Young or old? Intelligent, definitely, but educated? It was difficult to say. If we were dealing with an UNSUB between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, I would say that person was filling a role similar to the role Webber had played to Dean’s father. Apprentice. A younger UNSUB committing these murders was proving himself. He was grandstanding, looking for approval—yearning for it. Much older than that and the UNSUB wouldn’t see himself as an apprentice at all. Viewed from that perspective, this became less about approval and more about proving himself dominant. An older UNSUB, executing this plan to perfection, would be setting himself above the cult—likely from a position of power himself.
You want power—either because you’ve already had a taste of it and want more, or because you’ve been made to feel powerless for too long.
I forced my mind back to the victims. In the prior Fibonacci cases, victimology had been one of the distinguishing features that allowed us to tell the killers apart. There has to be something, I kept thinking. I have to be missing something.
Drowning. Strangling. Those victims had been young, female. The gorier deaths had been reserved for males.
You don’t like hurting women. I turned that over in my head. You will, of course, to suit your goal. But given a choice, you’d prefer it to be neat. That made me wonder about the UNSUB’s other relationships. A mother? A daughter? A love?
My temples pounded. What else? I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t let myself stop. We had five hours before Michael left for the Majesty. No matter how heavily guarded he was, no matter how much we knew, that wasn’t a risk I wanted to take.
January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. The knife.
I had to keep going. I had to think. I had to see whatever it was that we were missing.
Think. We were looking for someone highly intelligent, organized, charming enough to put people at ease. Alexandra Ruiz. The girl at Tory’s show. Michael. The UNSUB had hypnotized at least three people.
“Cassie.” Michael’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Go to bed.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Liar.” Lia was two-thirds asleep on the couch. She didn’t even open her eyes to speak. She’d been going back over interviews, looking for anything she might have missed the first time.
Sloane had been staring at the pattern for hours.
“Briggs and Sterling are calling in the cavalry,” Michael said. “There will be no fewer than a dozen agents, armed to the teeth, watching my every move. The moment they catch sight of a knife, the UNSUB goes down.”
That was how this was supposed to go, but there was a reason this plan was a last resort.
Victimology, I thought. Four victims. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t. Not until the agents came the next morning to take Michael away.
They put Michael in a bulletproof vest. They put a wire on him. Video, audio—whatever he saw, whatever he heard, Sterling and Briggs would, too. The other agents were also wired—video only—and those feeds would be accessible not only by Briggs as he coordinated the mission, but by the rest of us back at the safe house.
It only takes one detail, I thought. One moment, one realization for everything to fall into place.
I couldn’t push down the part of me that was thinking that it only took one moment, one mistake, for this to go wrong, too.
Dean, Lia, Sloane, and I sat huddled on the couch as we waited. Lia refused to show any sign of nerves. Sloane, in contrast, was rocking back and forth.
Beside me, Dean shook his head. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Townsend’s unpredictable. He has no regard for his own safety. He’s constitutionally incapable of backing down from a fight.”
“Tell you what, Dean,” Lia replied. “When Michael gets back, we’ll get the two of you a room. Obviously, there are feelings involved.”
“We’re all worried,” I told Dean, ignoring Lia. “I don’t like this any more than you do.”
Sloane whispered something beside us. I couldn’t make out what she said.
“Sloane?” I said.
“January twenty-third,” she whispered. “February first, February third, February thirteenth.”
It took me a second to register that she was rattling off the next four Fibonacci dates.
I need nine.
We’d been focused on the next kill—January twelfth. But if we didn’t catch the UNSUB, this was what was next.
“The parking garage,” Sloane said. “Then the buffet, then the day spa.” The spiral was centered on the Majesty. It started out and spiraled in—and once it settled there, it kept going, closer and closer to the spiral’s center.
“Where does it end?” I asked her. We’d been so focused on what the UNSUB had already done that I hadn’t given much thought to the rest of the pattern. My heart pounded.
One detail. It only takes one detail.
Michael was still in transit. He wasn’t there yet. It would be minutes yet before the plan was put in motion.
Please, I thought, not sure who or what I was begging—or even what, precisely, I was begging for.
“It ends in the theater,” Sloane said, truly surprised the rest of us didn’t know. “On February thirteenth.”
“The poker tournament ends today.” Lia pointed out the obvious. “It’s going to be hard for most of the players to explain hanging around Vegas for long.”
Wesley. The professor.
“I chose the Majesty for a reason,” Dean said. “It was always going to end here. I knew, from the beginning, how this was going to end.”