The Naturals: All In Part 19

"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 a.s.sured 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 circ.u.mstances." 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 p.a.w.n 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 a.s.sembling 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 Ca.s.sie face," Michael prodded me.

"Drink your whiskey," I told him.

Sloane raised her hand, like a student waiting to be called on in cla.s.s. "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 n.o.body'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, Ca.s.sie. These names, this case.

Not the phone call. Not an answer I already knew.

"Eleven years ago," I said, addressing the UNSUB out loud and forcing everything else from my mind, "you slit the throats of nine people in a four-month period ranging from August to January."

"Five years ago," Dean responded, "I did it again. Poison, this time."

The changing method had always been one of the more perplexing aspects of the Vegas murders. Most killers had a single preferred method of killing-or, if not a method or weapon of choice, at least an emotional kill type. Poison meant killing without physical contact-not dissimilar from orchestrating an accident in which a young woman drowns. Slitting someone's throat, on the other hand, was closer to putting an arrow through an old man's chest. Neither was as painful as, say, burning alive.

"The last time we had an UNSUB who fluctuated this much from kill to kill," I said slowly, thinking back to the case we'd worked involving Dean's father, "we were dealing with multiple UNSUBs."

Dean's jaw clenched, but when I laid a hand on his shoulder, he relaxed under my touch.

"'I need nine,'" Dean said after a moment. "I, not we."

As different as the four murders we were dealing with in Vegas were, something about them felt the same. Not just the numbers on the wrists, not just the locations or the dates, but the meticulousness of the method, the compulsive desire to send a message with each kill.

That didn't strike me as the work of multiple UNSUBs-not unless one of them was the architect behind it all.

You want to be recognized. You want to be heard.

It was there on every wrist, there in the message the UNSUB had carved into the arrow, there in the message a bystander had been hypnotized to deliver. You don't want to be stopped. But you do want-very much-to be seen. You want to be larger-than-life, I thought. You want the world to know what you have done. You want to be a G.o.d among men.

And for that, I thought, you need nine.

"Why nine?" I asked. "What happens after the ninth?"

Dean echoed the most significant part of that question. "Why stop?"

Why stop eleven years ago? Why stop after killing Scarlett Hawkins?

"I need to see the file," I told Dean.

"You know we can't."

"Not Scarlett's. The other case Sloane found. The one in New York."

Sloane was sitting in front of the coffee table, holding the DVD Aaron had given us. She'd put it back in the case and was staring at it. I knew, instinctively, that she was thinking about Tory and what Aaron had done for her.

She was thinking-painfully hoping-that maybe Aaron wasn't like their father after all.

"Sloane," I said, "can you hack the FBI database and pull up the New York file?"

Having a flawless memory herself, Sloane didn't quite grasp the utility of rehacking a file she'd already read, but she did as I asked and set the DVD aside. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. After several seconds, she paused, then hit a few keys, then paused again.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"The program I wrote earlier," Sloane said, "it finished its search."

"Let me guess," Lia put in. "It returned the Nightshade case, which we, under threat of exile, cannot so much as breathe on."

"Yes," Sloane said. "It did."

Lia tilted her head to one side. "Why doesn't that sound entirely true?"

"Because," Sloane said, turning the computer around so the rest of us could see, "that's not the only case it returned."

Sloane's search hadn't yielded one case. Or two. Or three.

"How many are there?" I asked, my throat dry.

"Going back to the 1950s," Sloane replied, "almost a dozen. All serial murder, all unsolved."

I leaned back against the counter, my hands gripping the edge. "Nine kills each time?"

"I set the search to return anything over six," Sloane said. "With the thought that some victims may not have been discovered or linked to the same UNSUB."

"But all of the victims in each case were killed on one of the twenty-seven Fibonacci dates you identified," Dean said.