All In: (The Naturals #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I walked over to the wall with the colored objects sitting—large to small—on the glass shelf. I looked past the sheets Sloane had put up for January, for February, for March, for April.

  Two dates in May.

  “May fifth,” I said out loud, my entire body tensing. “And May eighth.”

  Six years, this May, Judd had told me. But that wasn’t all he’d told me. He’d told me the date on which Scarlett was murdered. May eighth.

  I didn’t remember walking to the kitchen, but the next thing I knew, I was there, towel and all, dripping on the floor.

  Michael’s gaze went to my face. Dean went very still. Even Lia seemed to sense that now wasn’t the moment to make a comment about my state of undress.

  “Judd,” I said.

  “Everything okay there, Cassie?” He was standing at the counter, doing a crossword.

  All I could think was that the answer had to be no. When I asked, Judd had to say no.

  “The UNSUB who killed Scarlett,” I said. “Nightshade. How many people did he kill?” I realized, distantly, that the question I’d asked couldn’t be answered with a yes or a no.

  Judd’s expression wavered, just for an instant. I thought he would refuse to answer, but he didn’t.

  “As far as we know,” he said, his voice hoarse, “he killed nine.”

  YOU

  Everything can be counted. Everything but true infinity has its end.

  Without the knife in hand, all you can do is lightly trace the pattern on the surface of your shirt. You can feel the cuts underneath, feel the promise you etched into your own skin.

  Around. Up and down. Left and right.

  Seven plus two is nine.

  Nine is the number. And Nine is what you were always meant to be.

  Serial killers don’t just stop.

  Agent Sterling had been the one to tell me that. I’d realized at the time that she had been thinking about the UNSUB who had killed Scarlett Hawkins.

  I just hadn’t realized that Scarlett was Nightshade’s ninth.

  As Judd stood there, staring at and through me, my brain regurgitated everything I’d ever overheard about his daughter’s death. Briggs and Sterling had been assigned to the Nightshade case shortly after they’d arrested Dean’s father. They’d gone after the killer hard. And in retaliation, he’d come after them.

  He’d killed their friend, a member of their team—one who was never supposed to be on the front lines—in her own lab.

  They never caught him. I couldn’t stop the words from cycling through my mind, over and over again. And serial killers don’t just stop.

  New York, eleven years ago.

  D.C., five and a half.

  And now Vegas.

  Dean came to stand beside Judd. Neither of them was much for words. I could see, in the way they stood, echoes of the man who’d lost his daughter and the twelve-year-old boy he’d put aside his grief to save.

  “We need to look up the dates of the rest of Nightshade’s kills.” When Dean spoke, it wasn’t to offer comfort. Judd wasn’t the type you comforted.

  You don’t want comfort. You never have. You want the man who killed your daughter, and you want him dead.

  I understood that, better than most.

  “We don’t need to look up anything.” Judd’s voice was hard. “I know the dates.” His chin wavered slightly, his lips curving inward toward his teeth. “March fourth. March fifth. March twenty-first.” I could hear the marine in his tone as he spoke, like he was reading a list of fallen comrades. “April second. April fourth.”

  “Stop.” Sloane came over and grabbed his hand. “Judd,” she said, her heart in her eyes, “you can stop now.”

  But he couldn’t. “April fifth. April twenty-third. May fifth.” He swallowed, and even as his face tightened, I could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “May eighth.”

  The muscles in Judd’s arms tensed. For a moment, I thought he was going to push Sloane away, but instead, his fingers curved around hers. “The dates match?” he asked her.

  Sloane nodded, and once she started, she couldn’t stop nodding. “I wish they didn’t,” she said fiercely. “I wish I’d never seen it. I wish—”

  “Don’t,” Judd told her sharply. “Don’t you ever apologize for being what you are.”

  He gently returned her hand to her side. Then he looked around at each of us, one by one. “I should be the one to tell Ronnie and Briggs,” he said. “And I should do it in person.”

