The UCLA campus was a living organism, breathing with a thousand small motions. Late afternoon light slanted across the quad, gilding textbook pages and the occasional cigarette ember. Students moved in clumps and solos—some sprinting down paths with backpacks slung like armor, others collapsed across the grass as if they'd been poured there. Laughter snapped like a kite string; someone disagreed about a thesis in raised voices near the fountain; a girl doodled chemical structures into the margin of a love note.
Only a few blocks away from that quotidian life, in a windowless suite behind curtains and an unmarked door, the FBI's temporary command center felt like a different planet. The air conditioning chugged; the light was white and constant. Agents flowed through the room in practiced currents, carrying tablets, printouts, Styrofoam coffee cups. Every flat surface carried a purpose—laptops, external drives, labeled evidence boxes, digital scopes that made tiny, faint things look like a map of constellations.
A massive corkboard dominated the far wall, its surface a chaos masquerading as logic: photographs, grainy CCTV stills, sheet maps of Los Angeles with pushpins sticking in neighborhoods, index cards with handwriting in black marker and strings connecting them all like the neural tangles of a very tired brain. In the center of it all, a printed face—pale, dark-haired, expressionless—had been circled three times in red marker.
Supervisory Special Agent Lindsay McDermont stood near the middle of the room, elbows hooked on her hips like a woman braced against a storm. Her eyes had that flat, acquisitive look of someone who could parse a story from a smear of evidence: the way threads intersected, which alibis smelled of desperation, which photographs hid truths in their blurry angles. The image of the "Organ Harvester"—the moniker the press had latched onto—hung in the seam between professional instinct and something colder. Seven hundred confirmed victims. Five years. Surgical precision. No obvious motive. No suspect. Until now.
She watched a younger agent cross the floor, tablet in hand, and thought of the numbers in the file: seven hundred. Whole lives reduced to ledger entries. How do you build a life inside a body count? The thought made a taste of metal rise in her mouth.
Footsteps in the doorway pulled her attention. Agent Schraigg came in carrying a thick folder, his stride practiced but quick, eyes scanning the room as if checking for listeners. He moved like he was carrying not just paper but the weight of something new.
"Schraigg," Lindsay called, voice low enough to keep from spilling anything into someone else's ear. She made a small gesture for him to come forward.
He stepped close and passed the folder to her, as if surrendering a secret. He lowered his voice, shoulders tensing to keep the information from dispersing.
"I went through the profiles for thirty-something likely suspects," he said, "but there's not a single clean link." His words were clipped. "Routines, histories… nothing aligns. But I did find something else."
Lindsay flipped the first page and held the folder up so she could get a clear line on a photo clipped to the cover. A young woman stared back—dark hair, vacant expression—lips parted like someone listening to a distant wind.
"Go on," Lindsay said.
"There's one name that stuck out," Schraigg continued, "Krista Adelaide Morrigan. Formerly Williams."
Lindsay's head lifted. "Why her? She's not in biology, right?"
"No," Schraigg said. "She's engineering. Robotics major. Interns with cybernetics. Smart as a goddamn whip. But her history—her family—gave me pause."
Schraigg flipped the file to the first report, letting the facts land like stones. "She's from Orlando. Her parents—Nate and Nora Williams—were found dead the year she left Florida. In the trunk of their minivan—dismembered and partially burned. Police called it a gas-leak explosion. Forensics found two knives—Japanese sushi knife and a cleaver—on the stairs to the garage. Everything else was—" he closed his mouth, hands folding the sentence to avoid its finish. "The case was closed for lack of leads."
"In pieces?" Lindsay asked, and her voice was the kind that cut into other people's attention.
"Dismembered," Schraigg said. "Stab wounds, deliberate cutting. Explosion was a cover of some kind. Neighbors reported seeing a man and two girls leave the property days before, but those leads never panned out."
Lindsay's hand went unconsciously to the folder, fingertips moving the paper like a small ritual. "What about motive?" she asked. "Enemies? Debts? Someone who hated them?"
"Oh, there's a motive," Schraigg said dryly. "Nate and Nora were two million dollars in debt. High-roller gambling, underground rooms—people who're desperate make the worst bets."
"And the girls?" Lindsay asked. "Krista and Olivia."
"They were reported missing shortly after the explosion," Schraigg said. "Four days later, they show up in Los Angeles. Timing's what we'd call suspicious."
"Four days," Lindsay repeated, and the quiet in the room seemed to lean in.
"Olivia Cinder Morrigan—formerly Williams—was in a car accident in 2018. Major spinal cord injury. Paraplegic." Schraigg tapped the file. "Now she's in a wheelchair. Krista was fifteen at the time; Olivia ten. They disappear. Reappear across the country. Their parents are dead and burned and cut into pieces."
Lindsay let out a long breath and rubbed her temples, feeling the ache that lived in cases like this: the ache that was more than paperwork. "Keep digging," she said.
"I did," Schraigg said. "Krista works nights at a pest control outfit called BringEmPain. Office's in Skid Row, right by Werdin Place. Moreso—work hours are nine PM to four AM."
