Seven is a four-letter number:
I wondered how long it would take Sloane to run through the two thousand nine hundred and sixteen possible combinations.
“What?” The sound of my mother’s name was like a bucket of ice water thrown directly into my face.
“567-3524 is the telephone number that corresponds to the word
“Is
“Plus one,” Dean read over my shoulder. “You think the UNSUB is trying to tell us that we’ve got another victim on our hands?”
Now I had ironclad proof that this case had something to do with my mother’s. That was why the UNSUB had wanted me to come here. He’d left me this message—complete with a “guaranteed plus one.” Someone the UNSUB had already attacked? Someone he was planning on attacking?
I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that if I didn’t solve this, if
There was no answer, just the realization that everything was playing out exactly as the UNSUB had intended. Every discovery I’d made had been choreographed. I was playing a part.
Unable to stop myself, I turned my attention to the last line of the message.
“Symbolism?” Dean asked me, following my thoughts exactly. “Kola. Cola. Drinking. Thorn. Rose. Blood …”
“An anagram?” Sloane had that faraway look in her eye, the same one she’d gotten the day I met her, kneeling over a pile of glass. “Ankh onto lard. Hot nodal nark. Land rand hook. Oak land north.”
“North Oakland,” Dean cut in. “That’s in Arlington.”
“We need a list of every building on North Oakland,” I said, my body buzzing with a sudden rush of adrenaline.
“What are we looking for?” Briggs asked me.
I didn’t have an answer—a warehouse, maybe, or an abandoned apartment. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t quite rid my brain of the sound of my mother’s name, and I realized suddenly that if this killer knew me half as well as he thought he did, there was another possibility.
The dressing room. The blood. I swallowed. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think you might be looking for a theater.”
CHAPTER 32
“We’ve got a body at a small, independent theater in Arlington.” Agent Briggs’s fingers curled into his palms as he delivered the news, but he fought the urge to clench his fists. “It’s not Genevieve Ridgerton.”
I didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset. Somewhere, fifteen-year-old Genevieve might still be alive. But now we were dealing with body number eight.
Our UNSUB’s “plus one.”
“Starmans, Vance, Brooks: I want the three of you to take the kids back to the house. I want one of you posted at the front door, one at the back door, and one with Cassie at all times.” Agent Briggs turned and started walking out of the club, a signal to the rest of us that he was so confident that we would follow his orders that he didn’t even need to stay here to see them through.
I didn’t need Lia or Michael here to tell me that his confidence was a lie.
“I’m going with you,” I said, following him outside. “The exact same logic that let you bring me here applies in Arlington. The UNSUB turned this into a little treasure hunt. He wants to see me follow it to the end.”
“I don’t care what he wants,” Briggs cut in. “I want to keep you safe.”
His tone was uncompromising and full of warning, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Why? Because I’m
Agent Briggs closed the space between us and brought his face down level with mine. “Do you really think that little of me?” he asked quietly. “I’m ambitious. I’m driven. I’m single-minded, but do you really think that I would knowingly put any of you in danger?”
I thought of the moment we’d met. The pen without the cap. His preference for basketball over golf.
“No,” I said. “But we both know that this case is killing you. It’s killing Locke, and now there’s a senator’s daughter involved. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have sent someone to check out that theater. We wouldn’t have discovered the body for hours, maybe days—and who knows what our UNSUB would have done to Genevieve in the meantime?
If you don’t want to use me as bait anymore, fine. But you need to take me with you. You need to take all three of us with you, because we might see something that you can’t.”
That was the whole reason Briggs had started the Naturals program. The whole reason that he’d come to twelve-year-old Dean. No matter how long they did this job, or how much training they had, these agents would never have instincts as finely honed as ours.
“Let her come.” Locke placed a hand on Briggs’s arm, and for the first time, I wondered if there was anything between the two of them other than work. “If Cassie’s old enough to play bait, she’s old enough to learn from the experience.” Locke glanced around the room—at Sloane and Dean. “They all are.”
Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to 4587 North Oakland Street. The local police were already there, but at the FBI’s insistence, they hadn’t touched a thing. Dean, Sloane, and I waited in the car with Agents Starmans and Vance until the local PD had been cleared off the scene, and then they brought us up to the third floor.
To this tiny theater’s only dressing room. I made it halfway down the hall before Agent Briggs stepped out of the room, blocking the entrance.
“You don’t need to see this, Cassie,” he said.
I could smell it—not rotten, not yet, but coppery: rust with just a hint of decay. I pushed past Briggs. He let me.
The room was rectangular. There was blood smeared across the light switch, blood pooled near the door. The entire left-hand side of the room was lined with mirrors, like a dance studio.
Like my mother’s dressing room.
My limbs felt heavy all of a sudden. My lips were numb. I couldn’t breathe, and just like that, I was right back—
Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on.
