CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kate stepped into the small room she’d more or less claimed since this nightmare began — noticing as if for the first time the corkboard with pinholes like freckles, and the blinds that never fully closed.
Her coat hung over the back of the chair where she’d dropped it hours ago.
Her laptop sat open on the main desk, its screen still glowing with the last images she’d been studying before Sullivan called her out to Brennan’s garden at dawn.
She closed the door behind her and the noise of the precinct softened to a dull, distant wash.
She uploaded the final crow drawing, enlarged it, arranged it alongside the others so that they sat like cartoon birds on a telegraph wire. Seeing them this large made them feel almost confrontational. The birds seemed to lean forward, waiting.
She moved the mouse, clicking between them, zooming in, zooming out, trying to re-interrogate the details she’d already interrogated to exhaustion.
The final crow's head still bothered her. The angle is just slightly off. The eye — darker, sharper, more insistent. The berries — swollen and overworked, as if the artist was stuck on a point.
Her eyes stung. She’d stared at pixels too long this morning, then stared at a corpse posed like a prayer, and now stared at these again until the distinctions between what she knew and what she imagined blurred.
Something Gabe had said that night when he'd called her half-high and too honest kept tugging. "You might be being premature…" "I mean, think about it. Commandment killings one to four, all referencing your past, glancingly or comprehensively. And now, what? Bubkes?”
She’d brushed him off at the time. She still wanted to brush it off. Only something wasn’t letting her.
She exhaled and pressed the heels of her hands briefly into her eyes, grounding herself.
A gentle tap sounded on the open door.
“Valentine?”
Detective Sullivan stepped inside, balancing two coffees. One had a lopsided smiley face drawn on the lid — an optimistic barista’s attempt at cheer that clashed with the morning’s realities.
He’d showered since Brennan’s yard — his hair still damp, the collar of his shirt less rumpled — but the fatigue in his posture was undeniable. He looked like a man who had been up since before dawn and was only now realizing it.
“Saw you were back,” he said, setting one coffee on her desk. “Thought you might need reinforcements. Caffeine or human.”
She didn’t look away from the screen. “Thanks, Brian.”
“We let Webb go. It all checked out.”
Kate held a finger aloft in recognition.
But the Boston cop lingered beside her desk for a beat, clearly hoping for something — a smile, eye contact, acknowledgement of a shared burden.
When she didn’t turn, he eased himself into the spare chair with a soft exhale.
“You’re back on the artworks?” he asked casually, as though he wasn’t already sure of the answer.
"Looks like it," she said tersely.
“Well, that tracks,” he said with a small, self-deprecating chuckle. “I’ve been told I get hyper-focused too, but you… you make me feel like a housecat.”
No response.
He tried again, softer. “Rough morning.”
Still nothing.
His gaze drifted to the monitor. “A murder of crows, isn’t that right? The collective noun?”
She looked at him. “Yes, you’re right. I hadn’t spotted that.”
He shrugged. “I doubt it matters. I mean, we don’t need a collective noun to tell us what’s going on when we got three crime scenes.”
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, squinting at the enlarged images. “Man, blown up like that, they’re… something. That’s a lot of work. A lot of time with a brush and a grudge. Then he’s got to shrink it down, I’m guessing laser-print it onto the canvas?”
If he was hoping for an answer, he’d be waiting a long while.
He craned his neck slightly, inspecting the third drawing the way a person evaluates a painting they don’t fully understand but are trying to pretend they do.
“What’s with the berries?”
Kate sighed and looked at him. “That’s the million-dollar question. I keep staring at it in the hope that the answer’s going to pop out. But it doesn’t.”
“Four,” Sullivan said. “Four berries. Three crime scenes.”
She looked at him sharply.
“Sorry,” Sullivan said. “I’m just trying to help.”
“I know. Finish the thought.”
“Well… it’s just that if there’s four berries and we only know of three killings…”
“Then there might be another body out there, waiting to be discovered,” Kate said, slowly.
“Or he’s planning to kill one more person.”
Kate didn’t like that thought. She especially didn’t like that thought, because the bird in the last painting seemed to be looking directly at her.
Bird-like, the cursor blinked in the corner, waiting for her next move.
*
At eleven-thirty in the morning, Boston Children’s Hospital was a living organism— fast, loud, and relentlessly purposeful.
