I barely registered Michael’s reply. Wesley had dressed in keeping with his image. Millionaire. Eccentric. Rake. In contrast, the professor was self-contained, dressed to blend among businessmen, not to stand out at the table.
Precise. Single-minded. Contained.
We were looking for someone who planned ten steps ahead. You need nine, and you have to know that with each one, the pressure will mount. Someone who planned as meticulously as this killer—who was as grandiose as this killer, who prided himself on being better, being more—would have a plan to circumvent suspicion.
You have alibis, I thought, staring at Thomas Wesley. You’re the one who tipped the FBI about Tory’s powers of hypnosis.
On-screen, the professor won the hand. The slightest of smiles pulled at the edge of his lips. You win because you deserve to, I thought, slipping out of Wesley’s perspective and into the professor’s. You win because you’ve mastered your emotions and decoded the odds.
I could see bits and pieces of our UNSUB’s profile in both of them, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something missing, some piece of the puzzle that would let me say, definitively, yes or no.
I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate and work my way through what that information might be.
“Sloane discovered the Fibonacci dates because she knew our UNSUB was obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence,” I said finally. “So how did our UNSUB discover them?”
If the pattern was oblique enough that the authorities had never discovered it, never linked the cases we could now attribute to this group, how had our UNSUB?
I tried to push my way through to the answer. You know what they do. You want their attention. It was more than that, though. You want what you’re owed. These murders weren’t just attention-getters. Viewed from the perspective of a group that valued its invisibility, they were attacks.
“Tell Briggs and Sterling to look for a history of trauma,” I said. “See if we can tie anyone from this case to a victim in one of the prior cases.”
To find the pattern, you would have had to be obsessed. I knew that kind of obsession and knew it well. Maybe they took something from you. Maybe this is you taking it back.
“They’ll want to look at family members of suspects as well.” Dean knew obsession as well as I did, for different reasons. “It’s possible we could be looking for a relative of a member—a child or sibling who was denied admission himself.”
To do this, to put this much time and effort and calculation into getting this group’s attention…It’s personal, I thought. It has to be.
You want to be them, and you want to destroy them. You want power where you’ve had none.
You want it all.
“It’s always personal,” Dean said, his thoughts working in tune with mine. “Even when it’s not.”
“There are other cases,” Sloane said quietly, her hands clasped in front of her body. “Other victims.”
“The cases your program didn’t find,” I said.
There was a long pause.
“It is possible,” Sloane mumbled, “that I got bored yesterday and wrote another program.”
A chill settled on the surface of my skin and burrowed deep. Profiling the Vegas UNSUB was one thing, but the cult was another altogether. Nightshade’s message to Judd—whatever the content—had conveyed one thing very clearly, through its existence alone.
No matter who you are, or where you go, no matter how well-protected you are, we’ll find you.
Judd was right to try to pull us off the case. He was right to try to stop us before we were in too deep.
But it’s too late, I thought. We can’t un-see what we’ve seen. We can’t pretend. We can’t stop looking, and even if we could…
“What did your program find?” Lia asked Sloane.
“Instead of scanning law enforcement databases, I programmed it to scan newspapers.” Sloane shifted to a cross-legged position. “Several of the larger ones have been working on digitizing their archives. Add in the databases of historical societies, library documents, and virtual depositories of non-fiction texts, and there’s a wealth of information to search.” She twisted her hands against each other. “I couldn’t use the same parameters, so I just searched for murders on Fibonacci dates. I’ve been weeding through them by hand.”
“And?” Dean prompted.
“I found a few of our missing cases,” Sloane said. “Most weren’t identified as serial murder, but the date, year, and method of killing match the pattern.”
Some UNSUBs were better at hiding their work than others.
“We’ll have to tell Sterling and Briggs about those cases,” I said. “If we think the Vegas UNSUB might have a connection to one of them—”
“There’s something else,” Sloane cut in. “The pattern, it goes back a lot further than the 1950s. I’ve tracked at least one case as far back as the late 1800s.”
More than a century.
Whatever this was, whoever these people were—they’d been doing this for a very long time.
Passed down, I thought. Over decades and generations.
Without warning, Lia slammed Michael back against the wall, pinning his hands over his head.
“Now really isn’t the time or the place,” Michael told her.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lia asked, her voice furious and low.
“Lia?” I said. She ignored me, and when Dean called her name, she ignored him, too.