All In (The Naturals, #3)(7)

Briggs and Sterling exchanged a look. “Neither.” Sterling was the one who answered the question. “According to her friends, she got the tattoo herself.”

As we processed that information, Briggs cleared the screen and brought up a new photo. I tried to look away, but couldn’t. The corpse on the screen was covered in blisters and burns. I couldn’t tell if the victim was male or female. There was only one patch of unmarred skin.

The right wrist.

Briggs gave us a close-up.

“4-5-5-8.” Sloane read out loud. “3-2-1-3. 4-5-5-8.” She stopped talking, but her lips kept moving as she went over and over the numbers.

Meanwhile, Dean and I were staring at the photograph.

“Not henna this time,” he said. “This time I had the numbers burned into my target’s skin.”

My preferred pronoun for profiling was you. I talked to the killer, to the victims. But when Dean slipped into an UNSUB’s head, he imagined being the killer. Doing the killing.

Given who and what his father was—and the way Dean couldn’t shake the fear that he’d inherited some trace of monstrousness—that didn’t surprise me. Every time he profiled, he faced that fear head-on.

“I suppose you’re going to tell us victim number two burned the numbers into his own arm?” Lia asked Briggs. She did a good job of sounding unaffected by the gruesomeness of what we were seeing, but I knew better. Lia was an expert at masking her true reactions, showing only what she wanted the world to see.

“In a manner of speaking.” Briggs brought up another picture, side by side with the wrist. It looked like some kind of wristband. Set back into the thick material it was made of were four metal numbers: 4558, but flipped—a mirror image of the numbers on the victim’s skin.

Agent Sterling enlightened us. “Fire-retardant fabric. When our victim caught fire, it heated the metal, but not the fabric, leaving a legible brand underneath.”

“According to our sources, the victim received the bracelet with a parcel of fan mail,” Briggs continued. “The envelope it was mailed in is long gone.”

“Fan mail?” I said. “And that makes the victim…who?”

Another picture flashed onto the screen in response to my question, this one of a twentysomething male. His face was striking and gaunt, sharp angles offset by violet eyes—probably contacts.

“Sylvester Wilde.” Lia let one of her feet fall to the floor. “Modern-day Houdini, illusionist, hypnotist, and jack-of-all-trades.” She paused, then translated for the rest of us. “He’s a stage magician—and like most of his kind, an excellent liar.”

From Lia, that was a compliment.

“He had a nightly show,” Briggs said, “at the Wonderland.”

“Another casino.” Dean mulled that over.

“Another casino,” Agent Sterling confirmed. “Mr. Wilde was in the midst of his evening performance on January second when he—to all appearances—accidentally set himself on fire.”

“Another accident.” Dean bowed his head slightly, his hair falling into his face. Already, his concentration was so intense, I could see it in the lines of his shoulders, his back.

“Or so the authorities believed,” Agent Briggs said. “Until…”

One last picture, one last victim.

“Eugene Lockhart. Seventy-eight. He was a regular at the Desert Rose Casino. He came once a week with a small group from a local retirement home.” Briggs didn’t say anything about how Eugene had died.

He didn’t need to.

There was an arrow protruding from the old man’s chest.





How did a killer go from staging accidents to shooting someone with an arrow in broad daylight?

As the jet descended into Las Vegas, that was the question I kept coming back to. Our briefing hadn’t stopped with the picture of Eugene Lockhart, skewered through the heart, but that was the moment when every assumption I’d made about this killer had started to change.

Beside me, I could feel Dean mulling over what we’d been told, too. Part of being a Natural was not being able to turn off the parts of our brains that worked differently than other people’s. Lia couldn’t choose to stop recognizing lies. Sloane would always see numbers everywhere she looked. Michael couldn’t help picking up on every last micro-expression that crossed a person’s face.

And Dean and I compulsively pieced people together like puzzles.

I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried—and knowing what my brain would cycle back to the second I stopped thinking about this case, I didn’t fight it.

Behavior. Personality. Environment. There was a rhyme and reason to the way even the most monstrous killers behaved. Decoding their motivations meant trying to step into the UNSUB’s shoes, trying to see the world the way he or she saw it.

You wanted the police to know that Eugene Lockhart was murdered, I thought, starting with the obvious. People didn’t get “accidentally” shot with hunting arrows in the middle of busy casinos. Compared to the earlier murders, that was definitely an attention-getter. You wanted the authorities to take notice. You wanted them to see. See what you were doing. See you.

Are you used to going unnoticed?

Are you sick of it?

I went back over what we’d been told. In addition to the four-digit number written in permanent marker on the old man’s wrist, the medical examiner had also found a message inscribed on the arrow that had killed him.