All In: (The Naturals #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  We needed evidence.

  You plan. You wait, and you plan, and you execute those plans with mathematical precision. I could see Beau in my mind, his lips upturned in something like a smile. Waiting for our time to run out. Waiting for the FBI to let him go.

  Sloane sat in front of the television, a tablet plugged into the side. She wasn’t crying now. She wasn’t even blinking. She was just watching the moment her brother’s corpse had been discovered, again and again.

  “Sloane.” Judd stood in the doorway. “Sweetheart, turn that off.”

  Sloane didn’t even seem to hear him. She watched the camera footage shake as an agent ran toward Aaron’s body.

  “Cassie. Turn it off.” Judd issued the order to me this time.

  You want to protect us, I thought, knowing quite well where Judd’s need to do that came from. You want us to be safe and well and warm.

  But Judd couldn’t protect Sloane from this.

  “Dean.” Judd turned his attention to my fellow profiler.

  Before Dean could reply, Sloane spoke up. “Six cameras, but none of them are stationary. I can extrapolate Beau’s position, but the margin of error in calculating his trajectory is bigger than I would like.” She paused the footage over Aaron’s corpse. For a moment, she lost herself to the image of her brother’s blood-spattered body, her gaze hollow. “The killer was right-handed. Spatter is consistent with a single wound, left to right across the victim’s neck. The blade was angled slightly upward. Killer’s height is roughly seventy-point-five inches, plus or minus half an inch.”

  “Sloane,” Judd said sharply.

  She blinked, then turned away from the screen. It’s easier, I thought, slipping from Judd’s perspective into Sloane’s, when the body belongs to “the victim.” Easier when you don’t have to think Aaron’s name.

  Sloane shut off the television. “I can’t do this.”

  For a moment, Judd looked relieved. Then Sloane got out her laptop. “I need stationary footage. Higher resolution.” Seconds later, her fingers were flying over the keys.

  “Hypothetically speaking,” Lia said to Judd, “if Sloane were hacking the Majesty’s security feed, would you want to know?”

  Judd looked at Sloane for several seconds. Then he walked over to her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. She won’t stop. She can’t. You know that.

  His mouth set into a firm line, Judd turned back to Lia. “No,” he grunted. “If Sloane were illegally hacking her father’s casino, I would not want to know.” Then he glanced back at Dean and Michael and me. “But, hypothetically speaking, what can I do to help?”

  You had less than a minute to do what needed to be done.

  As Sloane watched the security footage she’d hacked, murmuring numbers under her breath, I slipped into Beau’s perspective, trying to imagine what he’d been thinking and feeling in those moments.

  You knew exactly where your target was standing. You knew Aaron wouldn’t panic when the lights went off. Aaron Shaw was at the top of the food chain. You knew it would never occur to him that he might be your prey.

  “Suspect was walking toward the stage at a rate of one-point-six meters per second. Victim was twenty-four meters away, at a forty-two-degree angle to suspect’s last marked trajectory.”

  You knew exactly where you were going, exactly how to get there.

  Sloane froze the footage and did a screen capture, the second before the lights went out. She repeated the process when the lights came back on. Before. After. Before. After. Sloane toggled back and forth between the still images. “In fifty-nine seconds, the suspect moved forward six-point-two meters, still facing the stage.”

  “His pupils were dilated,” Michael put in. “Before the lights went off, his pupils were already dilated—alertness, psychological arousal.”

  “If I can do this,” Dean murmured, “I’m invincible. If I can do this, I’m worthy.”

  Aaron was the Majesty’s golden son, the heir apparent. Killing him was an assertion of power. This is your inheritance. This is what you are. This is what you deserve.

  “Beau’s posture changes,” Michael continued. “It’s subtle, but it’s there, beneath the poker face.” Michael indicated first one image, then the other. “Anticipation before. And after: elation.” He swung his eyes back to the first photo. “Look how he’s holding his shoulders.” He glanced at Sloane. “Play the footage.”

  Sloane brought up the video and let it play.

