The Naturals: All In Part 7

I stared at the ceiling. "I am." The sound of his heartbeat filled the silence. I wondered if he could hear the sound of mine. "a.s.suming the Majesty's 'maintenance issue' really was another body, that's four murders in four days."

What happens on day five? We both knew the answer to that question.

"Why the Fibonacci sequence?" I asked instead.

"Maybe I'm the type of person who needs things to add up," Dean said. "Each number in the Fibonacci sequence is the sum of the two previous numbers. Maybe what I'm doing is part of a pattern-each kill exceeding the last."

"Do you like it?" I wondered out loud. "What you're doing? Does it bring you joy?"

Dean's fingers stilled in my hair.

Does it bring you joy?

I realized, then, how that question would have sounded to Dean. I sat up and turned to face him.

"You're nothing like him, Dean."

I ran my hand along his jaw. Dean's greatest fear was that he had something of his father in him. Psychopathy. Sadism.

"I know that," he told me.

You know it, I thought, but you don't believe it.

"Believe me," I whispered.

He cupped a hand around my neck, and he nodded-just once, just a little. My chest tightened, but inside me, something else gave.

You're nothing like your father.

What happened to my mother wasn't my fault.

My heart in my throat, I stood. I went to get the drive with my mother's files on it. And then I walked back and pressed it into his hand.

"You open the files," I told him, my voice dropping to a lower pitch as it got caught in my throat. "You open them, because I can't."

The skeleton is wrapped in a royal blue shawl.

I sat in front of the computer with Dean beside me, scrolling from one picture to the next, my finger feeling heavier with each click.

There's a long-dead flower pressed into the bones of her left hand.

The necklace is around her neck, the chain tangled in her rib cage.

Empty sockets stared back at me from a skull devoid of human flesh. I stared at the contours, waiting for a spark of recognition, but all I felt was bile rising in the back of my throat.

You removed the flesh from her bones. Forensic a.n.a.lysis suggested the removal had been done post mortem, but that was cold comfort. You destroyed her. You eradicated her.

Dean brought his hand to rest on the back of my neck. I'm here.

I swallowed back the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm me. Once. Twice. Three times-and then I scrolled on to the next picture. There were dozens of them: pictures of the dirt road on which she'd been buried. Pictures of the construction equipment that had uncovered a plain wooden casket.

You wrapped her bones in a blanket. You buried her with flowers. You gave her a coffin....

I forced myself to breathe and switched from the pictures to reading the official report.

According to the medical examiner, there was a notch on the outside of one of her arm bones, a defensive wound where a knife had literally cut her to the bone. Laboratory results indicated that the bones had been treated with some kind of chemical prior to burial. That made the remains hard to date, but crime scene a.n.a.lysis put the time of burial within days of my mother's disappearance.

You killed her, then you erased her. No skin on the bones. No hair on her head. Nothing.

Dean's fingers kneaded gently at the muscles at the back of my neck. I turned my gaze from the computer screen to him. "What do you see?"

"Care." Dean paused. "Honor. Remorse."

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn't want to know if the killer had felt remorse. I didn't care that she'd mattered enough to him that he hadn't just flung her body down in some hole.

You don't get to bury her. You don't get to honor her, you sick son of a b.i.t.c.h.

"Do you think she knew him?" My voice sounded distant to my own ears. "That's one explanation for what we're seeing, isn't it? He killed her in a frenzy and regretted it after the fact."

The blood-splattered dressing room in my memory spoke of domination and anger, the burial site, as Dean had said, of honor and care. Two sides of the same coin-and taken together, the suggestion was that this wasn't a random act of violence.

You took her with you. I'd always known that my mother's killer had removed her from the room. Whether she was alive or dead when he'd done so, the police hadn't been able to say, though they'd known from day one that she'd lost enough blood that her chances of survival were next to nonexistent. You took her because you needed her with you. You couldn't leave her behind for someone else to bury.

"He might have known her." Dean's voice brought me back to the present. I noticed that this once, with this case, he didn't use the word I. "Or he might have watched her from afar and convinced himself that the interaction went both ways. That she knew he was watching. That he knew her the way no one else ever would."

My mom had made her living as a "psychic." Like me, she'd been good at reading people-good enough to convince them that she had a line to "the other side."

Did she do a reading for you? Did you go to one of her shows?

