Part One: First Blood
The coffee had gone cold two hours ago, but Maya Reyes kept lifting the cup to her lips anyway, a mechanical gesture that gave her something to do with her hands while she stared at the crime scene photos spread across her kitchen table. Twenty-three years old, three months out of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit training program, and she was already breaking protocol by bringing case files home.
But this wasn't just any case.
The woman in the photographs had been beautiful once. Blonde hair, bright smile, the kind of face that belonged on a college brochure or a lifestyle blog. Now she was a collection of clinical details: ligature marks on the wrists and ankles, petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes, post-mortem staging that suggested the killer had spent time with the body. Arranging her. Perfecting his work.
Victim number four. At least, the fourth they knew about.
Maya's phone buzzed. A text from her supervisor, SSA Marcus Chen: Go to bed. That's an order.
She typed back: Can't sleep anyway.
The truth was more complicated. She could sleep—her body was exhausted, begging for rest—but every time she closed her eyes, she saw her sister. Not as she was now, alive and living in Portland with her husband and two kids, but as she'd been fifteen years ago. Eleven years old, stumbling out of the woods near their childhood home in Eugene, Oregon, covered in dirt and blood that wasn't hers, unable to speak for three days.
The man who took Lucia had never been caught. The case had gone cold within six months, buried under newer tragedies and limited resources. Their parents had moved the family to California, started over, pretended it never happened. Lucia had spent years in therapy, slowly rebuilding herself into someone who could function, who could smile at her wedding and hold her babies without flinching at unexpected sounds.
But Maya remembered. Maya had been sixteen, old enough to understand what almost happened, old enough to read between the lines of what the detectives wouldn't say. Old enough to decide that she would spend her life hunting men like him.
And now, staring at these photos, she felt the old familiar pull. The certainty that lived somewhere beneath her ribs, irrational and unshakeable: this was the same man.
Fifteen years later. Still hunting.
Her phone rang. Chen, not texting this time.
"I told you to sleep," he said when she answered.
"And I told you I can't."
A sigh. "You're too close to this, Reyes. I shouldn't have brought you onto the task force."
"You brought me on because I'm good. Because I see patterns no one else sees."
"You see patterns because you're looking for them. Confirmation bias is a real thing, even for us." His voice softened. "Especially for us."
Maya stood, pacing to her apartment window. Outside, Seattle glittered in the rain, the Space Needle a distant spike against the night sky. Somewhere out there, he was probably sleeping peacefully. They always did, the organized ones. The ones who planned and prepared and treated murder like an art form.
"The staging is identical to the Oregon cases," she said. "The victim profile, the dump sites, the—"
"The Oregon cases are fifteen years old and were never definitively linked. You were a kid. Your memory—"
"My memory is perfect." Her voice came out harder than she intended. "I read every file. I memorized every detail. This is him, Marcus."
Silence on the other end. Then: "Come to the office. Six AM. We'll go through it together, properly. But Maya—" He paused. "If you can't be objective about this, I'll have to pull you. I mean it."
"I can be objective."
"Prove it."
He hung up.
Maya returned to the table, to the photos, to the face of a woman who would never smile again. Sarah Mitchell, 24, graduate student at the University of Washington. Last seen leaving a coffee shop in Capitol Hill three days ago. Found yesterday morning in Discovery Park, posed like she was sleeping, hands folded across her chest, a small bouquet of wildflowers tucked into her fingers.
The flowers were his signature. Always wildflowers, always arranged with care. A gift, maybe. Or a mockery.
Maya's phone buzzed again. Not Chen this time. A news alert: BREAKING: Fifth Body Found in Seattle Serial Killer Case.
Her blood went cold.
Fifth. They'd found another one.
She was out the door before she could think, grabbing her badge and gun, not bothering with the coffee or the files or anything except the address already pulling up on her phone. Carkeek Park, north Seattle. Twenty minutes if she drove fast.
She made it in twelve.