All In (The Naturals, #3)(68)

I didn’t want to think about the ways that a killer could go about reclaiming power and control with a knife.

“My father won’t cancel tomorrow?” Sloane asked, her voice tight. “He won’t even consider moving it to a different part of the casino?”

Briggs gave a shake of his head.

Power. Control. Sloane’s father wouldn’t let go of that any more than the UNSUB would.

“If I were to go to the tournament tomorrow,” Michael spoke up, “then we wouldn’t just know where this guy’s going to be, or what he’s planning to do. We’d know who the target is.” He turned to Briggs. “You used Cassie for bait on the Locke case. You paraded her out for an UNSUB to see, because there was a life at stake, and you thought you could protect her. How is this any different?”

My gut twisted, because it wasn’t.

“If I’m not there,” Michael continued unflinchingly, “this guy just chooses someone else. Maybe you catch him, maybe you don’t.” He paused. “There’s a good chance someone dies bloody.”

I didn’t want Michael to be right. But he was.

Someone dies tomorrow. At the appointed time. At the appointed place. By your knife.

“This UNSUB isn’t the only one who’ll be there tomorrow.” Judd appeared in the doorway. “You go, Michael, and you’ll be wearing more than one target on your back.”

I didn’t hear a trace of doubt in the old man’s words. He thinks Nightshade will be there.

Agent Sterling met Judd’s eyes. “I’d like to see the note he sent you.”

Judd nodded to one of the agents on guard detail, and the man disappeared and returned a moment later with an evidence bag. Inside was the envelope from the plane.

Agent Sterling took a pair of gloves out of her pocket. She reached into the envelope. She pulled out a photo. After a moment, she flipped it over to read the back.

She looked over at Briggs. “Flower,” she reported hoarsely. “White.”

I remembered Judd telling me that Nightshade had sent each of his victims a flower—the bloom of a white nightshade—before they died. And now he’d sent Judd a photograph of the same.

“He sent you a flower?” I asked Judd, panic winding its way down my spine, my heart in my throat. Not Judd. Not here, not now, not again.

“He did,” Judd allowed. I remembered what he’d said about Nightshade’s poison of choice. Undetectable. Incurable. Painful. “Maybe it’s too late for me,” Judd continued, his voice hard, “and maybe it isn’t, but I’m telling you, he’ll be there tomorrow.”

Nightshade hadn’t wanted us leaving Las Vegas. He’d tampered with the plane. He’d made sure Judd knew we had nowhere to go.

Had he known that the UNSUB had marked Michael? Had Nightshade been watching? Was he watching us still?

Don’t, I told myself. Don’t give him that kind of power. Don’t let your mind make him into anything other than a man.

“Nightshade chose all of his victims beforehand,” I said, treating him as no more significant than any other UNSUB. “He sent them flowers.”

A warning. A gift.

“Stalking behavior,” Dean said shortly. “Not indicative of an opportunity killer. If I’m Nightshade, if I’m focused on Judd? If I’ve received permission from the cult to eliminate any and all problems, or finally reached the point where permission doesn’t matter? I’d rather take something from Judd here than at the Majesty tomorrow.”

Nightshade had gotten to Scarlett in the FBI labs. He had to know we’d been taken to a safe house. And to a man like that, us being in protection might just look like a challenge.

“It’s settled, then,” Michael said, even though it was anything but. “No place is safe, and I’m going.”





Michael going had been deemed a last resort.

By two in the morning, it was looking like the only option.

No matter how many times I went back over the profile, nothing changed. The ritualized elements of the crimes made it difficult to nail down even the most basic aspects of the UNSUB’s demographic. Drowning. Fire. Impaling. Strangling. The methods told us nothing about the killer, other than the fact that he was going in a fixed order.

Young or old? Intelligent, definitely, but educated? It was difficult to say. If we were dealing with an UNSUB between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, I would say that person was filling a role similar to the role Webber had played to Dean’s father. Apprentice. A younger UNSUB committing these murders was proving himself. He was grandstanding, looking for approval—yearning for it. Much older than that and the UNSUB wouldn’t see himself as an apprentice at all. Viewed from that perspective, this became less about approval and more about proving himself dominant. An older UNSUB, executing this plan to perfection, would be setting himself above the cult—likely from a position of power himself.

You want power—either because you’ve already had a taste of it and want more, or because you’ve been made to feel powerless for too long.

I forced my mind back to the victims. In the prior Fibonacci cases, victimology had been one of the distinguishing features that allowed us to tell the killers apart. There has to be something, I kept thinking. I have to be missing something.