  “You go.” Lia beat me to responding. “We’ll be fine.” Lia rarely spoke in sentences that short. The look on her face reminded me that Judd had been taking care of Lia since she was thirteen years old.

  “I don’t want you poking around in the Nightshade file.” Judd stared at Lia as he issued that order, but it was clear he was talking to all of us. “I know how you all work. I know the second I walk out the door, you’ll be wanting to have Sloane pull up the details so you can dive in headfirst, but I’m pulling rank.” Judd leveled a hard stare at each of us in turn. “You go near that file without my say-so, and I’ll have you on the next plane back to Quantico, this case be damned.”

  There wasn’t a person in the room who thought Judd made idle threats.

  Room service arrived fifteen minutes after Judd left. None of us touched the food.

  “Judd was right,” Michael said, breaking the silence that had descended in Judd’s wake. “It’s too early in the day for champagne.” He walked over to the bar and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He got down five glasses.

  “You really think this is the appropriate time to drink?” Dean asked him.

  Michael stared at him. “Redding, I think this is the very definition of ‘an appropriate time to drink.’” He turned to the rest of us. I shook my head. Lia held up two fingers.

  “Sloane?” Michael asked. It was indicative of his personality that he rationed her caffeine intake, but didn’t bat an eye at the thought of offering her hard liquor.

  “In Alaska, you can be criminally prosecuted for feeding alcohol to a moose.”

  “I’m going to take that as a no,” Michael said.

  “In America,” Dean pointed out, “you can be criminally prosecuted for underage drinking.” Lia and Michael ignored him. I knew Dean well enough to know that his mind wasn’t really on the bottle of whiskey. It was on Judd.

  So was mine.

  Without details, I could only sketch out the barest bones of a profile of the UNSUB who’d killed Judd’s daughter. The FBI came after you hard. You went after them personally. That told me we were dealing with someone with no fear, who lived to put fear into others. Someone who saw killing as a game. Someone who liked to win. More likely male than female, even though the name Nightshade strongly suggested the killer’s weapon of choice had been poison, which was more typically associated with women.

  Unable to get further than that, I took a step back and viewed this from the other side of the equation. I knew very little about Nightshade, but I knew a few things about Judd’s daughter. Months ago, Agent Sterling had told me a story. We’d been held captive at the time, and she’d told me that as a kid, her best friend, Scarlett, was continually coming up with ridiculously dire scenarios and brainstorming how to get out of them. You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin with a sleeping cobra on your chest, she would say. What do you do?

  On another occasion, Judd had indicated that a school-aged Scarlett had once convinced a young Veronica Sterling to accompany her on a “scientific expedition” that involved some minor (or possibly not-so-minor) cliff-scaling.

  You were fearless and funny and too stubborn to be talked out of anything once your mind was set, I thought, reading between the lines of what I knew. Scarlett had grown up to work in the FBI labs. Were you working the Nightshade case? I asked her silently. Is that why you were in the lab that night? I thought of Sloane getting a puzzle on the brain and refusing to let go until the numbers made sense. Was that what you were like?
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  Without reading the file, there was no way for me to know. Did you see your killer, Scarlett? Did he watch you die? The questions kept coming, one after another. Was it fast, or was it slow? Did you call for help? Did you think about cobras and glass coffins? About Sterling and Briggs and Judd?

  A knock at the door pulled me from my thoughts. I shivered. Like a kid saying Bloody Mary into a mirror, part of me felt like I might have pulled the dark thing toward me, just by thinking his name.

  Dean stood and walked toward the door, Michael and Lia on his heels. Dean stared through the peephole. “What do you want?” Whoever was on the other side, Dean wasn’t feeling friendly.

  “I have something for you.”

  The voice was muffled slightly by the door, but I recognized it anyway.

  “Aaron?” Sloane came to stand beside Dean. For a split second, her face lit up. I saw the exact moment she remembered that her half brother might not be all that different from the father they shared.

  “Sloane.” Aaron spoke to her now, instead of Dean. “I know what you do for the FBI. My father told me.”

