Page 167 of Shhh…It’s A Killer Story

The cottage was asleep. Frank had somehow managed to fall sideways against the flowerpot. Gerald was still facing the front window, as if he'd spent the last forty-five minutes waiting for the government to arrive. I smiled to myself.

"You're both exhausting."

Neither answered. I wandered into my bedroom, pulled one of Elias's photographs from beneath my pillow, and sat on the edge of the mattress. The newest one. The one from this morning. Max's paws against his chest. That laugh. I traced the outline of his smile with the tip of my thumb.

"So..." I whispered.

"You do smile."

The detective would probably hate knowing I'd discovered that. Some things belong to the public and some things belong to the people who pay attention. I slipped the photograph into my journal between today's pages before returning the book to the bedside drawer.

Safe.

Preserved.

Documented.

I reached over and switched off the lamp. Darkness settled across the room. Outside, somewhere beyond the trees, an owl called once. I smiled into the black.

"Goodnight, Detective...I'll see you again."

Elias

The secondary evidence room smelled like burnt coffee, dry-erase markers, old paper, and failure. It wasn't a smell most people would recognize, but I'd spent enough years chasing dead ends to know exactly what failure smelled like.

The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed loud enough to make my teeth ache. Someone had been meaning to replace the tubes for months. Nobody had. There were always more important things than lights that hummed. Like murder. Like twelve women who had disappeared so completely it was as if the earth itself had opened beneath them.

I rubbed both hands over my face before forcing my eyes back toward the evidence board. Forty-eight hours. That was how long none of us had slept.

Derek looked like he'd aged ten years overnight. Mason hadn't touched the coffee sitting beside him in nearly an hour, which told me more about his state of mind than his expression ever could. Mason didn't ignore coffee unless something had gone catastrophically wrong.

Something had.

The whiteboard stretched almost the entire length of the wall now. It had started as one victim. One body. One question. Now it looked like someone had emptied an entire filing cabinet onto it. Photographs. Maps. Autopsy reports. Traffic routes. Phone records. Forensic summaries. Red thread crisscrossed between photographs until the whole thing resembled a spider's web built by someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Or me.

I stepped closer. The first section was simple enough.

Drew Lian.

Respected citizen. Found inside an abandoned kiln shack his mouth had his dick in it opened so violently the coroner had struggled to determine where the first cut actually began. Bound. Displayed. Waiting to be found.

The second photograph sat beside his. An unidentified woman. No... Not unidentified anymore. She had a name now. A family. People who finally knew why she wasn't coming home. The method matched almost perfectly. The same staging but differently. The same careful positioning but differently. The same message.

You're Welcome.

Two words. Two impossible words. I'd seen killers leave signatures before. Initials carved into skin. Symbols. Religious verses. Sometimes flowers. Sometimes coins. But gratitude? That was new.

Who the hell murdered someone... and then thanked us?

I moved my attention lower. The next two victims looked less like people and more like warnings. One male and one female. Neither had names. Faces destroyed beyond recognition. Fingerprints intentionally removed. Teeth extracted with clinical precision. No dental records. No usable DNA. Nothing. That wasn't rage or panic. It was a planned murder.

Whoever had done this hadn't wanted to slow investigators down. They'd wanted to erase them completely. Even then...They'd still left the note.

You're Welcome.

I fucking hated those two words. The longer I looked at them, the more they felt like someone smiling across the room while sharpening a knife. Behind me I heard Derek shift his weight.