The Naturals: All In Part 26

What better way to avoid suspicion than being arrested for the crimes and then exculpated and released?

You wrote the wrong number on his wrist. Misdirection.

"Ca.s.sie?" Agent Sterling said again.

On the floor, Sloane rocked back and forth, shuddering in Lia's arms.

I told Agent Sterling what she needed to hear. "I'm sure."

The FBI took Beau Donovan into custody. He didn't evade arrest. He didn't resist.

He didn't have to.

You know we don't have proof. You've already constructed your defense.

You're going to enjoy this.

At the time of arrest, Beau had no weapon on him. Thanks to the blackout, no one could place him near the body. You're better than that. I'd spent enough time in our UNSUB's head to know that Beau would have had a plan for disposing of the weapon. You didn't expect to be arrested, but what does it matter? They can't prove it. They can't touch you.

Nothing can touch you now.

"Seventy-two hours." Sloane's voice was barely more than a whisper, rough and raw in her throat. The video feeds had been cut, but she was still staring at the blank screen, seeing Aaron's body the way I could close my eyes and see my mother's blood-spattered dressing room. "In most states, suspects can be held up to seventy-two hours before charges are filed," Sloane stammered on. "It's forty-eight in California. I'm...I'm...I'm not sure about Nevada." Her eyes welled with unshed tears. "I should be sure. I should be. I can't-"

I sank to the floor beside her. "It's okay."

She shook her head-shook it and shook it and shook it. "I told my father this was going to happen." She just kept staring at the blank screen. "January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. I told him, and now-I'm not sure. Is it forty-eight hours in Nevada or seventy-two?" Sloane plucked at the air, her hands trembling. "Forty-eight or seventy-two? Forty-eight or-"

"Hey." Dean knelt in front of her and caught her hands in his. "Look at me."

Sloane just kept shaking her head. I glanced helplessly at Lia, who hadn't left Sloane's side.

"We're going to get him," Lia said, her voice as quiet as Sloane's, but deadly.

Somehow, the words permeated Sloane's brain enough that the younger girl stopped shaking her head.

"We are going to nail Beau Donovan to the wall," Lia continued, her voice low, "and he is going to spend the rest of his life in a box with the walls closing in on him. No hope. No way out. Nothing but the realization that he lost." Lia sold every word of that statement with 100 percent conviction. "If we have to do it in forty-eight hours, we'll do it in forty-eight hours, and if it's seventy-two, we'll do it in forty-eight anyway. Because we're that good, Sloane, and we are going to get him."

Slowly, Sloane's breathing evened out. She finally met Dean's eyes, tears spilling out of her own. I watched them carve their way down her face.

"I was Aaron's sister," Sloane said simply. "And now I'm not. I'm not his sister anymore."

My throat tightened around the words I wanted to say. You're still his sister, Sloane. Before I could manage a verbal reply, I heard the front door open. A heartbeat later, Michael appeared at the threshold to the living room.

The full truth of the situation broadsided me with physical force. It could have been Michael. If we'd never left Vegas, if Beau hadn't changed the plan, it could have been Michael. I couldn't let myself think about it. I couldn't stop. Michael's throat, slit with that knife. Michael, gone in an instant...

Michael paused, his eyes on Sloane. He took in the tear tracks on her face, her rounded shoulders, a thousand and one cues I couldn't even see. Being a Natural meant Michael couldn't turn off his ability. He couldn't stop seeing what Sloane felt. He saw it, and he felt it, and I knew him well enough to know that he was thinking, It should have been me.

"Michael." Sloane choked out his name. For several seconds, she just stared at him. Her hands worked their way into fists by her side. "You're not allowed to go away again," she told him fiercely. "Michael. You're not allowed to leave me, too."

Michael hesitated just a moment longer, then he took one step forward and then another, collapsing to the ground beside us. Sloane latched her arms around him and held on for dear life. I could feel the heat from their bodies. I could feel their shoulders racked with sobs.

And all I could think, huddled on the floor with them, a ma.s.s of grief and anger and loss, was that Beau Donovan thought he'd won. He thought he could take and kill and tear lives apart and that nothing and no one could touch him.

You thought wrong.

The clock was ticking. Instinct and theories weren't enough. Being sure wasn't enough.

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.

"Ca.s.sie. 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 a.s.sertion 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. "Antic.i.p.ation 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 plastic 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, br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 pa.s.s?"

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 s.h.i.+rt 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 cl.u.s.ter." 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."