The Naturals: All In Part 17

Dean made the call.

Pick up, I thought. Pick up, Briggs.

If this was the killer's third time going through this pattern-nine bodies, killed on Fibonacci dates-we weren't dealing with a novice. We were dealing with an expert. The level of planning. The lack of evidence left behind.

It fit.

A second realization followed on the heels of the first. If our killer was slitting throats more than a decade ago, we're looking for someone no younger than their late twenties. And if the New York murders had been the second set and not the first...

"Briggs." Dean's voice was terse, but calm. I turned toward him as he began bringing Briggs up to speed. "We have reason to believe this might not be our UNSUB's first rodeo."

Dean fell silent as Agent Briggs replied. I closed the s.p.a.ce between Dean and me and put a hand on his arm. "Tell him that Sloane broke the code," I said. "The UNSUB is going to kill again-in the Grand Ballroom-on January twelfth."

Dean hung up the call without saying another word.

"What?" I asked him. "Why did you hang up?"

Dean's grip tightened over his phone.

"Dean?"

"Briggs and Sterling got a call at three in the morning."

There was only one reason to call the FBI at three in the morning. It's too soon, I thought. Sloane said the next murder would be on the twelfth. The pattern- "The Majesty's head of security was attacked," Dean continued. "Blunt-force trauma."

I thought of the man who'd pulled us into the security office. The one who had come to get Sloane's father the night Camille was murdered.

"It fits the MO," Dean continued. "New method. Numbers on his wrist."

"Weapon?" I asked.

"A brick."

You bashed his head in with a brick. You took a brick and wrapped your fingers around it, and rage exploded inside of you, and you- "Ca.s.sie." Dean cut my thought off. "There's something else you should know."

Did you get tired of waiting? I asked the UNSUB silently. Did something set you off? Did you get a rush out of watching this man go down? Did you savor the sound of his skull cracking? I couldn't stop. Each time, you feel more invincible, less fallible, less human.

"Ca.s.sie," Dean said again. "The victim was still alive when they found him. He's in a medically induced coma now, but he's not dead."

Dean's words snapped me out of it.

You made a mistake, I thought. This was a killer who didn't make mistakes. Having left a victim alive would gnaw at him from the inside out.

"We need more information," I said. "Pictures of the crime scene, defensive wounds on the victim, anything that might help us walk through it."

"They don't need us to walk through anything," Dean said.

"Explain how that sentence could possibly be true."

I turned in the direction of the voice that had spoken those words and saw Lia. I wondered how long she'd been standing there, watching the interplay between Dean and me.

"They don't need us to profile it, because there was a witness." Dean looked from Lia to me. "They've already apprehended the suspect."

On-screen, Beau Donovan sat in an interrogation room. His hands were cuffed behind his back. He was staring straight ahead-not at Sterling and Briggs, but through them.

"This isn't right," Sloane said, plopping down on the floor beside the coffee table. A moment later, she popped back up, pacing. "It was supposed to happen on the twelfth. It doesn't add up."

She didn't say that she needed it to add up. She didn't say that she needed this one thing to make sense.

"Mr. Donovan, a witness puts you at the crime scene, crouched over the victim, writing on his wrist." Briggs was playing bad cop. It wasn't so much in the words he said as in the way he said them, like each part of that statement was a nail in Beau Donovan's coffin.

A muscle in Beau's cheek twitched.

"Fear," Michael said. "With a heaping side of anger, and underneath that..." Michael searched the lines of Beau's face. "Playing around the corners of the lips-satisfaction."

Satisfaction. That was more d.a.m.ning than either anger or fear. Innocent people weren't satisfied when they were arrested for attempted murder.

"Beau." Agent Sterling wasn't a natural fit for good cop, but based on what we knew of Beau, she must have suspected he'd be more likely-though still not likely-to trust a female. "If you don't talk to us, we can't help you."

Beau slumped in his seat, as much as he could with both hands cuffed behind his back.

"You were found with this in the pocket of your sweats.h.i.+rt." Briggs threw down an evidence bag. Inside was a permanent marker. Black. I registered the color, but didn't dwell on it. "What do you think the chances are that forensics shows us your pen is a match for this?" Briggs laid a photo beside the evidence bag. The head of security's wrist.

Written on it was a four-digit number.