I racked my memory, but it was a blur of faces in the crowd. My mother had done a lot of readings. She'd done a lot of shows. We'd moved around often enough that there was no point in forming connections. No friends. No family.

No men in her life.

"Ca.s.sie, look at this." Dean drew my attention back to the screen. He zoomed in on one of the pictures of the coffin. There was a design etched into the surface of the wood: seven small circles, forming a heptagon around what appeared to be a plus sign.

Or, I thought, thinking about remorse and burial rituals and the monster who'd carved that symbol, a cross.

Sleep came for me in the dead of night. I dreamt of my mother's eyes, wide-set and rimmed in liner that made them look almost impossibly large. I dreamt of the way she'd shooed me out of the dressing room that day.

I dreamt of the blood and woke the next morning to something sticky dripping onto my forehead, one drop of liquid at a time. My eyes flew open.

Lia stood over me, a straw in one hand and a can of soda in the other. She eased her finger off the top of the straw and let another drop of soda hit my forehead.

I wiped it off and sat up, careful not to wake Dean, who lay beside me on the couch, still dressed in his clothes from the night before.

Lia put the straw in her mouth and sucked the remaining liquid out before plopping it back down in her soda. Smirking, she eyed the sleeping Dean, then raised an eyebrow at me. When that failed to engender a response, she made a quiet tsk-ing sound with her tongue. I stood up, which forced her to take a step back.

"It's not what you think," I told her, my voice muted.

Lia twirled the straw contemplatively in between her middle finger and her thumb. "So you two weren't up until the wee hours of the morning looking at the information on that drive Agent Sterling gave you?"

"How did you-"

Lia cut off the question by turning my still-open laptop to face me. "Fascinating reading."

I felt a sinking sensation deep in my gut. Lia knows. She read the file, and she knows.

I waited for Lia to say something else about the files on that computer. She didn't. Instead, she strolled toward the bedroom she'd claimed as her own. After a long moment, I followed, just as she'd intended me to. We ended up out on the balcony.

Lia closed the door behind us, then hopped up on the railing. We were forty stories off the ground, and she sat there, perfectly balanced, staring me down.

"What?" I said.

"If you mention a word of what I'm about to tell you to Dean, I will disavow any knowledge of this conversation." Lia's tone was casual, but I believed every word of it.

I braced myself for an attack.

"You make him happy." Lia narrowed her eyes slightly. "As happy as Dean can be," she modified. "We'd have to ask Sloane for the exact numbers, but I'm estimating a two hundred percent reduction in brooding since the two of you embarked on...this thing of yours."

Dean was Lia's family. If she had a choice between saving every other person on the face of the planet and saving Dean, she would choose Dean.

She hopped off the railing and gripped my arm lightly. "I like you." Her grip tightened, as if she found that admission mildly distasteful to say.

I like you, too, I almost said, but didn't want to chance that she'd see those words as a shade short of the truth.

"I missed you," I said instead-the same words I'd said to Sloane. "You, Michael, Sloane, Dean. This is home."

Lia looked at me for a moment. "Whatever," she said, pus.h.i.+ng down any emotion my words had wrought with a graceful little shrug. "The point is that I don't hate you," she continued magnanimously, "so when I say that you need to put on your big-girl panties and woman up, I mean that in the nicest possible way."

"Excuse me?" I said, pulling my arm from her grasp.

"You have Mommy issues. I get it, Ca.s.sie. I get that this is hard, and I get that you have every right to deal with the whole body-showing-up thing in your own way and time. But fair or not, no one here has the emotional bandwidth to deal with the Continuing Woes of Ca.s.sie's Murdered Mother."

I felt like she'd slammed the heel of her hand into my throat. But even as I weathered the blow, I knew Lia had said those words for a reason. You're not cruel. Not like that.

"Sloane slipped two pairs of chopsticks into her sleeve last night at the end of the meal." Lia's statement confirmed my gut instinct. "Not disposable ones. The nice ones they had on the table."

In addition to being our resident statistician, Sloane was also our resident klepto. The last time I'd seen her take something, she'd been stressed out about a confrontation with the FBI. For Sloane, sticky fingers were a sign that her brain was short-circuiting with emotions she couldn't control.

