The Naturals: All In Part 8

I thought about the chopsticks Sloane had stolen the night before. You needed Briggs to pick up your call. You needed to be recognized. You needed to be heard.

"There was another murder," Briggs told Sloane.

"I know." Sloane stared at the coffee in her hands. "Two. Three. Three. Three."

"What did you say?" Briggs asked sharply.

"The number on the corpse. It's 2333." Sloane finally came to sit at the table with the rest of us. "Isn't it?"

Briggs pulled a new picture out of the file. Camille's wrist: 2333 had been carved into it. Literally. The b.l.o.o.d.y numbers were slightly jagged. From a henna tattoo to this. The numbers had always been a message-but this? This was violent. Personal.

"Was she alive when the UNSUB did this?" I asked.

Briggs shook his head. "Postmortem. There was a compact in the victim's purse. We believe the UNSUB broke it and used one of the shards to carve the numbers in her wrist."

I shifted from Camille's perspective to her attacker's. You're a planner. If this was what you'd intended all along, you would have brought something with you to do the job.

That left me with two questions: first, what had the plan been, and second, why had the UNSUB deviated from it?

What went wrong? I asked the killer silently. Did she thwart your plan somehow? Was she harder to manipulate than the others? I thought about the fact that Camille had been present at the crime scenes for two of the victims. Did you know her?

"This is personal." Dean's thoughts were exactly in line with my own. "The other targets might have been selected for convenience. But not this one."

"That was Agent Sterling's take as well," Briggs said. He turned back to Sloane. "You decoded the numbers?"

Sloane grabbed a pen out of Agent Briggs's pocket, flipped the folder closed, and started scrawling numbers on the outside of the folder, talking as she wrote. "The Fibonacci sequence is a series of integers where each number is derived by adding the two that come before it. Most people believe it was discovered by Fibonacci, but the earliest appearances of the sequence are in Sanskrit writings that predate Fibonacci by hundreds of years."

Sloane set the pen down. There were fifteen numbers on the page: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377.

"I didn't see it at first," she continued. "The pattern picks up mid-integer."

"Pretend for a moment," Lia told her, "that we're all very, very slow."

"I'm not very good at pretending," Sloane told her seriously. "But I think I can do that."

Michael choked back a snort.

Sloane picked the pen back up and put it down under the number thirteen. "It starts here," she said, underlining four numbers, then inserting a slash before repeating the process.

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 3/4 55 8/9 144/ 233 377.

2333. The image of Camille's wrist rose to the surface of my mind, like a drowned man bobbing to the surface of a lake. You break the gla.s.s. You press the jagged edge to her flesh, carving in the numbers.

"Why this sequence?" I said. "And why make it this hard to see? Why not start at the beginning, with 0112?"

"Because," Dean said slowly, "this knowledge has to be earned."

Briggs glanced at us, one after the other. "Agent Sterling and I will be spending the afternoon talking to potential witnesses. If you have any names to add to that list-besides Aaron Shaw-now would be the time to speak up."

At the mention of Aaron's name, Sloane's hands curved tightly around her cup of coffee. Michael c.o.c.ked his head to the side and stared at her. An instant later, he caught me watching him and raised an eyebrow at me in an unspoken challenge.

You know something's up with Sloane, I thought, and you know that I know what it is.

"I a.s.sume you've gathered that Camille was out with Tory Howard last night?" Dean asked Briggs.

Briggs gave a brief nod. "We talked with Tory briefly yesterday. We'll go back for seconds today, then work our way through the rest of our list."

"I don't suppose you'd like to take me with you when you go to talk to this fine collection of potentially homicidal individuals?" Lia batted her eyes at Agent Briggs.

Briggs withdrew four earpieces from his pocket and laid them down on the table. They were joined, a moment later, by a tablet from his briefcase. "Video and audio feeds," he told us. "Agent Sterling and I are wired. Within a four-mile radius, you'll see what we see. You'll hear what we hear. If you pick up on something you think we might have missed, you can text or call. Otherwise, I want you studying up on our interrogation techniques."

Lia, Michael, Dean, and I reached for earpieces in unison.

Sloane turned to Briggs. "What about me?" she asked quietly.

There were four earpieces and five of us.

"Four casinos in four days," Briggs said. "I need you"-he put enough emphasis on those words to tell me he'd picked up on the vulnerability in Sloane's tone-"to figure out where this killer is going to strike next."

YOU.

The roulette wheel spins. The players watch with bated breath. You watch the players. Like ants in an ant farm, they're predictable.

Some bet on black.

Some bet on red.

Some are hesitant. Some believe chance favors the bold.

You could tell them the exact odds of winning. You could tell them that chance favors no man. Red or black, it doesn't matter.

The house always wins.

You expel a breath, long and slow. Let them have their fun. Let them believe that Lady Luck might smile down on them. Let them keep their games of chance.

Your game-the one they don't even know they're playing-is a game of skill.

1/1.

1/2.

1/3.

1/4.

You know what comes next. You know the order. You know the rules. This is bigger than ants in an ant farm could ever imagine.

No one can stop you.

You are Death.

You are the house. And the house always wins.

Lia perched on the back of the couch, one leg stretched out along its length, the other dangling over the side. Dean sat on the sofa in front of her, his forearms resting on his knees, staring at the tablet we'd propped up on the coffee table.

"Anything yet?" I asked, taking a seat beside him.

Dean shook his head.

"There." Lia's posture never changed, but her eyes lit up. On the tablet, a shot of a hand dominated the screen as Briggs reoriented the camera masquerading as a pen in his suit pocket.

"Michael-" I started to call out.

Michael appeared before I could say anything else. "Let me guess," he said, producing a flask and taking a swig. "Showtime."

