All In (The Naturals, #3)(73)

“Beau’s posture changes,” Michael continued. “It’s subtle, but it’s there, beneath the poker face.” Michael indicated first one image, then the other. “Anticipation before. And after: elation.” He swung his eyes back to the first photo. “Look how he’s holding his shoulders.” He glanced at Sloane. “Play the footage.”

Sloane brought up the video and let it play.

“Restricted motion,” Michael said. “He’s fighting tension in his shoulders. He’s walking, but his arms are still by his sides.”

“The knife,” Dean murmured beside me, his eyes locked on the screen. “I had it on me. I could feel it. That’s why my arms aren’t moving. The knife is weighing me down.” Dean swallowed, shifting his eyes to me. “I have the knife,” he said, his voice pitched unnaturally low. “I am the knife.”

On-screen, everything went black. Seconds ticked by in silence.

Adrenaline surged through your veins. I imagined being Beau. I imagined sidling up behind Aaron in the dark. No hesitation. He’s stronger than you are. Bigger. All you have is the element of surprise.

All you have is a holiness of purpose.

I imagined sliding the blade across Aaron’s throat. I imagined letting it drop to the floor. I imagined walking back, through the dark. I imagined knowing, with an unworldly, overwhelming certainty that death was power. My power.

On-screen, the lights came back on, jarring me from the brief instant when I’d stopped talking to Beau and let myself be him. I could feel the heat from Dean’s body beside me—I could feel the dark place he’d been the moment before.

The place I’d gone, too.

“Look at his arms,” Michael said, gesturing to Beau.

They swing slightly as you walk. You’re lighter now. Balanced. Perfect.

“I’ve done what needed to be done.” Dean looked down at his hands. “And I got rid of the knife.”

“The knife was found less than a meter away from the body.” Sloane spoke at a stilted, uneven pace. “Killer dropped it. He would have backed away. Couldn’t risk stepping in Aaron’s blood.” There was something brittle in her voice, something fragile. “Aaron’s blood,” she repeated.

Sloane looked at crime scenes and saw numbers—spatter patterns and probability and signs of rigor mortis. But no matter how hard she tried, Aaron would never just be number five to her.

“The suspect’s not wearing gloves.” Lia was the one who made the observation. “I doubt he left fingerprints on the knife. So what gives?”

Sloane closed her eyes. I could feel her cataloging the possibilities, going through the physical evidence again and again, hurting and hurting and pushing through it—

“Plastic.” Judd had never weighed in on one of our cases before. He wasn’t FBI. He wasn’t a Natural. But he was a former marine. “Something disposable. You wrap the knife in it, dispose of it separately.”

That’s it. My heart skipped a beat. That’s our smoking gun.

“So where did I dispose of it?” Dean asked.

Not a trash can—the police might look there. I forced myself to back up, to walk through it step by step. You make your way through the crowd—to Aaron. You come up behind him. You slice the knife across his neck—quick. No hesitation. No remorse. You peel the plastic off, drop the blade.

Thirty seconds.

Forty seconds.

How long has it been? How long do you have to make your way back to where you were when the lights went out?

You push your way through the crowd.

“The crowd,” I said out loud.

Dean understood before the others. “If I’m a killer who thinks of every contingency, I don’t throw the evidence away. I let someone else do it for me….”

“Preferably after they get home,” I finished.

“He planted the evidence on someone,” Lia translated. “If I’m his mark, and I get home and find a plastic bag in my pocket? I throw it away.”

“Unless it has blood on it,” Sloane said. “A drop, a smear…”

I saw the web of possibilities, the way this played out. “Depending on who you are, you might call the police.” I considered a second possibility. “Or you might burn it.”

There was a beat of saturated silence, brimming with the things none of us would say. If we don’t find it, if we don’t find the person who has it…

Our killer would win.





“We need Beau’s trajectory.” Sloane tapped the pad of her thumb across each of her fingers, one after the other, again and again as she spoke. “Point A to point B to point C. How did he get there? Who did he pass?”

Before. After. Before. After. Sloane went back to switching from one still image to the next. “There are at least nine unique paths with a likelihood greater than seven percent. If I isolate the length and angle of the suspect’s stride after the lights came back on…” Sloane stopped talking, lost to the numbers in her head.

The rest of us waited.

And waited.

Tears welled in Sloane’s eyes. I knew her—I knew her brain was racing, and I knew that number after number, calculation after calculation, all she could see was Aaron’s face. His empty eyes. The shirt he’d bought her.