Tertium. Tertium. Tertium. I could hear the girl saying the word. I could see her gaze staring out into the crowd.
“The third time.” Dean slid to the end of the bed. He sat there for a moment in silence, and I knew he was putting himself in the killer’s shoes, walking through the logic without ever saying it out loud. Finally, he stood. “We need to call Briggs.”
Dean made the call.
Pick up, I thought. Pick up, Briggs.
If this was the killer’s third time going through this pattern—nine bodies, killed on Fibonacci dates—we weren’t dealing with a novice. We were dealing with an expert. The level of planning. The lack of evidence left behind.
It fit.
A second realization followed on the heels of the first. If our killer was slitting throats more than a decade ago, we’re looking for someone no younger than their late twenties. And if the New York murders had been the second set and not the first…
“Briggs.” Dean’s voice was terse, but calm. I turned toward him as he began bringing Briggs up to speed. “We have reason to believe this might not be our UNSUB’s first rodeo.”
Dean fell silent as Agent Briggs replied. I closed the space between Dean and me and put a hand on his arm. “Tell him that Sloane broke the code,” I said. “The UNSUB is going to kill again—in the Grand Ballroom—on January twelfth.”
Dean hung up the call without saying another word.
“What?” I asked him. “Why did you hang up?”
Dean’s grip tightened over his phone.
“Dean?”
“Briggs and Sterling got a call at three in the morning.”
There was only one reason to call the FBI at three in the morning. It’s too soon, I thought. Sloane said the next murder would be on the twelfth. The pattern—
“The Majesty’s head of security was attacked,” Dean continued. “Blunt-force trauma.”
I thought of the man who’d pulled us into the security office. The one who had come to get Sloane’s father the night Camille was murdered.
“It fits the MO,” Dean continued. “New method. Numbers on his wrist.”
“Weapon?” I asked.
“A brick.”
You bashed his head in with a brick. You took a brick and wrapped your fingers around it, and rage exploded inside of you, and you—
“Cassie.” Dean cut my thought off. “There’s something else you should know.”
Did you get tired of waiting? I asked the UNSUB silently. Did something set you off? Did you get a rush out of watching this man go down? Did you savor the sound of his skull cracking? I couldn’t stop. Each time, you feel more invincible, less fallible, less human.
“Cassie,” Dean said again. “The victim was still alive when they found him. He’s in a medically induced coma now, but he’s not dead.”
Dean’s words snapped me out of it.
You made a mistake, I thought. This was a killer who didn’t make mistakes. Having left a victim alive would gnaw at him from the inside out.
“We need more information,” I said. “Pictures of the crime scene, defensive wounds on the victim, anything that might help us walk through it.”
“They don’t need us to walk through anything,” Dean said.
“Explain how that sentence could possibly be true.”
I turned in the direction of the voice that had spoken those words and saw Lia. I wondered how long she’d been standing there, watching the interplay between Dean and me.
“They don’t need us to profile it, because there was a witness.” Dean looked from Lia to me. “They’ve already apprehended the suspect.”
On-screen, Beau Donovan sat in an interrogation room. His hands were cuffed behind his back. He was staring straight ahead—not at Sterling and Briggs, but through them.
“This isn’t right,” Sloane said, plopping down on the floor beside the coffee table. A moment later, she popped back up, pacing. “It was supposed to happen on the twelfth. It doesn’t add up.”
She didn’t say that she needed it to add up. She didn’t say that she needed this one thing to make sense.
“Mr. Donovan, a witness puts you at the crime scene, crouched over the victim, writing on his wrist.” Briggs was playing bad cop. It wasn’t so much in the words he said as in the way he said them, like each part of that statement was a nail in Beau Donovan’s coffin.
A muscle in Beau’s cheek twitched.
“Fear,” Michael said. “With a heaping side of anger, and underneath that…” Michael searched the lines of Beau’s face. “Playing around the corners of the lips—satisfaction.”
Satisfaction. That was more damning than either anger or fear. Innocent people weren’t satisfied when they were arrested for attempted murder.
“Beau.” Agent Sterling wasn’t a natural fit for good cop, but based on what we knew of Beau, she must have suspected he’d be more likely—though still not likely—to trust a female. “If you don’t talk to us, we can’t help you.”