All In: (The Naturals #3) (21 page)

“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.”

I
tried Sterling’s cell, then Briggs’s. Neither of them answered.
They were probably up all night,
I thought,
talking to witnesses, trying to figure out who, if anyone, hypnotized Aaron’s “friend” to deliver that message.

“I’m going to talk to Dean,” I told Sloane. “Catch him up on what you just told me.” I took in the dark circles under Sloane’s eyes. “You should try
getting some sleep.”

Sloane frowned. “Giraffes only sleep four and a half hours a day.”

Knowing a losing battle when I saw one, I let her be. Making my way quietly across the suite, I stopped outside Dean’s room. The door was cracked open. I placed my hand flat on the
wood.

“Dean?” I called. When he didn’t respond, I knocked lightly. The door drifted inward, and I caught sight of Dean sleeping. He’d pushed his bed to one side of the room and
slept with his back to the wall. His blond hair fell gently into his eyes. His face was free of tension.

He looked peaceful.

I began backing out of the doorway. The floor creaked, and Dean bolted up in bed, his eyes unseeing, his hand thrust out in front of him. His fingers were curved, like he’d caught a ghost
by the neck.

“It’s me,” I said quickly. When he still didn’t register my presence, I turned on the light. “It’s me, Dean.” I stepped toward the bed.
It’s
just me.

Dean’s head swiveled. He stared through me. And then a moment later, he was back. His eyes focused on mine. “Cassie.” He said my name the way another person might rattle off a
prayer.

“Sorry,” I told him, coming closer. “For waking you up.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Dean said, his voice rough.

I crawled onto the bed beside him. His hands found their way to the ends of my hair, his touch soft. He closed his eyes for a moment, taking in the warmth of my body. When he opened them, they
were calmer, clear.

“Something’s wrong,” Dean said, observant as always. I wondered if he could see the tension in my shoulders. I wondered if he could feel it with his featherlight touch.

“Sloane found something.” I let his touch steady me, even as it steadied him. “She derived a series of twenty-seven dates from the Fibonacci sequence. Then she did a search on
the FBI’s database for serial murders where one or more of the killings happened on New Year’s Day.”

“Briggs and Sterling gave her that kind of access?”

My facial expression must have answered that question for me.

“She hacked the FBI.” Dean paused. “Of course she did. She’s Sloane.”

“She found a decade-old case that fits the same pattern,” I told him. “Nine victims, killed on Fibonacci dates.”

“MO?” Dean asked.

“Killer used a knife. He attacked from behind and slit his victims’ throats. The first victim was a prostitute. I don’t have information on any of the others.”

“Nine bodies,” Dean repeated. “On dates derived from the Fibonacci sequence.”

I shifted my body, leaning into his. “Last night, the message was ‘I need nine.’
Need,
Dean, not ‘want,’ not ‘I’m going to kill nine.’
Need.
”

The number of victims mattered, the same way the numbers on the wrists did, the same way the dates did.

“The case Sloane found is still open,” I told Dean. “It was never closed. Sterling said that serial killers don’t just stop killing.”

Dean heard the question I hadn’t yet put into words.
Could we be dealing with the same killer?

“Eleven years is a long time for a killer to deny himself,” Dean said. I saw the shift in Dean before his words confirmed it. “Each time I kill, I need more. To go without, for
so long…”

“Is it even possible?” I asked Dean “Can an UNSUB kill nine people and then just…wait?”

“Our UNSUB just killed four people in four days,” Dean replied. “And now he’s waiting. Smaller scale, same concept.”

The numbers matter.
The numbers told the UNSUB where to kill, when to kill, how long to wait. But making sure a portion of the sequence appeared on each victim’s wrist?

From the beginning, we’d read that as a message. What if the message was
I’ve done this before
?

Suddenly, my throat tightened.
Tertium,
I thought.

