All In: (The Naturals #3) (14 page)

Beside me, Michael winced. Not because of his swollen lip or the cut over his quickly blackening eye, but because he could tell, from the slight hints of strain in Judd’s face,
exactly
how much trouble we were in.

When we reached him, Judd turned without a word and started stalking toward the elevator. We followed on his heels. He didn’t say a word until the elevator doors had closed.

“You’re lucky that doesn’t need stitches,” Judd told Michael. I gathered from his tone that we were all somewhat less than lucky to be stuck on an elevator with a marine
sniper who knew how to kill a grown man using nothing but his little finger.

“The audio feeds went out while Briggs and Sterling were questioning Thomas Wesley,” Lia said. “We were just trying to stay in range.”

I opened my mouth to confirm what Lia had said, but Judd stopped me. “Don’t,” he told me. “We’re in Vegas. You’re teenagers stuck in a hotel suite. If I were
a betting man, I’d give myself excellent odds on guessing how this went down.”

“If you were a betting man,” Michael said lazily, “you’d be downstairs at the casino.”

Judd reached out and pulled the emergency stop button. The elevator jerked to a halt. He turned and leveled a very calm stare at Michael, never saying a word.

Seconds ticked by, verging on a minute.

“Sorry.” Michael addressed the apology more to the ceiling tiles than to Judd. “Sometimes, I just can’t help myself.”

I wondered if Michael was apologizing for the disrespect or for what he’d done at the pool.

“What do you think is going to happen,” Judd said softly, “when the man you hit and his family go home tonight?”

The question sucked all of the oxygen out of the air. Judd pushed the stop button back in and the elevator jolted back into motion. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Michael, because
there was nothing—
nothing
—Judd could have said to devastate him more.

Eventually, the elevator doors opened. Judd and I were the last ones off. I couldn’t help giving him a look as I stepped into the hall.

“May eighth,” Judd said quietly. “Six years, this May.” He gave me just enough time to process that date—process what it had to refer to—before he continued.
“If I have to be a real bastard to keep from burying another kid, well then, Cassie, I can be a real bastard.”

The muscles in my throat tightened. Judd walked past me, past the others, and got to the door to our suite first. He opened it, then froze.

My heart pounding in my ears, I hurried to catch up.
What would it take to catch a battle-hardened marine completely off guard?
In the second or two before I saw for myself, my mind put
forth the worst possible answer.

Sloane.

I made it to the entryway. Lia, Michael, and Dean were standing there, just as frozen in place as Judd. The first thing I saw was red.

Red dots. Red streaks. Red on the windows.

Sloane turned to beam at us. “Hi, guys!”

It took me a moment to process the fact that she was there, and she was
fine
. It was several seconds more before I realized that the red on the windows was a
drawing
.

“What the hell, Sloane?” Lia recovered her voice first.

“I needed a bigger surface to write on.” Sloane popped the cap on and off the marker in her hand. “It’ll come off,” she told us. “Assuming I grabbed the
dry-erase marker and not a permanent Sharpie.”

Still processing what I was seeing, I walked toward the diagram Sloane had sketched onto the panoramic window’s surface.

“There’s a seventy-four percent chance it will come off,” Sloane said, amending her prior statement. “On the bright side,” she said, turning to survey her work,
“I know where the killer is going to strike next.”

“I
’ve drawn a to-scale map of the Strip, plotting out the locations of the first four murders.” Sloane tapped on
each red
X
as she rattled off the locations. “The rooftop pool at the Apex, the stage in the main theater at the Wonderland, the exact location where Eugene Lockhart was sitting when
he was shot, and…” Sloane came to stand before the last
X
. “The east-most bathroom on the casino floor of the Majesty.” She stared at us in anticipation. “The
pattern isn’t where the UNSUB struck as in
which casino
. It’s the precise coordinates of the murder!”

An intense look settled over Dean’s features. “Coordinates as in latitude and longitude?”

I could feel him starting to sink into the killer’s perspective, integrating that information, when Sloane interjected.

“Not latitude. Not longitude.”

She uncapped her pen and drew a straight line connecting the first two victims. Then she did the same, connecting the second victim to the third victim and the third to the fourth. Finally, she
added five more marks, closely clustered inside the boundaries of the Majesty. She connected them to the rest, one after the other, then turned back to us, her eyes alight.

“Now do you see?”

I did.

“It’s a spiral,” Dean said.

At his words, Sloane went back over it and sketched an arc over each of the straight lines. The resulting pattern looked like a seashell.

“Not just
a
spiral,” Sloane said, stepping back. “A Fibonacci spiral!”

Lia flopped down on the sofa and stared up at Sloane’s diagram. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that has something to do with the Fibonacci sequence.”

Sloane nodded emphatically. All energy, she looked at the window and, seeing no place left to write, bounded over to the adjacent wall.

“Let’s try some paper this time,” Judd interjected mildly.

Sloane stared at him very hard.

“Paper,” she said, as if it were a word in another language. “Right.”

Judd handed her a piece. She plopped unceremoniously down on the floor and began to draw. “The first non-zero number in Fibonacci’s sequence is one. So you draw a square,” she
said, doing just that, “where each side is one unit long.”

Beneath that square, she drew a second, identical square. “The next number in the sequence is also one. So now you have one and one….”

“And one plus one is?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Two.” Another square, this one twice as big as each of the first.

“Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three is eight….” Sloane kept drawing squares, moving counterclockwise as she drew, until she ran out of space.

“Now imagine I kept going,” she said, shooting Judd a very pointed look that I interpreted to mean that she thought he’d erred in forbidding her to draw on the wall. “And
imagine I did
this.
…” She started drawing arcs through the diagonal of each square.

“If I kept going,” she said, “and added two more squares, it would look exactly”—she turned to the spiral on the window—“like that.”

I looked from Sloane’s drawing to the layout of Vegas she’d drawn onto the window. She was right. Starting with the Apex, the killer was spiraling in. And if Sloane’s
calculations were correct—and I had no reason to doubt that they were—our UNSUB was doing so in a precise and predictable fashion.

Sloane began scrawling the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence across the margins of the page, and I remembered that the first time she’d told us about the sequence, she’d said that it
was everywhere. She’d said that it was beautiful.

She’d said that it was
perfection
.

You see that same thing when you look at this pattern.
I addressed the UNSUB.
Its beauty. Its perfection. Inked into Alexandra Ruiz’s wrist. Burned into the magician’s.
Written on the old man’s skin. Carved into Camille’s flesh.

You’re not just sending a message. You’re creating something. Something beautiful.

Something holy.

“Where’s the next location?” Dean asked. “The next kill-point on the spiral—where is it?”

Sloane turned back to the window and tapped her finger just below the fifth
X
she’d drawn. “It’s here,” she said. “At the Majesty. All of the remaining
kill-points are. The closer you get to the heart of the spiral, the closer they get to each other.”

“Where at the Majesty?” Dean asked Sloane.