All In: (The Naturals #3) Read online

  “The Fibonacci sequence is everywhere,” Sloane was saying. The man in the earpiece approached Mr. Shaw and bent to whisper something in his ear. The casino owner’s face remained carefully controlled, but when Michael followed my gaze, he must have seen something I didn’t. His eyebrows shot up.

  “It’s beautiful,” Sloane continued. “It’s perfection.”

  I met Michael’s eyes across the table. He held my gaze for a few seconds, then he raised one finger. “Check, please.”

  The UNSUB’s calling card had just taken on a whole new meaning. I’d assumed the numbers might have personal significance to the killer. But if they really were part of some famous mathematical sequence, there was a chance the point of the numbers was less about fulfilling our killer’s emotional needs and more about sending a message.

  What message? I smoothed a hand over my dress as we began the long walk back toward the main body of the hotel and casino. That your actions aren’t emotional? That they’re as predetermined as numbers plugged into an equation?

  I barely noticed the lights and sounds that bombarded our senses when we hit the casino floor.

  That you’re a part of the natural order, like pinecones and seashells and bees?

  Judd, Dean, and Sloane hung a left toward the lobby. Michael began veering right. “Shopping?” he asked Lia.

  Somehow, I doubted that Michael and Lia, if left to their own devices in Sin City, would spend their time perusing the shops. Judd must have been thinking the same thing, because he gave the two of them a look.

  “I’ll have you know I’m very fashionable,” Michael told Judd.

  You saw something when security came for Sloane’s father, Michael. You asked for the check an instant later. You’re not going shopping.

  Dean knew me well enough to recognize when I was profiling someone. “I’ll go with Sloane to call Sterling and Briggs,” he told me. I heard what he wasn’t saying: Go.

  Whatever Michael and Lia were about to do, I wanted in on it—and if part of the reason was that going back upstairs meant going back to the information that awaited me on that drive, Dean didn’t begrudge me that.

  When I was ready, he would be there.

  “Fair warning.” Lia eyed Dean and me before turning back to Judd. “If you make me go up to the suite right now, there’s a very good chance that I will give a full-length performance of The Ballad of Cassie and Dean. Complete with musical numbers.”

  “And there is a very good chance,” Michael added, “that I will be forced to accompany those musical numbers with a stunning display of interpretive dance.”

  Judd must have decided that it was in the best interest of team harmony to avoid that performance at all cost. “One hour,” he told Michael and Lia. “Don’t leave the building. Don’t separate. Don’t approach anyone related to this case.”

  “I’ll go with them,” I volunteered.

  Judd eyed me for a moment. Then he gave a brisk nod. “Make sure they don’t burn the place down.”

  It took exactly thirty seconds after we parted ways with the others for Michael to confirm my assumption that he hadn’t been overcome with a need to hit the shops. He came to a stop as we reached the edge of the casino floor. For several seconds, he stood there, his gaze moving methodically from one party of people to the next.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked him.

  “Curiosity. Irritation.” He zeroed in on a group of women coming toward us. “That mollified look people get when they’re offered free drinks in exchange for an inconvenience.” He hung a right. “This way.”

  As Lia and I followed, Michael continued scanning faces. As we worked our way from the slots to the poker tables, I could sense an emotional shift in the air, even if I couldn’t pinpoint it the way Michael could.

  “Incoming,” Michael murmured to Lia.

  Seconds later, a bouncer was glaring down at us. “IDs, please,” the man said. “You have to be twenty-one or over to be in this area.”

  “As luck would have it,” Lia told him, “it’s my twenty-first birthday.” She said those words with a coy smile and just the right level of underlying giddiness.

  “And your friends?” the bouncer asked Lia.

  Lia linked an arm through Michael’s. “We,” she said, “just met. And as for Miss Sweet-and-Innocent-Looking over there, I know for a fact that there are some pretty incriminating pictures of her twenty-first floating around on the interwebs, which is why my clothes will be staying on this evening.”

