All In: (The Naturals #3) (33 page)

Our killer would win.

“W
e 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 pass?”

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 shirt 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 clusters 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 cluster.” 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.”

You’re weaving through the crowd. It’s dark. Chaotic. People are fumbling for their cell phones. You keep your head down. There’s no room for hesitation. No room for
mistakes.

I looked at the three people Lia had indicated.
You just killed a man, and you’re going to let someone else dispose of the evidence.
From the beginning, I’d seen our UNSUB
as a planner, a manipulator.
You knew exactly which mark to choose.

“That one.” I pointed to the second of the two marks Lia had chosen.
Late twenties. Male. Wearing a suit jacket. Mouth pursed in distaste.

Familiar.

“Thomas Wesley’s assistant.” Michael recognized him, too. “Not a big fan of the FBI, is he?”

“We’re on it.” Agent Briggs wasn’t a person to sit on a lead for long. He and Agent Sterling were in transit before we’d even finished briefing
them.

“Will it be enough?” I asked. Sloane had gone quiet beside me. No matter how badly she wanted answers, she wouldn’t be able to form the question, so I asked it for her.

“
If
the assistant still has it, and
if
it has Beau’s fingerprints on it, and
if
forensics can tie it to either the knife or Aaron’s blood…”
Briggs let the number of conditionals in that sentence speak for itself. “Maybe.”

Trace evidence.
That was what this came down to. Trace evidence had told me my mother’s blood was on that shawl. Trace evidence had said those bones were hers.

The universe owes me this,
I thought—fiercely, irrationally. Trace evidence had taken my mother away. Trace evidence could give me—give Sloane—this one thing.

“
Maybe
isn’t good enough.” Lia spoke now, just as much for Sloane as I had. “I want him squirming. I want him helpless. I want him to watch it all come crumbling
down.”

“I know.” There was an undertone in Briggs’s voice that told me he wanted the same, wanted it the way he’d wanted Dean’s father, once upon a time.
“We’ve got local PD working on tracking down video footage—of Michael at the Desert Rose, of the hours leading up to the fight between Beau and the Majesty’s head of
security. Something will turn up.”

Something has to,
I thought desperately.
You don’t get to get away with this, Beau Donovan. You don’t get to walk away from this unscathed.
If we could obtain
physical evidence—and video evidence—the one thing we were missing was witness testimony.

“Tory Howard.” I threw the name out there, knowing that I wasn’t saying anything that Briggs and Sterling hadn’t already considered.

“We tried,” Briggs replied curtly. “This is the second time we’ve arrested Beau. She thinks he’s innocent.”

Of course Tory wouldn’t want to believe Beau had done this. I thought about the young woman I’d profiled again and again.
You loved Aaron. Beau can’t have been the one to
take him away from you.

“We’re the bad guys here,” Briggs continued. “Tory won’t talk to us.”

You loved Aaron,
I thought again, still focused on Tory.
You’re grieving.
I thought of the last time I’d seen Tory and let out a long breath. “She won’t
talk to
you
,” I said out loud, “but she might talk to Sloane.”

T
ory didn’t answer the first time we called. Or the second. Or the third. But Sloane had an eerie capacity for persistence.
She could do the same thing over and over, caught in a loop until the outcome changed, jarring her from the pattern.

You’re not going to stop calling. You’re not ever going to stop calling.

Sloane dialed the number Sterling and Briggs had given her in full each time. I knew her well enough to know that she found some comfort in the rhythm, the motion, the numbers—but not
enough.

“Stop calling.” A voice answered, loud enough that I could make out every word from standing next to Sloane. “Just leave me alone.”

For a split second, Sloane stood, frozen, uncertain now that the pattern had been broken. Lia snapped a finger in front of her face, and Sloane blinked.

“I told him. I told my father.” Sloane went straight from one pattern to another. How many times had she spoken those words? How often must they have been repeating themselves in her
head for her to utter them so desperately each time?

“Who is this?” Tory’s voice cracked on the other end of the phone line.

