You want it all.
“It’s always personal,” Dean said, his thoughts working in tune with mine. “Even when it’s not.”
“There are other cases,” Sloane said quietly, her hands clasped in front of her body. “Other victims.”
“The cases your program didn’t find,” I said.
There was a long pause.
“It is possible,” Sloane mumbled, “that I got bored yesterday and wrote another program.”
A chill settled on the surface of my skin and burrowed deep. Profiling the Vegas UNSUB was one thing, but the cult was another altogether. Nightshade’s message to Judd—whatever the content—had conveyed one thing very clearly, through its existence alone.
No matter who you are, or where you go, no matter how well-protected you are, we’ll find you.
Judd was right to try to pull us off the case. He was right to try to stop us before we were in too deep.
But it’s too late, I thought. We can’t un-see what we’ve seen. We can’t pretend. We can’t stop looking, and even if we could…
“What did your program find?” Lia asked Sloane.
“Instead of scanning law enforcement databases, I programmed it to scan newspapers.” Sloane shifted to a cross-legged position. “Several of the larger ones have been working on digitizing their archives. Add in the databases of historical societies, library documents, and virtual depositories of non-fiction texts, and there’s a wealth of information to search.” She twisted her hands against each other. “I couldn’t use the same parameters, so I just searched for murders on Fibonacci dates. I’ve been weeding through them by hand.”
“And?” Dean prompted.
“I found a few of our missing cases,” Sloane said. “Most weren’t identified as serial murder, but the date, year, and method of killing match the pattern.”
Some UNSUBs were better at hiding their work than others.
“We’ll have to tell Sterling and Briggs about those cases,” I said. “If we think the Vegas UNSUB might have a connection to one of them—”
“There’s something else,” Sloane cut in. “The pattern, it goes back a lot further than the 1950s. I’ve tracked at least one case as far back as the late 1800s.”
More than a century.
Whatever this was, whoever these people were—they’d been doing this for a very long time.
Passed down, I thought. Over decades and generations.
Without warning, Lia slammed Michael back against the wall, pinning his hands over his head.
“Now really isn’t the time or the place,” Michael told her.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lia asked, her voice furious and low.
“Lia?” I said. She ignored me, and when Dean called her name, she ignored him, too.
“Where do you get off?” Lia asked Michael. She kept his right arm pinned with her left and brought her right hand up to the bottom of his sleeve. His eyes flashed, but before he could fight back, she’d pulled the sleeve roughly back.
“You just had to come with me,” Lia spat. “You wouldn’t let me walk out of that hotel room alone. I didn’t need you there. I didn’t want you there.”
My eyes landed on the arm Lia had bared. Breath rushed out of my lungs like I’d been hit with a block of cement.
There, raised against Michael’s skin like welts, were four numbers.
7761.
YOU
You plan for every contingency. You see ten moves ahead. This is not supposed to be happening.
Your target had a room booked through the end of the week. He was not supposed to leave.
Nine.
Nine.
Nine.
Your temples pound with it. Your heart races with it. You can feel your plan disintegrating, feel it falling apart. This is what you get for playing it safe. This is what you get for holding back. Are you what you claim to be, or aren’t you?
“I am.” You say the words. It takes everything in you not to scream them. “I am!”
A complication is just a complication. An opportunity. To take what you want. To do what you want. To be what you were always meant to be.
You press the tip of the knife to your stomach. Blood beads up on the surface.
Just a little complication.
Just a little blood.
Circle. Circle. Circle. Around. Up and down. Left and right.
Do it, a voice whispers from your memory. Please, God, just do it.
Everything but true infinity has its end. All mortal men must die. But you were never meant to be mortal. You were born for things such as these.
Tomorrow is the day, and the day will be perfect.
“So it has been decided,” you murmur, “and so it shall be.”
“How long?” I asked Michael, my eyes locked on his wrist.
He knew exactly what I was asking. “It showed up this morning, itching like hell.”
