Detective Adrian Raines woke to the sound of his phone vibrating violently against the nightstand. For a moment, he didn't move. His head pounded from the whiskey he'd drowned in the night before, and his body begged him to sink deeper into the mattress. But the phone wouldn't stop.
He groaned, rubbed his eyes, and finally snatched it up. "Raines," he said, voice rough.
A pause, then the clipped tone of Dispatch filled his ear. "Detective, you're needed. Warehouse district, Pier 17. Possible homicide."
He sat up, the bedsprings protesting beneath him. "Possible?"
Another pause. Then: "You'll see when you get there."
The line went dead.
Raines sat for a moment, staring at the darkness of his apartment. The blinds were half-open, letting in thin stripes of orange streetlight. Empty bottles littered the coffee table. A file folder lay open on the couch, case notes he hadn't touched in days.
He dragged a hand down his face and muttered, "Perfect."
---
The rain hadn't let up by the time he reached Pier 17. It hammered the windshield of his rusted sedan, turning the world into shifting rivers of light. He killed the engine, lit a cigarette, and sat there for a long moment watching the blue and red strobes reflect off the puddles outside.
Crime scenes had a smell. Metallic, sour, clinging. He hated that his body recognized it before his brain did.
With a sigh, he stepped out, coat pulled tight against the rain, cigarette dangling from his lips.
The warehouse loomed ahead like the carcass of a beast, its broken windows glowing faintly under the floodlights set up by the uniforms. Yellow tape fluttered in the wind, and beyond it, shadows moved — officers, photographers, the coroner's team.
One of the patrolmen spotted him and nodded. "Detective Raines. Inside."
He flicked the cigarette away and stepped under the tape.
---
The moment he entered, the smell hit him — iron and damp wood. The kind of smell you carried home, no matter how hard you scrubbed. His boots echoed on the concrete as he followed the faint trail of light deeper inside.
And then he saw it.
The body sat in a chair at the center of the room, arms bound, chest soaked in dried crimson. His eyes were wide, staring into the void, lips parted in a scream that never came.
But it wasn't the corpse that made Raines' stomach knot. It was the piece of paper pinned neatly to the man's shirt.
Four words, scrawled in jagged black ink:
DO YOU REMEMBER FAYETTE?
His breath caught. For a second, the room swayed around him. The cigarette taste turned bitter on his tongue.
"Detective?"
He blinked. A young officer stood beside him, notebook in hand. Nervous. Too green for this scene.
"You okay, sir?"
Raines forced his voice steady. "Yeah. First victim?"
"Far as we know. No ID yet. Looks like torture before the kill. Whoever did this wanted to send a message."
Raines' eyes lingered on the note. The word burned into him. Fayette. A name he hadn't heard in years. A name he had tried, with every bottle and every sleepless night, to erase.
But here it was. Back from the grave.
He crouched, studying the note without touching it. The handwriting was sharp, deliberate, almost obsessive. Whoever wrote it wanted the letters to cut as deep as the knife wounds.
Behind him, the coroner cleared her throat. "Cause of death looks like a puncture wound straight through the lung. Clean. Professional. But the bruising on the wrists and face… he suffered first."
Raines barely heard her. The note filled his vision. Fayette.
His father's name.
---
He stood abruptly, shoving his hands into his coat pockets to hide the tremor in them.
"Detective?" the young officer asked again, hesitant.
Raines' jaw tightened. "Bag the note. Run it through for prints, handwriting, anything."
"Yes, sir."
He turned and walked toward the edge of the room, needing distance, needing air. The rain slipped through holes in the roof, dripping steadily into rusted barrels. Each drop sounded like a ticking clock.
For the first time in years, he thought about the man he had spent his whole life trying to forget. Fayette Raines. Decorated veteran. Community hero. And a monster in ways no one else would ever believe.
Why now? Why this?
His phone buzzed in his pocket, jerking him back. He answered. "Raines."
A voice crackled over the line — the station chief. "Detective, we've got another call. Same setup. East side. Different victim. And Adrian—"
Raines gripped the phone tighter. "What?"
The chief's voice lowered, grim. "There's another note."
---