  Did she just…My cheeks flushed scarlet as I processed the fact that, yes, Lia had really just implied that my fictional twenty-first birthday had taken a Girls Gone Wild turn.

  The bouncer leaned to one side to get a better look at me. If anything, the mortified expression on my face seemed to sell Lia’s story.

  “I’m going to hurt you,” I muttered in Lia’s general direction.

  “You can’t hurt me,” she shot back brightly. “It’s my birthday.”

  The bouncer grinned. “Happy birthday,” he told Lia.

  Chalk one up for the professional liar.

  “But I’m still going to need to see some ID.” The bouncer turned back to Michael. “Company policy.”

  Michael shrugged. He reached into his back pocket and removed a wallet. He flashed an ID at the bouncer, who examined it carefully. It must have passed muster, because then he turned to Lia and me. “Ladies?”

  Lia opened her purse and handed him not one, but two IDs. He glanced at them and raised an eyebrow at Lia.

  “It’s not your birthday,” he said.

  Lia executed a delicate shrug. “What’s the fun of only turning twenty-one once?”

  With a snort, the bouncer handed the IDs back to her. “This area is closing,” he said. “For maintenance. If you’re looking for poker, you’ll want to hit the tables on the south side.”

  When we were a good ten feet away, Michael turned to Lia. “Well?”

  “Whatever this area’s closing for,” she replied, “it’s not maintenance.”

  I tried to process the fact that Lia had fake IDs for both of us, then caught sight of something about a hundred yards away.

  “There,” I told Michael. “By the sign that says restrooms.”

  A half-dozen security personnel were directing patrons away.

  “Come on,” Michael said, looping around to come at the blocked-off area from behind.

  “Back at the restaurant, a man came to get the hotel owner,” I said, processing the situation as we walked. “I’d bet a thousand dollars that he’s in private security.”

  There was a beat of silence during which I thought Michael might not reply. “Security was grim, but calm,” he said finally. “Shaw Senior, on the other hand, looked shaken, calculating, and like someone had just offered him a plate of rotting meat. In that order.”

  We came out on the other side of the slot machines. From this angle, it was clear that they were redirecting foot traffic long before people could reach the area surrounding the bathroom.

  January first, I thought suddenly. January second. January third.

  “Three bodies at three different casinos in three days.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken the words out loud until I felt Michael and Lia staring at me. “Today’s day four.”

  As if to mark my words, security parted to let Mr. Shaw past. He wasn’t alone. Even from a distance, I recognized the suit-clad pair with him.

  Sterling and Briggs.

  YOU

  1/1.

  1/2.

  1/3.

  1/4.

  You strip off your clothes and step into the shower, letting the scalding spray hit you in the chest. The water isn’t hot enough. It should hurt. It should burn.

  It doesn’t.

  There was blood this time.

  1/1.

  1/2.

  1/3.

  1/4.

  It’s her fault. If she’d done what she was supposed to do, there would have been no n
eed for blood.

  1/1.

  1/2.

  1/3.

  1/4.

  It’s her fault for seeing through you.

  It’s her fault for resisting.

  You close your eyes and remember coming up behind her. You remember closing your hands around the chain. You remember her fighting.

  You remember the moment when she stopped.

  You remember the blood. And when you open your eyes and look at the angry red surface of your own skin, you know that water this hot should hurt. You should burn.

  But you don’t.

  The smile spreads slowly over your face.

  1/1.

  1/2.

  1/3.

  1/4.

  Nothing can hurt you. Soon, they’ll see. Everyone will see.

  And you will be a god.

  I stayed up until two in the morning, sitting on the couch with my phone on the coffee table, waiting for Sterling and Briggs to call, waiting for them to tell us what they’d found in that bathroom.

  Maintenance issues, the bouncer had said.

  You didn’t call the FBI for maintenance.

