Chapter 19: The Reply
The duet had found its tempo.
And George moved with it.
The car did not belong to him.
At least, not in any way that could be traced.
Old paint. Dull finish. A license plate that had lived more than one life. The kind of vehicle memory refused to hold onto.
It idled low beneath a flickering streetlight, its engine a quiet, patient murmur.
George's hands were statues on the wheel. He wasn't looking for a person. He was looking for a **frequency**.
Lagos breathed around him in layers. There were streets that refused sleep—bright, loud, crowded with motion. And then there were the others. The in-between. Where movement dissolved without consequence.
He saw her.
His next masterpiece.
The woman walked with the heavy, rhythmic gait of the exhausted. A plastic bag swung from her wrist—*thwack, thwack*—against her thigh. She was a metronome of the mundane.
George didn't feel pity. He felt **alignment**.
He drove past.
He circled.
He returned.
The streetlights here were dying, flickering like failing hearts. When he stepped out of the car, the silence was absolute.
Step.
Drag.
Step.
He didn't grab her. He **harvested** her.
One hand clamped over her mouth—scent of old copper and latex. The other anchored her spine. The plastic bag dropped, scattering oranges across the black asphalt like severed, citrus heads.
She resisted for three seconds. Then, the night swallowed her whole.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, filling the station with a low, restless hum.
Detective Izuora stood over the board, sleeves rolled, eyes fixed. Her third cigarette of the hour was a jagged line of ash between her fingers. Femi lingered nearby, file in hand, his face pale under the clinical glare.
"They didn't just leave him alive."
Femi exhaled sharply, rubbing his temples. "We already established that, Ma'am. The paramedics barely got him to the hospital before—"
"No."
She didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to. Izuora tapped the image of the fourth victim's throat. Slower this time. More deliberate.
"They **used** him."
Femi frowned, stepping closer to the gore-slicked photo. "Used him how?"
She didn't answer immediately. Her gaze wasn't on the wound anymore. It was somewhere beyond it, tracing the ghost of a killer's hand.
"Think about the timing," she said.
Femi flipped a page instinctively, looking for a timestamp, a gap in the patrol.
"They didn't stay," she continued. "Didn't finish. Didn't correct."
A pause. She let the smoke curl around the photographs like a shroud.
"They left something behind that could still… **change**."
Femi's grip tightened on the file. "You mean—talk?"
Izuora exhaled slowly, the grey smoke obscuring her expression.
"Not to us."
That part hadn't changed. The message was never for the police. But then—
"They were waiting."
Silence stretched, heavy and unwelcome.
"For what?" Femi asked.
Now she looked at him. Fully. Her eyes were dark, reflecting the madness they were tracking.
"For a response."
The room tightened. Femi shook his head, a desperate rejection of the logic. "You're saying the Copycat expects the Original to see this? Understand it?"
Izuora didn't hesitate.
"Yes."
A beat.
"And worse—" She turned back to the board, marking the subtle shift between the surgical beauty of the first kills and the jagged mess of the fourth. "They're confident he will."
Femi's voice dropped. "Why?"
Izuora's finger hovered over the image of the unfinished throat.
"Because they've seen enough to believe he's watching."
A pause. Then—quieter. Sharper.
"Or…" Her eyes hardened into obsidian. "They've seen him up close."
She spun around, slamming her hand onto the desk, her voice turning into a whip.
"Femi, get the Commissioner. I want every bridge in this city locked down. Third Mainland, Carter, Eko—all of them. Every major artery. Set up checkpoints. If a car looks too quiet, I want it dismantled. He's going to respond, and he's going to do it tonight. We are stopping the Original's reply before he even finds a canvas."
The woman awoke to a world of **crinkling transparency**.
She tried to move, but her limbs were anchored. She wasn't just on a table; she was inside a lung.
