My mom had made her living as a “psychic.” Like me, she’d been good at reading people—good enough to convince them that she had a line to “the other side.”
Did she do a reading for you? Did you go to one of her shows?
I racked my memory, but it was a blur of faces in the crowd. My mother had done a lot of readings. She’d done a lot of shows. We’d moved around often enough that there was no point in forming connections. No friends. No family.
No men in her life.
“Cassie, look at this.” Dean drew my attention back to the screen. He zoomed in on one of the pictures of the coffin. There was a design etched into the surface of the wood: seven small circles, forming a heptagon around what appeared to be a plus sign.
Or, I thought, thinking about remorse and burial rituals and the monster who’d carved that symbol, a cross.
Sleep came for me in the dead of night. I dreamt of my mother’s eyes, wide-set and rimmed in liner that made them look almost impossibly large. I dreamt of the way she’d shooed me out of the dressing room that day.
I dreamt of the blood and woke the next morning to something sticky dripping onto my forehead, one drop of liquid at a time. My eyes flew open.
Lia stood over me, a straw in one hand and a can of soda in the other. She eased her finger off the top of the straw and let another drop of soda hit my forehead.
I wiped it off and sat up, careful not to wake Dean, who lay beside me on the couch, still dressed in his clothes from the night before.
Lia put the straw in her mouth and sucked the remaining liquid out before plopping it back down in her soda. Smirking, she eyed the sleeping Dean, then raised an eyebrow at me. When that failed to engender a response, she made a quiet tsk-ing sound with her tongue. I stood up, which forced her to take a step back.
“It’s not what you think,” I told her, my voice muted.
Lia twirled the straw contemplatively in between her middle finger and her thumb. “So you two weren’t up until the wee hours of the morning looking at the information on that drive Agent Sterling gave you?”
“How did you—”
Lia cut off the question by turning my still-open laptop to face me. “Fascinating reading.”
I felt a sinking sensation deep in my gut. Lia knows. She read the file, and she knows.
I waited for Lia to say something else about the files on that computer. She didn’t. Instead, she strolled toward the bedroom she’d claimed as her own. After a long moment, I followed, just as she’d intended me to. We ended up out on the balcony.
Lia closed the door behind us, then hopped up on the railing. We were forty stories off the ground, and she sat there, perfectly balanced, staring me down.
“What?” I said.
“If you mention a word of what I’m about to tell you to Dean, I will disavow any knowledge of this conversation.” Lia’s tone was casual, but I believed every word of it.
I braced myself for an attack.
“You make him happy.” Lia narrowed her eyes slightly. “As happy as Dean can be,” she modified. “We’d have to ask Sloane for the exact numbers, but I’m estimating a two hundred percent reduction in brooding since the two of you embarked on…this thing of yours.”
Dean was Lia’s family. If she had a choice between saving every other person on the face of the planet and saving Dean, she would choose Dean.
She hopped off the railing and gripped my arm lightly. “I like you.” Her grip tightened, as if she found that admission mildly distasteful to say.
I like you, too, I almost said, but didn’t want to chance that she’d see those words as a shade short of the truth.
“I missed you,” I said instead—the same words I’d said to Sloane. “You, Michael, Sloane, Dean. This is home.”
Lia looked at me for a moment. “Whatever,” she said, pushing down any emotion my words had wrought with a graceful little shrug. “The point is that I don’t hate you,” she continued magnanimously, “so when I say that you need to put on your big-girl panties and woman up, I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
“Excuse me?” I said, pulling my arm from her grasp.
“You have Mommy issues. I get it, Cassie. I get that this is hard, and I get that you have every right to deal with the whole body-showing-up thing in your own way and time. But fair or not, no one here has the emotional bandwidth to deal with the Continuing Woes of Cassie’s Murdered Mother.”
I felt like she’d slammed the heel of her hand into my throat. But even as I weathered the blow, I knew Lia had said those words for a reason. You’re not cruel. Not like that.
“Sloane slipped two pairs of chopsticks into her sleeve last night at the end of the meal.” Lia’s statement confirmed my gut instinct. “Not disposable ones. The nice ones they had on the table.”
In addition to being our resident statistician, Sloane was also our resident klepto. The last time I’d seen her take something, she’d been stressed out about a confrontation with the FBI. For Sloane, sticky fingers were a sign that her brain was short-circuiting with emotions she couldn’t control.
“Let’s call that Exhibit A,” Lia suggested. “Exhibit B would be Michael. Do you have any idea what kind of absolute mind-warp going home is for him?”
I thought of the conversation I’d overheard between Lia and Michael the day before. “Yes,” I said, turning back to face Lia again. “I do.”
There was a beat of silence as she processed the truth she heard in those words.
“You think you do,” Lia said softly. “But you couldn’t.”
“I heard you guys talking yesterday,” I admitted.
I expected Lia to have a knee-jerk reaction to those words, but she didn’t. “Once upon a time,” she said, her voice even as she turned to stare out at the Strip, “someone used to give me gifts for being a good girl, the way Michael gets ‘gifts’ from his father. You might think you understand what’s going on in Michael’s head right now, but you don’t. You can’t profile this, Cassie. You can’t puzzle it out.”
