All In (The Naturals, #3)(49)

Smart, I thought. Looking at Beau on paper, it was easy to underestimate him. High school dropout. Working a crappy job. He made no effort whatsoever to give the impression that he was anything more—but his success at the poker tournament told a very different story.

He’s used to being dismissed and ignored, but has a very high IQ, I thought.

“Tory lied to us.” Briggs lowered his voice. “Maybe we should be looking at charging her as an accessory.”

“Briggs,” Sterling said sharply—good cop until the end.

Agent Briggs leaned across the table, getting in Beau’s face and going in for the kill. “Tell me, Beau, has Tory ever taught you how to hypnotize someone?”





Briggs and Sterling kept at it, but Beau didn’t say a word. Eventually, they left him to stew and put in a call to us.

“Thoughts?” Briggs asked on speaker.

“It’s not him.” Sloane was practically vibrating with intensity. “You have to see that. The numbers? Wrong. The location? Wrong. The timing?” Sloane turned her back on the phone. “It’s all wrong.”

Silence descended. Dean filled the void. “He’s got the potential for violence.” The way Dean phrased that observation made me wonder if he saw any of himself in Beau. “He’s been living at the bottom of a hierarchy that favors those with money and power, and he has neither. Given the opportunity, he’d enjoy playing a game where he came out on top.” Dean leaned on the counter, his head bowed. “He’s angry, and I’m guessing he’s spent a lot of his life being tossed aside like garbage. If the Majesty’s head of security does die, Beau won’t feel bad about it. Given the choice, he’d probably pick up that brick again.”

“But—” Sloane started to say.

“But,” Dean said, “Sloane’s right. The numbers on the victims’ wrists aren’t just a part of this UNSUB’s MO. They’re a part of his signature. He needs to mark his victims. And I’m not convinced we’re dealing with an UNSUB who, after four meticulously planned kills, gets caught writing numbers onto the wrist of the fifth before the man is even dead.”

“The wrong numbers,” Sloane put in emphatically.

Sterling cleared her throat. “I tend to agree with Sloane and Dean. Our UNSUB’s MO has changed with each kill. And so has the method with which the victims were marked. Until now.”

Eugene Lockhart had numbers written on his wrist in a permanent marker, too, I realized.

“Say you’d killed someone.” Lia instantly had the room’s attention. “Or, in Beau’s case, say that you thought the person you’d hit with a brick was about to die.” She leaned back on the heels of her hands, and my mind went back to Two Truths and a Lie.

I killed a man when I was nine.

“Maybe you had a choice. Maybe you didn’t. And afterward,” Lia continued, her voice light and airy, “say you didn’t want to get caught. What do you do?”

Seconds ticked by in silence. Dean was the one who provided the answer. He knew Lia better than any of us. “You lie.”

“You lie,” Lia repeated. “You cover it up. And if you happened to know there was a serial killer out there…” Lia shrugged.

“Maybe Beau heard about the numbers,” I said, picking up where Lia had left off. “Not what the pattern was, exactly, just that there were numbers on all of the victims’ wrists.”

Sterling picked up where I left off. “He grabs that brick. He hits the victim. Panics, and to cover, he tries to make it look like the work of our UNSUB.”

Anger. Fear. Satisfaction. Everything Michael had said Beau had been feeling fit with this interpretation of events.

Beau wasn’t our UNSUB. He was mimicking our UNSUB.

“That means the pattern’s not broken,” Sloane whispered. “The pattern isn’t wrong.”

You are not broken, I translated. You are not wrong.

“Grand Ballroom. January twelfth.” Sloane held out first one finger, then another, like she was counting. “The pattern says the next murder is going to happen in the Grand Ballroom on January twelfth.”

Three days. If Sloane was right about the Fibonacci dates, that wasn’t our only problem.

“Speaking of the pattern,” I told Sterling and Briggs, dread seeping back over my body, “there’s something else you should know.”





“Sloane hacked the FBI’s files. Based on what she found, you think our UNSUB might have done this before.” Agent Sterling let her summation of what I’d just said hang in the air for several seconds before she added, “Twice.”

“It’s just a theory,” I replied before either of the agents could decide that now was a good time to lecture Sloane on the virtues of not hacking the FBI. “But the case Sloane found was never solved, and it fits the pattern.”

“With respect to location as well?” Briggs asked. I could practically hear him rubbing his temples. “Was that killer working in a spiral?”

“A Fibonacci spiral,” Sloane corrected. “And no, he wasn’t.”

“Numbers on the wrists?” Sterling asked.

“No,” Sloane said again.

No numbers on the wrist. No spiral. If we were dealing with the same killer, then that killer had changed. That wasn’t unheard of, but we typically saw changes in an UNSUB’s MO—the necessary elements of a crime. Writing numbers on the victims’ wrists wasn’t necessary. Killing them in a spiral was a choice. A killer’s MO might change, but typically, the signature stayed the same.