The Naturals: All In Part 23

You sent them something to let them know what was coming. You watched them. You chose them. You marked them.

"It never occurred to me he might still be watching." Judd's voice was harder now. "Best we could figure, the person who killed Scarlett was in jail or dead. But knowing what I know now?" Judd leaned back in his seat, his eyes never leaving mine. "I think the son of a b.i.t.c.h was watching. I think he'd have killed a dozen more if they'd have let him. But if he had to content himself with nine..."

He would have made the most of it.

I closed my eyes. "I think I met him," I said. "Last summer."

I couldn't provide a description of the man. Michael, who'd been with me that day at the river, couldn't do much better Three minutes, six months ago. My brain stored all kinds of information about people-but even in a dream, I hadn't been able to make out the phantom's face.

Michael's voice broke into my thoughts. "Now strikes me as the appropriate time for a distraction."

I was sitting on the couch, staring at nothing. Michael took a seat on the other end, leaving s.p.a.ce for Dean between him and me.

Whatever complications there were between us, this was so much bigger.

"Now," Michael said, determined to bring levity to a moment where there was none, "having recently been involuntarily drafted into a rather violent mud wrestling compet.i.tion myself"-he shot a dirty look at Lia-"it occurs to me that perhaps we could-"

"No." Dean took the seat between Michael and me.

"Excellent," Michael replied with a smile. "That leaves Lia, Ca.s.sie, Sloane, and me for the wrestling. You can referee."

"Tomorrow's the twelfth." Sloane sat down on the floor in front of us, pulling her legs to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. "We keep talking about mud wrestling and...and Nightshade, and how he knew we were here, and what he's doing-but tomorrow's the twelfth."

Tomorrow, I filled in for her, someone dies.

Judd still hadn't let us look at the Nightshade case file-as if not knowing might protect us, when he knew as well as we did that ship had sailed. But Sloane was right-even bundled off to a safe house, with armed guards policing our every move, we didn't have to sit back and wait.

"We know where the Vegas UNSUB is going to strike," I said, looking from Sloane to the others. "We know he's going to use a knife." The word knife would always come rife with images for me. I let the sickening memories roll over me, and I pushed on. "We need more."

"Funny you should say that," Lia said. She reached for the TV control and turned the television on to ESPN. "Personally," she said, "I don't consider poker a sport."

On-screen, five individuals sat around a poker table. I only recognized two of them-the professor and Thomas Wesley.

"Beau Donovan is in the other bracket," Lia volunteered. "a.s.suming they let him back in after his recent brush with the law. The top two players from each bracket plus one wild card will face off tomorrow at noon."

"Where?" Sloane beat me to the question.

"The tournament has been hopping from one casino to the next," Lia said. "But the finals are at the Majesty."

"Where at the Majesty?" I asked.

Lia met my gaze. "Take a wild guess."

January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom.

"Open to the public?" Dean asked.

Lia nodded. "Got it in one."

Grayson Shaw must have gone against the FBI's wishes and resumed business as usual.

"My father should have listened to me." Sloane didn't sound small or sad this time. She sounded angry. "I'm not normal," she said. "I'm not the daughter he wanted, but I'm right, and he should have listened."

Because he hadn't, someone would die.

No. I was sick of losing. A killer had taken my mother away from me. Now, the man who'd killed Judd's daughter had taken our home. He'd watched us, he'd threatened us, and there was nothing we could do about it.

I wasn't just going to sit here.

"No one dies tomorrow," I told the others. "No one."

I stared at the screen, looking for an answer, willing my mind to do what my genetic predispositions and my mother's early training had formed me to do.

"Who's happier about their hand?" Lia asked Michael. "Smirky or Intense?"

I barely registered Michael's reply. Wesley had dressed in keeping with his image. Millionaire. Eccentric. Rake. In contrast, the professor was self-contained, dressed to blend among businessmen, not to stand out at the table.

Precise. Single-minded. Contained.

We were looking for someone who planned ten steps ahead. You need nine, and you have to know that with each one, the pressure will mount. Someone who planned as meticulously as this killer-who was as grandiose as this killer, who prided himself on being better, being more-would have a plan to circ.u.mvent suspicion.

You have alibis, I thought, staring at Thomas Wesley. You're the one who tipped the FBI about Tory's powers of hypnosis.

On-screen, the professor won the hand. The slightest of smiles pulled at the edge of his lips. You win because you deserve to, I thought, slipping out of Wesley's perspective and into the professor's. You win because you've mastered your emotions and decoded the odds.

I could see bits and pieces of our UNSUB's profile in both of them, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something missing, some piece of the puzzle that would let me say, definitively, yes or no.

I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate and work my way through what that information might be.

"Sloane discovered the Fibonacci dates because she knew our UNSUB was obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence," I said finally. "So how did our UNSUB discover them?"

If the pattern was oblique enough that the authorities had never discovered it, never linked the cases we could now attribute to this group, how had our UNSUB?

I tried to push my way through to the answer. You know what they do. You want their attention. It was more than that, though. You want what you're owed. These murders weren't just attention-getters. Viewed from the perspective of a group that valued its invisibility, they were attacks.

