“The wrong numbers,” Sloane put in emphatically.
Sterling cleared her throat. “I tend to agree with Sloane and Dean. Our UNSUB’s MO has changed with each kill. And so has the method with which the victims were marked. Until now.”
Eugene Lockhart had numbers written on his wrist in a permanent marker, too, I realized.
“Say you’d killed someone.” Lia instantly had the room’s attention. “Or, in Beau’s case, say that you thought the person you’d hit with a brick was about to die.” She leaned back on the heels of her hands, and my mind went back to Two Truths and a Lie.
I killed a man when I was nine.
“Maybe you had a choice. Maybe you didn’t. And afterward,” Lia continued, her voice light and airy, “say you didn’t want to get caught. What do you do?”
Seconds ticked by in silence. Dean was the one who provided the answer. He knew Lia better than any of us. “You lie.”
“You lie,” Lia repeated. “You cover it up. And if you happened to know there was a serial killer out there…” Lia shrugged.
“Maybe Beau heard about the numbers,” I said, picking up where Lia had left off. “Not what the pattern was, exactly, just that there were numbers on all of the victims’ wrists.”
Sterling picked up where I left off. “He grabs that brick. He hits the victim. Panics, and to cover, he tries to make it look like the work of our UNSUB.”
Anger. Fear. Satisfaction. Everything Michael had said Beau had been feeling fit with this interpretation of events.
Beau wasn’t our UNSUB. He was mimicking our UNSUB.
“That means the pattern’s not broken,” Sloane whispered. “The pattern isn’t wrong.”
You are not broken, I translated. You are not wrong.
“Grand Ballroom. January twelfth.” Sloane held out first one finger, then another, like she was counting. “The pattern says the next murder is going to happen in the Grand Ballroom on January twelfth.”
Three days. If Sloane was right about the Fibonacci dates, that wasn’t our only problem.
“Speaking of the pattern,” I told Sterling and Briggs, dread seeping back over my body, “there’s something else you should know.”
“Sloane hacked the FBI’s files. Based on what she found, you think our UNSUB might have done this before.” Agent Sterling let her summation of what I’d just said hang in the air for several seconds before she added, “Twice.”
“It’s just a theory,” I replied before either of the agents could decide that now was a good time to lecture Sloane on the virtues of not hacking the FBI. “But the case Sloane found was never solved, and it fits the pattern.”
“With respect to location as well?” Briggs asked. I could practically hear him rubbing his temples. “Was that killer working in a spiral?”
“A Fibonacci spiral,” Sloane corrected. “And no, he wasn’t.”
“Numbers on the wrists?” Sterling asked.
“No,” Sloane said again.
No numbers on the wrist. No spiral. If we were dealing with the same killer, then that killer had changed. That wasn’t unheard of, but we typically saw changes in an UNSUB’s MO—the necessary elements of a crime. Writing numbers on the victims’ wrists wasn’t necessary. Killing them in a spiral was a choice. A killer’s MO might change, but typically, the signature stayed the same.
“The numbers were always there.” Sloane’s voice was insistent. “Even if he didn’t write them on someone’s wrist, or kill in the right locations, they were there.”
In the dates, I finished silently. Maybe the signature, the deep-seated psychological need being manifested in the UNSUB’s behavior, was that the kills needed to be driven by the numbers. Viewed from that perspective, the additional elements of the Vegas crimes weren’t a departure in signature.
They were an escalation. More numbers, more rules.
“I’m older now,” Dean said, testing out the possibility. “Wiser, better. I’ve waited for so long, planned so long….” His voice was lower when he profiled, deeper. “Once upon a time, I was an amateur. Now, I’m an artist. Invincible. Unstoppable.”
“And this time,” I said slowly, “you want credit.”
That’s why you wrote the numbers on your victims’ wrists, I thought. You wanted us to crack the code. You wanted us to see the full extent of what you’d done.
“We’ll have a hard enough time convincing the local PD that Beau Donovan isn’t our serial killer without bringing up a decade-old case that, on the surface, looks completely unrelated.” Briggs’s voice broke into my thoughts. “The powers that be in this city want this case solved. Now. If we push the theory that this last attack isn’t the work of our UNSUB, we can expect the cooperation we’ve seen up to this point to dry up pretty quickly.”