All In: (The Naturals #3) Read online

  I stared at the picture, willing myself to see the UNSUB’s logic. “The message on the arrow,” I said. “Tertium. For the third time. In your mind, they’re all the same—drowning and watching someone burn alive and shooting the old man with an arrow, they’re the same thing to you.”

  But they’re not. That was what I couldn’t shake. The manner in which an UNSUB killed told a story about motivations and underlying psychological needs.

  What story are you telling me?

  “Camille Holt was strangled with her own necklace.” Dean moved on to the final picture. “Organized killers typically bring their own weapons to the scene.”

  “Yes,” Agent Sterling replied, “they do.”

  Strangling was personal. It was physical, far more about dominance than manipulation.

  “You carved the numbers into her skin,” I said out loud. “To punish her. To punish yourself for falling short of perfection.”

  You have a plan. Failure is not an option.

  “What’s the trajectory here?” Agent Sterling prompted.

  “More violent with each kill,” Dean said. “And more personal. He’s escalating.”

  Agent Sterling gave a brief nod. “Escalation,” she said, falling into lecture mode, “happens as a killer begins needing more with each kill. It can manifest in any number of ways. A killer who starts by stabbing victims once and then switches to stabbing them over and over is escalating. A killer who starts by killing once a week and then kills two victims in the same day is escalating. A killer who starts out targeting people who are easy to pick off and graduates to harder and harder targets is escalating.”

  “And,” Dean added, “a killer who moves on to progressively more violent means with each subsequent kill is escalating.”

  I saw the logic inherent in what they were saying. “Diminished returns,” I said. “Like a junkie shooting up and needing progressively stronger doses to get the same high each time.”

  “Sometimes,” Agent Sterling agreed. “Other times, escalation can reflect a loss of control, brought on by some kind of external stressor. Or it might reflect a killer’s growing belief that he’s invulnerable. As the UNSUB becomes more grandiose, so do the kills.”

  You’re escalating. I meditated on that for a moment. Why?

  I spoke the next question to cross my mind out loud. “If the UNSUB is escalating,” I said, “why would he stop?”

  “He couldn’t.” Dean’s voice was flat.

  Four bodies in four days, and then nothing.

  “Most serial killers don’t just stop,” Agent Sterling said. “Not unless someone or something stops them.”

  The way she said those words told me she was thinking about another case—about a particular killer she’d hunted once who had stopped. The one who got away.

  “The most likely explanation for the sudden and permanent cessation of serial murder,” Agent Sterling continued, “is that the UNSUB has been arrested on an unrelated crime or died.”

  I glanced at Judd. His daughter had been Agent Sterling’s best friend. Is your daughter’s killer dead, Judd? Avoiding detection? Was he arrested on an unrelated crime? I didn’t need to know much about the case to know that those were questions that haunted both Sterling and Judd.

  “What’s next?” I asked Agent Sterling, tamping down on the urge to go further into her psyche.

  “We have to figure out two things,” my mentor replied. “Why our UNSUB escalated, and why he or she stopped.”

  “No one stopped.”

  Dean, Agent Sterling, and I all whipped our heads to the doorway. Sloane stood there, her hair still tousled with sleep.

  “He can’t just stop,” Sloane said stubbornly. “It’s not done yet. The Grand Ballroom is next.”

  I could hear it in Sloane’s voice—she needed to be right. She needed to have done this one thing right.

  “Sloane,” Agent Sterling said gently, “there’s a chance—a good one—that we inadvertently tipped off the killer. We disrupted the pattern.”

  Sloane shook her head. “If you start at the origin of the spiral and work your way out, you can stop at any time. But if you start at the outside and work your way in, there’s a start, and there’s a finish. The pattern is set.”

  “Can you continue monitoring the Grand Ballroom?” Dean asked Sterling. He knew Sloane as well as I did. He knew what this meant to her—and he knew that when it came to numbers, her instincts were better than anyone’s.

