All In: (The Naturals #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “I already have tickets reserved under your name,” she said. “Six of them.”

  I knew before I’d even fully processed what she was saying that this was Nightshade’s doing, too. You chose Scarlett for your ninth, I thought, unable to stop myself. You chose her because she mattered to Sterling and Briggs and they dared to think they might stop you. You chose her because she was a challenge.

  Of all of Nightshade’s victims, Scarlett was his greatest feat. She would be the one he went back to. The one he re-lived. You’ve watched Judd, haven’t you? Every now and again, you like to remind yourself of what you took from him—from all of them.

  I wanted that guess to be off the mark. I wanted to be wrong. But the fact that Nightshade wanted us to stay in Vegas—the fact that Nightshade even knew there was an “us”…

  Six tickets. The woman behind the counter printed them off and handed them to Judd. I knew before I looked that they would have our names on them.

  First names. Last names.

  The flight was to D.C.

  You know who we are. You know where we live. The implications were chilling. Nightshade had been watching—quite possibly since he’d killed Scarlett Hawkins and Judd had moved in with Dean.

  Killers don’t just stop, I thought, but in this group, they did. Nine and done. Those were the rules. Some killers take trophies, I thought. To re-live what they’ve done, to get some portion of that rush.

  If Nightshade had been watching off and on, whenever he needed a fix—if he was in Vegas—then he knew what was happening here.

  You’ve never killed Judd—never killed us, because the rules say you stop at nine. But an organization like yours—a cult like yours—would have a way of dealing with threats.

  Lia had said it herself: if the Vegas UNSUB had been a part of this group, he would be dead. And if the cult realized that we’d made the connection, if they saw us as a threat…

  Nightshade would probably love for the kids Judd was caring for to be the exception to the rules.

  Judd slammed the tickets down onto the counter. He turned and was on his phone again in an instant. “I’m going to need transport, a security detail, and a safe house.”

  The safe house was sixty-five miles northeast of Las Vegas. I knew this because Sloane felt compelled to share the calculation—as well as at least half a dozen others.

  We were all on edge.

  That night, in a strange bed with armed federal agents in the adjacent room, I stared up at the ceiling, not even trying to sleep. Briggs and Sterling were still in Vegas, working against a ticking clock to stop the UNSUB before he killed again. Another team had been assigned to take Judd’s statement about his communications with Nightshade. That statement hadn’t included any information about a cult of serial killers that had gone undetected for more than sixty years.

  That information had been declared need-to-know.

  Outside of our team, only two people had been read in—Agent Sterling’s father, FBI Director Sterling, and the director of National Intelligence.

  Two days, I thought as the clock ticked past midnight. Two days until our UNSUB killed again—unless Nightshade killed him first.

  You’re here to clean up a mess. I could feel my heart pounding in my throat, but I forced myself to go deeper into Nightshade’s psyche. Your work is neat. Clean. Poison is an efficient enough means of removing pests.

  I tried not to wonder if Nightshade was the only one whose attention our UNSUB had caught.

  I tried not to wonder if the other members of the cult knew about us, too.

  You could have killed this UNSUB, I thought, focusing on Nightshade, the evil I could name. As soon as you got here, you could have killed this imposter making a mockery of something he does not understand. Throwing it in your faces. Attempting to fashion himself into something more.

  So why wait? Had Nightshade not made any more progress than we had at identifying the UNSUB? Or was he biding his time?

  That was the question that dogged me the first night in the safe house. The second night, my thoughts shifted toward the way Nightshade had signed his message to Judd.

  An old friend.

  It feels true to you, doesn’t it? I thought. That killing Scarlett linked you and Judd. You chose her for what she was—a challenge, a slap in the face to Sterling and Briggs. But after…

  When he’d stopped—when he’d completed his ninth and disappeared from the FBI’s radar—he’d have needed something to fill that void.

  There were days when I couldn’t draw the line between profiling and guessing. Hovering on the verge of sleep, I wondered how much of my understanding of Nightshade was intuition and how much was imagination, making mountains of molehills, because molehills were all that I had.

  Even now, even after everything, Judd still wouldn’t let us touch the Nightshade file.

  Exhaustion wore at me, like the elements biting at a body as it decomposed. I hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours. In that time, I’d received confirmation of my mother’s death and been made aware of the fact that the man who’d killed Judd’s daughter was watching us all.