  “Restricted motion,” Michael said. “He’s fighting tension in his shoulders. He’s walking, but his arms are still by his sides.”

  “The knife,” Dean murmured beside me, his eyes locked on the screen. “I had it on me. I could feel it. That’s why my arms aren’t moving. The knife is weighing me down.” Dean swallowed, shifting his eyes to me. “I have the knife,” he said, his voice pitched unnaturally low. “I am the knife.”

  On-screen, everything went black. Seconds ticked by in silence.

  Adrenaline surged through your veins. I imagined being Beau. I imagined sidling up behind Aaron in the dark. No hesitation. He’s stronger than you are. Bigger. All you have is the element of surprise.

  All you have is a holiness of purpose.

  I imagined sliding the blade across Aaron’s throat. I imagined letting it drop to the floor. I imagined walking back, through the dark. I imagined knowing, with an unworldly, overwhelming certainty that death was power. My power.

  On-screen, the lights came back on, jarring me from the brief instant when I’d stopped talking to Beau and let myself be him. I could feel the heat from Dean’s body beside me—I could feel the dark place he’d been the moment before.

  The place I’d gone, too.

  “Look at his arms,” Michael said, gesturing to Beau.

  They swing slightly as you walk. You’re lighter now. Balanced. Perfect.

  “I’ve done what needed to be done.” Dean looked down at his hands. “And I got rid of the knife.”

  “The knife was found less than a meter away from the body.” Sloane spoke at a stilted, uneven pace. “Killer dropped it. He would have backed away. Couldn’t risk stepping in Aaron’s blood.” There was something brittle in her voice, something fragile. “Aaron’s blood,” she repeated.

  Sloane looked at crime scenes and saw numbers—spatter patterns and probability and signs of rigor mortis. But no matter how hard she tried, Aaron would never just be number five to her.

  “The suspect’s not wearing gloves.” Lia was the one who made the observation. “I doubt he left fingerprints on the knife. So what gives?”

  Sloane closed her eyes. I could feel her cataloging the possibilities, going through the physical evidence again and again, hurting and hurting and pushing through it—

  “Plastic.” Judd had never weighed in on one of our cases before. He wasn’t FBI. He wasn’t a Natural. But he was a former marine. “Something disposable. You wrap the knife in it, dispose of it separately.”

  That’s it. My heart skipped a beat. That’s our smoking gun.

  “So where did I dispose of it?” Dean asked.

  Not a trash can—the police might look there. I forced myself to back up, to walk through it step by step. You make your way through the crowd—to Aaron. You come up behind him. You slice the knife across his neck—quick. No hesitation. No remorse. You peel the plastic off, drop the blade.

  Thirty seconds.

  Forty seconds.

  How long has it been? How long do you have to make your way back to where you were when the lights went out?

  You push your way through the crowd.

  “The crowd,” I said out loud.

  Dean understood before the others. “If I’m a killer who thinks of every contingency, I don’t throw the evidence away. I let someone else do it for me….”

  “Preferably after they get home,” I finished.

  “He planted the evidence on someone,” Lia translated. “If I’m his mark, and I get home and find a pla
stic bag in my pocket? I throw it away.”

  “Unless it has blood on it,” Sloane said. “A drop, a smear…”

  I saw the web of possibilities, the way this played out. “Depending on who you are, you might call the police.” I considered a second possibility. “Or you might burn it.”

  There was a beat of saturated silence, brimming with the things none of us would say. If we don’t find it, if we don’t find the person who has it…

  Our killer would win.

  “We need Beau’s trajectory.” Sloane tapped the pad of her thumb across each of her fingers, one after the other, again and again as she spoke. “Point A to point B to point C. How did he get there? Who did he pass?”

  Before. After. Before. After. Sloane went back to switching from one still image to the next. “There are at least nine unique paths with a likelihood greater than seven percent. If I isolate the length and angle of the suspect’s stride after the lights came back on…” Sloane stopped talking, lost to the numbers in her head.

  The rest of us waited.

  And waited.

