The Naturals: All In Part 18

Whether or not Sterling and Briggs were "on it," none of us had any intention of sitting around and twiddling our thumbs until they came up with our next a.s.signment.

I grabbed a pen and the Majesty notepad by the phone and wrote down the names of everyone we'd talked to so far on this case, then crossed off two: the head of security and Camille Holt. He was in a coma; she was dead. Neither were suspects.

"The New York murders were committed eleven years ago," I said. "By virtue of their ages, that rules out not just Beau Donovan, but also Aaron Shaw and Tory Howard."

Children could be made to do horrible things-Dean was proof enough of that. But slitting someone's throat from behind? That wasn't the MO of a child with limited reach.

I went through the rest of the names on my list. Thomas Wesley was thirty-nine, which put him at twenty-seven and serving as the CEO of his first company at the time of the New York murders. The professor was thirty-two, and a quick internet search informed me that he'd done his undergraduate degree at NYU. I hesitated slightly, then added a final name to the list.

Grayson Shaw.

Sloane's father was in his early fifties. He was clearly a man who thrived on power and being in control. The way he'd treated Sloane told me that he had tendencies toward seeing people as possessions and behaving callously and unemotionally toward them.

I would have bet Michael's car that, as the owner of the Majesty corporation, Grayson Shaw made frequent trips to New York.

"Far be it from me to suggest that Sloane hack the FBI again," Michael said, preventing Sloane from dwelling on her father's name, "but I think Sloane should hack the FBI again."

Judd appeared in the doorway a moment later. He eyed Michael, eyed the rest of us, and then went to make himself some coffee.

"You missed out on a lot of action this morning," Lia called after him.

He didn't so much as turn around. "I don't miss out on much."

In other words: Judd knew quite well what we'd spent our morning doing. He just hadn't interfered-and he wasn't going to interfere now. Judd's priority wasn't solving cases, or making sure the FBI didn't get hacked. His job was keeping us safe and fed.

No matter what.

As far as he was concerned, most everything else came out in the wash.

"If tertium doesn't just mean that our killer has a fixation on the number three, if it really does mean that this is the third time our killer has pulled this routine," Lia was saying beside me, warming up to Michael's suggestion, "it only makes sense to see if we can dig up the case we're missing."

Only Lia could make hacking the FBI sound reasonable.

"I can set up a program," Sloane volunteered. "Not just for the FBI, but for Interpol, local police databases, anything I already have a back door into. I'll have it search any available records that fit our parameters. Last time, I did a manual search for a single Fibonacci date. This will take a little more time up front, but the results will be more comprehensive."

"In the meantime." Judd came to stand at the edge of the kitchen. "The rest of you miscreants can eat."

Michael opened his mouth to object, but Judd quelled him with a look.

"Room service?" Michael suggested smoothly.

"Only if you want to rack up a two-hundred-dollar bill," Judd replied.

Michael made his way over to the nearest phone. He'd been remarkably low-key since the fight at the pool, but I knew before he even started to place his order that he'd try his best to rack up a three-hundred-dollar breakfast bill.

The only thing Judd vetoed was the champagne.

While we waited for the food, I retreated to take a shower. I'd been going a million miles an hour since Sloane had explained the dates to me that morning. A shower would be good for me. Even better, it might quiet my mind enough that I could really think.

When I'd first joined the program, we'd been restricted to cold cases, fed no more than the occasional sc.r.a.p about whatever case our handlers were currently working. In the three months since the rules had changed, we'd worked a half-dozen active cases. The first one we'd solved in less than three days. The second, even faster than that. The third had taken almost a week, but this one...

So many details. The longer the case dragged on, the more information my brain had to juggle. The UNSUB's profile evolved with each kill, and now that it looked like we might be dealing with a repeat offender, my brain had kicked into hyperdrive. The files I'd read. The interviews I'd watched. My own first impressions.

I was learning that the hardest thing about being a profiler was figuring out what information to discard. Did it matter that Beau and Tory had both spent time in foster homes? What about the way Aaron both resented and bowed down to his father? The slightly clingy vibe I'd gotten from Thomas Wesley's a.s.sistant? The drink the professor had ordered, but only pretended to drink?

Even now that our suspicions were targeted at suspects over the age of thirty, I couldn't turn off the part of my brain that arranged and rearranged what I knew about everyone involved, continually looking for meaning.

I couldn't shake the feeling that I was missing something. Then again, being a profiler meant that I always felt like I was missing something, right up until the case was closed. Until the killing stopped-and not just for a day or two days or three.

For good.

The sound of the shower spray beating against the tub was rhythmic and soothing. I let it drown out my thoughts as I stepped into the shower and under the spray. Breathe in. Breathe out. I turned, arching my neck and letting the water soak my hair and dribble down the front of my face.

For a few, blissful minutes my mind was quiet-but it never stayed quiet for long.

June twenty-first. That was where my brain went when I wasn't trying to force it to think about one thing or another. My mother's dressing room. Blood on my hands. Blood on the walls.

"Dance it off, Ca.s.sie."

I could compartmentalize. I could distract myself. I could focus on the current case to the exclusion of everything else-but still, the memories and the fears and the sinking certainty about the skeleton in that dirt-road grave were there, waiting for me, just below the surface.

My dreams were proof enough of that.

June twenty-first, I thought again. I remembered standing in front of the calendars Sloane had drawn, pressing my fingers to the date. No Fibonacci dates in June.

And still, my mind cycled back. June twenty-first.

Why was I thinking about this? Not about my mother-I didn't need my expertise in the human psyche to figure that one out-but about the date? I pictured myself standing in front of the calendar, going through it month by month. A handful in April, only two in May. None in June.

A breath caught in my throat. My hand lashed out of its own accord, turning the shower off. I stepped out, barely remembering to wrap a towel around my torso on my way back into the bedroom.

I walked over to the wall with the colored objects sitting-large to small-on the gla.s.s 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, Ca.s.sie?" 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 hoa.r.s.e, "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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 a.s.signed 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 d.a.m.ned."

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 gla.s.ses.

"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 a.s.sociated 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 gla.s.s 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?

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 gla.s.s coffins? About Sterling and Briggs and Judd?

A knock at the door pulled me from my thoughts. I s.h.i.+vered. Like a kid saying b.l.o.o.d.y 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 m.u.f.fled slightly by the door, but I recognized it anyway.