“Dean.” My lips felt numb. “What if the word on the arrow didn’t just refer to Eugene Lockhart being the UNSUB’s third victim this time around?”

Tertium. Tertium. Tertium.
I could hear the girl saying the word. I could see her gaze staring out into the crowd.

“The third time.” Dean slid to the end of the bed. He sat there for a moment in silence, and I knew he was putting himself in the killer’s shoes, walking through the logic
without ever saying it out loud. Finally, he stood. “We need to call Briggs.”

D
ean made the call.

Pick up,
I thought.
Pick up, Briggs.

If this
was
the killer’s third time going through this pattern—nine bodies, killed on Fibonacci dates—we weren’t dealing with a novice. We were dealing with an
expert.
The level of planning. The lack of evidence left behind.

It fit.

A second realization followed on the heels of the first.
If our killer was slitting throats more than a decade ago, we’re looking for someone no younger than their late twenties.
And if the New York murders had been the second set and not the first…

“Briggs.” Dean’s voice was terse, but calm. I turned toward him as he began bringing Briggs up to speed. “We have reason to believe this might not be our UNSUB’s
first rodeo.”

Dean fell silent as Agent Briggs replied. I closed the space between Dean and me and put a hand on his arm. “Tell him that Sloane broke the code,” I said. “The UNSUB is going
to kill again—in the Grand Ballroom—on January twelfth.”

Dean hung up the call without saying another word.

“What?” I asked him. “Why did you hang up?”

Dean’s grip tightened over his phone.

“Dean?”

“Briggs and Sterling got a call at three in the morning.”

There was only one reason to call the FBI at three in the morning.
It’s too soon,
I thought.
Sloane said the next murder would be on the twelfth. The pattern—

“The Majesty’s head of security was attacked,” Dean continued. “Blunt-force trauma.”

I thought of the man who’d pulled us into the security office. The one who had come to get Sloane’s father the night Camille was murdered.

“It fits the MO,” Dean continued. “New method. Numbers on his wrist.”

“Weapon?” I asked.

“A brick.”

You bashed his head in with a brick. You took a brick and wrapped your fingers around it, and rage exploded inside of you, and you—

“Cassie.” Dean cut my thought off. “There’s something else you should know.”

Did you get tired of waiting?
I asked the UNSUB silently.
Did something set you off? Did you get a rush out of watching this man go down? Did you savor the sound of his skull
cracking?
I couldn’t stop.
Each time, you feel more invincible, less fallible, less human.

“Cassie,” Dean said again. “The victim was still alive when they found him. He’s in a medically induced coma now, but he’s not dead.”

Dean’s words snapped me out of it.

You made a mistake,
I thought. This was a killer who didn’t
make
mistakes. Having left a victim alive would gnaw at him from the inside out.

“We need more information,” I said. “Pictures of the crime scene, defensive wounds on the victim, anything that might help us walk through it.”

“They don’t need us to walk through anything,” Dean said.

“Explain how that sentence could possibly be true.”

I turned in the direction of the voice that had spoken those words and saw Lia. I wondered how long she’d been standing there, watching the interplay between Dean and me.

“They don’t need us to profile it, because there was a witness.” Dean looked from Lia to me. “They’ve already apprehended the suspect.”

On-screen, Beau Donovan sat in an interrogation room. His hands were cuffed behind his back. He was staring straight ahead—not
at
Sterling and Briggs, but
through
them.

“This isn’t right,” Sloane said, plopping down on the floor beside the coffee table. A moment later, she popped back up, pacing. “It was supposed to happen on the
twelfth. It doesn’t add up.”

She didn’t say that she
needed
it to add up. She didn’t say that she needed this one thing to make sense.

“Mr. Donovan, a witness puts you at the crime scene, crouched over the victim, writing on his wrist.” Briggs was playing bad cop. It wasn’t so much in the words he said as in
the way he said them, like each part of that statement was a nail in Beau Donovan’s coffin.