All In (The Naturals, #3)(77)

You won’t be in here forever. You’ll finish what you started. You’ll take your seat at the table. The ninth seat.

Nine.

Nine.

Nine.

Four more, and then you will be finished. Four more, and you can go home.





Agent Sterling and Agent Briggs sat in the interrogation room opposite Beau Donovan. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit. His wrists were handcuffed together. A public defender sat beside Beau, continually advising his client not to speak.

Back at the safe house, Lia, Michael, Dean, and I watched. Sloane had tried to watch, too, but she couldn’t.

She’d been wearing the shirt Aaron gave her for three days straight.

We needed a confession. We’d laid out enough evidence to convince the DA to press charges, but to avoid a trial, to be sure that Beau would pay, we needed a confession.

“My client,” the lawyer said forcefully, “is pleading the Fifth.”

“You have nothing,” Beau told Briggs and Sterling, his eyes simultaneously dead of emotion and strangely alight. “This is the second time you’ve tried to put me in this box. It won’t work. Of course it won’t.”

“My client,” the lawyer repeated, “is pleading the Fifth.”

“Nine bodies.” Agent Briggs leaned forward. “Every three years. On dates derived from the Fibonacci sequence.”

This was the final card we had to play.

“Keep going,” Michael told them, his words going to the earpiece both agents wore. “He’s surprised that you know about the others. And the way his eyes just darted toward his lawyer? Agitation. Anger. Fear.”

Beau’s lawyer was an outsider. He didn’t know why his client had done what he’d done. He didn’t know what had inspired him to kill. We were banking on the fact that Beau might not want the man to know.

One by one, Briggs started pulling pictures out of his file. Kills—but not Beau’s. “Drowning. Fire. Impaling. Strangling.”

Beau was getting visibly agitated.

“Knife.” Briggs paused. That was as far as Beau’s pattern had gone. “You would have beaten your sixth victim to death.” Another picture.

You weren’t expecting this. You weren’t expecting the FBI to know. Beau went pale. The FBI can’t know.

You only meant to hint at age-old secrets. To get their attention. To make them see you.

You never meant for it to go this far.

“Number seven would have been poison,” Briggs continued. He laid the last picture down. In it, a woman with blond hair, green eyes, and a face that tended more toward quirky than cute lay on her back. Her mouth was crusted with blood. Her body was contorted. She’d ripped her own fingernails off.

I swallowed as I remembered what Judd had said about Nightshade’s poison. Undetectable. Incurable. Painful.

“She was my best friend.” Agent Sterling brought her fingers to the very edge of Scarlett’s picture. “Did they take someone from you, too?”

“They?” the lawyer said. “Who’s they?” He gestured angrily toward the pictures. “What is the meaning of this?”

Briggs locked his eyes onto Beau. “Should I answer that question?” he asked. “Should I tell him why we’re showing you these pictures?”

“No!” The word burst out of Beau as a snarl.

You don’t talk to outsiders. Lia’s insight into cult mentality rang in my head. You don’t tell them what they’re not blessed enough to know.

“Get out,” Beau told his lawyer.

“I can’t just leave—”

“I’m the client,” Beau said. “And I said get out. Now.”

The lawyer left.

“You’re under no obligation to speak with us without your lawyer present,” Briggs said. “But then, I’m not convinced you want him to hear about this. I’m not convinced you want anyone to hear about this.” Briggs paused. “You’re right when you said we might not have enough for a conviction.”

Sterling picked up where Briggs left off. “But we do have enough for a trial.

“Twelve people on a jury,” Sterling said. I recognized her strategy of playing up the numbers, playing into his pattern of thinking. “Dozens of reporters. The victims’ families will want to be there, of course….”

“They will destroy you,” Beau said.

“Will they?” Sterling asked. “Or will they destroy you?”

Those words landed. I could see Beau straining against the handcuffs, straining to keep from turning back and looking over his shoulder.

“Tell him a story,” Dean instructed the agents. “Start with the day someone found him in the desert.”

Dean and I were used to using our abilities to catch killers. But profiling was just as useful in knowing how to break them.

“Let me tell you a story,” Briggs said on-screen. “It’s a story about a little boy who was found, half-dead, in the desert, when he was six years old.”

Beau’s breath was coming quicker now.

“No one knew where he’d come from,” Briggs continued.

“No one knew what he was,” I said. Briggs repeated my words to Beau.

We weren’t positive how Beau had spent those first six years, but Dean had a theory. I’d wondered, days ago, if Dean had seen any of himself when he looked at Beau. I’d thought that if the UNSUB was young, his profile wouldn’t be dissimilar from Daniel Redding’s apprentices’.