  I didn’t trust Sloane’s father—and that made it very hard to trust Aaron.

  “I don’t like it,” Aaron continued. “This isn’t the kind of life I want for you. This isn’t the conversation I want us to be having. But I need to get something to the FBI.”

  Dean’s eyes darted to Lia. She nodded. Aaron was telling the truth.

  “Then give it to the police,” Dean barked back, still not inclined to open the door.

  “My father owns the police.” Aaron pitched his voice lower. I struggled to hear him. “And he wants Beau Donovan in jail.”

  At the mention of Beau’s name, I took a step forward. What Aaron was saying fit with what Agent Briggs had said about the powers that be wanting a neat resolution to their little serial killer problem.

  “Please,” Aaron said. “The longer I stand in the hallway, the better the chances someone catches me on a security feed, and then we’ll have bigger problems than the fact that you don’t trust me.”

  Dean walked into the kitchen. He opened one drawer, then another. A moment later, he went back to the front door.

  Carrying a butcher’s knife.

  Dean opened the door. Aaron stepped in, eyed Dean’s knife, and let the door shut behind him.

  “I appreciate that someone’s watching out for Sloane,” Aaron told Dean. “But I also feel compelled to point out that a knife like that wouldn’t do much good if the person on the other side of this door had a gun.”

  All that glitters is not gold, I thought, taking in the warning embedded in Aaron’s words. You’re used to the people around you being armed. The world you grew up in is a dangerous, glittering place.

  Dean gave Sloane’s brother a dead-eyed stare. “You might be surprised.”

  Aaron must have seen something there that sent a chill down his spine. “I’m not armed,” he assured Dean, “and I’m not here to hurt anyone. You can trust me.”

  “Not an incredibly trusting fellow, Dean,” Michael said lightly. “Must come from being raised by a psychotic serial killer with a fondness for knives.” He gave Aaron a steely smile. “Do come in.”

  Aaron’s eyes sought out Lia. “You’re the one who can detect lies?” he asked.

  “Who?” Lia said. “Me?”

  “I’m not armed,” Aaron said again, staring her straight in the eye. “And I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

  Without another word, he took a seat in the living room. Dean sat opposite him. I stayed standing.

  “As you are doubtlessly aware,” Aaron started, “Beau Donovan and I got into an altercation last night.”

  The debacle backstage at Tory’s show seemed like a lifetime ago—and given what we’d learned since then, almost painfully insignificant.

  “You brought another girl to Tory’s show.” Sloane didn’t look at Aaron as she spoke. She stared at the window behind him—at her map and her calculations and the Fibonacci spiral. “Beau considers Tory his sister. I suspect a nontrivial percentage of his demographic would have reacted similarly, under such circumstances.” Then, as if that weren’t clear enough, Sloane elaborated. “According to my calculations, there was a ninety-seven-point-six percent chance you deserved to be punched in the nose.”

  Aaron’s lips tilted upward slightly. “I heard you were good with numbers.”

  I couldn’t detect even a hint of criticism in Aaron’s tone. From Michael’s expression, I didn’t think he caught any, either. My mind went to Sloane saying that she wanted Aaron to like her.

  I studied Aaron. You do like her. You want to know her.

  “How about we focus on this mythical thing you need us to give to the FBI?” Lia came and sat on the arm of Dean’s chair. She didn’t like strangers, and she didn’t trust them—especially not with Sloane.

  Aaron reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear case. Inside, there was a DVD. “Security footage,” he said. “Taken from a pawn shop across the street from where Victor McKinney was attacked.”

  Lia’s silence seemed to confirm that the DVD was what Aaron had said it was.

  “Victor was our head of security,” Aaron continued. “From his perspective—and my father’s—Beau Donovan was a security risk.”

  Beau had attacked Aaron. He hadn’t done any damage, but to a man like Grayson Shaw, I doubted that mattered. If Sloane’s father viewed Sloane as little more than an inconvenient possession, his legitimate son would be viewed not just as property, but as an extension of himself.

