Eventually, the elevator doors opened. Judd and I were the last ones off. I couldn’t help giving him a look as I stepped into the hall.
“May eighth,” Judd said quietly. “Six years, this May.” He gave me just enough time to process that date—process what it had to refer to—before he continued. “If I have to be a real bastard to keep from burying another kid, well then, Cassie, I can be a real bastard.”
The muscles in my throat tightened. Judd walked past me, past the others, and got to the door to our suite first. He opened it, then froze.
My heart pounding in my ears, I hurried to catch up. What would it take to catch a battle-hardened marine completely off guard? In the second or two before I saw for myself, my mind put forth the worst possible answer.
Sloane.
I made it to the entryway. Lia, Michael, and Dean were standing there, just as frozen in place as Judd. The first thing I saw was red.
Red dots. Red streaks. Red on the windows.
Sloane turned to beam at us. “Hi, guys!”
It took me a moment to process the fact that she was there, and she was fine. It was several seconds more before I realized that the red on the windows was a drawing.
“What the hell, Sloane?” Lia recovered her voice first.
“I needed a bigger surface to write on.” Sloane popped the cap on and off the marker in her hand. “It’ll come off,” she told us. “Assuming I grabbed the dry-erase marker and not a permanent Sharpie.”
Still processing what I was seeing, I walked toward the diagram Sloane had sketched onto the panoramic window’s surface.
“There’s a seventy-four percent chance it will come off,” Sloane said, amending her prior statement. “On the bright side,” she said, turning to survey her work, “I know where the killer is going to strike next.”
“I’ve drawn a to-scale map of the Strip, plotting out the locations of the first four murders.” Sloane tapped on each red X as she rattled off the locations. “The rooftop pool at the Apex, the stage in the main theater at the Wonderland, the exact location where Eugene Lockhart was sitting when he was shot, and…” Sloane came to stand before the last X. “The east-most bathroom on the casino floor of the Majesty.” She stared at us in anticipation. “The pattern isn’t where the UNSUB struck as in which casino. It’s the precise coordinates of the murder!”
An intense look settled over Dean’s features. “Coordinates as in latitude and longitude?”
I could feel him starting to sink into the killer’s perspective, integrating that information, when Sloane interjected.
“Not latitude. Not longitude.”
She uncapped her pen and drew a straight line connecting the first two victims. Then she did the same, connecting the second victim to the third victim and the third to the fourth. Finally, she added five more marks, closely clustered inside the boundaries of the Majesty. She connected them to the rest, one after the other, then turned back to us, her eyes alight.
“Now do you see?”
I did.
“It’s a spiral,” Dean said.
At his words, Sloane went back over it and sketched an arc over each of the straight lines. The resulting pattern looked like a seashell.
“Not just a spiral,” Sloane said, stepping back. “A Fibonacci spiral!”
Lia flopped down on the sofa and stared up at Sloane’s diagram. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that has something to do with the Fibonacci sequence.”
Sloane nodded emphatically. All energy, she looked at the window and, seeing no place left to write, bounded over to the adjacent wall.
“Let’s try some paper this time,” Judd interjected mildly.
Sloane stared at him very hard.
“Paper,” she said, as if it were a word in another language. “Right.”
Judd handed her a piece. She plopped unceremoniously down on the floor and began to draw. “The first non-zero number in Fibonacci’s sequence is one. So you draw a square,” she said, doing just that, “where each side is one unit long.”
Beneath that square, she drew a second, identical square. “The next number in the sequence is also one. So now you have one and one….”
“And one plus one is?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Two.” Another square, this one twice as big as each of the first.
“Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three is eight….” Sloane kept drawing squares, moving counterclockwise as she drew, until she ran out of space.
“Now imagine I kept going,” she said, shooting Judd a very pointed look that I interpreted to mean that she thought he’d erred in forbidding her to draw on the wall. “And imagine I did this.…” She started drawing arcs through the diagonal of each square.