"Tell Briggs and Sterling to look for a history of trauma," I said. "See if we can tie anyone from this case to a victim in one of the prior cases."

To find the pattern, you would have had to be obsessed. I knew that kind of obsession and knew it well. Maybe they took something from you. Maybe this is you taking it back.

"They'll want to look at family members of suspects as well." Dean knew obsession as well as I did, for different reasons. "It's possible we could be looking for a relative of a member-a child or sibling who was denied admission himself."

To do this, to put this much time and effort and calculation into getting this group's attention...It's personal, I thought. It has to be.

You want to be them, and you want to destroy them. You want power where you've had none.

You want it all.

"It's always personal," Dean said, his thoughts working in tune with mine. "Even when it's not."

"There are other cases," Sloane said quietly, her hands clasped in front of her body. "Other victims."

"The cases your program didn't find," I said.

There was a long pause.

"It is possible," Sloane mumbled, "that I got bored yesterday and wrote another program."

A chill settled on the surface of my skin and burrowed deep. Profiling the Vegas UNSUB was one thing, but the cult was another altogether. Nightshade's message to Judd-whatever the content-had conveyed one thing very clearly, through its existence alone.

No matter who you are, or where you go, no matter how well-protected you are, we'll find you.

Judd was right to try to pull us off the case. He was right to try to stop us before we were in too deep.

But it's too late, I thought. We can't un-see what we've seen. We can't pretend. We can't stop looking, and even if we could...

"What did your program find?" Lia asked Sloane.

"Instead of scanning law enforcement databases, I programmed it to scan newspapers." Sloane shifted to a cross-legged position. "Several of the larger ones have been working on digitizing their archives. Add in the databases of historical societies, library doc.u.ments, and virtual depositories of non-fiction texts, and there's a wealth of information to search." She twisted her hands against each other. "I couldn't use the same parameters, so I just searched for murders on Fibonacci dates. I've been weeding through them by hand."

"And?" Dean prompted.

"I found a few of our missing cases," Sloane said. "Most weren't identified as serial murder, but the date, year, and method of killing match the pattern."

Some UNSUBs were better at hiding their work than others.

"We'll have to tell Sterling and Briggs about those cases," I said. "If we think the Vegas UNSUB might have a connection to one of them-"

"There's something else," Sloane cut in. "The pattern, it goes back a lot further than the 1950s. I've tracked at least one case as far back as the late 1800s."

More than a century.

Whatever this was, whoever these people were-they'd been doing this for a very long time.

Pa.s.sed down, I thought. Over decades and generations.

Without warning, Lia slammed Michael back against the wall, pinning his hands over his head.

"Now really isn't the time or the place," Michael told her.

"What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?" Lia asked, her voice furious and low.

"Lia?" I said. She ignored me, and when Dean called her name, she ignored him, too.

"Where do you get off?" Lia asked Michael. She kept his right arm pinned with her left and brought her right hand up to the bottom of his sleeve. His eyes flashed, but before he could fight back, she'd pulled the sleeve roughly back.

"You just had to come with me," Lia spat. "You wouldn't let me walk out of that hotel room alone. I didn't need you there. I didn't want you there."

My eyes landed on the arm Lia had bared. Breath rushed out of my lungs like I'd been hit with a block of cement.

There, raised against Michael's skin like welts, were four numbers.

7761.

YOU.

You plan for every contingency. You see ten moves ahead. This is not supposed to be happening.

Your target had a room booked through the end of the week. He was not supposed to leave.

Nine.

Nine.

Nine.

Your temples pound with it. Your heart races with it. You can feel your plan disintegrating, feel it falling apart. This is what you get for playing it safe. This is what you get for holding back. Are you what you claim to be, or aren't you?

"I am." You say the words. It takes everything in you not to scream them. "I am!"

A complication is just a complication. An opportunity. To take what you want. To do what you want. To be what you were always meant to be.

You press the tip of the knife to your stomach. Blood beads up on the surface.

Just a little complication.

Just a little blood.

Circle. Circle. Circle. Around. Up and down. Left and right.

Do it, a voice whispers from your memory. Please, G.o.d, just do it.

Everything but true infinity has its end. All mortal men must die. But you were never meant to be mortal. You were born for things such as these.

Tomorrow is the day, and the day will be perfect.

"So it has been decided," you murmur, "and so it shall be."

"How long?" I asked Michael, my eyes locked on his wrist.

He knew exactly what I was asking. "It showed up this morning, itching like h.e.l.l."

More than thirty-six hours after we'd left Vegas.

"Toxicodendrons." Sloane pulled her legs back to her chest, her hands worrying at the knees of her jeans. "Plants in the toxicodendron genus produce urushiol. It's a sticky oil, a powerful allergen. If Michael's been exposed before, the delay of onset for the rash the second time would be between twenty-four and forty-eight hours."

"Pretty sure I'd know if I'd been exposed before," Michael pointed out.

"Poison ivy and poison oak are toxicodendrons."