  My mind went to the UNSUB. You do everything to a timetable. You’re not going to stop. You’re going to kill one a day, every day, until we catch you.

  “Can’t sleep?” a voice asked me quietly. I looked up to see Dean silhouetted in the doorway. He was wearing a threadbare white T-shirt, thin enough and tight enough that I could see the steady rise and fall of his chest underneath.

  “Can’t sleep,” I echoed. You can’t, either, I thought. A light sheen of sweat on Dean’s face told me that he’d been doing sit-ups or push-ups or some other form of physical exercise punishing enough in repetition to quiet the whispers in his own memories.

  The things his serial killer father had told him again and again.

  “I keep thinking about the fact that there was probably a body in that bathroom,” I said, sharing the source of my sleepless night to keep him from dwelling on his own. “I keep thinking that Briggs and Sterling are going to call.”

  Dean stepped out of the shadows. “We’re allowed to work active cases.” He moved toward me. “That doesn’t mean they’re obligated to use us.”

  Dean was telling himself that, as much as telling me. When I profiled, it was like stepping into someone else’s shoes. When Dean profiled, he gave in to a pattern of thought his early experiences had ingrained in him, a darkness he kept under lock and key. Neither one of us was good at pulling back. Neither one of us was good at waiting.

  “I just keep thinking about the first three victims,” I said, my voice rough in my throat. “I keep thinking that if we hadn’t gone to dinner, if we’d worked harder, if I’d…”

  “If you’d done what?”

  I could feel the heat of Dean’s body beside me.

  “Something.” The word tore its way out of my mouth.

  Agent Sterling had told me once that I was the biggest liability on the team because I was the one who really felt things. Michael and Lia were experts in masking their emotions and forcing themselves not to care. Dean had lived through horrors at the age of twelve that had convinced him that he was a ticking time bomb, that if he really felt things, he might turn into a monster like his father. And though Sloane wore her heart on her sleeve, she would always see patterns first and people second.

  But I felt the loss of every victim. I felt my own lack every time an UNSUB killed, because every time that I didn’t stop it, every time I didn’t see it coming, every time I got there too late—

  “If you’d done something,” Dean said softly, “your mother might still be alive.”

  I knew what kept Dean up at night, and he knew what I was thinking before I did. He knew why I felt the weight of blood on my hands every time we lost a victim because I wasn’t smart or fast enough.

  “I know it’s stupid.” My throat closed in around the words. “I know what happened to my mom wasn’t my fault.”

  Dean picked up my hand, holding it in his, sheltering it in his.

  “I know it, Dean, but I don’t believe it. I won’t ever believe it.”

  “Believe me,” he said simply.

  I laid my hand flat on his chest. His hand closed around mine, holding on to it and on to me.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Dean said.

  I could feel him willing me to believe that. My fingers curled inward, his shirt bunching in my hand as I pulled him toward me. My mouth came down over his.

  The harder I kissed him, the harder he kissed back. The closer we were, the closer I needed him to be.

  You can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep, and we’re here, in the dead of night—

  I caught his lip in my teeth.

  Dean was gentle. Dean was sweet. Dean was self-contained and always in control—but tonight, he buried his hands in my hair and pulled my head back. He captured my mouth with his.

  Believe me, he’d said.

  I believed that he knew what it was like to be broken. I believed that I wasn’t broken to him.

  “You’re still thinking about what you saw downstairs.” Dean ran his fingers gently through my hair, my head on his chest. The threadbare fabric of his shirt was soft against my cheek, the victim of too many washes.

  I stared at the ceiling. “I am.” The sound of his heartbeat filled the silence. I wondered if he could hear the sound of mine. “Assuming the Majesty’s ‘maintenance issue’ really was another body, that’s four murders in four days.”

  What happens on day five? We both knew the answer to that question.

  “Why the Fibonacci sequence?” I asked instead.