"That's the same window as the killings," Lindsay said. She didn't need to look at the printed timeline to know it was true.
"It's a fucking overlap," Schraigg said. "Not definitive, but a pattern."
Lindsay closed the folder and let the information settle like dust. "Alright. Let's bring it to the team. We run surveillance tonight. If she's our killer, we catch her in the act or find the truth behind her façade."
Two days later, the room felt both smaller and more cavernous. New photos had been added to the corkboard, and a fresh map with color-coded pins was stuck at an angle. Agents clustered in small groups, murmuring, their voices smeared into a low hum of hypotheses. The bustle had a rhythm now, like a hive thinking.
Agent Davies stepped forward, carrying a different kind of gravity—a ledger of money and secrets rather than blood and timelines. Her posture was taut with the kind of focus that made colleagues keep a respectful distance.
"Davies," Lindsay said. "Go ahead."
Davies hesitated, as if measuring how heavy a suggestion she could throw into the room without causing it all to topple. The folder she held was thinner, but every page in it had smudges of implication.
"I've been looking at Krista's finances," she said slowly. "Given her family's financial collapse before their deaths, I wanted to know how she funded tuition, housing—how she kept herself afloat. And it looks like—someone's been helping her."
"How?" Schraigg asked. "Scholarships? Loans?"
"No," Davies said. "A single lump-sum donation paid her tuition. Someone using an alias—James Carrow—wired the money. The same alias purchased the warehouse on East 8th Street—converted into residential units; that's where Krista and Olivia currently live."
The word warehouse evoked a dozen different mental images: industrial windows, concrete floors, converted loft beds, a certain kind of quiet. Lindsay pictured the kind of place that could be a refuge or a cage.
"You trace the alias?" Lindsay asked.
"I worked with the NSA on facial recognition for a photo associated with the alias," Davies said, flipping the next page. "The analysis returned a name—Bradley Kinford."
Kinford. The name snagged a memory—two decades of headlines, a crime family that had carved its piece of Chicago into black. Lindsay felt the room tilt.
"Kinford? Wasn't he presumed dead?"
"Presumed dead in 2017," Davies confirmed, "car exploded, charred remains, all that. But I pulled traffic cam and diner footage from 2019. Found a photograph of a man—Kinford—sitting in a diner in San Marino. And in the background, two girls."
She set down a printed, grainy shot. The man's jaw was a map of angles, his nose distinctive even through the static of the image. At a table in the same frame, two girls hunched—small, gaunt.
"That's them," Lindsay said. The recognition was immediate and absolute. "Krista at fifteen, Olivia at ten."
Davies didn't need to explain the implication; the room made it for her. Homeless girls. Dead parents. A man with mafia history who reappears after a death that should have been final. Someone footing the bill for a prestigious education and a converted warehouse.
"You think Kinford took them in," Schraigg said.
"I think it's possible," Davies said. "Kinford has history with trafficking and black markets. If he saw potential in Krista—if he saw she was capable of taking the steps required to survive in that world—he'd have reason to invest."
"Invest how?" Lindsay asked. The world narrowed to questions that managed both the ethics of investigation and the logistics of catching monsters.
"Maybe he didn't teach her how to cut," Davies said, careful. "Maybe he didn't need to. Maybe he recognized a pattern in her—violence in her history, survival skills—and opened a door. He gives access: cash, security, a place to live. He offers a network. In return, she might owe him. Or she pays back in ways that aren't strictly monetary."
Lindsay looked at the printouts again. The photos looked like a small universe collapsing inward on itself. "So she's not just a lone wolf."
"No," Davies said. "If Kinford's involved, this could be an entire supply chain. Organs, buyers, fences—people who can move bodies and parts and make them vanish into whatever world the wealthy live in. The money from that sale could be directed anywhere—Kinford's ledgers, back into his operations, or to pay for things Krista needs."
"What does Olivia have to do with it?" Schraigg asked. "Is she a reason Krista would go along? A leverage?"
"She's paralyzed," Davies said. "Expensive medicine, adaptive equipment, stable housing. If Krista believed she could provide the means to keep Olivia safe, she could be pushed toward choices she otherwise wouldn't make. Desperation is a powerful recruiter."
The agents stood in a ring of new possibilities that smelled like old crimes. Lindsay thought about the description of Krista she'd read earlier: obsessively perfect grades, robotics work, a student so focused she was almost hermetic. The idea that someone with that brain could be channeled into murder didn't compute easily—until you factored in survival and debt and a man like Kinford.
"Alright," Lindsay said finally. "We approach this in layers. Surveillance on Krista tonight, discreet. We pull her professors. Talk to neighbors. Run a financial probe on anyone tied to that alias. And—we get the NSA to dig deeper on Kinford. If he's alive and foots payments, he's our node."
They moved like a machine. Agents dispersed to phone calls and briefings, splitting tasks: surveil on the ground, blade through bank records, subpoena records from the pest control company, and assign an undercover to BringEmPain if they needed to. The plan had the smell of inevitability the way something with teeth feels inevitable.