Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
Ash’s chest pulled tight. Jimmy’s grin beamed back, too bright, too full of careless promise. He remembered the cold alley, the way his stomach turned when he saw what had been carved away. He forced his eyes to stay on the picture.
“I never got to thank you for that lead,” Rick said, quieter.
Ash swallowed a sip of his drink. “You’re welcome.”
Rick left it there. He touched the last pinned photo: a boy still soft around the jaw, trying to look older than he was. “And our latest, Sean Burns, twenty-three. Found in Ravenholt Park, October twenty-fifth.”
Ash’s breath caught. The face rang with memory, not from the city streets but from the dark corners of his mind. Sean stretched against a wooden saltire, wrists locked in iron bars, damp air pressing close, the taste of rust in his throat.
Rick noticed the shift. “What is it?”
Ash’s throat worked. “I’ve seen him. In my dream.”
Rick’s expression sharpened. “You’re sure?”
“As sure as I get.” He tried to drag the images out of the haze. “He was bound. Shackled. Stone walls, water dripping somewhere. A basement, maybe. That’s all I could hold onto before it blurred out.”
Silence settled in the room, broken only by the steady rain and the muffled hum of the bullpen beyond the glass. The board loomed before them, a wall of faces waiting for resolution.
Rick exhaled through his nose, wrote something quick beneath Sean’s photo, and stepped back. “It’s something. Means he was held before he died.”
Ash rubbed at his arms, restless. “Yeah. But where?” His voice was tight with frustration.
His gaze slid over the office again, the leaning stacks of files, the coffee rings seared into the wood, the folders spilling from open drawers.
All of it spoke of long nights and slow work, not quick answers.
He felt the weight of it pressing in: six boys gone, a monster still at large.
And him stuck in the middle, trapped between blood-soaked memory and torn scraps of a dream he couldn’t stitch together.
He stepped closer to the board, drawn to the city map pinned beside the photographs.
Colored markers dotted the grid—harbor, underpass, rooftops, alleys—each one a quiet wound in the sprawl of Calgrave.
His brows knitted. From a distance, the placements seemed scattered, arbitrary, the sort of chaos a killer hid behind.
But the longer he stared, the more something in his hindbrain stirred. Not logic. Recognition.
He lifted a finger, tracing the air above the map without touching it. “Rick…”
He felt rather than saw Rick watching him, unblinking, waiting.
Ash slid the pen from Rick’s grasp and began sketching between the points, letting the lines pull themselves out of him.
A curve here. A crooked pivot there. Two slanted strokes converging where the river bent.
The shape wasn’t perfect, not yet, but the geometry was undeniable.
“It’s not random,” he murmured. “He’s placing them.
Each one… it lines up. Look,” he tapped the rough outline.
“It’s the same symbol he leaves at the scenes. The bodies are making it.”
Rick stepped in close enough that Ash felt the warmth of him at his shoulder. His breath hitched as the truth hit. Six points forming an incomplete sigil; one gap left, one final stroke waiting to be carved. “So the bastard’s building his ritual right into the city.”
Ash swallowed, staring at the map. “And he only needs one more to finish it.”
The room seemed to contract around him, the air thinning as if the walls themselves leaned closer. Rain hammered the windows with a furious insistence, each drop a nail in a coffin he suddenly felt himself standing inside.
Suddenly, the door banged open hard enough to rattle the glass. A thickset man barreled in, thundercloud in a suit, cigar smoldering as he jabbed it toward Rick. “Slade!” His voice exploded. “Mind tellin’ me why one of my top men’s laid up in a hospital with his skull split open?”
Rick leaned forward, jaw knotted, palms braced on the desk as though he needed the wood to anchor him. “Captain… we were tailing a possible suspect. Off the record. There was a misunderstanding—”
“A misunderstanding?” The Captain’s laugh was sharp, ugly.
He paced a tight line across the cramped office, belly straining his vest, cigar waving like a conductor’s baton.
“A misunderstanding is when a broad slaps you for gettin’ fresh.
Not when my detective ends up on ice for five goddamn weeks!
No wonder this case is colder than a morgue slab if this is how you’re runnin’ it! ”
Ash stood in the corner, half-drowned in shadow, content to watch the sparks fly. A low laugh slipped out before he could stop it. It was only a breath against the quiet, but it was enough to finally draw the captain’s glare.
“And what the fuck is this?” He stomped closer, smoke puffing hot between his teeth. “Who let this fox in here?”
Rick flinched. “Sir, this is Ash Hunter. He’s… he’s an advisor on the case.”
“Advisor?” The man barked the word, spittle catching the light. “Didn’t you have him in cuffs last week? And now he’s lounging in your nest? What’s next—sending the Sculptor a goddamn dinner invite?”
The heat in the room swelled. Rick stood stiff, jaw tight, caught in the blast of it.
Ash felt the current ripple through him, the wolf beneath straining at its leash.
He, on the other hand, let it roll past like rain off glass.
He eased away from the wall with a languid stretch, sliding one hand into his pocket, the other tracing the line of the desk as he moved.
When he spoke, his tone was honey poured over barbed wire.
“I’m only here to help, Captain. You’ve got a killer loose in your city. Seems to me you could use all the help you can get.”
The captain’s fury faltered mid-stride. His gaze snagged on Ash, stuck a beat too long.
Smoke curled forgotten from the cigar as his jaw worked without sound.
Some of the thunder drained out of him, his shoulders dropping a notch.
He muttered something indecipherable, then jabbed the cigar at Rick instead.
“You better get me results. Fast. Or so help me, you’ll be pounding pavement ‘til your shoes dissolve.”
He spun on his heel, storming out in a trail of fume, door slamming behind him.
The silence he left behind rang louder than his shouting. Rick stood there, nostrils flaring, knuckles white against the edge of the desk. He studied Ash with narrowed eyes, suspicion shading the edges, but the set of his shoulders had eased by a fraction. Respect; reluctant, but there.
Ash only lifted his brows, smirk flickering, the picture of innocence with his fists in his pockets. “Don’t be so impressed. It doesn’t work on everyone.”
Rick frowned, watching him too closely. “No?”
Ash strolled past Rick with unhurried grace, crossing to the rain-streaked window.
He rested his hands on the sill, eyes on the blurred city beyond, his voice low and almost careless when he spoke.
“Only the ones with a crack already in them. A weakness. A want.” He left it hanging there, a suggestion more than a confession, before looking back with a gaze that didn’t quite give itself away, the weight of the unsaid hanging between them like smoke.