  Agent Sterling’s reply was measured. “The casino’s owner accommodated us when we said the Grand Ballroom might be at risk, but the management’s good will is quickly running thin.” The fact that Agent Sterling refused to refer to Sloane’s father by name told me that she knew exactly who he was to Sloane.

  “Tell him it has to stay closed,” Sloane said fiercely. “Tell him the pattern isn’t complete yet. Make him listen.”

  He never listens to you. He’s never really seen you.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Agent Sterling said.

  Sloane swallowed. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll do better. I’ll find the answer, I promise, you just have to tell him.”

  “You don’t have to do better,” Agent Sterling said. “You’ve done everything we’ve asked of you. You’ve done everything right, Sloane.”

  Sloane shook her head and retreated to the living room. She pressed the button to lift the blackout curtain and stared at the calculations on the window. “I’ll find it,” she said again. “I promise.”

  “What next?” I asked Agent Sterling quietly. She, Dean, and I had retreated to the hallway outside the suite.

  “We can keep the Grand Ballroom closed for another day,” Agent Sterling said. “Maybe two. But the FBI and local police can’t afford to spare more than a couple of teams to monitor it. We have other leads to follow up on.”

  “Leads like Tory Howard?” I asked.

  Agent Sterling just arched an eyebrow. “I take it in the midst of Michael’s brawl you managed to overhear that part of our interview with Thomas Wesley?”

  I nodded. For Dean’s benefit, I filled in the blanks. “Wesley claimed that Tory was particularly gifted at hypnosis.”

  “Our attention has been focused on the numbers and the ballroom,” Sterling replied. She lowered her voice to keep Sloane from hearing her. “But it might be time to start pursuing other leads.”

  How had our UNSUB gotten Alexandra Ruiz to tattoo the number on her arm? How had she come to be facedown in that pool with no signs of a struggle?

  Manipulation. Influence.

  “Hypnosis,” Dean repeated. I could practically see him thinking that Tory Howard had lied to the police. She was hiding something.

  “I should go,” Agent Sterling said. “I told Briggs I wouldn’t be gone long. Dean, keep working on the profile. Why the UNSUB escalated, why the UNSUB stopped, anything else that jumps out at you.”

  “And me?” I asked.

  Sterling glanced back toward the living room. “I want you to get Sloane out of the suite and away from the case for a couple of hours. She has obsessive tendencies under the best of circumstances.”

  It went unsaid that these weren’t the best of circumstances.

  “Where should I take her?” I asked.

  Agent Sterling’s lips tilted slightly upward in a way that made me think I wouldn’t like her answer. “I believe Lia said something about wanting to go shopping?”

  “Is it me, or is it me?” Lia held up a top the color of a black opal. Even on the hanger, the cut was striking, with an asymmetrical neck and gathers at the waist. Before I could answer, Lia had picked up a second shirt: a dainty white peasant top. A skirt joined the shirts a moment later: brown, tan, and fitted.

  Each item she picked up looked like it belonged on a different person—and that was the point. Lia didn’t just try on clothing. She tried on personas.

  I killed a man when I was nine.

  I grew up in a cult.

  I had no way of
knowing which of those statements was true. And that was just the way Lia liked it.

  “See anything you like, Sloane?” I asked our other companion. Sloane hadn’t wanted to leave the suite. Ultimately, I’d lured her with the promise of espresso.

  In response to my question, Sloane shook her head, but I noticed her running a hand lightly over a white top marked with a trio of artistic purple blotches.

  “Try it on,” Judd suggested gruffly. Logically, a sixty-year-old retired marine shouldn’t have been able to fade into the background in a high-end boutique, but Judd had been standing still enough that I’d almost forgotten he was there. Agent Sterling had drafted him to accompany us, for safety.

  I truly did not want to think what might come of Michael and Dean being left in the suite alone.

  “Only seventy-one percent of visitors to Las Vegas play the odds while they’re here,” Sloane said, drawing her hand back from the light, silky fabric of the shirt. “More and more, people are coming for the shopping.”