  Tears welled in Sloane’s eyes. I knew her—I knew her brain was racing, and I knew that number after number, calculation after calculation, all she could see was Aaron’s face. His empty eyes. The shirt he’d bought her.

  I wanted him to like me, she’d told me.

  “Don’t look at Beau.” Lia broke the silence in the room. She caught Sloane’s gaze and held it. “When you’re looking for a lie, sometimes you look at the liar, and sometimes you look at everyone else. The better the liar, the better the chance that your tell is going to come from someone else. When you’re dealing with a group, you don’t always watch the person speaking. You watch the worst liar in the room.” Lia leaned back on the heels of her hands, the casual posture belied by the intensity in her voice. “Don’t look at the suspect, Sloane.”

  Lia might have been trying to spare Sloane from looking—again and again—at Beau, knowing what he’d done to Aaron, but it was good advice. I could see the exact moment it took hold in Sloane’s mind.

  Don’t look at the suspect. Look at everyone else.

  “Crowds move,” Sloane said, her voice going up in pitch as she gathered steam. “When someone works their way through a crowd, people move. If I can isolate the migration patterns during the blackout…” Her eyes darted side to side. Scanning the footage, she sent the still images to the printer. Before. After. Her fingers grappled for a pen. She looked from the footage to the images and back again, uncapping the pen and circling clusters of people. “Controlling for baseline movements, with a margin of error for individual differences in response to chaos, there are gaps here, here, and here, with slight but consistent movement northwest and southeast among each cluster.” Sloane drew a path from Aaron’s body to Beau’s final position, then ran her finger back over the path she’d drawn.

  You drop the knife. You make your way back through the crowd, light on your feet, never hesitating, never stopping.

  “Pretend you’re picking pockets,” Dean told Lia, his gaze fixed on the path Sloane had drawn. “Who are your easy marks?”

  “I’m insulted you think I would know,” Lia replied, not sounding insulted in the least. She brought her fingertip to the image and tapped one long, painted nail against first one person, then two more. “One, two, and three,” Lia said. “If I were picking pockets, those would be my marks.”

  You’re weaving through the crowd. It’s dark. Chaotic. People are fumbling for their cell phones. You keep your head down. There’s no room for hesitation. No room for mistakes.

  I looked at the three people Lia had indicated. You just killed a man, and you’re going to let someone else dispose of the evidence. From the beginning, I’d seen our UNSUB as a planner, a manipulator. You knew exactly which mark to choose.

  “That one.” I pointed to the second of the two marks Lia had chosen. Late twenties. Male. Wearing a suit jacket. Mouth pursed in distaste.

  Familiar.

  “Thomas Wesley’s assistant.” Michael recognized him, too. “Not a big fan of the FBI, is he?”

  “We’re on it.” Agent Briggs wasn’t a person to sit on a lead for long. He and Agent Sterling were in transit before we’d even finished briefing them.

  “Will it be enough?” I asked. Sloane had gone quiet beside me. No matter how badly she wanted answers, she wouldn’t be able to form the question, so I asked it for her.

  “If the assistant still has it, and if it has Beau’s fingerprints on it, and if forensics can tie it to either the knife or Aaron’s blood…” Briggs let the number of conditionals in that sentence speak for itself. “Maybe.”

  Trace evidence. That was what this came down to. Trace evidence had told me my mother’s blood was on that shawl. Trace evidence had said those bones were hers.

  The universe owes me this, I thought—fiercely, irrationally. Trace evidence had taken my mother away. Trace evidence could give me—give Sloane—this one thing.

  “Maybe isn’t good enough.” Lia spoke now, just as much for Sloane as I had. “I want him squirming. I want him helpless. I want him to watch it all come crumbling down.”

  “I know.” There was an undertone in Briggs’s voice that told me he wanted the same, wanted it the way he’d wanted Dean’s father, once upon a time. “We’ve got local PD working on tracking down video footage—of Michael at the Desert Rose, of the hours leading up to the fight between Beau and the Majesty’s head of security. Something will turn up.”

