“I called you last night,” Sloane told him reproachfully. “I called and called, and you didn’t answer. Ergo, I get coffee, and you don’t get to complain.”
I thought about the chopsticks Sloane had stolen the night before. You needed Briggs to pick up your call. You needed to be recognized. You needed to be heard.
“There was another murder,” Briggs told Sloane.
“I know.” Sloane stared at the coffee in her hands. “Two. Three. Three. Three.”
“What did you say?” Briggs asked sharply.
“The number on the corpse. It’s 2333.” Sloane finally came to sit at the table with the rest of us. “Isn’t it?”
Briggs pulled a new picture out of the file. Camille’s wrist: 2333 had been carved into it. Literally. The bloody numbers were slightly jagged. From a henna tattoo to this. The numbers had always been a message—but this? This was violent. Personal.
“Was she alive when the UNSUB did this?” I asked.
Briggs shook his head. “Postmortem. There was a compact in the victim’s purse. We believe the UNSUB broke it and used one of the shards to carve the numbers in her wrist.”
I shifted from Camille’s perspective to her attacker’s. You’re a planner. If this was what you’d intended all along, you would have brought something with you to do the job.
That left me with two questions: first, what had the plan been, and second, why had the UNSUB deviated from it?
What went wrong? I asked the killer silently. Did she thwart your plan somehow? Was she harder to manipulate than the others? I thought about the fact that Camille had been present at the crime scenes for two of the victims. Did you know her?
“This is personal.” Dean’s thoughts were exactly in line with my own. “The other targets might have been selected for convenience. But not this one.”
“That was Agent Sterling’s take as well,” Briggs said. He turned back to Sloane. “You decoded the numbers?”
Sloane grabbed a pen out of Agent Briggs’s pocket, flipped the folder closed, and started scrawling numbers on the outside of the folder, talking as she wrote. “The Fibonacci sequence is a series of integers where each number is derived by adding the two that come before it. Most people believe it was discovered by Fibonacci, but the earliest appearances of the sequence are in Sanskrit writings that predate Fibonacci by hundreds of years.”
Sloane set the pen down. There were fifteen numbers on the page:
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377
“I didn’t see it at first,” she continued. “The pattern picks up mid-integer.”
“Pretend for a moment,” Lia told her, “that we’re all very, very slow.”
“I’m not very good at pretending,” Sloane told her seriously. “But I think I can do that.”
Michael choked back a snort.
Sloane picked the pen back up and put it down under the number thirteen. “It starts here,” she said, underlining four numbers, then inserting a slash before repeating the process.
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 3/4 55 8/9 144/ 233 377
2333. The image of Camille’s wrist rose to the surface of my mind, like a drowned man bobbing to the surface of a lake. You break the glass. You press the jagged edge to her flesh, carving in the numbers.
“Why this sequence?” I said. “And why make it this hard to see? Why not start at the beginning, with 0112?”
“Because,” Dean said slowly, “this knowledge has to be earned.”
Briggs glanced at us, one after the other. “Agent Sterling and I will be spending the afternoon talking to potential witnesses. If you have any names to add to that list—besides Aaron Shaw—now would be the time to speak up.”
At the mention of Aaron’s name, Sloane’s hands curved tightly around her cup of coffee. Michael cocked his head to the side and stared at her. An instant later, he caught me watching him and raised an eyebrow at me in an unspoken challenge.
You know something’s up with Sloane, I thought, and you know that I know what it is.
“I assume you’ve gathered that Camille was out with Tory Howard last night?” Dean asked Briggs.
Briggs gave a brief nod. “We talked with Tory briefly yesterday. We’ll go back for seconds today, then work our way through the rest of our list.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to take me with you when you go to talk to this fine collection of potentially homicidal individuals?” Lia batted her eyes at Agent Briggs.
Briggs withdrew four earpieces from his pocket and laid them down on the table. They were joined, a moment later, by a tablet from his briefcase. “Video and audio feeds,” he told us. “Agent Sterling and I are wired. Within a four-mile radius, you’ll see what we see. You’ll hear what we hear. If you pick up on something you think we might have missed, you can text or call. Otherwise, I want you studying up on our interrogation techniques.”
Lia, Michael, Dean, and I reached for earpieces in unison.
Sloane turned to Briggs. “What about me?” she asked quietly.
There were four earpieces and five of us.
“Four casinos in four days,” Briggs said. “I need you”—he put enough emphasis on those words to tell me he’d picked up on the vulnerability in Sloane’s tone—“to figure out where this killer is going to strike next.”
YOU
The roulette wheel spins. The players watch with bated breath. You watch the players. Like ants in an ant farm, they’re predictable.