All In: (The Naturals #3) (30 page)

“You know me, Colorado,” he said, his voice soft. “I’ve never been very good at
should
.”

“Try harder,” I told him fiercely.

“Look what trying gets you.” Michael might not have meant to say those words, but he meant them. He was talking about me. And Dean. He’d spent the past few months pretending
he’d never been interested in me. He’d flipped his emotions off, like I’d never mattered to him at all.

Look what trying gets you.

“You don’t get to do that,” I said, feeling like he’d kicked me in the teeth. “You don’t get to make me the reason you do or don’t do anything.
I’m not a reason, Michael. I’m not something you
try
for.” I took a step forward. “I’m your friend.”

“You used to look at me and feel something,” Michael said. “I know you did.”

Michael was marked for death. A serial killer from Judd’s past was stalking us all. But we were doing this—right here, right now.

“I never had friends,” I said. “Growing up, it was just me and my mom. There was never anyone else. She never let there be anyone else.”

For the first time since I’d gotten the call from my father, I
felt
something about my mother’s death.
Anger
—and not just at the person who killed her.
She’d gone away, and even if that hadn’t been her choice,
she
was the reason there was no one else—no friends, no family,
nothing
until social services tracked
down my dad.

“When I joined the program,” I told Michael, “I didn’t know how to really be with people. I couldn’t…” The words wouldn’t come. “I kept everyone
at a distance, and there you were, smashing through every wall. I felt something,” I told Michael. “You made me feel something, and I am grateful for that. Because you were the first,
Michael.”

There was a long silence.

“The first friend,” Michael said finally, “that you ever had.”

“That may not mean much to you.” It hurt me to admit that. “To you, I might not be worth anything, if I’m with Dean. But it means something to me.”

The silence that followed was twice as long as the first.

“I don’t like running away.” Michael brought his eyes from the floor to mine. “I don’t run, I don’t hide, I don’t cower, I don’t beg, Cassie,
because running and hiding and begging—it doesn’t work. It never works.”

Michael was repeating the words Dean had said to him. He was admitting it out loud. To me.

I looked down at the angry red numbers on his arm.
7761.

January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. The knife.

“It’s not running,” I told Michael, “if we catch him first.”

W
e had eleven hours and twenty-seven minutes until midnight.

First order of business was calling Sterling and Briggs. It took them two hours to extract themselves from the case and get to us. They questioned Michael and Lia about their little foray to the
Desert Rose. What had they done there? Who had they seen?

“You don’t remember anything out of the ordinary?” Briggs asked Michael. “Running into someone? Talking to someone?”

“Letting someone write a number on my arm in invisible, poison-ivy ink?” Michael suggested archly. “Shockingly, no. I remember dropping something. I remember bending down to
pick it up.” He closed his eyes. “I dropped something,” he repeated. “I bent to pick it up. And then…”

Nothing.

“Pattern interruption,” Sloane said. “It’s the second-quickest method of inducing hypnosis.”

To be hypnotized, you have to want to be hypnotized.
Tory’s words rang in my ears. Either she was lying, or Michael hadn’t been on guard around the UNSUB.

Or both.

“You don’t remember anything else?” Dean said.

“Well, when you phrase it like that, I remember exactly what happened. You have unmasked the killer, Redding. How do you do it, you profiling fiend?”

“You know who the killer is?” Sloane’s eyes went comically wide.

“That was sarcasm,” Dean told her, sparing a glare for Michael.

“What about the moments leading up to the gap in your memory?” Agent Sterling said, redirecting the conversation. “You said you were playing poker, Lia?”

“With a group that included Thomas Wesley,” Lia filled in. “I trounced all of them. Michael was just my arm candy. After that, we split up. He went to cash in the chips, and I
went to sign him up for mud wrestling against his will.”

I tried to picture it in my mind—
Lia at a poker table, Michael beside her. Lia is winning. Her fingers play at the tips of her dark hair. Beside her, Michael fastens and unfastens the
top button on his blazer.

What had made our UNSUB stop and take notice?
Why Michael?

“What happens if the intended victim isn’t in the Grand Ballroom on January twelfth?” Briggs posed the question to the room as a whole.

“Four variables.” Sloane tapped the thumb on her right hand to each of her fingers as she rattled them off. “Date, location, method, and victim.”

“If the equation changes, the UNSUB has to adapt.” Sterling worked her way through the logic out loud. “The date and the method are necessary to achieve the UNSUB’s
primary objective. The location and making sure the number shows up on his victim’s wrist—those are psychologically meaningful, symbols of mastery. To adapt, the UNSUB would have to
give up some portion of the power and control that mastery represents.”

“I’ll want that back,” Dean said. “The power. The control.”

January twelfth. The knife.
Those were the constants in this equation. If it came down to the location and the victim…

The spiral is your greatest work. A sign of rebellion. A sign of devotion. It’s perfect.

“You would change victims rather than location,” I said, sure enough of that.

“I’ll adapt,” Dean ruminated. “I’ll choose someone new—and whoever I choose will pay for the fact that I had to.”

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.”

M
ichael 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.

Drowning. Strangling.
Those victims had been young, female. The gorier deaths had been reserved for males.

You don’t like hurting women.
I turned that over in my head.
You will, of course, to suit your goal. But given a choice, you’d prefer it to be neat.
That made me
wonder about the UNSUB’s other relationships.
A mother? A daughter? A love?

My temples pounded.
What else?
I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t let myself stop. We had five hours before Michael left for the Majesty. No matter how heavily guarded he was, no
matter how much we knew, that wasn’t a risk I wanted to take.

January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. The knife.

I had to keep going. I had to think. I had to see whatever it was that we were missing.

Think.
We were looking for someone highly intelligent, organized, charming enough to put people at ease.
Alexandra Ruiz. The girl at Tory’s show. Michael.
The UNSUB had
hypnotized at least three people.