  Something has to, I thought desperately. You don’t get to get away with this, Beau Donovan. You don’t get to walk away from this unscathed. If we could obtain physical evidence—and video evidence—the one thing we were missing was witness testimony.

  “Tory Howard.” I threw the name out there, knowing that I wasn’t saying anything that Briggs and Sterling hadn’t already considered.

  “We tried,” Briggs replied curtly. “This is the second time we’ve arrested Beau. She thinks he’s innocent.”

  Of course Tory wouldn’t want to believe Beau had done this. I thought about the young woman I’d profiled again and again. You loved Aaron. Beau can’t have been the one to take him away from you.

  “We’re the bad guys here,” Briggs continued. “Tory won’t talk to us.”

  You loved Aaron, I thought again, still focused on Tory. You’re grieving. I thought of the last time I’d seen Tory and let out a long breath. “She won’t talk to you,” I said out loud, “but she might talk to Sloane.”

  Tory didn’t answer the first time we called. Or the second. Or the third. But Sloane had an eerie capacity for persistence. She could do the same thing over and over, caught in a loop until the outcome changed, jarring her from the pattern.

  You’re not going to stop calling. You’re not ever going to stop calling.

  Sloane dialed the number Sterling and Briggs had given her in full each time. I knew her well enough to know that she found some comfort in the rhythm, the motion, the numbers—but not enough.

  “Stop calling.” A voice answered, loud enough that I could make out every word from standing next to Sloane. “Just leave me alone.”

  For a split second, Sloane stood, frozen, uncertain now that the pattern had been broken. Lia snapped a finger in front of her face, and Sloane blinked.

  “I told him. I told my father.” Sloane went straight from one pattern to another. How many times had she spoken those words? How often must they have been repeating themselves in her head for her to utter them so desperately each time?

  “Who is this?” Tory’s voice cracked on the other end of the phone line.

  With shaking hands, Sloane set the phone to speaker. “I used to be Aaron’s sister. And now I’m not. And you used to be his person, and now you’re not.”

  “Sloane?”

  “I told my father that it was going to happen. I told him that there was a pattern. I told him the next murder was going to happen in the Grand Ballroom on Januar
y twelfth. I told him, Tory, and he didn’t listen.” Sloane sucked in a ragged breath. On the other end of the phone line, I could hear Tory doing the same. “So you are going to listen,” Sloane continued. “You’re going to listen, because you know. You know that just because you ignore something, that doesn’t make it go away. Pretending something doesn’t matter doesn’t make it matter less.”

  Silence on the other end of the phone line. “I don’t know what you want from me,” Tory said after a small eternity.

  “I’m not normal,” Sloane said simply. “I’ve never been normal.” She paused, then blurted out, “I’m the kind of not-normal that works with the FBI.”

  This time, Tory’s intake of breath sounded sharper. A flicker in Michael’s eye told me he heard layers of emotion in it.

  “He was my brother,” Sloane said again. “And I just need you to listen.” Sloane’s voice broke and broke again as she spoke. “Please.”

  Another eternity of silence, tenser this time. “Fine.” Tory clipped the word. “Say what you need to say.”

  I could feel Tory shifting from one mode to another: naked grief to defensiveness to a kind of flippancy I recognized from Lia. Things only matter if you let them. People only matter if you let them.

  “Cassie?” Sloane sat the phone down. I stepped forward. On Sloane’s other side, Dean did the same, until the two of us were standing facing each other, the phone on the coffee table between us.

  “We’re going to tell you about the killer we’re looking for,” I said.

  “I swear to God, if this is about Beau—”

  “We’ll tell you about our killer,” I continued evenly. “And then you’ll tell us.” Tory was quiet enough on the other end of the line that I wasn’t completely sure she hadn’t hung up on us. I glanced at Dean. He nodded slightly, and I started. “The killer we’re looking for has killed five people since January first. Four of the five people were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. While this could mean that our killer has a fixation on this age group due to a prior experience in his or her life, we believe the most likely explanation—and the one that fits best with the nature of the crimes—is that the killer is young as well.”