“In a manner of speaking.” Briggs brought up another picture, side by side with the wrist. It looked like some kind of wristband. Set back into the thick material it was made of were four metal numbers: 4558, but flipped—a mirror image of the numbers on the victim’s skin.
Agent Sterling enlightened us. “Fire-retardant fabric. When our victim caught fire, it heated the metal, but not the fabric, leaving a legible brand underneath.”
“According to our sources, the victim received the bracelet with a parcel of fan mail,” Briggs continued. “The envelope it was mailed in is long gone.”
“Fan mail?” I said. “And that makes the victim…who?”
Another picture flashed onto the screen in response to my question, this one of a twentysomething male. His face was striking and gaunt, sharp angles offset by violet eyes—probably contacts.
“Sylvester Wilde.” Lia let one of her feet fall to the floor. “Modern-day Houdini, illusionist, hypnotist, and jack-of-all-trades.” She paused, then translated for the rest of us. “He’s a stage magician—and like most of his kind, an excellent liar.”
From Lia, that was a compliment.
“He had a nightly show,” Briggs said, “at the Wonderland.”
“Another casino.” Dean mulled that over.
“Another casino,” Agent Sterling confirmed. “Mr. Wilde was in the midst of his evening performance on January second when he—to all appearances—accidentally set himself on fire.”
“Another accident.” Dean bowed his head slightly, his hair falling into his face. Already, his concentration was so intense, I could see it in the lines of his shoulders, his back.
“Or so the authorities believed,” Agent Briggs said. “Until…”
One last picture, one last victim.
“Eugene Lockhart. Seventy-eight. He was a regular at the Desert Rose Casino. He came once a week with a small group from a local retirement home.” Briggs didn’t say anything about how Eugene had died.
He didn’t need to.
There was an arrow protruding from the old man’s chest.
How did a killer go from staging accidents to shooting someone with an arrow in broad daylight?
As the jet descended into Las Vegas, that was the question I kept coming back to. Our briefing hadn’t stopped with the picture of Eugene Lockhart, skewered through the heart, but that was the moment when every assumption I’d made about this killer had started to change.
Beside me, I could feel Dean mulling over what we’d been told, too. Part of being a Natural was not being able to turn off the parts of our brains that worked differently than other people’s. Lia couldn’t choose to stop recognizing lies. Sloane would always see numbers everywhere she looked. Michael couldn’t help picking up on every last micro-expression that crossed a person’s face.
And Dean and I compulsively pieced people together like puzzles.
I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried—and knowing what my brain would cycle back to the second I stopped thinking about this case, I didn’t fight it.
Behavior. Personality. Environment. There was a rhyme and reason to the way even the most monstrous killers behaved. Decoding their motivations meant trying to step into the UNSUB’s shoes, trying to see the world the way he or she saw it.
You wanted the police to know that Eugene Lockhart was murdered, I thought, starting with the obvious. People didn’t get “accidentally” shot with hunting arrows in the middle of busy casinos. Compared to the earlier murders, that was definitely an attention-getter. You wanted the authorities to take notice. You wanted them to see. See what you were doing. See you.
Are you used to going unnoticed?
Are you sick of it?
I went back over what we’d been told. In addition to the four-digit number written in permanent marker on the old man’s wrist, the medical examiner had also found a message inscribed on the arrow that had killed him.
Tertium.
Latin, meaning “for the third time.”
Hence the police looking back over all recent accidental deaths and homicides and the discovery of the numbers tattooed on Alexandra Ruiz’s wrist and burned into Sylvester Wilde’s.
Why Latin? I turned that over in my head. Do you consider yourself an intellectual? Or is the use of Latin ritualistic? A slight shiver ran down my spine at that possibility. Ritualistic how?
Without meaning to, I leaned into Dean’s body. Brown eyes met mine, and I wondered what he was thinking. I wondered if climbing into this killer’s mind was giving him chills, too.
Dean laid a hand on my arm, his thumb tracing along the back of my wrist.
Across from us, Lia eyed our hands and then brought her own to her forehead in a melodramatic motion. “I’m a dark and angsty profiler,” she intoned. “No,” she countered in a falsetto, bringing her other hand up, “I’m a dark and angsty profiler. Ours is a star-crossed love.”
Toward the front of the plane I heard Judd cough. I deeply suspected he was covering a laugh.
“You never did tell us why the locals called in the FBI so quickly,” I told Agent Briggs, easing my body away from Dean’s and trying to redirect Lia’s attention before she did a reenactment of our entire relationship.
The plane landed. Lia stood and stretched, arching her back before taking the bait. “Well?” she prompted the agents. “Care to share with the class?”
Briggs kept his answer brief and to the point. “Three murders at three different casinos in three days. The casino owners are obviously concerned.”