All In (The Naturals, #3)(57)

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.