  Lia picked up the top Sloane was looking at. “You’re trying it on,” she informed her. “Or I’m reneging on Cassie’s offer of espresso.”

  Sloane frowned. “Can she do that?”

  It quickly became apparent that, yes, Lia could. After Lia dragged Sloane to the dressing room, Judd turned to me. “You don’t see anything you like?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. In truth, I wasn’t feeling much like shopping. I’d agreed with Agent Sterling when she’d said we needed to get Sloane out of the suite. I wanted to be there for my roommate, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep from wondering what the UNSUB was doing right now.

  Why did you escalate? Why did you stop?

  I forced myself to pick a dress up off a nearby rack. It was simple: an A-line cut in a brilliant, royal blue. It wasn’t until I’d joined Lia and Sloane in the dressing room and tried it on that I realized it was the exact same shade as the shawl that had been wrapped around what were, in all likelihood, my mother’s remains.

  “Dance it off.” My mom is wrapped in a royal blue scarf, her red hair damp from cold and snow as she flips the car radio on and turns it up.

  This time, I couldn’t fight the memory. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  “You can do better than that,” she tells me, glancing over from the driver’s seat, where she’s dancing up a storm.

  I’m six or seven, and it’s so early in the morning that I can barely keep my eyes open. Part of me doesn’t want to dance it off this time.

  “I know,” my mom says over the music. “You liked the town and the house and our little front yard. But home isn’t a place, Cassie. Home is the people who love you most.” She pulls over to the side of the highway. “Forever and ever,” she murmurs, brushing the hair away from my face. “No matter what.”

  “No matter what,” I whisper, and she smiles, one of those slow-spreading, mysterious smiles that make me smile, too. The next thing I know, she’s turned the music up as loud as it can go, and the two of us are out of the car, and we’re dancing, right there on the side of the highway, in the snow.

  “Cassie?” Lia’s voice snapped me back to the present. For once, her voice was gentle.

  We don’t know the body is her, I thought, not for a fact. But staring at myself in the mirror, I didn’t believe that. My eyes popped against the blue of the dress. My hair looked a deeper, almost jewel-toned auburn.

  “That really is your color,” Lia told me.

  It was my mother’s color, too, I thought. If a person had known my mother, had loved her, had thought she was beautiful—this was the color they would have buried her in.

  Her necklace. Her color. An odd numbness descended over my body, my limbs heavy and my tongue thick in my mouth. I took the dress off and made my way back to the front of the store. Across the promenade, there was an old-fashioned candy shop. I fell back on the habits of my childhood, people-watching and telling myself stories about the customers.

  The woman buying herself lemon drops just broke up with her boyfriend. The boys looking at candy cigarettes hope their mother doesn’t realize they’ve tried the real thing. The little girl staring at a lollipop as big as her head missed her nap this afternoon.

  My phone rang. I answered, still watching the little girl across the way. She didn’t reach for the lollipop. She just stared at it, solemn-eyed and still.

  “Hello?”

  “Cassie.”

  It took me longer to recognize my father’s voice than it would have taken me to recognize Sterling’s or Briggs’s.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, my throat closing in around the words, my mind awash in all the things I’d been trying to forget. “Now really isn’t a good time.”

  Across the way, the solemn-eyed little girl eyeing the lollipop was joined by her father. He held out his hand. She took it. Simple. Easy.

  “I was just calling to see how you’re doing.”

  My father was trying. I could see that—but I could also see the ease with which the man across the way hoisted his little daughter onto his shoulders. She was three, maybe four years old. Her hair was red, brighter than mine, but it was easy enough to picture myself at that age.

  I hadn’t even known I had a father.

  “I’m okay,” I said, turning my back on the scene across the way. I didn’t need to know whether or not the father would surprise his daughter with the lollipop. I didn’t need to see the way she looked at him.

  “I got a call from the police this morning.” My father had a naturally deep voice.

