All In (The Naturals, #3)(55)

“He’s kidding,” Dean said, before Sloane could tell us the exact likelihood of stumbling over a moose in a Las Vegas casino. “And nobody’s drinking any more whiskey.”

Dean walked over to the counter and picked up the notepad I’d been making notes on earlier. He stared at the three remaining names.

The professor. Thomas Wesley. Sloane’s father.

I approached Dean and looked over his shoulder at the list. Focus on this, Cassie. These names, this case.

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…