When she turned back to face me, the expression on her face was flippant. “What I’m saying here is that Michael is about one downward spiral–induced bad decision away from eloping with a showgirl, and Sloane has been acting weird—even for Sloane—since we got here. We are officially at issue capacity, Cassie. So I’m sorry, but you don’t get to be effed up right now.” She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger. “It’s not your turn.”
If Lia had done to Michael what she’d just done to me, he would have lashed back at her. If she’d done it to Sloane, Sloane would have been crushed—but I wasn’t. Sooner or later, my grief would catch up to me. But Lia had given me a reason to fight it for that much longer. She wasn’t wrong about Michael. She wasn’t wrong about Sloane. Someone had to hold them together. Someone had to hold us together.
And I needed that person to be me.
My gut said Lia knew that. You could have been nicer about it, I thought—but if she had been, she wouldn’t be Lia.
I stayed out on the balcony for another ten minutes after Lia sauntered off. When I finally made my way back inside, Michael, Lia, and Dean were gathered around the kitchen table—and so was Agent Briggs. He was dressed in plain-clothes, which told me the FBI was making an effort at keeping these visits on the down low. The fact that Briggs’s version of plain clothes still made him look like a cop was perfectly reflective of his personality: hyperfocused, ambitious.
Briggs played to win.
“There’s been another murder.” Briggs had apparently been waiting for my arrival to make that announcement. None of the four of us made an attempt at looking surprised. “That makes the Apex, the Wonderland, the Desert Rose, and the Majesty, all in a matter of four days. We may be looking at someone who has a grudge against the casinos or the people who profit from them.”
Dean looked toward a file Briggs held in his hand. “The latest victim?”
Briggs tossed the folder down onto the
kitchen table. I flipped it open. Glassy blue eyes stared back at me, impossibly large in a heart-shaped face.
“Is that…” Michael started to say.
“Camille Holt,” I finished, unable to pull my eyes away.
You like being underestimated, Camille, I thought dully, bringing my hand to touch the edge of the picture. You’re fascinated by the way the mind works, the way it breaks, the way people survive things no one should be able to survive.
Her skin was tinged a ghastly gray; the whites of her wide-set eyes were marked by blots of red—capillaries that had burst as she’d struggled against her assailant.
You struggled. You fought. She was lying on her back on a white marble floor, strawberry blond hair spread out in a halo around her head—but I knew in my gut that she’d fought, viciously, with an almost feral strength her assailant wouldn’t have been expecting.
“Asphyxiation,” Dean commented. “She was strangled.”
“Murder weapon?” I asked. There was a difference between strangling someone with a wire and strangling them with a rope.
Briggs took out a snapshot of an evidence bag. Inside was a necklace—the thick metal chain Camille had worn looped twice around her neck the night before.
In my mind, I could see her, sitting at the bar, one leg dangling off the stool. I could see her turning toward us and walking toward the exit.
I could see Aaron Shaw watching her go.
“You’ll want to talk to the casino owner’s son.” Michael’s thoughts were perfectly in line with my own. “Aaron Shaw. His interest in Ms. Holt wasn’t professional.”
“What did you see?” Briggs asked.
Michael shrugged. “Attraction. Affection. A sharp edge of tension.”
What kind of tension? I didn’t get the chance to follow up before Sloane popped into the kitchen and went to pour herself some coffee. Briggs eyed her warily. Sloane’s tendency toward high-speed babbling when caffeinated was a thing of legend.
“I called you last night,” Sloane told him reproachfully. “I called and called, and you didn’t answer. Ergo, I get coffee, and you don’t get to complain.”
I thought about the chopsticks Sloane had stolen the night before. You needed Briggs to pick up your call. You needed to be recognized. You needed to be heard.
“There was another murder,” Briggs told Sloane.
“I know.” Sloane stared at the coffee in her hands. “Two. Three. Three. Three.”
“What did you say?” Briggs asked sharply.
“The number on the corpse. It’s 2333.” Sloane finally came to sit at the table with the rest of us. “Isn’t it?”
Briggs pulled a new picture out of the file. Camille’s wrist: 2333 had been carved into it. Literally. The bloody numbers were slightly jagged. From a henna tattoo to this. The numbers had always been a message—but this? This was violent. Personal.
“Was she alive when the UNSUB did this?” I asked.
Briggs shook his head. “Postmortem. There was a compact in the victim’s purse. We believe the UNSUB broke it and used one of the shards to carve the numbers in her wrist.”
I shifted from Camille’s perspective to her attacker’s. You’re a planner. If this was what you’d intended all along, you would have brought something with you to do the job.
That left me with two questions: first, what had the plan been, and second, why had the UNSUB deviated from it?
What went wrong? I asked the killer silently. Did she thwart your plan somehow? Was she harder to manipulate than the others? I thought about the fact that Camille had been present at the crime scenes for two of the victims. Did you know her?
“This is personal.” Dean’s thoughts were exactly in line with my own. “The other targets might have been selected for convenience. But not this one.”
