“If I kept going,” she said, “and added two more squares, it would look exactly”—she turned to the spiral on the window—“like that.”
I looked from Sloane’s drawing to the layout of Vegas she’d drawn onto the window. She was right. Starting with the Apex, the killer was spiraling in. And if Sloane’s calculations were correct—and I had no reason to doubt that they were—our UNSUB was doing so in a precise and predictable fashion.
Sloane began scrawling the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence across the margins of the page, and I remembered that the first time she’d told us about the sequence, she’d said that it was everywhere. She’d said that it was beautiful.
She’d said that it was perfection.
You see that same thing when you look at this pattern. I addressed the UNSUB. Its beauty. Its perfection. Inked into Alexandra Ruiz’s wrist. Burned into the magician’s. Written on the old man’s skin. Carved into Camille’s flesh.
You’re not just sending a message. You’re creating something. Something beautiful.
Something holy.
“Where’s the next location?” Dean asked. “The next kill-point on the spiral—where is it?”
Sloane turned back to the window and tapped her finger just below the fifth X she’d drawn. “It’s here,” she said. “At the Majesty. All of the remaining kill-points are. The closer you get to the heart of the spiral, the closer they get to each other.”
“Where at the Majesty?” Dean asked Sloane.
If the UNSUB continued killing a person a day, we might be minutes away from the next murder—and no more than hours.
“The Grand Ballroom,” Sloane murmured, staring at the pattern inked onto the window, lost in what she saw. “That’s where it has to be.”
YOU
The knife is next.
Water. Fire. Impaling the old man on an arrow. Strangling Camille. Then comes the knife. That’s the way this is done. That is how it must be.
You sit on the floor, your back to the wall, the blade carefully balanced on one knee.
Water.
Fire.
Impaling.
Strangling.
One, two, three, four…
Knife will make five. You breathe in the weapon’s numbers: the exact weight of the blade, the speed with which you will slice it across your next target’s throat.
You breathe out.
Water. Fire. Impaling. Strangling. The knife is next. And then—and then—
You know how this will end. You are the bard telling this tale. You are the alchemist, pulling the pattern apart.
But for now, all that matters is the blade and the steady rise and fall of your chest and the knowledge that everything you’ve worked for will come to pass.
Starting with number five.
The FBI staked out the Grand Ballroom. For those of us who weren’t licensed to participate in stakeouts, the day quickly devolved into a waiting game. The afternoon bled slowly into evening. The darker it got, the brighter the lights outside our marked-red window seemed to grow, and the harder my heart beat in my chest.
January first. January second. January third. January fourth. I kept thinking, over and over again, that today was the fifth. Four bodies in four days. Next comes number five. That’s how you think of them, isn’t it? Not as people. As numbers. Things to be quantified. A part of your equation.
My mind went to the photo I’d seen in my mother’s file of a skeleton wrapped carefully in a royal blue shawl. Dean had read remorse into the way the body had been buried. I couldn’t help seeing the contrast.
You don’t feel remorse. I made myself focus on the Vegas killer. That, I could handle. That, I could do. Why would you? There are billions of people in the world, and you’ve killed such a very small percentage of them. One, two, three, four—
“Okay, that’s it.” Lia exited her bedroom, took one look at the rest of us, and flounced into the kitchen. I heard her bang open the freezer. A few seconds later, she was back. She tossed something at Michael. “Frozen washcloth,” she told him. “Put it on your eye and stop with the brooding, because I think we all know that Dean has that market cornered.”
Lia didn’t wait to see if Michael followed her instructions before she turned to her next target. “Dean,” she said, her voice wavering slightly. “I’m pregnant.”
Dean’s eyelid twitched. “No, you’re not.”
“Who’s to say, really?” Lia countered. “The point is that sitting here waiting for the phone to ring and mentally going over worst-case scenarios isn’t helping anybody.”
“So what do you suggest we do?” I asked.
Lia hit a switch and a blackout screen slowly covered the wall of windows—and Sloane’s writing. Sloane let out an indignant squeak, but Lia preempted any actual complaint.