Chapter 57
Mireya
Play - Talk by Hozier
Rehearsed patterns
It’s been a few days since I realized that the file was missing.
Three days of buried-in-paper, rewound VHS, scratched CDs, and spreadsheets full of scribbles and arrows that make sense only to me.
Do they really, Reya ?
Judging by the need to scream of exasperation I feel in my head, nothing makes sense.
Everything is digital enough to search, but not automated enough to do the thinking for me. I like doing the thinking part. I need to. Because if I don’t, I’ll think about something else, like the eyes of that young girl, the way she looked empty, the way her body felt cold.
I’m hunched over the desk in the lab, sleeves rolled up, papers already crumpled from hours of shoving my arms into them. My fingers are stained from highlighter ink, and I miss drawing. Why am I even thinking about this now?
The screens are flickering as I click between files, crime reports, and archived footage. Every detail I’ve collected over the past days is here. Every crime scene and report, every witness statement has the same missing piece.
Something that was deliberately erased, or left corrupted.
Some footage that are conveniently unavailable.
Witnesses giving the same story: a man waiting in a car, the victim walking toward him willingly, no one ever seeing his face.
And all the victims, young, beautiful, often from broken families. All chosen carefully.
I lean back in my chair and spin slowly, staring at the ceiling.
Doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting the same results is stupid, Reya.
I mutter the phrase to myself, sticking my fingertips at the root of my hair.
When working alone, I notice the same things he would notice, parallel lines of deduction all converging at the same spot. I’ve been here since five in the morning and I feel like the same question is creeping back.
Why exactly did he stop for so long?
Years passed with nothing. Then now… he’s active again. I cross-reference the old victims’ ages, dates, and locations, scribbling notes on a pad that’s practically glued to my hand.
And then it clicks.
He probably…had a child, or discovered he had a family. That’s why he had a hiatus. That’s why there have been no new victims for years.
And now, with the academy reopening and new students arriving, it’s the perfect opportunity. The perfect target pool.
The most recent victim was selected to begin training here. She never even set foot on the island and the headmaster…covered it up. There’s no information about her murder here. They never mentioned her, or anything.
I run a hand over my face, exhaling. My third coffee has gone cold again. My notebooks are a mess of arrows, question marks, and underlined names. By the time I realize, the clock’s already screaming at me.
I’m going to be late.
And unfortunately enough, my next course is his class. I grab my bag, shoving notes and notebooks inside, and jog down the hall, trying not to slam into anyone.
My mind races over the missing file, the patterns, the victims. I barely notice the crowded corridor. I’m three minutes late. The digital clock above the door says 09:03 when I slip inside, and he’s already talking.
“—baseline behavior,” he says. “You identify deception by understanding what normal looks like first.” I slide into the room quietly, but he looks up. “Take a seat, Miss Vitelli,” he lets out.
I drop into the seat next to Hayzel, and she pushes her notebook toward me without looking. “We’re on behavioral leakage,” she whispers. “You missed the fun part.”
“Tragic,” I murmur, flipping my notebook open.
“I sent you texts… and I was shocked that my insane best friend was late to her favorite course with her favorite teacher.”
I gasp quietly and she laughs before nodding back to him.
At the front, he uncaps a marker and writes on the board:
BASELINE, DEVIATION, AND MOTIVE.
“Profiling is mostly creating the perfect suspect without enough information,” he continues. “It’s in the speech cadence, and gesture clusters. Context.”
My pencil moves automatically, notes at first, then arrows, circles and dates. My brain drifts, and the case slips in sideways, the missing footage, the repeated witness language, the man in the car. Same baseline, same deviation.
I don’t notice when my notes stop being words. A small cat appears in the margin, curled around a list of dates.
Hayzel glances over. “Is that… Blue?”
“Hey,” I whisper. “I’m profiling.”
She stifles a laugh.
“Behavior doesn’t lie,” he says, moving through the rows. “People do.”
He stops beside my desk. His shadow falls across the page of my notebook as he leans just enough to look. His eyes skim the notes first, the circled names, the arrows. Then at the cat and finally me. “Creative coping mechanism?” he says quietly.
I don’t look up but keep adding details on my drawing. “Exactly, Mister Caldwell.”
“Hmm,” he says. “Effective.” Then, softer he adds, “Try not to let it replace your analysis, Miss Vitelli.”
He taps the page once, right next to the cat, and moves on.
Hayzel’s eyes widened, and the second he’s out of range, she leaned in. “Did he just comment on your doodle?”
“He commented on my coping mechanism,” I whisper. “That’s very different.”
She shrugs her shoulders and grins at me. “Could have fooled me, he was looking at you.”
“He was looking at my notes.”
“Sure,” she says. “Your notes are interesting to him, then.”
I shake my head, but I’m smiling despite myself.
He turns back to the class and speaks again, “Pair up. You’ll get a transcript and a short clip. Identify baseline behavior and flag deviations.”
Groans ripple through the room as people start pairing up, and obviously I have my partner next to me already. “Imagine if I picked someone else to work with,” Hayzel says, shaking her head.