With shaking hands, Sloane set the phone to speaker. “I used to be Aaron’s sister. And now I’m not. And you used to be his person, and now you’re not.”

“Sloane?”

“I told my father that it was going to happen. I told him that there was a pattern. I told him the next murder was going to happen in the Grand Ballroom on January twelfth.
I told
him,
Tory, and he didn’t listen.” Sloane sucked in a ragged breath. On the other end of the phone line, I could hear Tory doing the same. “So
you
are going to
listen,” Sloane continued. “You’re going to listen, because
you know
. You know that just because you ignore something, that doesn’t make it go away. Pretending
something doesn’t matter doesn’t make it matter less.”

Silence on the other end of the phone line. “I don’t know what you want from me,” Tory said after a small eternity.

“I’m not normal,” Sloane said simply. “I’ve never been normal.” She paused, then blurted out, “I’m the kind of not-normal that works with the
FBI.”

This time, Tory’s intake of breath sounded sharper. A flicker in Michael’s eye told me he heard layers of emotion in it.

“He was my brother,” Sloane said again. “And I just need you to listen.” Sloane’s voice broke and broke again as she spoke. “Please.”

Another eternity of silence, tenser this time. “Fine.” Tory clipped the word. “Say what you need to say.”

I could feel Tory shifting from one mode to another: naked grief to defensiveness to a kind of flippancy I recognized from Lia.
Things only matter if you let them.
People
only
matter if you let them.

“Cassie?” Sloane sat the phone down. I stepped forward. On Sloane’s other side, Dean did the same, until the two of us were standing facing each other, the phone on the coffee
table between us.

“We’re going to tell you about the killer we’re looking for,” I said.

“I swear to God, if this is about Beau—”

“We’ll tell you about our killer,” I continued evenly. “And then you’ll tell us.” Tory was quiet enough on the other end of the line that I wasn’t
completely sure she hadn’t hung up on us. I glanced at Dean. He nodded slightly, and I started. “The killer we’re looking for has killed five people since January first. Four of
the five people were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. While this could mean that our killer has a fixation on this age group due to a prior experience in his or her life, we believe
the most likely explanation—and the one that fits best with the nature of the crimes—is that the killer is young as well.”

“We’re looking for someone in his early twenties,” Dean continued. “Someone who had a reason to target the casinos in general and the Majesty in particular. It’s
likely our killer has extensive experience with Las Vegas and is used to going unseen. This is both his greatest asset and the fuel for much of his rage.”

“Our killer is used to being dismissed,” I continued. “He almost certainly has a genius-level IQ, but probably performed poorly in school. Our killer can play by the rules, but
feels no guilt for breaking them. He’s not just smarter than people give him credit for—he’s smarter than the people who make the rules, smarter than the people who give the
assignments, smarter than the people he works for and with.”

“Killing is an act of dominance.” Dean’s voice was quiet and understated, but there was conviction in it—the kind of conviction that spoke of firsthand experience.
“The killer we’re looking for doesn’t care about physical dominance. He wouldn’t back down from a fight, but he’s lost his fair share. This killer dominates his
victims mentally. They don’t lose because he’s stronger than they are—they lose because he’s smarter.”

“They lose,” I continue, “because he’s a true believer.”

“Beau isn’t religious.” Tory latched on to that—which I took to mean she recognized just how well everything else we’d said fit her foster brother.

“Our killer believes in power. He believes in destiny.” Dean paused. “He believes that something has been taken from him.”

“He believes,” I said quietly, “that now is the time to take it back.”

We didn’t tell Tory about the cult. With Nightshade’s attention on Vegas, knowing could put her in danger. Instead, I stopped telling Tory about our killer’s present state of
mind and starting extrapolating backward.

“Our killer is young,” I said again, “but it’s clear from the level of organization in the kills that these murders have been years in the making.”

There was a reason we hadn’t been able to pinpoint the UNSUB’s age until we’d identified Michael as the intended fifth victim. So much about these kills spoke of
planning—experience, grandiosity,
artistry
. To have reached that point by the age of twenty-one…