“That was Agent Sterling’s take as well,” Briggs said. He turned back to Sloane. “You decoded the numbers?”
Sloane grabbed a pen out of Agent Briggs’s pocket, flipped the folder closed, and started scrawling numbers on the outside of the folder, talking as she wrote. “The Fibonacci sequence is a series of integers where each number is derived by adding the two that come before it. Most people believe it was discovered by Fibonacci, but the earliest appearances of the sequence are in Sanskrit writings that predate Fibonacci by hundreds of years.”
Sloane set the pen down. There were fifteen numbers on the page:
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377
“I didn’t see it at first,” she continued. “The pattern picks up mid-integer.”
“Pretend for a moment,” Lia told her, “that we’re all very, very slow.”
“I’m not very good at pretending,” Sloane told her seriously. “But I think I can do that.”
Michael choked back a snort.
Sloane picked the pen back up and put it down under the number thirteen. “It starts here,” she said, underlining four numbers, then inserting a slash before repeating the process.
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 3/4 55 8/9 144/ 233 377
2333. The image of Camille’s wrist rose to the surface of my mind, like a drowned man bobbing to the surface of a lake. You break the glass. You press the jagged edge to her flesh, carving in the numbers.
“Why this sequence?” I said. “And why make it this hard to see? Why not start at the beginning, with 0112?”
“Because,” Dean said slowly, “this knowledge has to be earned.”
Briggs glanced at us, one after the other. “Agent Sterling and I will be spending the afternoon talking to potential witnesses. If you have any names to add to that list—besides Aaron Shaw—now would be the time to speak up.”
At the mention of Aaron’s name, Sloane’s hands curved tightly around her cup of coffee. Michael cocked his head to the side and stared at her. An instant later, he caught me watching him and raised an eyebrow at me in an unspoken challenge.
You know something’s up with Sloane, I thought, and you know that I know what it is.
“I assume you’ve gathered that Camille was out with Tory Howard last night?” Dean asked Briggs.
Briggs gave a brief nod. “We talked with Tory briefly yesterday. We’ll go back for seconds today, then work our way through the rest of our list.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to take me with you when you go to talk to this fine collection of potentially homicidal individuals?” Lia batted her eyes at Agent Briggs.
Briggs withdrew four earpieces from his pocket and laid them down on the table. They were joined, a moment later, by a tablet from his briefcase. “Video and audio feeds,” he told us. “Agent Sterling and I are wired. Within a four-mile radius, you’ll see what we see. You’ll hear what we hear. If you pick up on something you think we might have missed, you can text or call. Otherwise, I want you studying up on our interrogation techniques.”
Lia, Michael, Dean, and I reached for earpieces in unison.
Sloane turned to Briggs. “What about me?” she asked quietly.
There were four earpieces and five of us.
“Four casinos in four days,” Briggs said. “I need you”—he put enough emphasis on those words to tell me he’d picked up on the vulnerability in Sloane’s tone—“to figure out where this killer is going to strike next.”
YOU
The roulette wheel spins. The players watch with bated breath. You watch the players. Like ants in an ant farm, they’re predictable.
Some bet on black.
Some bet on red.
Some are hesitant. Some believe chance favors the bold.
You could tell them the exact odds of winning. You could tell them that chance favors no man. Red or black, it doesn’t matter.
The house always wins.
You expel a breath, long and slow. Let them have their fun. Let them believe that Lady Luck might smile down on them. Let them keep their games of chance.
Your game—the one they don’t even know they’re playing—is a game of skill.
&nb
sp; 1/1.
1/2.
1/3.
1/4.
You know what comes next. You know the order. You know the rules. This is bigger than ants in an ant farm could ever imagine.
No one can stop you.
You are Death.
You are the house. And the house always wins.
Lia perched on the back of the couch, one leg stretched out along its length, the other dangling over the side. Dean sat on the sofa in front of her, his forearms resting on his knees, staring at the tablet we’d propped up on the coffee table.
“Anything yet?” I asked, taking a seat beside him.
Dean shook his head.
“There.” Lia’s posture never changed, but her eyes lit up. On the tablet, a shot of a hand dominated the screen as Briggs reoriented the camera masquerading as a pen in his suit pocket.
“Michael—” I started to call out.
Michael appeared before I could say anything else. “Let me guess,” he said, producing a flask and taking a swig. “Showtime.”
My eyes lingered on the flask.
Dean put one hand on my knee. If Lia and I had noticed Michael skating around the edges of the dark place, Dean almost certainly had as well. He’d known Michael for longer than I had, and he was telling me not to press the issue.
Without a word, I slipped in the earpiece Agent Briggs had given me and turned my attention back to the video feed.
On the screen, we saw what Agent Briggs saw—a stage with massive columns on either side. As he got closer to the stage, I recognized the person standing in front of it, examining the lighting.
Tory Howard was wearing a black tank and jeans, her hair pulled into a ponytail that was neither high nor low. No muss. No fuss. She either didn’t care about the image she projected or she went out of her way to project an image centered on that ideal.
When she saw Briggs, she wiped her hands on the front of her jeans and met him in the middle aisle. “Agents,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”
All In: (The Naturals #3) Page 7