Briggs and Sterling kept at it, but Beau didn’t say a word. Eventually, they left him to stew and put in a call to us.
“Thoughts?” Briggs asked on speaker.
“It’s not him.” Sloane was practically vibrating with intensity. “You have to see that. The numbers? Wrong. The location? Wrong. The timing?” Sloane turned her back on the phone. “It’s all wrong.”
Silence descended. Dean filled the void. “He’s got the potential for violence.” The way Dean phrased that observation made me wonder if he saw any of himself in Beau. “He’s been living at the bottom of a hierarchy that favors those with money and power, and he has neither. Given the opportunity, he’d enjoy playing a game where he came out on top.” Dean leaned on the counter, his head bowed. “He’s angry, and I’m guessing he’s spent a lot of his life being tossed aside like garbage. If the Majesty’s head of security does die, Beau won’t feel bad about it. Given the choice, he’d probably pick up that brick again.”
“But—” Sloane started to say.
“But,” Dean said, “Sloane’s right. The numbers on the victims’ wrists aren’t just a part of this UNSUB’s MO. They’re a part of his signature. He needs to mark his victims. And I’m not convinced we’re dealing with an UNSUB who, after four meticulously planned kills, gets caught writing numbers onto the wrist of the fifth before the man is even dead.”
“The wrong numbers,” Sloane put in emphatically.
Sterling cleared her throat. “I tend to agree with Sloane and Dean. Our UNSUB’s MO has changed with each kill. And so has the method with which the victims were marked. Until now.”
Eugene Lockhart had numbers written on his wrist in a permanent marker, too, I realized.
“Say you’d killed someone.” Lia instantly had the room’s attention. “Or, in Beau’s case, say that you thought the person you’d hit with a brick was about to die.” She leaned back on the heels of her hands, and my mind went back to Two Truths and a Lie.
I killed a man when I was nine.
“Maybe you had a choice. Maybe you didn’t. And afterward,” Lia continued, her voice light and airy, “say you didn’t want to get caught. What do you do?”
Seconds ticked by in silence. Dean was the one who provided the answer. He knew Lia better than any of us. “You lie.”
“You lie,” Lia repeated. “You cover it up. And if you happened to know there was a serial killer out there…” Lia shrugged.
“Maybe Beau heard about the numbers,” I said, picking up where Lia had left off. “Not what the pattern was, exactly, just that there were numbers on all of the victims’ wrists.”
Sterling picked up where I left off. “He grabs that brick. He hits the victim. Panics, and to cover, he tries to make it look like the work of our UNSUB.”
Anger. Fear. Satisfaction. Everything Michael had said Beau had been feeling fit with this interpretation of events.
Beau wasn’t our UNSUB. He was mimicking our UNSUB.
“That means the pattern’s not broken,” Sloane whispered. “The pattern isn’t wrong.”
You are not broken, I translated. You are not wrong.
“Grand Ballroom. January twelfth.” Sloane held out first one finger, then another, like she was counting. “The pattern says the next murder is going to happen in the Grand Ballroom on January twelfth.”
Three days. If Sloane was right about the Fibonacci dates, that wasn’t our only problem.
“Speaking of the pattern,” I told Sterling and Briggs, dread seeping back over my body, “there’s something else you should know.”
 |
“Sloane hacked the FBI’s files. Based on what she found, you think our UNSUB might have done this before.” Agent Sterling let her summation of what I’d just said hang in the air for several seconds before she added, “Twice.”
“It’s just a theory,” I replied before either of the agents could decide that now was a good time to lecture Sloane on the virtues of not hacking the FBI. “But the case Sloane found was never solved, and it fits the pattern.”
“With respect to location as well?” Briggs asked. I could practically
hear him rubbing his temples. “Was that killer working in a spiral?” “A Fibonacci spiral,” Sloane corrected. “And no, he wasn’t.” “Numbers on the wrists?” Sterling asked.
“No,” Sloane said again.
No numbers on the wrist. No spiral. If we were dealing with the same killer, then that killer had changed. That wasn’t unheard of, but we typically saw changes in an UNSUB’s MO—the necessary elements of a crime.
Writing numbers on the victims’ wrists wasn’t necessary. Killing them in a spiral was a choice. A killer’s MO might change, but typically, the signature stayed the same.
“The numbers were always there.” Sloane’s voice was insistent. “Even if he didn’t write them on someone’s wrist, or kill in the right locations, they were there.”
In the dates, I finished silently. Maybe the signature, the deep-seated psychological need being manifested in the UNSUB’s behavior, was that the kills needed to be driven by the numbers. Viewed from that perspective, the additional elements of the Vegas crimes weren’t a departure in signature.
