Dr. Reed's question hung in the thick, dusty air of the archive, heavier than the scent of old paper and leather. Have you considered what it is they might be building?
DI Miles Corbin stared at her, the tidy case files and procedural logic of his world seeming to dissolve around him. He was a policeman. He dealt with forensics, motives, alibis. He didn't deal with… construction.
"Building what?" he finally managed, his voice a dry rasp.
"Precisely," Dr. Reed said, a flicker of satisfaction in her sharp eyes. She stood up and began to pace, her movements full of a restless, contained energy. "You're an excellent detective, Inspector. You saw the pattern, the artistry, where your superiors saw only chaos. You called it a showcase. But a showcase is, by definition, a display of components. Let's look at your components."
She began to tick them off on her long, slender fingers.
"An Oculist, who takes an eye. He isn't just stealing an organ; he's harvesting Perception. Your Architect, who shatters a perfect body. He's not just a brute; he's claiming dominion over Structure. Your Pathfinder, who runs his prey to ground in the wild. He's bottling pure, primal Instinct."
She paused in front of a shelf groaning with ancient-looking tomes. "Then you have the more modern ones. The Echo, who erases a digital ghost. A perfect theft of Identity. And your Puppeteer…" She turned to face him fully. "He doesn't just kill; he breaks a man's spirit. He harvests Willpower."
Corbin felt a profound chill that had nothing to do with the archive's cool temperature. "You're talking like they're building Frankenstein's monster."
Dr. Reed gave a thin, sharp smile. "Frankenstein was a clumsy butcher, Inspector. He used mismatched, rotting parts. These people… they are connoisseurs. They are harvesting the concepts, the archetypal essence of these traits, from the most perfect specimens they can find." She leaned forward, her voice dropping to an intense, conspiratorial whisper. "They aren't building a body. They are attempting to construct a soul."
The sheer, breathtaking insanity of the statement left Corbin speechless. And yet, it was the only theory that fit. It explained the bizarre artistry, the lack of forensic links, the total absence of any conventional motive. It explained the chilling perfection of it all.
"Good God," he breathed. "But for who? For what?"
"The next logical question," Reed nodded, clearly pleased he was following her line of reasoning. "Are they working for a sixth member, a 'Creator' who has commissioned these parts? Or, and this is more common in the historical precedents, are they preparing a 'vessel'?"
"A vessel?"
"An empty host. Someone lacking all the qualities they've collected. It could be a person in a coma. It could be a corpse they intend to reanimate. Or it could be something else entirely." She shrugged. "My expertise is in identifying the pattern of the ritual, not in predicting its outcome."
Corbin's mind reeled. He had been hunting for five killers. Now he had to consider a sixth, or a potential seventh victim who wasn't even dead yet—or was already dead. The case had just fractured into a dozen terrifying new dimensions. He realised Dr. Reed had given him a new, impossible lens through which to view his evidence.
He stood up, his mind racing. "Thank you, Doctor. You've been… very helpful."
"I know," she said simply, without a trace of arrogance.
He left the dusty archive and stepped out into the evening air of Cambridge, the normal world of students on bicycles and tourists seeming like a distant dream. His investigation had been a straight line, and now it was a maddening spiral.
He got into his car and pulled out his mobile, dialling DC Harris's number.
"Harris," he said when the young detective answered, his voice low and intense. "Scrap the company search for now. I need you to start a new line of enquiry. It's going to sound mad, so just listen."
He paused, taking a steadying breath before giving the impossible order, the words feeling alien and absurd on his tongue.
"Go back through the victims' lives. All of them. This time, I'm not looking for what they had in common. I'm looking for who they were all missing."