My eyes lingered on the flask.

Dean put one hand on my knee. If Lia and I had noticed Michael skating around the edges of the dark place, Dean almost certainly had as well. He'd known Michael for longer than I had, and he was telling me not to press the issue.

Without a word, I slipped in the earpiece Agent Briggs had given me and turned my attention back to the video feed.

On the screen, we saw what Agent Briggs saw-a stage with ma.s.sive columns on either side. As he got closer to the stage, I recognized the person standing in front of it, examining the lighting.

Tory Howard was wearing a black tank and jeans, her hair pulled into a ponytail that was neither high nor low. No muss. No fuss. She either didn't care about the image she projected or she went out of her way to project an image centered on that ideal.

When she saw Briggs, she wiped her hands on the front of her jeans and met him in the middle aisle. "Agents," she said. "Can I help you with something?"

Agents, plural, I thought. That meant Sterling was there, too, just out of the frame.

"We have just a few more questions about last night for you." Briggs seemed to be taking lead on this one-which meant that Sterling had chosen to sit back and watch. Given that she was the profiler, that didn't surprise me. Sterling would want to get Tory's measure before she decided exactly which tack to take.

"I already told you," Tory replied to Briggs, a slight edge in her voice, "Camille and I went for drinks. We played a couple of hands of poker, and I called it an early night. Camille was looking for a party. I wasn't. I have a show today, and I like to be on my game."

"I understand your shows have been selling out," Agent Briggs said.

"Say what you mean, Agent." Tory leveled a look at him-and it was almost like she was aiming that same, dry look at us. "My show has been selling out ever since the Wonderland closed theirs down."

Ever since victim number two literally went up in flames, I corrected silently.

"You seem defensive." Agent Sterling was the one who said those words. I knew her well enough to know that she'd chosen that moment to speak up-and that observation-for a reason.

"This is the second time you've interviewed me in the past twelve hours," Tory retorted. "You came to my place of business. I hadn't known Camille for long, but I liked her. So, yes, when you come here, purportedly following up on what I told you last night, but also dropping oblique hints about my dead rival, I get a little defensive."

"Not just defensive," Michael opined. He didn't volunteer whatever else it was he saw in her face.

"I didn't hurt Camille," Tory said plainly. "And I wouldn't have wasted even one of my breaths on Sylvester Wilde. I'm sorry she's dead. I'm not sorry he is. Are we done here?"

Lia let out a low whistle. "She's good."

"At lying?" I asked, wondering which portion of the statement Tory had just made was untrue.

"She hasn't lied yet," Lia said. "But she will. The best liars start by convincing you either that they're straight shooters or that they can't lie. She's going with the former. And like I said, she's very, very good."

Tory was a magician. It was easy enough to believe that she was setting the stage so that when the misdirect came, Briggs and Sterling wouldn't see it coming.

Agent Sterling changed tactics. "Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Camille? Anyone who might have a grudge against her?"

A flicker of sorrow crossed Tory's face. She pushed back against it. No muss. No fuss. "Camille was the only female likely to advance to the final round in a high-stakes compet.i.tion dominated by egos and men. She was confident and manipulative, and she liked winning."

You identify with her, I realized as Tory spoke.

"Camille was also beautiful, borderline famous, and had no problems whatsoever telling people no," Tory continued unflinchingly. "There were probably a lot of people who wanted to hurt her."

Her tone was so matter-of-fact that I knew: Someone-maybe multiple someones-hurt you. Tory knew what it was like to be seen as weak, and she knew what it was like to be overpowered. I could see why Camille had chosen to spend time with her. If she'd been fictional, Tory Howard was exactly the kind of character Camille Holt would have chosen to play.

"Did Camille ever say anything to you about Aaron Shaw?" Agent Briggs switched up the line of questioning again.

"Interesting," Michael murmured, leaning closer to the screen-and closer to Tory.

"Camille and I met at a New Year's party," Tory replied. "We hit it off. We went out for drinks a couple of times. I wasn't exactly her confidante."

I glanced back at Lia. She's pelting them with truth again, I thought.

"One more question," Agent Sterling said. "You and Camille went to the Majesty last night."

"The new sushi restaurant," Tory supplied. More truth, easily verifiable.

"Who picked the restaurant?" Sterling asked.

Tory shrugged. "She did."

Behind me, Lia swung her legs off the couch and stood. "And there we have it," she told us. "That's the lie."

"I'll text Sterling." Dean reached for his phone. There was a good chance Sterling and Briggs might have picked up on the lie, but they'd want confirmation from Lia. "Anything to add?" Dean asked as he began typing.

By some miracle, Michael managed to stifle his long-held tendency to answer everything Dean said with a smart-mouthed barb. "Two things," Michael said. "First, defensiveness isn't an emotion. It's a combination of emotions that plays out in different ways in different people at different times. In this case, we've got a tantalizing c.o.c.ktail of anger and self-presentation and guilt."

Tory feels guilty. I tried to reconcile that with what I knew about her. She struck me as pragmatic. Like Camille, she'd risen to the top of a male-dominated field. To have her own show in Vegas, she'd have to be ambitious.

She didn't strike me as a person who would let herself feel bad about anything for long.

"And the second thing?" Dean asked.

"Her reaction to Aaron Shaw." I beat Michael to the punch line.

Michael inclined his head slightly. "Temporary freezing of the facial muscles, brows fighting the urge to draw together, lips just barely stretching themselves back." He shifted his flask rhythmically from one hand to the other and back again, then clarified. "Fear."

What are you scared of, Tory? Why did you skirt the question when Briggs and Sterling asked you if Camille had said anything about Aaron Shaw?