They were an escalation. More numbers, more rules.
“I’m older now,” Dean said, testing out the possibility. “Wiser, better. I’ve waited for so long, planned so long….” His voice was lower when he profiled, deeper. “Once upon a time, I was an amateur. Now, I’m an artist. Invincible. Unstoppable.”
“And this time,” I said slowly, “you want credit.”
That’s why you wrote the numbers on your victims’ wrists, I thought. You wanted us to crack the code. You wanted us to see the full extent of what you’d done.
“We’ll have a hard enough time convincing the local PD that Beau Donovan isn’t our serial killer without bringing up a decade-old case that, on the surface, looks completely unrelated.” Briggs’s voice broke into my thoughts. “The powers that be in this city want this case solved. Now. If we push the theory that this last attack isn’t the work of our UNSUB, we can expect the cooperation we’ve seen up to this point to dry up pretty quickly.”
“Meaning,” Lia said, “that you might lose your complimentary suite at the Desert Rose. I hear there are some lovely establishments just off the Strip.”
“Meaning,” Agent Briggs countered, “that if we want a list of hotel guests to compare to witnesses and persons of interest in the New York case, those same powers that be are probably going to refuse to hand anything over without a warrant.”
“And,” Agent Sterling added soberly, “Grayson Shaw will almost certainly insist on opening back up the Grand Ballroom at the Majesty.”
My fingers curled themselves inward, my nails lightly scratching the surface of my palms. Three days. That was how long we had until the next murder. That was how long we had to convince Sloane’s father that reopening the ballroom was a mistake.
“What do you want us to do?” Dean was nothing if not focused.
“For now,” Agent Briggs said, “we just need you to stay put. Stay in the room and stay out of trouble. We’re on it.”
Whether or not Sterling and Briggs were “on it,” none of us had any intention of sitting around and twiddling our thumbs until they came up with our next assignment.
I grabbed a pen and the Majesty notepad by the phone and wrote down the names of everyone we’d talked to so far on this case, then crossed off two: the head of security and Camille Holt. He was in a coma; she was dead. Neither were suspects.
“The New York murders were committed eleven years ago,” I said. “By virtue of their ages, that rules out not just Beau Donovan, but also Aaron Shaw and Tory Howard.”
Children could be made to do horrible things—Dean was proof enough of that. But slitting someone’s throat from behind? That wasn’t the MO of a child with limited reach.
I went through the rest of the names on my list. Thomas Wesley was thirty-nine, which put him at twenty-seven and serving as the CEO of his first company at the time of the New York murders. The professor was thirty-two, and a quick internet search informed me that he’d done his undergraduate degree at NYU. I hesitated slightly, then added a final name to the list.
Grayson Shaw.
Sloane’s father was in his early fifties. He was clearly a man who thrived on power and being in control. The way he’d treated Sloane told me that he had tendencies toward seeing people as possessions and behaving callously and unemotionally toward them.
I would have bet Michael’s car that, as the owner of the Majesty corporation, Grayson Shaw made frequent trips to New York.
“Far be it from me to suggest that Sloane hack the FBI again,” Michael said, preventing Sloane from dwelling on her father’s name, “but I think Sloane should hack the FBI again.”
Judd appeared in the doorway a moment later. He eyed Michael, eyed the rest of us, and then went to make himself some coffee.
“You missed out on a lot of action this morning,” Lia called after him. He didn’t so much as turn around. “I don’t miss out on much.”
In other words: Judd knew quite well what we’d spent our morning doing. He just hadn’t interfered—and he wasn’t going to interfere now. Judd’s priority wasn’t solving cases, or making sure the FBI didn’t get hacked. His job was keeping us safe and fed.
No matter what.
As far as he was concerned, most everything else came out in the wash. “If tertium doesn’t just mean that our killer has a fixation on the number
three, if it really does mean that this is the third time our killer has pulled this routine,” Lia was saying beside me, warming up to Michael’s suggestion, “it only makes sense to see if we can dig up the case we’re missing.”
Only Lia could make hacking the FBI sound reasonable.
“I can set up a program,” Sloane volunteered. “Not just for the FBI, but for Interpol, local police databases, anything I already have a back door into. I’ll have it search any available records that fit our parameters. Last time, I did a manual search for a single Fibonacci date. This will take a little more time up front, but the results will be more comprehensive.”
“In the meantime.” Judd came to stand at the edge of the kitchen. “The rest of you miscreants can eat.”
