Chapter 8: The pattern Beneath Silence
The air inside Panti Station was dead. Just thick, sweaty, and smelling like old paper and bad decisions. The fan overhead was doing its best, but it was just moving the same hot air in circles. Anyi stood there, staring at the case board.
Five faces.
They'd known this was a serial thing for a while, but knowing didn't mean they were winning. Amara was the fifth, and with her being a student, the city was about to boil over.
"Talk to me, Femi," Anyi said. Her throat felt like she'd swallowed a handful of sand.
Femi looked like a ghost. Dark circles under his eyes, shirt wrinkled. He dropped a plastic folder on the desk—*thud*. "Forensics finally stopped obsessing over the cuts and started looking at the jewelry. We missed it because it's tiny. Really tiny."
He pushed some photos across the table. Two watches, a thin bracelet, and a silver locket.
"The watches from two and four? Both stuck at 3:17," Femi said, tapping the glass in the picture. The photo of the fourth girl—the one they'd found dumped at the Apapa docks—showed the same frozen hands. "We thought it was just the impact or the water. Standard stuff."
Anyi picked up the shot of the locket. "And these?"
"Look at the clasp. Inside, right against the skin," Femi whispered.
Anyi leaned in until her eyes hurt. Scratched into the metal—looking like a stray mark from a jeweler's bench—were three numbers: **3 1 7**. It wasn't a factory mark. It was carved by someone with a hand that didn't shake.
"He's an artist, Femi," Anyi said, her voice going cold. "He kills them early, then spends four hours in the dark making sure every single detail is perfect. He doesn't leave until the clock hits his time."
She grabbed a compass and slammed it onto the map of Lagos pinned to the wall.
"Look at the radius, Femi. Apapa, the bridge, the lagoon. If you're driving at 3:00 a.m. with a body in the trunk, you have ten, maybe fifteen minutes to hit these dump sites by 3:17. All these circles? They overlap at the University. It's the only place that works as a launch point."
Femi frowned. "That's still just geography, Ma. Thousands of people live in that circle."
"It's not just the map," Anyi snapped, pointing at the forensics report for the second girl. "The lab found traces of industrial-grade hydraulic fluid on her bracelet. The kind they only use in heavy machinery and Engineering fabrication labs. Then we get Amara—the first one taken directly from campus. It's not a coincidence. He's not just a student; he's using that school's equipment to finish his 'work.' He's hiding in plain sight because nobody thinks a monster would have a matric number."
She looked at the clock. It was almost 2:00 a.m. "He's comfortable there. He thinks he's the only one who knows how to read a clock. But I'm watching. I'm just waiting for him to blink."
Back on campus, the evening was humming with that low generator drone. Curfew had turned the quad into a ghost town, and the heat was sitting on everything like a wet blanket.
George sat under a flamboyant tree near the Science auditorium. Just another student in a wheelchair, nose in an Engineering book. But he wasn't reading. He was listening to the *clink-clink-clink* of Mr. Okafor's keys.
The Lab Curator was old, limping his way through his rounds. On his belt was the master key—the only one that opened the heavy steel doors of the chemical storage in the basement. George knew he didn't keep his "work" on campus—that would be stupid. But things were evolving. He needed industrial preservatives from those sub-zero lockers to keep the next piece from rotting in the Lagos sun.
He watched the old man turn the corner into the pitch-black shortcut behind the auditorium.
George didn't use the motor. He reached down, his fingers finding the manual locks on the wheels. *Click.* One. *Click.* Two. He did it in sync with the jingle of the curator's keys so the sounds masked each other.
Then, George stood up.
His legs felt like lead, a dull ache radiating through his joints, but they held. To the world, he was the boy in the chair, the one who needed help with heavy doors. In the dark, he was a shadow on two feet, six feet of steady, focused muscle.
He stepped away from the wheelchair, his sneakers pressing into the dirt with the lightness of a ghost. Ahead of him, Okafor was humming that tuneless hymn. George closed the distance in three long, silent strides. He was right behind him. He could smell the menthol rub.
He reached out, his hand hovering inches from the swinging bunch of keys, ready to take what he needed.