Not the phone call. Not an answer I already knew.
“Eleven years ago,” I said, addressing the UNSUB out loud and forcing everything else from my mind, “you slit the throats of nine people in a four-month period ranging from August to January.”
“Five years ago,” Dean responded, “I did it again. Poison, this time.”
The changing method had always been one of the more perplexing aspects of the Vegas murders. Most killers had a single preferred method of killing—or, if not a method or weapon of choice, at least an emotional kill type. Poison meant killing without physical contact—not dissimilar from orchestrating an accident in which a young woman drowns. Slitting someone’s throat, on the other hand, was closer to putting an arrow through an old man’s chest. Neither was as painful as, say, burning alive.
“The last time we had an UNSUB who fluctuated this much from kill to kill,” I said slowly, thinking back to the case we’d worked involving Dean’s father, “we were dealing with multiple UNSUBs.”
Dean’s jaw clenched, but when I laid a hand on his shoulder, he relaxed under my touch.
“‘I need nine,’” Dean said after a moment. “I, not we.”
As different as the four murders we were dealing with in Vegas were, something about them felt the same. Not just the numbers on the wrists, not just the locations or the dates, but the meticulousness of the method, the compulsive desire to send a message with each kill.
That didn’t strike me as the work of multiple UNSUBs—not unless one of them was the architect behind it all.
You want to be recognized. You want to be heard.
It was there on every wrist, there in the message the UNSUB had carved into the arrow, there in the message a bystander had been hypnotized to deliver. You don’t want to be stopped. But you do want—very much—to be seen. You want to be larger-than-life, I thought. You want the world to know what you have done. You want to be a god among men.
And for that, I thought, you need nine.
“Why nine?” I asked. “What happens after the ninth?”
Dean echoed the most significant part of that question. “Why stop?”
Why stop eleven years ago? Why stop after killing Scarlett Hawkins?
“I need to see the file,” I told Dean.
“You know we can’t.”
“Not Scarlett’s. The other case Sloane found. The one in New York.”
Sloane was sitting in front of the coffee table, holding the DVD Aaron had given us. She’d put it back in the case and was staring at it. I knew, instinctively, that she was thinking about Tory and what Aaron had done for her.
She was thinking—painfully hoping—that maybe Aaron wasn’t like their father after all.
“Sloane,” I said, “can you hack the FBI database and pull up the New York file?”
Having a flawless memory herself, Sloane didn’t quite grasp the utility of rehacking a file she’d already read, but she did as I asked and set the DVD aside. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. After several seconds, she paused, then hit a few keys, then paused again.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The program I wrote earlier,” Sloane said, “it finished its search.”
“Let me guess,” Lia put in. “It returned the Nightshade case, which we, under threat of exile, cannot so much as breathe on.”
“Yes,” Sloane said. “It did.”
Lia tilted her head to one side. “Why doesn’t that sound entirely true?”
“Because,” Sloane said, turning the computer around so the rest of us could see, “that’s not the only case it returned.”
Sloane’s search hadn’t yielded one case. Or two. Or three.
“How many are there?” I asked, my throat dry.
“Going back to the 1950s,” Sloane replied, “almost a dozen. All serial murder, all unsolved.”
I leaned back against the counter, my hands gripping the edge. “Nine kills each time?”
“I set the search to return anything over six,” Sloane said. “With the thought that some victims may not have been discovered or linked to the same UNSUB.”
“But all of the victims in each case were killed on one of the twenty-seven Fibonacci dates you identified,” Dean said.
Sloane nodded. Without waiting for another question, she began skimming the files. “All over the country,” she reported. “Three in Europe. Stabbings, beatings, poison, arson—it’s all over the map.”
“I need pictures,” I said. “Anything you can get, from any file that’s not Nightshade’s.” Judd had forbidden us to go anywhere near the Nightshade case. But the others…
All of those victims. All of those families…
I had to do something. Nothing I did could possibly be enough. “This many cases,” I told Dean, “going back that far…”
“I know.” He met my eyes. Dean’s father was one of the most prolific serial killers of our time. But this was so far beyond even him.
All over the world, going back sixty years—the chances that we were dealing with a single UNSUB were dwindling by the second.
“How good is this program?” Lia asked Sloane.
“It’s only returning files that fit the parameters.” Sloane sounded mildly insulted.
“No,” Lia said. “What’s the return rate?” Every muscle in her face was tight. “How many is it missing?”
The numbers lie, I realized, following Lia’s train of thought. Oh, God.
Sloane closed her eyes, her lips moving rapidly as she went over the numbers. “When you take into account the number of databases I don’t have access to, the likelihood of old records being digitalized, the role the FBI has played in the investigation of serial murders over the years…” She rocked slightly in her chair. “Half,” she said. “At best, I might have gotten about half of the cases from 1950 until now.”
Almost a dozen had been unfathomable. Twice that? Not possible.
“How many?” I said. “Total victims, how many are we talking?”
“At minimum?” Sloane whispered. “One hundred and eighty-nine.”