More than thirty-six hours after we’d left Vegas.
“Toxicodendrons.” Sloane pulled her legs back to her chest, her hands worrying at the knees of her jeans. “Plants in the toxicodendron genus produce urushiol. It’s a sticky oil, a powerful allergen. If Michael’s been exposed before, the delay of onset for the rash the second time would be between twenty-four and forty-eight hours.”
“Pretty sure I’d know if I’d been exposed before,” Michael pointed out.
“Poison ivy and poison oak are toxicodendrons.”
Michael did a one-eighty and nodded sagely. “I have been exposed before.”
Lia’s grip on his arm tightened painfully. “You think this is funny?” She loosened her hold and pushed away from him. “You’re scheduled to die tomorrow. Hilarious.”
“Lia—” Michael started to say.
“I don’t care,” Lia told him. “I don’t care that you probably got that coming after me. I don’t care that you wore long sleeves to hide it from the rest of us. I don’t care if you have some sick death wish—”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Michael cut in.
“So you’re not planning to sneak off to Vegas tomorrow by yourself to try to lure this UNSUB out?” Lia folded her arms and tilted her head to one side, waiting.
Michael didn’t respond.
Tomorrow. January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom.
The knife.
“That’s what I thought,” Lia said. Without another word, she turned and walked out of the room.
“So,” Michael commented, “that went over well.”
“You aren’t going back there to play bait.” Dean got up and went to stand toe to toe with Michael. “You aren’t leaving this house.”
“I’m touched, Redding,” Michael said, bringing a hand to his heart. “You care.”
“You aren’t leaving this house,” Dean repeated. There was a quiet intensity in his voice.
Michael leaned forward, his face in Dean’s. “I don’t take orders from you.”
There was a beat, during which neither one of them backed down.
“I get it. You don’t like running away.” Dean’s voice was quiet, his eyes never leaving Michael’s. “You don’t run. You don’t hide. You don’t cower. You don’t beg.”
Because none of those things ever work. Dean didn’t say that. He didn’t have to.
“Get out of my head.” Michael’s expression matched the one he’d worn before he’d plowed his fist into that father’s face at the pool.
“Dean,” I said. “Give us a minute.”
With one last hard look at Michael, Dean did as I asked, leaving in the direction Lia had gone minutes before and taking Sloane with him.
Silence sat heavily between Michael and me.
“You should have told us,” I said quietly.
Michael studied my expression, and I didn’t even try to keep him from seeing what I felt. I’m angry, and I’m terrified. I can’t do this. I can’t sit around and wait for them to identify your body, too.
“You know me, Colorado,�
� he said, his voice soft. “I’ve never been very good at should.”
“Try harder,” I told him fiercely.
“Look what trying gets you.” Michael might not have meant to say those words, but he meant them. He was talking about me. And Dean. He’d spent the past few months pretending he’d never been interested in me. He’d flipped his emotions off, like I’d never mattered to him at all.
Look what trying gets you.
“You don’t get to do that,” I said, feeling like he’d kicked me in the teeth. “You don’t get to make me the reason you do or don’t do anything. I’m not a reason, Michael. I’m not something you try for.” I took a step forward. “I’m your friend.”
“You used to look at me and feel something,” Michael said. “I know you did.”
Michael was marked for death. A serial killer from Judd’s past was stalking us all. But we were doing this—right here, right now.
“I never had friends,” I said. “Growing up, it was just me and my mom. There was never anyone else. She never let there be anyone else.”
For the first time since I’d gotten the call from my father, I felt something about my mother’s death. Anger—and not just at the person who killed her. She’d gone away, and even if that hadn’t been her choice, she was the reason there was no one else—no friends, no family, nothing until social services tracked down my dad.
“When I joined the program,” I told Michael, “I didn’t know how to really be with people. I couldn’t…” The words wouldn’t come. “I kept everyone at a distance, and there you were, smashing through every wall. I felt something,” I told Michael. “You made me feel something, and I am grateful for that. Because you were the first, Michael.”
