The dream started the way it always did. I was walking through a narrow hallway. The floor was tiled. The walls were white. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead. On the ground, my shadow flickered, too.
At the end of the hallway, there was a metal door. I walked toward it. Don’t. Don’t open the door. Don’t go in there. The warning came from my conscious mind, which knew all too well what lay down that road.
But I couldn’t stop. I opened the door. I stepped into the darkness. I reached for the light switch on the wall. I felt something warm and sticky on my hands.
Blood.
I flipped the switch. Everything went white. All I could do was blink until the scene settled in front of me.
A spotlight.
A crowd.
I was onstage, wearing the royal blue dress I’d tried on in the store. My gaze traveled over the audience, picking out the ones I’d marked in advance for readings. The woman in the white vest, clutching her purse like it might sprout legs and run away. The teenager whose eyes were already tearing up. The older gentleman in the pale blue suit, sitting dead center in the front row.
This isn’t right, I thought frantically. I don’t want to do this. I turned, and in the wings, I saw myself. Younger. Watching. Waiting.
I woke with a start. My hands were wound tightly in the sheets. My chest heaved up and down. I was alone in the room. No Sloane. Processing that, I rolled over to look at the clock and froze.
The walls were completely covered. Sheet after sheet of paper, marked in red. This must have taken Sloane all night, I thought. She hadn’t said a word when we’d gotten back to the room—not about the message from our killer, not about Aaron and the accusations Beau had flung at him.
Rolling out of bed, I went to examine Sloane’s work more closely.
Twelve sheets of printer paper had been affixed to the wall in four rows of three.
January, February, March…
I was looking at a handwritten calendar. Dates had been circled at seemingly random intervals. Six in January, three in February, four in March. I scanned the next row. A handful in April, only two in May.
“Nothing in June or July,” I murmured out loud. My hand lifted. I pressed my fingers to the day that would always jump out at me in any calendar. June 21st. That was the day my mother had disappeared. Like the rest of the days in June, it was unmarked on Sloane’s calendar.
I scanned the remainder of the months, then moved on to the rest of the walls in our room. More calendars. More dates. Taking a step back, I took in the full scope of what Sloane had done. There were years’ worth of calendars on these walls, with the same dates marked on every one.
“Sloane?” I called toward the bathroom. The door was closed, but a moment later, I got a reply.
“I’m not naked!”
In Sloane-speak, that was as good as an invitation to come in. “Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked as I opened the door.
“Negative,” Sloane replied. She was wrapped in a towel and staring at the mirror. Her hair was wet. On the mirror’s surface she’d drawn a Fibonacci spiral. It covered her face in the reflection.
Sloane stared at herself through the spiral. “My mother was a dancer,” she said suddenly. “A showgirl. She was very beautiful.”
That was the first time I’d ever heard Sloane mention her mother. I knew, then, that she’d been awake all night for a reason beyond the papers on the walls.
“My biological father likes beautiful things.” Sloane turned to look at me. “Tory is aesthetically appealing, don’t you think? And the other girl with Aaron was very symmetrical.”
You’re wondering if Aaron takes after your father. You’re wondering if Tory is his secret, the way your mother was his father’s.
“Sloane—” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“It doesn’t matter,” Sloane said, in the tone of someone to whom it mattered very much. “January twelfth,” she said fiercely. “That’s what matters. Today’s the ninth. We have three days.”
“Three days?” I repeated.
Sloane nodded. “Until he kills again.”
“Tertium. Tertium. Tertium.” Sloane stood in the middle of our suite, gesturing to the paper-covered walls. “Three times three is nine.”
I need nine.
“And three times three times three,” Sloane continued, “is twenty- seven.”
Tertium. Tertium. Tertium. Three times three times three.
“Remember what I said yesterday about the dates and how I think they’re derived from the Fibonacci sequence?” Sloane said. “I spent all night going through the different possible methods of derivation. But this one”—she pointed to the first wall I’d investigated—“is the only version where, if you end the sequence twenty-seven dates in, you also end up with exactly three repetitions within the sequence.”
Three. Three times three times three.
“It was just a theory,” Sloane said. “But then I hacked the FBI’s server.” “You what?”
“I did a search over the past fifteen years,” Sloane clarified helpfully. “For murders committed on January first.”
“You hacked the FBI?” I said incredulously.
“And Interpol,” Sloane replied brightly. “And you’ll never guess what I found.”
Security holes that the world’s most elite crime-solving agencies seriously need to patch?
“Eleven years ago there was a serial killer in upstate New York.” Sloane walked over to the next wall, years’ worth of calendars papering it from
ceiling to floor. She knelt and pressed her fingers to one of the calendar pages.
“The first victim—a prostitute—turned up dead on August first of that year.” She moved her hand down the page. “Second victim on August ninth, third victim on August thirteenth.” She moved on to the next page. “September first, September fourteenth.” She bypassed October. “November second, November twenty-third.” She slowed as she brought her hand to rest on the date marked in December. “December third.”
She looked up at me, and I did the mental count. Eight, I thought. That’s eight.
I looked for the next date. January first.
“It’s the same pattern,” Sloane said. “Just with a different start date.” She turned to the last wall. There was a single piece of paper on it. The first thirteen numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233
“1/1,” Sloane said, “January first. In the first iteration I tried, the second date generated was 1/2. But that method limits you to dates in the first third of the month. Hardly efficient. Instead…” She drew a square around the second 1 and the 2 that followed it. “Voila. 1/12. Split in a different spot, that’s 11/2, so we add both of those dates to the list. Tack on the next digit in the sequence, and you’ve got 11/23. Once we’ve made all the dates we possibly can including the first integer in the sequence, we move on to the second. That gives us 1/2 and 1/23. And if you split 1/23 after the two instead of the one, that gives us 12/3. Then on to the third integer, 2/3.
February only has twenty-eight days, so 2/35 is just filler. We go on to 3/5, then 5/8, 8/1, 8/13, 1/3, 3/2, 3/21, 2/1, 2/13, 1/3—you see how January third just repeated?”
My brain raced as I tried to keep up.
“If you end the sequence after it’s produced twenty-seven dates—three times three times three—you’ve generated exactly three repeated dates: January third, February third, and May eighth.”
I tried to parse what Sloane was saying. If you generated a total of twenty-seven dates based on the Fibonacci sequence, you ended up with a pattern that was consistent not only with our killer’s pattern, but also with a series of nine murders committed over a decade ago.
I need nine.
“The case from eleven years ago,” I said, commanding Sloane’s attention. “Did they ever catch the killer?”
Sloane tilted her head to the side. “I’m not sure. I was just looking at the dates. Give me a second.” Sloane’s eidetic memory meant that she automatically memorized anything she read. After going back over the files in her head, she answered the question. “The case is still open. The killer was never caught.”
Most serial killers don’t just stop, I thought, Agent Sterling’s words echoing in my mind. Not unless someone stops them.
“Sloane,” I said, trying to keep my mind from racing too fast. “The killer who ended his run on January first—how did he kill his victims?”
This time, it took Sloane a fraction of a second to pull the information to the front of her mind. “He slit their throats,” she said. “With a knife.”
