It started with the odor.
Smoke and copper—thin, almost imperceptible now—but enough to linger on the edges of my mind. Enough to remind me that something was off. The mood of the scene had been too quiet. The blood too artfully done. No urgency, no frenzy. Whoever had killed this victim hadn't killed in an instant. The killer had designed a moment.
I continued to circle it in my mind. Over and over. Like a rat in a cage trying to find an opening in the wall. And each time I thought I was near, the pieces fell through my hands like sand.
The victim's name—Jonas Kreel—was nothing initially. No priors. No recorded enemies. No debt, no lovers. A ghost, essentially. But there was something about him. A tension in the cleanliness of his life. Too clean. Like someone had scrubbed it.
I sat at my desk, city light filtering through the blinds, casting slatted shadows on the wall of case files I'd started tacking up again. Habit. The department didn't like paper. Said everything was supposed to be electronic. But you can't work an electronic file. You can't smell the mildew of abandoned truth.
I pulled Kreel's folder in. Opened it. Ruffled the photos, the autopsy report, the scene sketches. None of them told me what I wanted to know. But then—
The scar.
It was small, hidden under his jaw, hardly noticeable. But I knew one like that. Years ago. Different case, different time, but same precision. A mark left behind like a brand. My stomach churned.
I went back to the archives. Cold cases. Files closed after verdicts that no one had the guts to challenge. The more I dug, the more I got that feeling again—like the city was holding its breath in anticipation.
Then the knock. Solid. Accurate. I opened the door to see Dr. Lillian Poe on the other side, hair styled, gloves still intact. Her eyes didn't blink much when she was on something, and tonight they were wide open.
"Elias," she said, handing me a thicker-than-usual folder. "We found something. You're going to want to sit."
Within, DNA. Compatible with Kreel, but a second marker—a rare, anomalous one. Not genetic, not familial. Engineered.
"Engineered?" I inquired.
She nodded. "We ran it twice. He's associated with a group of gene edits we've only seen in two other bodies in the last decade. Off-books, both. Quiet burials."
I said nothing. My throat constricted. Lillian waited a second. She knew I needed to think. She didn't show sympathy. She gave me facts.
"And Elias," she continued, "the laboratories he's connected with? They don't appear on any medical registry."
Underground networks. Human trials. Experimental edits. My mind spun. Who was Jonas Kreel, really?
Sylvie called an hour later. "You'll want to look at this." She was cold, abrupt, harsher than normal. She sent the documents—thick, encrypted, copied off a burner she'd never used before.
Bank accounts. Shell companies. Money routed through Zurich, Sao Paulo, Riyadh. All of which traced back to established crooks. But that was only the beginning.
One of them had an attached note. Four letters only.
DWLF.
Darius Wolfe.
The name hit me like a punch to the ribs. Wolfe was not a man. He was a legend that people pretended did not exist. Real estate tycoon on paper. Puppetmaster behind the scenes. Connected with political blackmail, corporate sabotage, and reputedly—now murder.
But he never left prints. Never needed to. His empire was not built of dollars. It was built of leverage.
I was barely breathing when I got the message from Jax.
"Midnight. No phones. Back lot behind Fifth and Hollow. Alone."
Jax Holloway wasn't shaken. Had been my five-year source. Lived deep within the underbelly like a rat that understood every wire, every tunnel. But he appeared hunted that night.
"This wasn't a hit," he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. "It was a message."
I waited.
"And you're beginning to read it."
My lips were dry. "What message, Jax?"
He paused, as if the words that followed were to be his downfall. "You're pointing in the wrong place. It's not about the body, Kane. It's about whoever wanted it found. And why they wanted it now."
That chilled me more than anything. I'd been pulling on threads, but someone had laid the whole tapestry—just waiting for me to grab the right one.
And when I turned aside from that vision, the city was different. As if it was observing me. As if it had always been.
I was home at 3 a.m., walls covered with notes and pictures. Maps. Bloodstain patterns. Financial charts. Gene loci. Kreel's face at the center, ringed with specters.
I was standing there, gazing, breathing, my thoughts unfolding as I did not comprehend. And then, suddenly—it clicked.
The scar. The DNA. The money. The note. Wolfe. They weren't separate.
Jonas Kreel was not a victim alone.
He was a signal.
An experiment subject who was destined to be eliminated the moment he lived beyond his usefulness. A man who tried to disappear but had something in his blood too valuable to be left behind. A person who was sent to remind certain individuals that their secrets were no longer safe.
And I had just walked right into it.
I fell into the chair, the city thrumming outside as if it had seen what I had just seen. My hand was trembling slightly as I poured a glass of whiskey. Not for the taste. Just to have something in my hand.
Because I knew what was coming.
They acknowledged I had seen the connection.
And then they'd come after me. End of Chapter 5