There was a long silence.
“The first friend,” Michael said finally, “that you ever had.”
“That may not mean much to you.” It hurt me to admit that. “To you, I might not be worth anything, if I’m with Dean. But it means something to me.”
The silence that followed was twice as long as the first.
“I don’t like running away.” Michael brought his eyes from the floor to mine. “I don’t run, I don’t hide, I don’t cower, I don’t beg, Cassie, because running and hiding and begging—it doesn’t work. It never works.”
Michael was repeating the words Dean had said to him. He was admitting it out loud. To me.
I looked down at the angry red numbers on his arm. 7761.
January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. The knife.
“It’s not running,” I told Michael, “if we catch him first.”
We had eleven hours and twenty-seven minutes until midnight.
First order of business was calling Sterling and Briggs. It took them two hours to extract themselves from the case and get to us. They questioned Michael and Lia about their little foray to the Desert Rose. What had they done there? Who had they seen?
“You don’t remember anything out of the ordinary?” Briggs asked Michael. “Running into someone? Talking to someone?”
“Letting someone write a number on my arm in invisible, poison-ivy ink?” Michael suggested archly. “Shockingly, no. I remember dropping something. I remember bending down to pick it up.” He closed his eyes. “I dropped something,” he repeated. “I bent to pick it up. And then…”
Nothing.
“Pattern interruption,” Sloane said. “It’s the second-quickest method of inducing hypnosis.”
To be hypnotized, you have to want to be hypnotized. Tory’s words rang in my ears. Either she was lying, or Michael hadn’t been on guard around the UNSUB.
Or both.
“You don’t remember anything else?” Dean said.
“Well, when you phrase it like that, I remember exactly what happened. You have unmasked the killer, Redding. How do you do it, you profiling fiend?”
“You know who the killer is?” Sloane’s eyes went comically wide.
“That was sarcasm,” Dean told her, sparing a glare for Michael.
“What about the moments leading up to the gap in your memory?” Agent Sterling said, redirecting the conversation. “You said you were playing poker, Lia?”
“With a group that included Thomas Wesley,” Lia filled in. “I trounced all of them. Michael was just my arm candy. After that, we split up. He went to cash in the chips, and I went to sign him up for mud wrestling against his will.”
I tried to picture it in my mind—Lia at a poker table, Michael beside her. Lia is winning. Her fingers play at the tips of her dark hair. Beside her, Michael fastens and unfastens the top button on his blazer.
What had made our UNSUB stop and take notice? Why Michael?
“What happens if the intended victim isn’t in the Grand Ballroom on January twelfth?” Briggs posed the question to the room as a whole.
“Four variables.” Sloane tapped the thumb on her right hand to each of her fingers as she rattled them off. “Date, location, method, and victim.”
“If the equation changes, the UNSUB has to adapt.” Sterling worked her way through the logic out loud. “The date and the method are necessary to achieve the UNSUB’s primary objective. The location and making sure the number shows up on his victim’s wrist—those are psychologically meaningful, symbols of mastery. To adapt, the UNSUB would have to give up some portion of the power and control that mastery represents.”
“I’ll want that back,” Dean said. “The power. The control.”
January twelfth. The knife. Those were the constants in this equation. If it came down to the location and the victim…
The spiral is your greatest work. A sign of rebellion. A sign of devotion. It’s perfect.
“You would change victims rather than location,” I said, sure enough of that.
“I’ll adapt,” Dean ruminated. “I’ll choose someone new—and whoever I choose will pay for the fact that I had to.”
I didn’t want to think about the ways that a killer could go about reclaiming power and control with a knife.
“My father won’t cancel tomorrow?” Sloane asked, her voice tight. “He won’t even consider moving it to a different part of the casino?”
Briggs gave a shake of his head.
Power. Control. Sloane’s father wouldn’t let go of that any more than the UNSUB would.
