Briggs’s version of plain clothes still made him look like a cop was perfectly reflective of his personality: hyperfocused, ambitious.
Briggs played to win.
“There’s been another murder.” Briggs had apparently been waiting for my arrival to make that announcement. None of the four of us made an attempt at looking surprised. “That makes the Apex, the Wonderland, the Desert Rose, and the Majesty, all in a matter of four days. We may be
looking at someone who has a grudge against the casinos or the people who profit from them.”
Dean looked toward a file Briggs held in his hand. “The latest victim?” Briggs tossed the folder down onto the kitchen table. I flipped it open.
Glassy blue eyes stared back at me, impossibly large in a heart-shaped face. “Is that…” Michael started to say.
“Camille Holt,” I finished, unable to pull my eyes away.
You like being underestimated, Camille, I thought dully, bringing my hand to touch the edge of the picture. You’re fascinated by the way the mind works, the way it breaks, the way people survive things no one should be able to survive.
Her skin was tinged a ghastly gray; the whites of her wide-set eyes were marked by blots of red—capillaries that had burst as she’d struggled against her assailant.
You struggled. You fought. She was lying on her back on a white marble floor, strawberry blond hair spread out in a halo around her head—but I knew in my gut that she’d fought, viciously, with an almost feral strength her assailant wouldn’t have been expecting.
“Asphyxiation,” Dean commented. “She was strangled.”
“Murder weapon?” I asked. There was a difference between strangling someone with a wire and strangling them with a rope.
Briggs took out a snapshot of an evidence bag. Inside was a necklace— the thick metal chain Camille had worn looped twice around her neck the night before.
In my mind, I could see her, sitting at the bar, one leg dangling off the stool. I could see her turning toward us and walking toward the exit.
I could see Aaron Shaw watching her go.
“You’ll want to talk to the casino owner’s son.” Michael’s thoughts were perfectly in line with my own. “Aaron Shaw. His interest in Ms. Holt wasn’t professional.”
“What did you see?” Briggs asked.
Michael shrugged. “Attraction. Affection. A sharp edge of tension.”
What kind of tension? I didn’t get the chance to follow up before Sloane popped into the kitchen and went to pour herself some coffee. Briggs eyed her warily. Sloane’s tendency toward high-speed babbling when caffeinated was a thing of legend.
“I called you last night,” Sloane told him reproachfully. “I called and called, and you didn’t answer. Ergo, I get coffee, and you don’t get to complain.”
I thought about the chopsticks Sloane had stolen the night before. You needed Briggs to pick up your call. You needed to be recognized. You needed to be heard.
“There was another murder,” Briggs told Sloane.
“I know.” Sloane stared at the coffee in her hands. “Two. Three. Three.
Three.”
“What did you say?” Briggs asked sharply.
“The number on the corpse. It’s 2333.” Sloane finally came to sit at the table with the rest of us. “Isn’t it?”
Briggs pulled a new picture out of the file. Camille’s wrist: 2333 had been carved into it. Literally. The bloody numbers were slightly jagged. From a henna tattoo to this. The numbers had always been a message—but this? This was violent. Personal.
“Was she alive when the UNSUB did this?” I asked.
Briggs shook his head. “Postmortem. There was a compact in the victim’s purse. We believe the UNSUB broke it and used one of the shards to carve the numbers in her wrist.”
I shifted from Camille’s perspective to her attacker’s. You’re a planner.
If this was what you’d intended all along, you would have brought something with you to do the job.
That left me with two questions: first, what had the plan been, and second, why had the UNSUB deviated from it?
What went wrong? I asked the killer silently. Did she thwart your plan somehow? Was she harder to manipulate than the others? I thought about the fact that Camille had been present at the crime scenes for two of the victims. Did you know her?
“This is personal.” Dean’s thoughts were exactly in line with my own. “The other targets might have been selected for convenience. But not this one.”
“That was Agent Sterling’s take as well,” Briggs said. He turned back to Sloane. “You decoded the numbers?”
Sloane grabbed a pen out of Agent Briggs’s pocket, flipped the folder closed, and started scrawling numbers on the outside of the folder, talking as she wrote. “The Fibonacci sequence is a series of integers where each
number is derived by adding the two that come before it. Most people believe it was discovered by Fibonacci, but the earliest appearances of the sequence are in Sanskrit writings that predate Fibonacci by hundreds of years.”
Sloane set the pen down. There were fifteen numbers on the page:
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377
“I didn’t see it at first,” she continued. “The pattern picks up mid- integer.”
“Pretend for a moment,” Lia told her, “that we’re all very, very slow.” “I’m not very good at pretending,” Sloane told her seriously. “But I
think I can do that.”
Michael choked back a snort.
Sloane picked the pen back up and put it down under the number thirteen. “It starts here,” she said, underlining four numbers, then inserting a slash before repeating the process.
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 3/4 55 8/9 144/ 233 377
2333. The image of Camille’s wrist rose to the surface of my mind, like a drowned man bobbing to the surface of a lake. You break the glass. You press the jagged edge to her flesh, carving in the numbers.
“Why this sequence?” I said. “And why make it this hard to see? Why not start at the beginning, with 0112?”
“Because,” Dean said slowly, “this knowledge has to be earned.”
Briggs glanced at us, one after the other. “Agent Sterling and I will be spending the afternoon talking to potential witnesses. If you have any names to add to that list—besides Aaron Shaw—now would be the time to speak up.”
At the mention of Aaron’s name, Sloane’s hands curved tightly around her cup of coffee. Michael cocked his head to the side and stared at her. An instant later, he caught me watching him and raised an eyebrow at me in an unspoken challenge.
You know something’s up with Sloane, I thought, and you know that I know what it is.
“I assume you’ve gathered that Camille was out with Tory Howard last night?” Dean asked Briggs.
Briggs gave a brief nod. “We talked with Tory briefly yesterday. We’ll go back for seconds today, then work our way through the rest of our list.” “I don’t suppose you’d like to take me with you when you go to talk to
this fine collection of potentially homicidal individuals?” Lia batted her eyes at Agent Briggs.
Briggs withdrew four earpieces from his pocket and laid them down on the table. They were joined, a moment later, by a tablet from his briefcase. “Video and audio feeds,” he told us. “Agent Sterling and I are wired. Within a four-mile radius, you’ll see what we see. You’ll hear what we hear. If you pick up on something you think we might have missed, you can text or call. Otherwise, I want you studying up on our interrogation techniques.”
Lia, Michael, Dean, and I reached for earpieces in unison. Sloane turned to Briggs. “What about me?” she asked quietly. There were four earpieces and five of us.
“Four casinos in four days,” Briggs said. “I need you”—he put enough emphasis on those words to tell me he’d picked up on the vulnerability in Sloane’s tone—“to figure out where this killer is going to strike next.”
YOU
The roulette wheel spins. The players watch with bated breath. You watch the players. Like ants in an ant farm, they’re predictable.
Some bet on black. Some bet on red.
Some are hesitant. Some believe chance favors the bold.
You could tell them the exact odds of winning. You could tell them that chance favors no man. Red or black, it doesn’t matter.
The house always wins.
You expel a breath, long and slow. Let them have their fun. Let them believe that Lady Luck might smile down on them. Let them keep their games of chance.
Your game—the one they don’t even know they’re playing—is a game of skill.
1/1.
1/2.
1/3.
1/4.
You know what comes next. You know the order. You know the rules.
This is bigger than ants in an ant farm could ever imagine.
No one can stop you. You are Death.
You are the house. And the house always wins.