  So you weren’t just calling to see if I was okay.

  “Cassie?”

  “I’m here.”

  “The forensics team was able to extract traces of blood from the shawl in which the skeleton was wrapped.”

  My mind took that information and ran with it. If her blood was on the shawl, you must have wrapped her in it at some point before you—before you—

  “Preliminary analysis suggests it’s the same blood type as your mother’s.” My father’s voice was so controlled that I wondered if he’d written this down, if he was just reading a script. “They’re running a DNA analysis. They’re not sure the sample will be big enough, but if it is, we should have answers in the next few days.” He wavered, just for a moment. “If they have to try to do a DNA analysis of the bones…” His voice broke. “That would take longer.”

  “Answers,” I said, fixating on that one word. It came out like an accusation. Her necklace. Her color. “I don’t just want to know if it’s her. I want to know who did this.”

  “Cassie.” That was all my father could say. His script had run out.

  I turned back toward the candy store. The little red-haired girl and her father were long gone. “I have to go.”

  I hung up the phone just in time for Lia to pounce.

  “I know,” I said, my voice taut. “It’s not my turn to have issues.”

  “Exhibit C as to why that’s the case?” Lia grabbed my arm and began pulling me toward the back of the store. “Sloane just made a beeline out the employees-only exit,” she said, her voice low. “And so did about five hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.”

  Who takes a stressed-out kleptomaniac shopping? I thought in self-recrimination as we slipped out the back exit. Seriously, who does that? The door closed behind us. Sloane was standing a few feet away, the silk shirt clutched in one hand and some kind of bracelet in the other.

  “Sloane,” I said, “we have to go back inside.”

  “It’s not just four bodies in four days,” Sloane said. “That’s what we missed. What I missed. January first, January second—those aren’t just days. They’re dates. 1/1. 1/2.”

  “I understand,” Lia said, so convincingly that I could almost believe she did. “You can tell us all about it after we get back inside before either Judd or the sales girl notices we’re gone.”

  “One, one, two.” Sloane continued on as if Lia had never spoken. “That’s the way
the sequence starts. 1/1. 1/2. Do you see? The pattern hasn’t been broken, because a body every day was never the pattern.” Sloane’s voice practically vibrated with intensity. “January first, second, third, and fourth—they’re all Fibonacci dates. Thirteen, 1/3. One hundred and forty-four, 1/4.” The words poured out of her mouth, faster and faster. “I just have to figure out the exact parameters he’s using….”

  At the end of the alleyway, another door opened. Lia thought fast, pulling Sloane and me back against the wall. She needn’t have bothered. The two people who exited were fully caught up in their own conversation.

  I couldn’t hear what either of them was saying, but I didn’t need Michael there to tell me that emotions were running high.

  Aaron Shaw. I registered Sloane’s brother’s presence a moment before I identified his companion. And Tory Howard.

  Aaron said something, pleading with her. She pulled back, then went back into the building, slamming the door. Aaron cursed—loud enough that I could make out the words—then kicked the metal door.

  “That’s my favorite curse word, too,” Sloane whispered.

  “Somebody,” Lia murmured, “has a temper.”

  The metal door banged open behind me, and I jumped. Judd stepped into the alleyway, scanning the perimeter for threats. I knew the exact second his eyes landed on Aaron Shaw.

  “Girls,” he said, “go back inside.”

  We did as we were told. The door closed behind us, leaving Judd in the alley.

  “Excuse me.” A man in a dark suit appeared in front of us. Security. He eyed the merchandise in Sloane’s hand and the direction from which we’d come. “I’m going to have to ask you girls to come with me.”

  Security had caught Sloane on camera leaving the store. The fact that she’d also returned of her own volition didn’t seem to negate their opinion that she’d shoplifted. I tried to trust that when Judd came back in from the alleyway and found us missing, he’d also find his way to the security office, where the three of us had been deposited in front of a man I recognized all too well.