  I’d seen that dynamic before—with Dean’s father.

  “If you’ll play the footage, you’ll see that Victor was the one who followed Beau, not the other way around. Victor was the one who slammed Beau against a wall. And Victor,” Aaron made himself finish, “is the one who pulled a gun and put it to the side of Beau’s head.”

  Dean absorbed that information in a heartbeat. “Your head of security never had any intention of pulling the trigger.”

  Aaron leaned forward. “Beau didn’t know that.”

  Sloane’s father liked issuing orders and ultimatums. It was a small hop to threats. Beau wasn’t a person who would take well to being threatened. He had a temper. The moment the gun came out, he would have fought back.

  “He grabbed a loose brick,” Aaron said.

  Blunt-force trauma.

  “Self-defense,” I said out loud. If Victor McKinney had drawn a gun on Beau, it was a clear case of self-defense. And if Aaron had seen the connection between Beau’s arrest and what the Majesty’s head of security had been sent to do, Grayson Shaw almost certainly had as well.

  “How could your father let Beau take the fall for the first four murders?” I asked. “Doesn’t he care that there’s a serial killer still out there?”

  “My guess?” Aaron replied. “My father thinks he and the FBI have scared the original killer away. He’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. As it stands, Beau Donovan will never lay hands on me again, and no one is questioning why the Majesty’s head of security went after Beau.”

  “Why bring this to us?” Lia asked. “Daddy Dearest isn’t going to be very happy with you.”

  “He rarely is.” Aaron stood, shrugging off the words like they meant nothing—which, of course, told me they meant more than he would ever admit.

  You’re the golden boy. The first-born son. The heir.

  I stared at him for a moment, my mind assembling the pieces of the puzzle. You don’t go against your father without a reason. “Tory,” I said. “You did this for Tory.”

  Aaron didn’t reply, but Michael translated his expression. “Yeah,” he said, sounding gut-punched at the depth of emotion he saw on Aaron’s face. “He did.”

  I read between the lines of Michael’s words, my gaze locked on Aaron’s. You love her. The realization took hold in the pit of my stomach.

  Aaron’s phone buzzed. He looked down, saved from confirming that he’
d risked his father’s wrath to save Beau because Beau was Tory’s brother.

  “Do we want to know what that text says?” Sloane asked.

  Aaron looked up, meeting his sister’s gaze. “That would depend on how you feel about the man Beau put in a coma waking up.”

  Aaron left. It didn’t take long to confirm what he’d told us. Victor McKinney—the Majesty’s head of security and our latest victim—was awake. Briggs and Sterling were on their way to the hospital to interview him, armed with Aaron’s accusations. We played the video, which was exactly what Aaron had said it was, and forwarded the footage to Sterling and Briggs. When they did talk to the Majesty’s head of security, they’d have some very pointed questions for him.

  Half an hour later, my phone rang. I almost answered out of reflex, expecting it to be Sterling or Briggs, but at the last second, I saw the caller ID.

  My father.

  Just like that, I was twelve years old again, walking down the hallway toward my mother’s dressing room door. Don’t open it. Don’t go there.

  I knew what he was calling to say.

  I knew that once that door was open, nothing could ever be the same.

  I declined the call.

  “That’s not a happy Cassie face,” Michael prodded me.

  “Drink your whiskey,” I told him.

  Sloane raised her hand, like a student waiting to be called on in class. “I think I would like some whiskey now,” she said.

  “First,” Michael told her seriously, “I need to verify that you have no plans to feed this whiskey to a moose.”

  “He’s kidding,” Dean said, before Sloane could tell us the exact likelihood of stumbling over a moose in a Las Vegas casino. “And nobody’s drinking any more whiskey.”

  Dean walked over to the counter and picked up the notepad I’d been making notes on earlier. He stared at the three remaining names.

  The professor. Thomas Wesley. Sloane’s father.

  I approached Dean and looked over his shoulder at the list. Focus on this, Cassie. These names, this case.