I nod before opening a new page and reply, “that would be blasphemy…”
“You can start, now,” Mister Caldwell adds dryly.
We skim the packet together.
“This guy’s lying,” Hayzel whispers, pointing at a guy.
“No,” I murmur. “He’s rehearsed, watch the way he pauses.”
She watches, blinks and smiles, “Okay, that’s unsettling.”
“I warned you.”
She nudges me just after that and asks, “Hey. I forgot to ask, have you seen Ethan at all today?”
“Nope. He’s probably stuck in another class.”
“That’s why it’s so relaxing to be here today,” she says.
“You’re mean today, I like it,” I reply, laughing.
We all worked on his exercise for an hour, then he checked everyone’s report before clapping with his hands to signal that the class was over.
The room filled with noise as everyone started to leave. Chairs scrape, people talk over each other. And I stay seated, gathering my things when Hayzel leans close. “Just saying… he’s still looking at ‘your notes’.” She smiles and winks at me at the last word.
“Drop it,” I mutter, standing and grabbing her arm to get out.
He’s standing near the entrance, talking to another instructor when he looks up. Somehow, across the noise, the bodies moving between us, our eyes still find each other. It lasts a heartbeat. Long enough to make me hope, but short enough to deny it.
Then we leave.
The rest of the day passes the way it always does. Classes bleed into one another, eating with Hayzel and Blue in my dorm then going back to it, drills, lectures, case studies.
By the time I get back to my dorm at the end of this long day, my brain feels overworked and under-stimulated at the same time. The door barely closes behind me before something skids across the floor.
“Hey—”
My cat darts toward me, tail flicking, something clenched between his teeth. Paper.
I drop my bag and crouch to kiss him. “What do you have here?”
He growls lightly when I reach for it, then relents, letting me pull the crumpled note free.
Library.
00:00.
-D
I exhale slowly.
Blue jumps onto my bed, completely unconcerned, and stretches like he didn’t just intercept a professionally inconvenient message. I follow him, sitting beside him and scratching behind his ears. “I know,” I tell him, “You missed me, didn’t you?”
He lies across the bed, claws scrabbling for traction, then flops dramatically onto his side like he’s been abandoned for weeks.
“I was gone for six hours,” I tell him. “You survived.”
He answers by biting my fingers as I reach for him. I lean down, laughing quietly, and untangle him, and he immediately grabs my sleeve with both paws, teeth grazing my wrist, but still purring softly. “Violence isn’t communication,” I inform him.
He blinks, rubs his head against my chin, then jumps on the floor, and I sit with him, back against the bed.
I missed him more than he did…
I roll a pen across the carpet, Blue launches after it and misses completely. He slides into the wall, and looks offended like it’s my fault.
“That’s on you,” I say.
He comes back and climbs into my lap like that was the plan all along, kneading my stomach as I rest my forehead against his and close my eyes.
He’s been here through late nights, early mornings, breakdowns I never even accepted. He doesn’t care about my schedules or my secrets. He just waits. Every day. Every night.
I scratch behind his ears and he purrs loudly, like he’s reminding me I exist outside of my own head. “I love you so much, Blue.”
For a while, I let myself stay there, no cases, no patterns, no Damien.
He falls asleep shortly after, and I follow for a quick nap, like my body is finally too exhausted for me to stay awake.
After a few minutes of rest, Blue weaves around my ankles, meowing loudly, then bolts toward his bowl like I’ve never fed him in my life. I scoop his cat food, refill his water, and clean out the litter while he supervises from the bed.
“Quality control?” I ask.
He blinks at me as if saying yes.
I check the clock. 11:38pm, then pull my phone out to text Hayzel.
Me: Going for a run. If you hear Blue screaming, you can come in.
Hayzel: You could’ve just talked. I hear everything you do
There’s a knock on the wall between our rooms. Then her voice, muffled, comes through, “Talk next time, woman!”
“Emergency cat coverage,” I yell.
Another knock. “Love you.”
“Me too,” I called back.
Blue jumps onto the bed as I lean closer. “I’ll be back,” I promise, rubbing his head.
He ignores me completely, so I change quickly, zip my jacket, and check the hallway.
At midnight, I step out. I leave my dorm, taking the stairs to avoid the lobby. A few students are heading out, and I keep my head down, moving fast so no one notices me.
The library doors are open, so he’s already here…
I pause, glance inside, just to check, and it’s empty. So I step in, checking quickly between the stacks, walking down the aisles, fingers brushing the spines, when I feel it, a hand, large, warm, light, brushing the side of my hair. I freeze and turn around.
“You’re always late these days,” he says.
I tilt my head before replying, “Seems like I don’t want to see you these days.”
He raises an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth twitching. “But you came.”
Something in that simple observation makes me realize, we’re standing closer than I expected.
“Come on,” he says after a beat. “Sit with me.”
I glance at the table he’s pulled a chair out for, hesitating a fraction of a second. Then I walk over, heart beating a little faster than it should, and sit.