“If I were to go to the tournament tomorrow,” Michael spoke up, “then we wouldn’t just know where this guy’s going to be, or what he’s planning to do. We’d know who the target is.” He turned to Briggs. “You used Cassie for bait on the Locke case. You paraded her out for an UNSUB to see, because there was a life at stake, and you thought you could protect her. How is this any different?”
My gut twisted, because it wasn’t.
“If I’m not there,” Michael continued unflinchingly, “this guy just chooses someone else. Maybe you catch him, maybe you don’t.” He paused. “There’s a good chance someone dies bloody.”
I didn’t want Michael to be right. But he was.
Someone dies tomorrow. At the appointed time. At the appointed place. By your knife.
“This UNSUB isn’t the only one who’ll be there tomorrow.” Judd appeared in the doorway. “You go, Michael, and you’ll be wearing more than one target on your back.”
I didn’t hear a trace of doubt in the old man’s words. He thinks Nightshade will be there.
Agent Sterling met Judd’s eyes. “I’d like to see the note he sent you.”
Judd nodded to one of the agents on guard detail, and the man disappeared and returned a moment later with an evidence bag. Inside was the envelope from the plane.
Agent Sterling took a pair of gloves out of her pocket. She reached into the envelope. She pulled out a photo. After a moment, she flipped it over to read the back.
She looked over at Briggs. “Flower,” she reported hoarsely. “White.”
I remembered Judd telling me that Nightshade had sent each of his victims a flower—the bloom of a white nightshade—before they die
d. And now he’d sent Judd a photograph of the same.
“He sent you a flower?” I asked Judd, panic winding its way down my spine, my heart in my throat. Not Judd. Not here, not now, not again.
“He did,” Judd allowed. I remembered what he’d said about Nightshade’s poison of choice. Undetectable. Incurable. Painful. “Maybe it’s too late for me,” Judd continued, his voice hard, “and maybe it isn’t, but I’m telling you, he’ll be there tomorrow.”
Nightshade hadn’t wanted us leaving Las Vegas. He’d tampered with the plane. He’d made sure Judd knew we had nowhere to go.
Had he known that the UNSUB had marked Michael? Had Nightshade been watching? Was he watching us still?
Don’t, I told myself. Don’t give him that kind of power. Don’t let your mind make him into anything other than a man.
“Nightshade chose all of his victims beforehand,” I said, treating him as no more significant than any other UNSUB. “He sent them flowers.”
A warning. A gift.
“Stalking behavior,” Dean said shortly. “Not indicative of an opportunity killer. If I’m Nightshade, if I’m focused on Judd? If I’ve received permission from the cult to eliminate any and all problems, or finally reached the point where permission doesn’t matter? I’d rather take something from Judd here than at the Majesty tomorrow.”
Nightshade had gotten to Scarlett in the FBI labs. He had to know we’d been taken to a safe house. And to a man like that, us being in protection might just look like a challenge.
“It’s settled, then,” Michael said, even though it was anything but. “No place is safe, and I’m going.”
Michael going had been deemed a last resort.
By two in the morning, it was looking like the only option.
No matter how many times I went back over the profile, nothing changed. The ritualized elements of the crimes made it difficult to nail down even the most basic aspects of the UNSUB’s demographic. Drowning. Fire. Impaling. Strangling. The methods told us nothing about the killer, other than the fact that he was going in a fixed order.
Young or old? Intelligent, definitely, but educated? It was difficult to say. If we were dealing with an UNSUB between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, I would say that person was filling a role similar to the role Webber had played to Dean’s father. Apprentice. A younger UNSUB committing these murders was proving himself. He was grandstanding, looking for approval—yearning for it. Much older than that and the UNSUB wouldn’t see himself as an apprentice at all. Viewed from that perspective, this became less about approval and more about proving himself dominant. An older UNSUB, executing this plan to perfection, would be setting himself above the cult—likely from a position of power himself.
All In: (The Naturals #3) Page 20