My gut said Lia knew that. You could have been nicer about it, I thought—but if she had been, she wouldn’t be Lia.
I stayed out on the balcony for another ten minutes after Lia sauntered off. When I finally made my way back inside, Michael, Lia, and Dean were gathered around the kitchen table—and so was Agent Briggs. He was dressed in plain-clothes, which told me the FBI was making an effort at keeping these visits on the down low. The fact that Briggs’s version of plain clothes still made him look like a cop was perfectly reflective of his personality: hyperfocused, ambitious.
Briggs played to win.
“There’s been another murder.” Briggs had apparently been waiting for my arrival to make that announcement. None of the four of us made an attempt at looking surprised. “That makes the Apex, the Wonderland, the Desert Rose, and the Majesty, all in a matter of four days. We may be looking at someone who has a grudge against the casinos or the people who profit from them.”
Dean looked toward a file Briggs held in his hand. “The latest victim?”
Briggs tossed the folder down onto the kitchen table. I flipped it open. Glassy blue eyes stared back at me, impossibly large in a heart-shaped face.
“Is that…” Michael started to say.
“Camille Holt,” I finished, unable to pull my eyes away.
You like being underestimated, Camille, I thought dully, bringing my hand to touch the edge of the picture. You’re fascinated by the way the mind works, the way it breaks, the way people survive things no one should be able to survive.
Her skin was tinged a ghastly gray; the whites of her wide-set eyes were marked by blots of red—capillaries that had burst as she’d struggled against her assailant.
You struggled. You fought. She was lying on her back on a white marble floor, strawberry blond hair spread out in a halo around her head—but I knew in my gut that she’d fought, viciously, with an almost feral strength her assailant wouldn’t have been expecting.
“Asphyxiation,” Dean commented. “She was strangled.”
“Murder weapon?” I asked. There was a difference between strangling someone with a wire and strangling them with a rope.
Briggs took out a snapshot of an evidence bag. Inside was a necklace—the thick metal chain Camille had worn looped twice around her neck the night before.
In my mind, I could see her, sitting at the bar, one leg dangling off the stool. I could see her turning toward us and walking toward the exit.
I could see Aaron Shaw watching her go.
“You’ll want to talk to the casino owner’s son.” Michael’s thoughts were perfectly in line with my own. “Aaron Shaw. His interest in Ms. Holt wasn’t professional.”
“What did you see?” Briggs asked.
Michael shrugged. “Attraction. Affection. A sharp edge of tension.”
What kind of tension? I didn’t get the chance to follow up before Sloane popped into the kitchen and went to pour herself some coffee. Briggs eyed her warily. Sloane’s tendency toward high-speed babbling when caffeinated was a thing of legend.
“I called you last night,” Sloane told him reproachfully. “I called and called, and you didn’t answer. Ergo, I get coffee, and you don’t get to complain.”
I thought about the chopsticks Sloane had stolen the night before. You needed Briggs to pick up your call. You needed to be recognized. You needed to be heard.
“There was another murder,” Briggs told Sloane.
“I know.” Sloane stared at the coffee in her hands. “Two. Three. Three. Three.”
“What did you say?” Briggs asked sharply.
“The number on the corpse. It’s 2333.” Sloane finally came to sit at the table with the rest of us. “Isn’t it?”
Briggs pulled a new picture out of the file. Camille’s wrist: 2333 had been carved into it. Literally. The bloody numbers were slightly jagged. From a henna tattoo to this. The numbers had always been a message—but this? This was violent. Personal.
“Was she alive when the UNSUB did this?” I asked.
Briggs shook his head. “Postmortem. There was a compact in the victim’s purse. We believe the UNSUB broke it and used one of the shards to carve the numbers in her wrist.”
I shifted from Camille’s perspective to her attacker’s. You’re a planner. If this was what you’d intended all along, you would have brought something with you to do the job.
That left me with two questions: first, what had the plan been, and second, why had the UNSUB deviated from it?
What went wrong? I asked the killer silently. Did she thwart your plan somehow? Was she harder to manipulate than the others? I thought about the fact that Camille had been present at the crime scenes for two of the victims. Did you know her?
“This is personal.” Dean’s thoughts were exactly in line with my own. “The other targets might have been selected for convenience. But not this one.”