  “Maybe I’m the type of person who needs things to add up,” Dean said. “Each number in the Fibonacci sequence is the sum of the two previous numbers. Maybe what I’m doing is part of a pattern—each kill exceeding the last.”

  “Do you like it?” I wondered out loud. “What you’re doing? Does it bring you joy?”

  Dean’s fingers stilled in my hair.

  Does it bring you joy?

  I realized, then, how that question would have sounded to Dean. I sat up and turned to face him.

  “You’re nothing like him, Dean.”

  I ran my hand along his jaw. Dean’s greatest fear was that he had something of his father in him. Psychopathy. Sadism.

  “I know that,” he told me.

  You know it, I thought, but you don’t believe it.

  “Believe me,” I whispered.

  He cupped a hand around my neck, and he nodded—just once, just a little. My chest tightened, but inside me, something else gave.

  You’re nothing like your father.

  What happened to my mother wasn’t my fault.

  My heart in my throat, I stood. I went to get the drive with my mother’s files on it. And then I walked back and pressed it into his hand.

  “You open the files,” I told him, my voice dropping to a lower pitch as it got caught in my throat. “You open them, because I can’t.”

  The skeleton is wrapped in a royal blue shawl.

  I sat in front of the computer with Dean beside me, scrolling from one picture to the next, my finger feeling heavier with each click.

  There’s a long-dead flower pressed into the bones of her left hand.

  The necklace is around her neck, the chain tangled in her rib cage.

  Empty sockets stared back at me from a skull devoid of human flesh. I stared at the contours, waiting for a spark of recognition, but all I felt was bile rising in the back of my throat.

  You removed the flesh from her bones. Forensic analysis suggested the removal had been done post mortem, but that was cold comfort. You destroyed her. You eradicated her.

  Dean brought his hand to rest on the back of my neck. I’m here.

  I swallowed back the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm me. Once. Twice. Three times—and then I scrolled on to the next picture. There were dozens of them: pictures of the dirt road on which she�
�d been buried. Pictures of the construction equipment that had uncovered a plain wooden casket.

  You wrapped her bones in a blanket. You buried her with flowers. You gave her a coffin….

  I forced myself to breathe and switched from the pictures to reading the official report.

  According to the medical examiner, there was a notch on the outside of one of her arm bones, a defensive wound where a knife had literally cut her to the bone. Laboratory results indicated that the bones had been treated with some kind of chemical prior to burial. That made the remains hard to date, but crime scene analysis put the time of burial within days of my mother’s disappearance.

  You killed her, then you erased her. No skin on the bones. No hair on her head. Nothing.

  Dean’s fingers kneaded gently at the muscles at the back of my neck. I turned my gaze from the computer screen to him. “What do you see?”

  “Care.” Dean paused. “Honor. Remorse.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn’t want to know if the killer had felt remorse. I didn’t care that she’d mattered enough to him that he hadn’t just flung her body down in some hole.

  You don’t get to bury her. You don’t get to honor her, you sick son of a bitch.

  “Do you think she knew him?” My voice sounded distant to my own ears. “That’s one explanation for what we’re seeing, isn’t it? He killed her in a frenzy and regretted it after the fact.”

  The blood-splattered dressing room in my memory spoke of domination and anger, the burial site, as Dean had said, of honor and care. Two sides of the same coin—and taken together, the suggestion was that this wasn’t a random act of violence.

  You took her with you. I’d always known that my mother’s killer had removed her from the room. Whether she was alive or dead when he’d done so, the police hadn’t been able to say, though they’d known from day one that she’d lost enough blood that her chances of survival were next to nonexistent. You took her because you needed her with you. You couldn’t leave her behind for someone else to bury.

  “He might have known her.” Dean’s voice brought me back to the present. I noticed that this once, with this case, he didn’t use the word I. “Or he might have watched her from afar and convinced himself that the interaction went both ways. That she knew he was watching. That he knew her the way no one else ever would.”