All In (The Naturals, #3)(14)

“Obviously,” Michael replied.

I picked up the final file, the one that belonged to Tory Howard, the only POI who wasn’t an elite poker player.

The magician.

“I’m bored and approaching really bored,” Lia announced when it became clear that none of us were going to take her up on the role-play suggestion. “And I think we all know that’s not a good thing.” She stood, smoothing one hand over her red dress while the other grabbed for the DVD. “At least on a security video, something might actually happen.”

Lia popped the DVD into a nearby player. Sloane looked up from her spot on the floor just as the security footage began to play. A split screen showed the view from eight cameras. Sloane stood, her eyes moving rapidly back and forth, as she took in the data, tracking hundreds of people, some stationary, some moving from one frame to the next.

“There.” Sloane reached for the remote and paused it. It took me a moment to zero in on what she’d seen.

Eugene Lockhart.

He was sitting in front of a slot machine. Sloane fast-forwarded the footage. I kept my eyes locked on Eugene. He stayed there, playing the same slot again and again.

But then, something shifted. He turned around.

Sloane set the DVD to play in slow motion. I skimmed each of the other cameras’ footage. A blur of motion passed first through one, then through another.

The arrow.

We watched as it buried itself in the old man’s chest. I didn’t let myself look away.

“The angle of entry,” Sloane murmured, “the placement of the cameras…” She rewound the footage and played it again.

“Stop,” Michael said suddenly. When Sloane didn’t pause the footage, he reached for the control himself and toggled back, bit by bit. “See anyone familiar?” he asked.

I scanned the various camera shots.

“Bottom right.” Dean found her first. “Camille Holt.”





We spent the next six hours buried in the evidence. Sloane and Michael went over and over the video. Dean and I made our way through the final dossier, then worked back through all of them in more detail. We found everything we could online about Camille Holt. I watched interview after interview with her. She was a self-professed method actor, who embodied her characters the entire time she was filming a role.

You like trying different people’s skin on for size. You’re fascinated by the way the mind works, the way it breaks, the way people survive things no one should be able to survive.

It was there, in the roles she chose: a mentally ill woman on death row, a single mother weathering the loss of her only child, a homeless teenager turned vigilante after an assault.

So, Camille, I wondered, what role are you playing now? According to our files, she’d been at the party where Alexandra was killed. That meant she was present at a minimum of two of the three murders.

“Enough.” Judd had stayed mostly out of our way, observing, but unobtrusive. Now, he reached for the remote control and turned the television off. “Your brains need time to process,” he said gruffly. “And your stomachs need food.”

We objected. That didn’t go well for us.

After we pried ourselves away from the evidence, Lia “suggested” Sloane and I change for dinner, which I took as a threat that she would pick out an outfit for me if I didn’t comply. Unwilling to tempt fate—and Lia’s fashion sense—I put on a dress. When I went to fold my jeans, the USB drive Agent Sterling had given me fell out of the pocket. I bent to pick it up, half expecting Sloane to come out of the bathroom and catch me in the act.

She didn’t.

I forced myself to open my hand and stared at the drive. No amount of throwing myself into the Vegas case could make this matter less. I’d wanted to see the files—needed to see them—but now that I held the answers in my hand, I was paralyzed.

When people ask me why I do what I do, Locke’s voice whispered in my memory, I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered.

Sensory detail broadsided me: the light reflecting off the knife, the glint in Agent Locke’s eyes. There wasn’t always a rhyme or reason to what triggered my flashbacks—and there was nothing I could do except ride it out.

I was supposed to kill her, Locke continued in my memory, manic with the desire to have been the one to end my mother’s life. I was supposed to be the one.

I shuddered. When I came back to the present, my palms sticky with sweat, I couldn’t keep from slipping into Locke’s mind. If you were here, if you had access to new information on my mom’s case, I thought, you’d find the person who killed her. You’d kill him, for killing her.

I swallowed back the emotion rising up inside of me, grabbed my computer, and made my way out into the suite. Judd had forbidden me from looking at my mother’s file alone. I’m not alone, I told myself. I was never really alone.

Part of me would always be in that blood-spattered dressing room with my mother. Part of me would always be at the safe house with Locke.

I made it to the door to the suite and began to open it, planning to slip out into the hallway. I just need a few minutes to look at—My thought cut off abruptly as I realized the hallway outside our suite was already occupied.

Lia was leaning against one wall, four-inch heels on her feet, one leg crossed over the other at the ankles. “We both know that when you told Cassie you were in one piece, you were lying.”