“We need Beau’s trajectory.” Sloane tapped the pad of her thumb across each of her fingers, one after the other, again and again as she spoke. “Point A to point B to point C. How did he get there? Who did he pass?”
Before. After. Before. After. Sloane went back to switching from one still image to the next. “There are at least nine unique paths with a likelihood greater than seven percent. If I isolate the length and angle of the suspect’s stride after the lights came back on…” Sloane stopped talking, lost to the numbers in her head.
The rest of us waited. And waited.
Tears welled in Sloane’s eyes. I knew her—I knew her brain was racing, and I knew that number after number, calculation after calculation, all she could see was Aaron’s face. His empty eyes. The shirt he’d bought her.
I wanted him to like me, she’d told me.
“Don’t look at Beau.” Lia broke the silence in the room. She caught Sloane’s gaze and held it. “When you’re looking for a lie, sometimes you look at the liar, and sometimes you look at everyone else. The better the liar, the better the chance that your tell is going to come from someone else. When you’re dealing with a group, you don’t always watch the person speaking. You watch the worst liar in the room.” Lia leaned back on the
heels of her hands, the casual posture belied by the intensity in her voice. “Don’t look at the suspect, Sloane.”
Lia might have been trying to spare Sloane from looking—again and again—at Beau, knowing what he’d done to Aaron, but it was good advice. I could see the exact moment it took hold in Sloane’s mind.
Don’t look at the suspect. Look at everyone else.
“Crowds move,” Sloane said, her voice going up in pitch as she gathered steam. “When someone works their way through a crowd, people move. If I can isolate the migration patterns during the blackout…” Her eyes darted side to side. Scanning the footage, she sent the still images to the printer. Before. After. Her fingers grappled for a pen. She looked from the footage to the images and back again, uncapping the pen and circling clusters of people. “Controlling for baseline movements, with a margin of error for individual differences in response to chaos, there are gaps here, here, and here, with slight but consistent movement northwest and southeast among each cluster.” Sloane drew a path from Aaron’s body to Beau’s final position, then ran her finger back over the path she’d drawn.
You drop the knife. You make your way back through the crowd, light on your feet, never hesitating, never stopping.
“Pretend you’re picking pockets,” Dean told Lia, his gaze fixed on the path Sloane had drawn. “Who are your easy marks?”
“I’m insulted you think I would know,” Lia replied, not sounding insulted in the least. She brought her fingertip to the image and tapped one long, painted nail against first one person, then two more. “One, two, and three,” Lia said. “If I were picking pockets, those would be my marks.”
You’re weaving through the crowd. It’s dark. Chaotic. People are fumbling for their cell phones. You keep your head down. There’s no room for hesitation. No room for mistakes.
I looked at the three people Lia had indicated. You just killed a man, and you’re going to let someone else dispose of the evidence. From the beginning, I’d seen our UNSUB as a planner, a manipulator. You knew exactly which mark to choose.
“That one.” I pointed to the second of the two marks Lia had chosen.
Late twenties. Male. Wearing a suit jacket. Mouth pursed in distaste.
Familiar.
“Thomas Wesley’s assistant.” Michael recognized him, too. “Not a big fan of the FBI, is he?”
“We’re on it.” Agent Briggs wasn’t a person to sit on a lead for long. He and Agent Sterling were in transit before we’d even finished briefing them.
“Will it be enough?” I asked. Sloane had gone quiet beside me. No matter how badly she wanted answers, she wouldn’t be able to form the question, so I asked it for her.
“If the assistant still has it, and if it has Beau’s fingerprints on it, and if forensics can tie it to either the knife or Aaron’s blood…” Briggs let the number of conditionals in that sentence speak for itself. “Maybe.”
Trace evidence. That was what this came down to. Trace evidence had told me my mother’s blood was on that shawl. Trace evidence had said those bones were hers.
The universe owes me this, I thought—fiercely, irrationally. Trace evidence had taken my mother away. Trace evidence could give me—give Sloane—this one thing.
“Maybe isn’t good enough.” Lia spoke now, just as much for Sloane as I had. “I want him squirming. I want him helpless. I want him to watch it all come crumbling down.”
“I know.” There was an undertone in Briggs’s voice that told me he wanted the same, wanted it the way he’d wanted Dean’s father, once upon a time. “We’ve got local PD working on tracking down video footage—of Michael at the Desert Rose, of the hours leading up to the fight between Beau and the Majesty’s head of security. Something will turn up.”
Something has to, I thought desperately. You don’t get to get away with this, Beau Donovan. You don’t get to walk away from this unscathed. If we could obtain physical evidence—and video evidence—the one thing we were missing was witness testimony.
“Tory Howard.” I threw the name out there, knowing that I wasn’t saying anything that Briggs and Sterling hadn’t already considered.
“We tried,” Briggs replied curtly. “This is the second time we’ve arrested Beau. She thinks he’s innocent.”
Of course Tory wouldn’t want to believe Beau had done this. I thought about the young woman I’d profiled again and again. You loved Aaron.
Beau can’t have been the one to take him away from you.
“We’re the bad guys here,” Briggs continued. “Tory won’t talk to us.”
You loved Aaron, I thought again, still focused on Tory. You’re grieving. I thought of the last time I’d seen Tory and let out a long breath. “She won’t talk to you,” I said out loud, “but she might talk to Sloane.”