Michael opened his mouth to object, but Judd quelled him with a look. “Room service?” Michael suggested smoothly.
“Only if you want to rack up a two-hundred-dollar bill,” Judd replied.
Michael made his way over to the nearest phone. He’d been remarkably low-key since the fight at the pool, but I knew before he even started to place his order that he’d try his best to rack up a three-hundred-dollar breakfast bill.
The only thing Judd vetoed was the champagne.
While we waited for the food, I retreated to take a shower. I’d been going a million miles an hour since Sloane had explained the dates to me that morning. A shower would be good for me. Even better, it might quiet my mind enough that I could really think.
When I’d first joined the program, we’d been restricted to cold cases, fed no more than the occasional scrap about whatever case our handlers were currently working. In the three months since the rules had changed, we’d worked a half-dozen active cases. The first one we’d solved in less than three days. The second, even faster than that. The third had taken almost a week, but this one…
So many details. The longer the case dragged on, the more information my brain had to juggle. The UNSUB’s profile evolved with each kill, and now that it looked like we might be dealing with a repeat offender, my brain
had kicked into hyperdrive. The files I’d read. The interviews I’d watched. My own first impressions.
I was learning that the hardest thing about being a profiler was figuring out what information to discard. Did it matter that Beau and Tory had both spent time in foster homes? What about the way Aaron both resented and bowed down to his father? The slightly clingy vibe I’d gotten from Thomas Wesley’s assistant? The drink the professor had ordered, but only pretended to drink?
Even now that our suspicions were targeted at suspects over the age of thirty, I couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that arranged and rearranged what I knew about everyone involved, continually looking for meaning.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. Then again, being a profiler meant that I always felt like I was missing something, right up until the case was closed. Until the killing stopped—and not just for a day or two days or three.
For good.
The sound of the shower spray beating against the tub was rhythmic and soothing. I let it drown out my thoughts as I stepped into the shower and under the spray. Breathe in. Breathe out. I turned, arching my neck and letting the water soak my hair and dribble down the front of my face.
For a few, blissful minutes my mind was quiet—but it never stayed quiet for long.
June twenty-first. That was where my brain went when I wasn’t trying to force it to think about one thing or another. My mother’s dressing room. Blood on my hands. Blood on the walls.
“Dance it off, Cassie.”
I could compartmentalize. I could distract myself. I could focus on the current case to the exclusion of everything else—but still, the memories and the fears and the sinking certainty about the skeleton in that dirt-road grave were there, waiting for me, just below the surface.
My dreams were proof enough of that.
June twenty-first, I thought again. I remembered standing in front of the calendars Sloane had drawn, pressing my fingers to the date. No Fibonacci dates in June.
And still, my mind cycled back. June twenty-first.
Why was I thinking about this? Not about my mother—I didn’t need my expertise in the human psyche to figure that one out—but about the date? I
pictured myself standing in front of the calendar, going through it month by month. A handful in April, only two in May. None in June.
A breath caught in my throat. My hand lashed out of its own accord, turning the shower off. I stepped out, barely remembering to wrap a towel around my torso on my way back into the bedroom.
I walked over to the wall with the colored objects sitting—large to small
—on the glass shelf. I looked past the sheets Sloane had put up for January, for February, for March, for April.
Two dates in May.
“May fifth,” I said out loud, my entire body tensing. “And May eighth.”
Six years, this May, Judd had told me. But that wasn’t all he’d told me.
He’d told me the date on which Scarlett was murdered. May eighth.
I didn’t remember walking to the kitchen, but the next thing I knew, I was there, towel and all, dripping on the floor.
Michael’s gaze went to my face. Dean went very still. Even Lia seemed to sense that now wasn’t the moment to make a comment about my state of undress.
“Judd,” I said.
“Everything okay there, Cassie?” He was standing at the counter, doing a crossword.
All I could think was that the answer had to be no. When I asked, Judd had to say no.
“The UNSUB who killed Scarlett,” I said. “Nightshade. How many people did he kill?” I realized, distantly, that the question I’d asked couldn’t be answered with a yes or a no.
Judd’s expression wavered, just for an instant. I thought he would refuse to answer, but he didn’t.
“As far as we know,” he said, his voice hoarse, “he killed nine.”
YOU
Everything can be counted. Everything but true infinity has its end.
Without the knife in hand, all you can do is lightly trace the pattern on the surface of your shirt. You can feel the cuts underneath, feel the promise you etched into your own skin.
Around. Up and down. Left and right. Seven plus two is nine.
Nine is the number. And Nine is what you were always meant to be.