"Let's call that Exhibit A," Lia suggested. "Exhibit B would be Michael. Do you have any idea what kind of absolute mind-warp going home is for him?"

I thought of the conversation I'd overheard between Lia and Michael the day before. "Yes," I said, turning back to face Lia again. "I do."

There was a beat of silence as she processed the truth she heard in those words.

"You think you do," Lia said softly. "But you couldn't."

"I heard you guys talking yesterday," I admitted.

I expected Lia to have a knee-jerk reaction to those words, but she didn't. "Once upon a time," she said, her voice even as she turned to stare out at the Strip, "someone used to give me gifts for being a good girl, the way Michael gets 'gifts' from his father. You might think you understand what's going on in Michael's head right now, but you don't. You can't profile this, Ca.s.sie. You can't puzzle it out."

When she turned back to face me, the expression on her face was flippant. "What I'm saying here is that Michael is about one downward spiralinduced bad decision away from eloping with a showgirl, and Sloane has been acting weird-even for Sloane-since we got here. We are officially at issue capacity, Ca.s.sie. So I'm sorry, but you don't get to be effed up right now." She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger. "It's not your turn."

If Lia had done to Michael what she'd just done to me, he would have lashed back at her. If she'd done it to Sloane, Sloane would have been crushed-but I wasn't. Sooner or later, my grief would catch up to me. But Lia had given me a reason to fight it for that much longer. She wasn't wrong about Michael. She wasn't wrong about Sloane. Someone had to hold them together. Someone had to hold us together.

And I needed that person to be me.

My gut said Lia knew that. You could have been nicer about it, I thought-but if she had been, she wouldn't be Lia.

I stayed out on the balcony for another ten minutes after Lia sauntered off. When I finally made my way back inside, Michael, Lia, and Dean were gathered around the kitchen table-and so was Agent Briggs. He was dressed in plain-clothes, which told me the FBI was making an effort at keeping these visits on the down low. The fact that Briggs's version of plain clothes still made him look like a cop was perfectly reflective of his personality: hyperfocused, ambitious.

Briggs played to win.

"There's been another murder." Briggs had apparently been waiting for my arrival to make that announcement. None of the four of us made an attempt at looking surprised. "That makes the Apex, the Wonderland, the Desert Rose, and the Majesty, all in a matter of four days. We may be looking at someone who has a grudge against the casinos or the people who profit from them."

Dean looked toward a file Briggs held in his hand. "The latest victim?"

Briggs tossed the folder down onto the kitchen table. I flipped it open. Gla.s.sy blue eyes stared back at me, impossibly large in a heart-shaped face.

"Is that..." Michael started to say.

"Camille Holt," I finished, unable to pull my eyes away.

You like being underestimated, Camille, I thought dully, bringing my hand to touch the edge of the picture. You're fascinated by the way the mind works, the way it breaks, the way people survive things no one should be able to survive.

Her skin was tinged a ghastly gray; the whites of her wide-set eyes were marked by blots of red-capillaries that had burst as she'd struggled against her a.s.sailant.

You struggled. You fought. She was lying on her back on a white marble floor, strawberry blond hair spread out in a halo around her head-but I knew in my gut that she'd fought, viciously, with an almost feral strength her a.s.sailant wouldn't have been expecting.

"Asphyxiation," Dean commented. "She was strangled."

"Murder weapon?" I asked. There was a difference between strangling someone with a wire and strangling them with a rope.

Briggs took out a snapshot of an evidence bag. Inside was a necklace-the thick metal chain Camille had worn looped twice around her neck the night before.

In my mind, I could see her, sitting at the bar, one leg dangling off the stool. I could see her turning toward us and walking toward the exit.

I could see Aaron Shaw watching her go.

"You'll want to talk to the casino owner's son." Michael's thoughts were perfectly in line with my own. "Aaron Shaw. His interest in Ms. Holt wasn't professional."

"What did you see?" Briggs asked.

Michael shrugged. "Attraction. Affection. A sharp edge of tension."

What kind of tension? I didn't get the chance to follow up before Sloane popped into the kitchen and went to pour herself some coffee. Briggs eyed her warily. Sloane's tendency toward high-speed babbling when caffeinated was a thing of legend.

"I called you last night," Sloane told him reproachfully. "I called and called, and you didn't answer. Ergo, I get coffee, and you don't get to complain."