One hundred and eighty-nine dead bodies. One hundred and eighty-nine lives snuffed out. One hundred and eighty-nine families who had lost what I’d lost. Lost like I’d lost.
One hundred and eighty-nine families who had never gotten answers.
Dean called Agent Sterling. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on Judd’s face when he’d talked about Scarlett’s murder. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and the blood on her dressing room walls and the nights I’d spent waiting for the police to call. They never did. I waited, and they never called—and when they finally did, it wasn’t any better. The days since they’d found the body—they weren’t any better.
One hundred and eighty-nine.
It was too much.
I can’t do this.
I did it anyway, because that was what I’d signed up for. That was what profilers did. We lived through horror. We submerged ourselves in it again and again and again. The same part of me that let me compartmentalize my mother’s case would let me do this, and the same part of me that couldn’t always fight the memories meant I would pay for it.
Profiling came with a cost.
But I would pay it again and again and again to make it so that even just one child never came home to blood on the walls.
Our in-suite printer nearly ran out of ink printing off the pictures of the bodies—and that was only for the case files Sloane had managed to fully access.
Mapping out the progression over time, several things became clear. Old and young, male and female. The victims ran the gamut. The only group not represented was children.
No kids. I wanted to cling to that, but I couldn’t.
The next thing that became clear, to my profiler’s eye, was that some sets of victims were more homogeneous than others. One case might involve only female victims with long blond hair; another might show clear signs that the murders had been those of opp
ortunity, with no patterning to the victim choice at all.
“Multiple killers.” Dean hadn’t looked at the spread for more than thirty seconds when he said the words. “And it’s not just a shift over time. Even back-to-back cases have totally different signatures.”
To some of you, choosing the victims is paramount. To others, the target is beside the point.
Eleven cases. Eleven different killers. Nightshade didn’t kill those people in New York. Viewed in the context of the larger pattern, it was easier to see. Nine victims, killed on Fibonacci dates. Everything else—everything that told us who the killer was—was different. It was like looking at eleven people writing the same sentence, over and over again. Different handwriting, same words.
So where did that leave our Vegas killer?
“Seven different methods of murder.” Sloane’s voice broke into my thoughts. Like her, I counted. One set of victims had been strangled. The New York killer had slit his victims’ throats; another had also used a knife but showed a preference for stabbing. Two sets of victims had been impaled through the heart—one with metal bolts and another with whatever happened to be on hand at the scene. Two sets had been beaten to death. A case in Paris featured victims who were burned alive.
The most recent case—only two and a half years old—was the work of an UNSUB who broke into homes and drowned the inhabitants in their own bathtubs.
And then there were the ones who’d been poisoned.
Sloane stood, staring down at the pictures. “The closest cases are three years apart.” Sloane squatted and began pulling out photos—one from each case for which we had them. With the same efficiency with which she’d organized the glass objects on the shelf in our room, she began ordering them, spacing some closer together than others. She waved for paper, and Michael supplied it.
What does Michael see when he looks at these pictures? The thought struck me suddenly and violently. Is there any emotion on a dead person’s face?
Beside me, Sloane scribbled on sheets of paper, making notes about the cases we didn’t have pictures for. She integrated those in with the others on the floor.
There’s a pattern. I didn’t need her to tell me that. To these killers—however many of them there were, whatever they were doing—the pattern was everything.
Sloane kept tearing pages off the notepad. The sound of her ripping sheet after sheet off was the only one in the room. She placed the blank pages in open gaps.
“Assume a three-year interval between each case and the one that follows,” Sloane murmured, “and you can extrapolate where we’re missing data.”
Three years, I thought. Three is the number.
“It repeats.” Sloane jerked back, like she was afraid the papers might infect her, like she was afraid they already had. “Every twenty-one years, the pattern repeats. Impaled, strangled, knifed, beaten, poisoned, drowned, burned alive.” She made her way down the row, filling in methods for the blank pages. When she started over, her voice went up an octave. “Impaled, strangled, knifed, beaten, poisoned, drowned, burned alive. Impaled—”
Her voice broke. Michael caught her and held her still, his arms wrapping around her and pulling her back to his chest. “I’ve got you,” he said.
He didn’t tell her it was okay. We all knew it wasn’t.
Dean crouched over the pattern Sloane had pulled out. “Cassie,” he said.
I knelt. Dean tapped one of the photos. Drowning. Starting there, I realized why Dean had called me over and not Sloane. Drowning, burning alive, impaled through the heart—
Alexandra Ruiz.
Sylvester Wilde.
Eugene Lockhart.
Our UNSUB was going in order.
You need nine, because that’s the way this is done. Those are the rules. My understanding of the Vegas UNSUB shifted. There is an order. You’re following it.
But being a follower isn’t enough.
The numbers on the wrists, the Fibonacci spiral—none of that was present in any of the other cases Sloane had pulled. Each of the cases in front of us had employed one of seven methods.
You’re going to do it all.
“Where are we in the cycle?” I asked. “Is our current UNSUB part of it, or does he break it?”