  I fell asleep like a drowning man making a conscious decision to stop coming up for air.

  This time, the dream started on the stage. I was wearing the royal blue dress. My mother’s necklace sat like a shackle around my throat. The auditorium was empty, but I could feel them out there—eyes, thousands of eyes, watching me.

  My skin crawled with it.

  I whirled toward the sound of footsteps. It was faint, but I could hear the footsteps getting louder. Closer. I started backing away, slowly at first, and then faster.

  The footsteps came faster, too.

  I turned to run. One second, I was onstage, and the next, I was running through the forest, my feet bare and bleeding.

  Webber. Daniel Redding’s apprentice. Hunting me like a deer.

  A twig snapped behind me, and I whirled. I felt a ghost of a whisper on the back of my neck and a hand trailing lightly over my arm.

  I scrambled backward and went down hard. I hit the ground and kept falling—down, down into a hole in the ground. Up above, I saw Webber, standing at the edge of the hole and holding his hunting rifle. A second person stepped up beside him. Agent Locke.

  Lacey Locke née Hobbes looked down at me, her red hair pulled high on her head, a pleasant smile on her face.

  She was holding a knife. “I’ve got a present for you,” she said.

  No. No, no, no—

  “You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin.” Those words came from my right. I turned. It was dark in the hole, but I could just barely make out the features of the girl next to me.

  She looked like Sloane—but I knew, deep in the pit of my stomach, that she wasn’t.

  “There’s a sleeping cobra on your chest,” the girl wearing Sloane’s body said. “What do you do?”

  Scarlett. Scarlett Hawkins.

  “What do you do?” she asked again.

  Dirt hit me in the face. I looked up, but all I saw this time was the glint of a shovel.

  “You’ve been buried alive,” Scarlett whispered. “What do you do?”

  The dirt was coming faster now. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe.

  “What do you do?”

  “Wake up,” I whispered. “I wake up.”

  I woke up on the banks of the Potomac River. It took me a moment to realize that I was back in Quantico, and another after that to realize that I wasn’t alone.

  There was a thick, black binder open on my lap.

  “Enjoying a bit of light reading?”

  I looked up at the person who’d asked that question, but couldn’t make out his face.

  “Something like that,” I said, realizing even as I did that I’d said these words before. The river. The man.

  The world around me jumped, like a jarring film cut.

  “You live at Judd’s place, right?” the faceless man was saying. “He and I go way back.
”

  Way back.

  My eyes flew open. I sat up—in bed this time. My hands grappled with the sheet. I was tangled in it, shaking.

  Awake.

  My hands worked their way over my legs, my chest, my arms, as if looking for assurance that I hadn’t left part of myself back on the Potomac, in the dream.

  The memory.

  The stage, running, being buried alive—that was the work of my twisted subconscious. But the conversation on the riverbank? That was real. That had happened, right after I’d joined the program.

  I’d never seen the man again.

  I swallowed, thinking of the envelope Nightshade had left for Judd on the plane. I thought of the message he’d signed from “an old friend.” Nightshade had known all of our names. He’d made the ticket arrangements, because he wanted Judd to know: you could have gotten to any of us, at any time.

  If I was right about that—about why Nightshade had left the note, about his fixation on Scarlett as his crowning achievement and, through her, on Judd—it was all too easy to believe that Nightshade might have dropped by to say hello when a new person arrived in Judd’s life.

  The rules are specific. Nine victims killed on Fibonacci dates. Normal killers kept killing until they got caught—but this group was different. This group didn’t get caught.

  Because they stopped.

  Judd was in the kitchen. So were two of the agents on our protection detail. “Can you give us a minute?” I asked them. I waited until they’d left to speak again. “I need to ask you something,” I told Judd. “And you’re not going to want to tell me the answer, but I need you to anyway.”

  Judd had a crossword in front of him. He laid down his pencil. That was as close to an invitation to continue as I was going to get.

  “Given what you know about the Nightshade case, given what you know about Nightshade himself, given whatever was in that envelope on the plane—do you think he came here for our killer and just happened to spot you while he was here, or do you think…” My mouth went dry. I swallowed. “Do you think that he’s been watching us all this time?”

  Theories were just theories. My intuition was good, but it wasn’t bulletproof, and I’d been given few enough details to work with that there was no way of knowing how far off the mark I might be.

