Rain turned New York into a smear of light and shadow, the kind of night where even the streetlamps looked guilty.
Queens was quieter than it had any right to be. Sirens had come and gone. The uniforms had pushed back the crowd, then the press, then anyone who didn't have a badge or a stomach for what waited in the alley off 39th Street. Now only the rain stayed, needling the pavement, washing the city's face while it pretended not to look.
Detective Elias Thorne stood at the mouth of the alley and listened.
He always listened first.
Not to people. People filled silence with lies, guesses, grief. He listened to the gaps between things—the drip from a bent fire escape, the low electrical buzz from a faulty sign over a shuttered bodega, the distant rumble of the elevated train sliding through the dark like a tired thought. The city had a pulse. Tonight it skipped.
A uniform stepped toward him, started to speak, then stopped himself. Everyone on the task force knew. Thorne didn't talk. Not since Brooklyn, three years ago, the night the warehouse went up and the screaming didn't stop even after the flames did.
Instead, Thorne opened the weathered leather notebook he carried in his coat pocket. The cover was scarred, water-swollen at the edges, elastic strap long gone. He wrote in tight, precise block letters.
Time body found?
The officer swallowed. "Twenty-two seventeen. Sanitation worker cutting through to the subway."
Thorne nodded once. His eyes were already moving past the man, into the alley.
Then he stepped inside.
The body lay halfway down, between a dented dumpster and a brick wall tattooed with old graffiti and new rain. Floodlights from the crime scene unit carved the space into harsh white planes and deep, inky voids. Steam curled from a sewer grate, drifting across the scene like breath.
Spider-Man was on the wall.
Not slumped. Not sprawled.
Mounted.
Arms outstretched, wrists fixed high above shoulder level. Ankles pinned apart. The pose was deliberate, almost anatomical, like a diagram in a textbook. The suit—once a blur of red and blue across rooftops—looked dulled under the lights, rainwater darkening the fabric, washing grime into the seams.
Someone had treated a legend like a lab specimen.
Thorne didn't react outwardly. Inside, something old and heavy shifted, but he put it where he put everything else: behind the work.
He slipped on gloves. Stepped closer.
The others had left him a clear path. They always did. Thorne saw what they missed, and they'd learned not to crowd his sightlines.
He crouched first, not at the body, but at the ground six feet away.
A shallow puddle. Oil-slick rainbow on the surface. He angled his head, watching how the light broke across it. A partial boot print at the edge—deep heel, narrow toe. Not NYPD issue. He wrote without looking down.
Photo: print by puddle. Cast if possible.
He moved forward, slow, measured. Every step was a question.
Up close, the suit told its own story. Micro-tears along the ribs. Scorching at the left shoulder, fabric melted in a pattern too clean for fire alone—directed heat, maybe electrical. The spider emblem on the chest was intact, but faint scoring lines crossed it, parallel, as if something rigid had pressed hard.
Thorne leaned in, not touching. He closed his eyes.
Not in grief.
In concentration.
Rain on fabric had a different sound than rain on brick. Water hitting synthetic weave made a softer, flatter patter. But under that, he caught something else—a faint, sticky pull when droplets slid down the wall behind the body.
Webbing.
He opened his eyes. The alley wall was laced with thin, nearly invisible strands, glistening only when the light caught them just right. Some were snapped. Others sagged, stretched past their normal tension.
A struggle, vertical. He'd fought on the wall.
Thorne raised a hand, fingers miming a quick series of motions: up, twist, pull. One of the techs nodded, understanding.
"Trajectory analysis on web lines. Anchor points, too."
The detective shifted his attention to the wrists.
The restraints weren't rope. Not cuffs. Two steel rods—construction rebar, cut and sharpened—had been driven through the fabric at the forearms, angled into the mortar between bricks. Not through flesh; the suit bunched around the metal, suggesting the rods pinned him by trapping the sleeves and web-shooter housings against the wall.
He wrote again.
Pinned postmortem?
The medical examiner, Dr. Kwan, stepped in beside him. "Preliminarily, yes. No major arterial spray on the wall. Most blood loss internal."
Internal.
Thorne's gaze tracked down the torso. There—subtle, almost polite—was a dark patch at the lower abdomen, where the red fabric had gone nearly black. A single penetration point, small, precise. Not a slash. Not a bullet tear.
A puncture.
He lifted his hand, two fingers together, miming a narrow instrument entering, angling up.
Kwan nodded grimly. "We'll know more at autopsy, but I'd guess a stiletto-type blade. Slid in under the ribcage. Upward thrust. Hit something vital."
Efficient. Clinical. No theatrics in the kill itself.
The theatrics came after.
Thorne's eyes moved to the mask.
The lenses—white, expressive in life—were clouded now, rain beading on them like tears that wouldn't fall. One lens was cracked, a spiderweb fracture across the surface. Beneath it, the fabric was slightly indented, as if someone had pressed a thumb there, hard.
He stared at that mark a long time.
Then he wrote.
Mask removal attempt? DNA under lens.
A gust of wind pushed rain deeper into the alley. Somewhere beyond the tape, someone shouted Spider-Man's name like a prayer. The city was grieving, but grief was loud and messy. Thorne worked in the quiet underneath it.
He stepped back, scanning the vertical space.
Fire escape above—rusted, dripping. A window two floors up, dark, blinds half-drawn. Brickwork old, mortar crumbling in places. On the third-story ledge, just left of the body, a faint scuff—fresh, lighter than the surrounding grime.
He pointed. A tech followed his line of sight.
"Ladder marks?" she offered.
Thorne shook his head. He mimed hands gripping, body pressed close, descending carefully.
Climber. Not superhuman. Careful.
He wrote:
Perp stayed on wall. Comfortable at height.
He closed the notebook and finally looked at the whole.
A hero was supposed to die in motion—mid-swing, mid-leap, a streak of color against the sky. Not like this. Not arranged, studied, reduced to angles and entry wounds.
Myth was bright. Reality was fluorescent and smelled faintly of bleach and wet brick.
Thorne felt the familiar divide open inside him—the world of symbols everyone else lived in, and the world of evidence he inhabited. In his world, even legends had body temperature, time of death, livor patterns. In his world, miracles bled.
He listened again.
Past the rain. Past the murmurs. Past the camera shutters.
He listened to the silence around the body—the absence of something that should have been there.
Spider-Man's hands.
Even pinned, the fingers were curled, not splayed. As if they'd grasped something small, hard.
Thorne stepped in close once more, careful, reverent in his precision. He angled the light.
There, caught in the webbing between index and middle finger of the right glove, was a speck of dark material. Not brick. Not rust.
Paint.
Industrial. Matte black, with a faint metallic sheen.
He held up one finger to the techs. Wait.
He slid a swab from his kit, worked it free with the delicacy of a watchmaker.
The city might see a fallen hero.
Thorne saw transfer evidence.
He wrote his final note for the scene and held it up for Kwan and the lead tech to read.
He grabbed the killer. Killer didn't know.
Rain kept falling, trying to wash the night clean.
Elias Thorne slipped the notebook back into his coat and turned toward the alley mouth, where the city's noise waited like a tide. He did not speak.
He did not need to.
The silence had already told him where to start.