“Last case was two and a half years ago,” Sloane said. “Three years before that, we have the Nightshade case.”
Six years in May, I thought.
“So the UNSUB is early,” I said. “Unless you go based on calendar year, and then—technically—it fits the pattern.”
Alexandra Ruiz had died after midnight on New Year’s Eve. January first. A date for beginnings. A date for resolutions.
“If we assume the UNSUB started at the beginning of the established cycle,” Dean said, “then that cycle starts with drowning.”
The most recent set of nine victims had been drowned.
“This isn’t a culmination,” I translated. “It’s not a grand finale. If it were, it would have happened before they started the cycle over.”
They. The word settled over me and refused to leave. “Who’s doing this?” I asked, looking down at the pictures. “Why?”
Hundreds of victims killed over decades. Different killers. Different methods.
“They’re doing it because someone told them to.” Lia managed to sound utterly bored, but she couldn’t look away from the pictures splayed out on the floor. “They’re doing it because they believe this is how it has to be done.”
When I was nine years old, I killed a man.
I grew up in a cult.
Lia’s statements from Two Truths and a Lie came back to me, and suddenly, it occurred to me that—per the rules of the game—both of those statements could be true, so long as what she’d said about considering shaving Michael’s head was not.
It would be just like Lia to tell outrageous truths and a joking, mundane lie.
Once upon a time, your name was Sadie. Now wasn’t the time to profile Lia, but I couldn’t stop it, any more than Sloane could have stopped looking for the Fibonacci dates. Someone used to give you gifts for being a good girl. You were on the streets by the time you were thirteen. Sometime before that, you learned not to trust anyone. You learned to lie.
Dean’s brown eyes settled on Lia. Their history was palpable in the air. For a moment, it was like no one else was in the room.
“You think we’re dealing with some kind of cult,” Dean said.
“You’re the profiler, Dean,” Lia responded, never looking away from his face. “You tell me.”
A string of victims every three years, killed in prescriptive ways on dates dictated by the Fibonacci sequence.
There was an unquestionable element of ritual to that.
“Say we are dealing with a cult,” Michael said, keeping his voice casual, never looking at Lia. “Does that make our guy a member?”
I turned the question over in my head. Lia answered it.
“Cult 101,” she said. “You don’t talk to outsiders.” Her voice was strangely flat. “You don’t tell them what they’re not blessed enough to know.”
The numbers on the wrists. The Fibonacci spiral. If there was some kind of group operating behind the scenes, they’d managed to avoid detection for more than six decades—until someone had turned Sloane onto the code.
Lia didn’t need experience with this cult to see meaning in that. “I’m going to go play some poker.” She stood up, shedding her previous affect as easily as someone stepping out of a dress. “If you try to stop me,” she said with a smile that looked so real, I almost believed it, “if you try to come with me, I will make you regret it.” She flounced to the door. Dean started to stand, and she gave him a look. A silent conversation passed between them.
She loved him, but right now, she didn’t want him. She didn’t want anyone.
Lia rarely showed us her true self. But what we’d just seen was more than that. The flat voice, the words she’d said—that wasn’t just the real Lia. That was the gir
l she’d spent years running from.
That was Sadie.
“Parting gift,” Lia said on her way out, twirling a finger through her jet-black hair, no sign of that girl in her now, “for those of you who might be a little slow on the uptake. Whoever our killer is, I’d bet a lot of money that he’s not a part of this group. If he were, the cult would be monitoring him. And if they were monitoring him and they found out that he’d shared even one of their secrets?” Lia shrugged, the very picture of careless indifference. “He wouldn’t be our problem. He’d already be dead.”
YOU
You step out into the fresh air. Inside, you’re smiling. Outside, you show a different face to the world. People have their expectations, after all, and you would hate to disappoint.
Drowning, fire, the old man impaled on the arrow, strangling Camille.
The knife is next.
Then beating a man to death with your bare hands.
Poison will be easy. Eloquent.
And then the last two—dealer’s choice. There should be nine ways. If you were in charge, there would be.
Three times three times three.
Nine is the number of victims. Three is the number of years between.
Nine seats at the table.
You pause at the doors to the Desert Rose. Not your preferred hunting grounds, of course. But a fine place to visit. A fine place to look at what you have made.
A fine place to anoint number five.
Everything is going according to plan. Word of your kills is spreading. You know they monitor others with similar proclivities. Looking for talent. For threats.
The Masters will finally see you for what you really are.
What you have become.
Michael announced he was going after Lia less than a minute after she left.
“She doesn’t want you there, Townsend,” Dean said tersely. Lia didn’t want Dean there, either. It was killing him not to go after her, but as protective as he was, Dean would only push Lia so far.
“Luckily for us,” Michael replied airily, “I’ve never met a bad idea I did not immediately embrace like the dearest of friends.” He went into his room, and when he came out, he was putting on a casual blazer, looking every inch the trust-fund kid. “I believe Lia when she says that she will make me regret going after her,” he told Dean. “But it just so happens regrets are a specialty of mine.”