  “I don’t want you working on Nightshade,” Judd said.

  “I know,” I told him. “But I need you to answer the question.”

  Judd sat, stone-still and staring at me, for more than a minute. “Nightshade sent something to the people he killed,” Judd said. “Before he killed them, he sent them a flower. A bloom, taken from a white nightshade plant.”

  “That’s how he got the name,” I said. “We assumed he’d used poison….”

  “Oh, he did,” Judd said. “It wasn’t nightshade, though. The poison he used was undetectable, incurable.” A shadow flickered across Judd’s eyes. “Painful.”

  You sent them something to let them know what was coming. You watched them. You chose them. You marked them.

  “It never occurred to me he might still be watching.” Judd’s voice was harder now. “Best we could figure, the person who killed Scarlett was in jail or dead. But knowing what I know now?” Judd leaned back in his seat, his eyes never leaving mine. “I think the son of a bitch was watching. I think he’d have killed a dozen more if they’d have let him. But if he had to content himself with nine…”

  He would have made the most of it.

  I closed my eyes. “I think I met him,” I said. “Last summer.”

  I couldn’t provide a description of the man. Michael, who’d been with me that day at the river, couldn’t do much better

  Three minutes, six months ago. My brain stored all kinds of information about people—but even in a dream, I hadn’t been able to make out the phantom’s face.

  Michael’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Now strikes me as the appropriate time for a distraction.”

  I was sitting on the couch, staring at nothing. Michael took a seat on the other end, leaving space for Dean between him and me.

  Whatever complications there were between us, this was so much bigger.

  “Now,” Michael said, determined to bring levity to a moment where there was none, “having recently been involuntarily drafted into a rather violent mud wrestling competition myself”—he shot a dirty look at Lia—“it occurs to me that perhaps we could—”

  “No.” Dean took the seat between Michael and me.

  “Excellent,” Michael replied with a smile. “That leaves Lia, Cassie, Sloane, and me for the wrestling. You can referee.”

  “Tomorrow’s the twelfth.” Sloane sat down on the floor in front of us, pulling her legs to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “We keep talking about mud wrestling and…and Nightshade, and how he knew we were here, and what he’s doing—but tomorrow’s the twelfth.”

  Tomorrow, I filled in for her, someone dies.

  Judd still hadn’t let us look at the Nightshade case file—as if not knowing might protect us, when he knew as well as we did that ship had sailed. But Sloane was right—even bundled off to a safe house, with armed guards policing our every move, we didn’t have to sit back and wait.

  “We know where the Vegas UNSUB is going to strike,” I said, looking from Sloane to the others. “We know he’s going to use a knife.” The word knife would always come rife with images for me. I let the sickening memories roll over me, and I pushed on. “We need more.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Lia said. She reached for the TV control and turned the television on to ESPN. “Personally,” she said, “I don’t consider poker a sport.”

  On-screen, five individuals sat around a poker table. I only recognized two of them—the professor and Thomas Wesley.

  “Beau Donovan is in the other bracket,” Lia volunteered. “Assuming they let him back in after his recent brush with the law. The top two players from each bracket plus one wild card will face off tomorrow at noon.”

  “Where?” Sloane beat me to the question.

  “The tournament has been hopping from one casino to the next,” Lia said. “But the finals are at the Majesty.”

  “Where at the Majesty?” I asked.

  Lia met my gaze. “Take a wild guess.”

  January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom.

  “Open to the public?” Dean asked.

  Lia nodded. “Got it in one.”

  Grayson Shaw must have gone against the FBI’s wishes and resumed business as usual.

  “My father should have listened to me.” Sloane didn’t sound small or sad this time. She sounded angry. “I’m not normal,” she said. “I’m not the daughter he wanted, but I’m right, and he should have listened.”

  Because he hadn’t, someone would die.

  No. I was sick of losing. A killer had taken my mother away from me. Now, the man who’d killed Judd’s daughter had taken our home. He’d watched us, he’d threatened us, and there was nothing we could do about it.

  I wasn’t just going to sit here.

  “No one dies tomorrow,” I told the others. “No one.”

  I stared at the screen, looking for an answer, willing my mind to do what my genetic predispositions and my mother’s early training had formed me to do.

  “Who’s happier about their hand?” Lia asked Michael. “Smirky or Intense?”

  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, s
taring 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.