Just a Dream?
MORGAN
It was nearly midnight when she got back to Frank’s house.
The porch light was on, and low-level lighting spilled out of the first-floor windows, welcoming her back with a warm glow and the quiet promise of someone being there to greet her.
Even with her mind whirring, she registered the contrast of returning to her sterile, dark, studio in the city after being called out to a scene.
She kept her steps light and quiet as she unlocked the door and stepped inside, but she needn’t have bothered. Frank was in the living room, a thick book open in his lap, while Shadow lazed at his feet.
Both looked at her when she came through the door. Frank executed a quick, assessing glance, while Shadow gave more of a lazy perusal.
“Everything all right?” he said.
That feeling of warmth bloomed beneath her ribcage. Frank had waited up for her. He’d never admit it, of course, and in return, she’d respect that by not calling him out.
But she knew.
“Fine,” she said. “It’s just been a long day.”
He looked at her for a moment with those dark green eyes that missed nothing. Then he nodded, closed his book, and stood.
“’Night.”
“Goodnight, Frank.”
Morgan sat on the edge of the bed with her laptop and told herself she'd make it quick.
The forum group had been working through the evening, cross-referencing what little the public record offered, hitting the same walls she'd been hitting. They had good instincts and insufficient data with which to work, which wasn’t uncommon.
Their skills lay more in discovering what wasn’t publicly available.
She was going to help them with that.
She opened a new post as GraveDigger, without preamble or context. No one would question how or where she’d got the information. Trust was implicit, and the goal was finding answers, not judging the methods with which they were found. Legality was often irrelevant when seeking the truth.
Gravedigger: Photographs of the victim attached. Full face and profiles. Run what you can.
She uploaded the images she'd taken in the morgue. They were clean, well-lit, and shot with a cold, professional eye, exactly like the kind she'd been taking for four years on the job. Then she closed the laptop before she got sucked into the rabbit hole.
She already had too many other thoughts vying for her attention.
One of the strongest contenders: Patrick Callaghan.
Her thoughts about Patrick had been circling in the background all evening, clouding the edges of everything else.
Like the way he'd waited in the car without complaint.
The firm and clear ‘she's Declan's friend’ declaration. The enigmatic curl of his lips when she’d not-so-subtly accused him of being DeepTrace.
Even though he hadn’t admitted it, he was DeepTrace. She knew it in her bones.
And that only made him that much more fascinating.
Morgan had been quietly appreciating DeepTrace’s analytical skills and pattern recognition for years.
Discovering that brilliant mind was wrapped in such a physically attractive package and tied up with a ribbon of endearing charm was more than any woman could be reasonably expected to resist.
Even her, who prided herself on calm, clear, rational behavior.
But she was not in a position to be this distracted.
She was supposed to be keeping her head down, cooling her heels far away from Philly while another investigator filed their (incomplete and erroneous) report and closed the case.
Only then could she quietly return, sufficiently chastised and properly warned about the consequences of making waves.
If that time came. If she still had a job to go back to.
The question now was, would her conscience allow her to?
She lay down and was asleep before she came up with an answer.
The dream didn’t have the usual chaotic, nonsensical elements of an overtired brain and hidden meaning.
It was more like a memory where things made sense.
Familiar buildings of stone and glass and chrome, not labyrinthine mansions with secret rooms. The people in it were dressed in ordinary day clothes doing everyday things, not circus performers riding unicycles across the Ben Franklin bridge.
In the dream, she was in the parking garage beneath the Philadelphia ME’s office.
Level two, to be specific—the one with the flickering light near the stairwell that facilities had been promising to fix for eight months.
She'd been heading to her car after a late shift, her bag over one shoulder, already thinking about the report she hadn't finished and trying to decide which frozen entrée to pop in the microwave when she got home.
She heard the voices before she saw them.
Words spoken in low, quiet tones not meant to carry.
When she came around the concrete pillar, she saw her supervisor and a man she didn't recognize.
She clocked his features without conscious thought, creating a mental snapshot, because that was the way her brain worked.
Medium height, medium build. Dark hair. The kind of nondescript looks that would be hard to describe.
Dressed in suits, they stood close, deep in what looked like a heated conversation.
The man she didn’t recognize spotted her first. His mouth clamped shut, his eyes narrowing on her as she drew closer. Her supervisor noticed and turned, doing the same.
She smiled apologetically and kept walking, aware that she’d interrupted a private conversation.
Then she'd gone to her car and driven home, not giving it another thought. It wasn’t any of her business. She'd had a report to finish and a case that wasn’t adding up and no reason to believe that their conversation had any relevance to her.
Except she’d seen that man in the dream again.
Because he’d been splayed out on a stainless-steel table in Pine Ridge morgue.
Morgan woke up.
She lay there for a moment, willing her heart to stop racing. A brief scan confirmed that she was in the guest room at Frank’s house. Shadow was a warm, breathing weight against her side.
She told herself it was just a dream. Her brain’s way of processing the day's input, trying to make sense of things without the restrictions of waking moments.
She was stressed about her job, about a case that bore the hallmarks of a cover-up, and a man she had no business being attracted to.
Her evening had been spent focused on a dead man. Of course he'd followed her into sleep.
She picked up her phone. 3:47 a.m.
She put it down.
Picked it up again.
The forum notifications were right there. New activity, multiple posts, no doubt due to her earlier upload. She couldn’t put it off again.
She opened the app.
The thread had moved fast. Someone had run her photographs through facial recognition software, but the official databases had returned nothing. No criminal record, no law enforcement file, no documented identity.
Then Halcyon had gone a different direction entirely.
Not official records but open source—news archives, local coverage, the kind of incidental photography that accumulated around crime scenes without anyone paying much attention to it.
Amateur photos. Bystander footage, posted with Halcyon’s brief comment “Got him. Why is he here?”
The clip was from a Philadelphia news archive. A wide shot of the street, police tape, investigators moving through the scene.
Including her.
And in the background, behind the tape, slightly out of focus but there: a man watching.
Medium height, medium build. Dark hair. Nondescript.
Morgan sat up.
It was him.
The dead guy.
The one she’d spent twenty minutes examining only a few hours earlier.
He’d been at that scene. And then, days later, she'd rounded a parking garage pillar and interrupted him mid-conversation with her supervisor, right before she’d been placed on forced leave.
Her brain processed the timeline, each instance a glaring marker.
Crime scene.
Parking garage conversation.
Forced leave.
Dead body less than two miles from where she was.
Not a coincidence. Not a random death. Not a medical event.
She sat there for a long time, Shadow's warm weight against her, and let that sink in.
Someone had sent him here.
Someone had sent him here because of her.
She closed the app. Put the phone face-down on the nightstand. Lay back down in the dark with her eyes open and the October night very quiet around her.
She didn't sleep again.