The Gallery was draped in heavy-duty polyethylene. The walls, the floor, the ceiling—everything was wrapped in layers of clear, industrial plastic. It caught the harsh, white LED light, refracting it into a thousand jagged diamonds. It was a room designed for two things: **visibility and containment**.
George stood in the center, a silhouette against the shimmering walls. To his right, the **tools** were laid out on a steel trolley with the precision of a clockmaker.
* **Scalpels:** Number 10s and 11s, edges so thin they seemed to vibrate.
* **Bone Saws:** Fine-toothed and cruel, designed to whisper through calcium.
* **Retractors:** Silver claws waiting to pull back the curtain of her skin.
But it was the background that stole her breath.
Stretched canvases leaned against the plastic-wrapped walls. From a distance, they looked like abstract expressionism. Up close, they were **topographies of trauma**. Swirls of deep, oxidized ochre. Splatters of bright, arterial scarlet.
They weren't just paintings. They were **archives of red**. And the empty canvas in the center was waiting for her.
George picked up a Number 11 scalpel.
"The one who found you... he was a butcher," George murmured. His voice was a calm, low melody. "He understood the blood, but he didn't understand the **geometry**."
He stepped closer. The woman's eyes were frantic moons.
"You were left breathing as a challenge. A question of whether I could preserve the music while I changed the score."
He didn't start with the saw. He pressed the point into the hollow of her throat.
The plastic floor beneath them caught the first drop of red. It didn't soak in. It sat there—a perfect, trembling bead on the polyethylene.
George didn't stagger the line. He refined it. He bypassed the veins with the precision of a jeweler, parting the dermis to reveal the white, glistening cords of her larynx. He worked with a terrifying, rhythmic speed.
The woman's breath hitched. A spray of fine, red mist coated the plastic wall behind her, creating a new, wet pattern on one of his background canvases.
George didn't blink. He tasted the copper on the air and felt the **rhythm** click into place. He wasn't just killing her. He was **correcting the Copycat's grammar**.
Outside, the city was screaming.
Blue and red lights strobed against the humid night as police vans slammed into position across the Third Mainland Bridge. Izuora stood by her car, her hair whipping in the wind, eyes scanning the sea of thousands of idling engines.
*Honk. Honk. Honk.*
Thousands of cars were trapped. Drivers were shouting, leaning out of windows. Femi walked up to her, his radio crackling with reports of total gridlock.
"Checkpoints are active on all sectors, Ma'am. But if he's out there... he's buried in ten miles of tailbacks. We'll find him."
Izuora didn't hear him. She was looking at the dark water of the lagoon.
"He's not in the traffic, Femi," she whispered. "He's already where he needs to be. We're locking the doors after the devil is already in the house."
In the cold light of the gallery, George stepped back.
The woman was still alive.
Her throat was an open book, a wet, red masterpiece of exposed valves. Every time she tried to gasp, the air passed through the modified rifts George had carved, creating a sound.
Not a scream.
Not a word.
A low, haunting **whistle**. A minor chord played on a violin made of meat and bone.
George wiped the blood from his cheek with a silk cloth. He looked at the plastic-wrapped wall, where the new spray of red had settled. It was perfect.
"You wanted a voice," George whispered to the silence.
He leaned down, his lips inches from the woman's ear. "Listen."
He adjusted a final flap of skin with a pair of silver tweezers. The pitch of the whistle shifted. It became a long, mourning note that echoed off the plastic.
It was a reply.
It was a correction.
It was a **threat**.
The street where the woman had been taken was empty. Except for the oranges.
Izuora stood in the center of the bridge road, her cigarette burning down to the filter. She looked at her watch.
3:17 am
The silence of the city felt different now. It didn't feel like peace. It felt like the moment after a conductor lowers his baton.
"He's done," she said, her voice hollow.
Femi frowned. "How do you know?"
Izuora looked at the dark horizon. "Because the air just stopped vibrating, Femi. The conversation is over."
She dropped her cigarette and crushed it.
"Now we just wait to find the letter."