"Nine-zero-nine-five," Sloane read. She walked forward until she was almost blocking the screen. "It's the wrong number. Seven-seven-six-one." She punctuated each number by tapping the middle finger on her right hand against her thumb. "That's what's next. That number"-she gestured toward the screen-"doesn't appear anywhere in the first hundred digits of the Fibonacci sequence."

On-screen, Agent Briggs wielded silence like a weapon. He was waiting for Beau to crack.

"I don't have to say anything to you."

Michael raised an eyebrow at Beau's tone, but this time, I didn't need a translation. Bravado. The kind born of being kicked too hard for too long.

Agent Sterling walked around to Beau's side of the table. For a moment, I thought he might lunge at her, but instead, he stiffened as she moved to unlock his cuffs.

"You don't have to say anything," she agreed. "But I think you want to. I think there's something you want us to know."

Michael took in Beau's nonverbal response, then made a finger-gunning motion at the screen. "Point to the lady," he said.

"You told us that Camille Holt was nice to you." Agent Sterling retreated back to her side of the table, never breaking eye contact with Beau. "Right now, it's looking an awful lot like you killed her."

"Even if I told you I didn't," Beau grunted, "you wouldn't believe me."

"Try me."

For a moment, I actually thought he might. Instead, he settled back in his seat again. "I don't feel much like talking," he said.

"During our last interview, you told us you were with Tory Howard when Camille was murdered." Agent Briggs leaned forward. "But we've recently come to believe that Tory was with Aaron Shaw that night."

"Maybe I was trying to protect her," Beau spat. "From you a.s.sholes."

"Or maybe," Briggs suggested, "you were really trying to protect yourself. Tory and Aaron have been keeping things on the down low. She didn't want to give his name as her alibi. She must have thought she was pretty lucky when you volunteered yourself for that role." He leaned forward. "She just didn't realize that when she allowed you to do so, she became your alibi for that night, too."

Smart, I thought. Looking at Beau on paper, it was easy to underestimate him. High school dropout. Working a c.r.a.ppy job. He made no effort whatsoever to give the impression that he was anything more-but his success at the poker tournament told a very different story.

He's used to being dismissed and ignored, but has a very high IQ, I thought.

"Tory lied to us." Briggs lowered his voice. "Maybe we should be looking at charging her as an accessory."

"Briggs," Sterling said sharply-good cop until the end.

Agent Briggs leaned across the table, getting in Beau's face and going in for the kill. "Tell me, Beau, has Tory ever taught you how to hypnotize someone?"

Briggs and Sterling kept at it, but Beau didn't say a word. Eventually, they left him to stew and put in a call to us.

"Thoughts?" Briggs asked on speaker.

"It's not him." Sloane was practically vibrating with intensity. "You have to see that. The numbers? Wrong. The location? Wrong. The timing?" Sloane turned her back on the phone. "It's all wrong."

Silence descended. Dean filled the void. "He's got the potential for violence." The way Dean phrased that observation made me wonder if he saw any of himself in Beau. "He's been living at the bottom of a hierarchy that favors those with money and power, and he has neither. Given the opportunity, he'd enjoy playing a game where he came out on top." Dean leaned on the counter, his head bowed. "He's angry, and I'm guessing he's spent a lot of his life being tossed aside like garbage. If the Majesty's head of security does die, Beau won't feel bad about it. Given the choice, he'd probably pick up that brick again."

"But-" Sloane started to say.

"But," Dean said, "Sloane's right. The numbers on the victims' wrists aren't just a part of this UNSUB's MO. They're a part of his signature. He needs to mark his victims. And I'm not convinced we're dealing with an UNSUB who, after four meticulously planned kills, gets caught writing numbers onto the wrist of the fifth before the man is even dead."

"The wrong numbers," Sloane put in emphatically.

Sterling cleared her throat. "I tend to agree with Sloane and Dean. Our UNSUB's MO has changed with each kill. And so has the method with which the victims were marked. Until now."

Eugene Lockhart had numbers written on his wrist in a permanent marker, too, I realized.

"Say you'd killed someone." Lia instantly had the room's attention. "Or, in Beau's case, say that you thought the person you'd hit with a brick was about to die." She leaned back on the heels of her hands, and my mind went back to Two Truths and a Lie.

I killed a man when I was nine.

"Maybe you had a choice. Maybe you didn't. And afterward," Lia continued, her voice light and airy, "say you didn't want to get caught. What do you do?"

Seconds ticked by in silence. Dean was the one who provided the answer. He knew Lia better than any of us. "You lie."

"You lie," Lia repeated. "You cover it up. And if you happened to know there was a serial killer out there..." Lia shrugged.

"Maybe Beau heard about the numbers," I said, picking up where Lia had left off. "Not what the pattern was, exactly, just that there were numbers on all of the victims' wrists."

Sterling picked up where I left off. "He grabs that brick. He hits the victim. Panics, and to cover, he tries to make it look like the work of our UNSUB."

Anger. Fear. Satisfaction. Everything Michael had said Beau had been feeling fit with this interpretation of events.

Beau wasn't our UNSUB. He was mimicking our UNSUB.

"That means the pattern's not broken," Sloane whispered. "The pattern isn't wrong."

You are not broken, I translated. You are not wrong.

"Grand Ballroom. January twelfth." Sloane held out first one finger, then another, like she was counting. "The pattern says the next murder is going to happen in the Grand Ballroom on January twelfth."

Three days. If Sloane was right about the Fibonacci dates, that wasn't our only problem.

"Speaking of the pattern," I told Sterling and Briggs, dread seeping back over my body, "there's something else you should know."

"Sloane hacked the FBI's files. Based on what she found, you think our UNSUB might have done this before." Agent Sterling let her summation of what I'd just said hang in the air for several seconds before she added, "Twice."

"It's just a theory," I replied before either of the agents could decide that now was a good time to lecture Sloane on the virtues of not hacking the FBI. "But the case Sloane found was never solved, and it fits the pattern."

"With respect to location as well?" Briggs asked. I could practically hear him rubbing his temples. "Was that killer working in a spiral?"

"A Fibonacci spiral," Sloane corrected. "And no, he wasn't."

"Numbers on the wrists?" Sterling asked.

"No," Sloane said again.

No numbers on the wrist. No spiral. If we were dealing with the same killer, then that killer had changed. That wasn't unheard of, but we typically saw changes in an UNSUB's MO-the necessary elements of a crime. Writing numbers on the victims' wrists wasn't necessary. Killing them in a spiral was a choice. A killer's MO might change, but typically, the signature stayed the same.

"The numbers were always there." Sloane's voice was insistent. "Even if he didn't write them on someone's wrist, or kill in the right locations, they were there."

In the dates, I finished silently. Maybe the signature, the deep-seated psychological need being manifested in the UNSUB's behavior, was that the kills needed to be driven by the numbers. Viewed from that perspective, the additional elements of the Vegas crimes weren't a departure in signature.

They were an escalation. More numbers, more rules.

"I'm older now," Dean said, testing out the possibility. "Wiser, better. I've waited for so long, planned so long...." His voice was lower when he profiled, deeper. "Once upon a time, I was an amateur. Now, I'm an artist. Invincible. Unstoppable."

"And this time," I said slowly, "you want credit."

That's why you wrote the numbers on your victims' wrists, I thought. You wanted us to crack the code. You wanted us to see the full extent of what you'd done.

"We'll have a hard enough time convincing the local PD that Beau Donovan isn't our serial killer without bringing up a decade-old case that, on the surface, looks completely unrelated." Briggs's voice broke into my thoughts. "The powers that be in this city want this case solved. Now. If we push the theory that this last attack isn't the work of our UNSUB, we can expect the cooperation we've seen up to this point to dry up pretty quickly."

"Meaning," Lia said, "that you might lose your complimentary suite at the Desert Rose. I hear there are some lovely establishments just off the Strip."

"Meaning," Agent Briggs countered, "that if we want a list of hotel guests to compare to witnesses and persons of interest in the New York case, those same powers that be are probably going to refuse to hand anything over without a warrant."

"And," Agent Sterling added soberly, "Grayson Shaw will almost certainly insist on opening back up the Grand Ballroom at the Majesty."

My fingers curled themselves inward, my nails lightly scratching the surface of my palms. Three days. That was how long we had until the next murder. That was how long we had to convince Sloane's father that reopening the ballroom was a mistake.

"What do you want us to do?" Dean was nothing if not focused.

"For now," Agent Briggs said, "we just need you to stay put. Stay in the room and stay out of trouble. We're on it."