Even in the staff-only corridors, the air thrummed with urgency: the rolling hum of gurneys, the clipped voices of nurses handing off charts, the soft beeping of monitors leaking through half-open doors.
Somewhere down the hall, a baby was crying — the sharp, heart-piercing kind of cry that made adults straighten involuntarily.
Marcus stepped out of the elevator into Paediatrics, badge clipped to his jacket pocket out of courtesy rather than necessity. He hated coming to hospitals in an official capacity. People here lived by the rule that pain was to be treated, eased, soothed — not interrogated.
He found Dr. Maya Brennan in a tiny break room that overlooked a courtyard scattered with toy tricycles and plastic ride-on cars. She wasn’t sitting; she was moving. Fast. Her white coat hung open as she rifled through a stack of files, her dark hair pulled back in a strained, too-tight knot.
She didn’t seem to register him until he spoke her name.
“Dr. Brennan?”
She jolted slightly, then turned. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, the kind of dryness that came from hours of refusing tears. She blinked at his badge, then at his face, as if translating both through several layers of fog.
“You’re the FBI,” she said mechanically. “I was told someone would come.”
“Yes,” Marcus said gently. “I’m Marcus Reid. I’m very sorry about your sister.”
She gave a sharp nod — not in acknowledgement, but in dismissal, as if she couldn’t afford to let the words land.
“I can give you ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.” She gestured vaguely toward the stack of folders. “I have five consults backed up, and two of my kids are pre-op. This is not—” Her voice cracked, a tiny fissure quickly sealed. “This is not a good day to fall apart.”
“I understand,” Marcus said. And he did. The whole floor smelled like sterility and heartbreak, and Maya looked like she had been holding up the ceiling by sheer will. “I’ll be quick.”
She nodded again, sharper this time, like she was bracing herself. She motioned toward a small table with two chairs. They sat.
She folded her hands tightly, knuckles whitening. “You need to ask about Sarah’s work? Or— God, I don’t know— her enemies?” She laughed once, a brittle sound. “She didn’t have enemies. She annoyed people sometimes, sure, but—”
“It’s about your parents,” Marcus said softly. “And the Brennan Foundation.”
Everything in her froze.
For a moment her expression went blank — not evasive, not resistant, simply blank, as if all her internal systems had shut down under overload. He watched her swallow, a faint tremor shivering along her jaw.
“No,” she whispered. “No, I can’t— not now. I have too much to do. I have patients who— who need—”
But the sentence didn’t finish. Her face twisted suddenly, painfully, and she pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eyes, as if trying to push back an incoming tide.
“Dr. Brennan,” Marcus said quietly, “it’s okay.”
She shook her head violently. “I can’t fall apart right now. I won’t. These kids— some of them don’t get parents who show up. Or they do and the parents are— are terrified. I have to be steady for them. I can’t lose it.”
But she was already losing it. Not loudly, not dramatically — but in the small, unstoppable ways grief seeped through armor: her shoulders shaking, breath hitching, a faint, keening sound escaping before she could choke it down.
Marcus didn’t speak. He simply shifted his chair closer, grounding his voice to a near-whisper. “You’ve been holding yourself together since you got the call. You’re allowed to… stop. Just for a minute.”
At that, something in her gave way.
The tears came fast — a sudden, flooding collapse, as if a dam had cracked and everything behind it surged forward.
She pressed her hands over her mouth to muffle the sobs, but they broke through anyway.
For a long time she couldn’t speak. Marcus didn’t rush her.
He just stayed where he was, letting her grief unfold in its own time.
Eventually, she sagged back in her chair, exhausted, wiping her cheeks with the cuff of her sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t have time to cry.”
“You have time,” Marcus said. “We can wait.”
A shaky breath. Then another.
“They made her do it,” Maya murmured at last. “My parents. They made Sarah take it all on.”
“The Brennan Foundation?” Marcus prompted softly.
She nodded.
“It was my great-grandfather’s legacy — big philanthropic thing.
Housing grants, medical scholarships, overseas health initiatives.
A lot of money, a lot of prestige. Mom and Dad were trustees.
And when they died…” Her voice fractured again.
“The will said it would pass to the eldest child if she was an adult. And technically, Sarah was. She was two days past her 18th birthday when they died. She was a teenager, for God’s sake. Who puts that on an eighteen-year-old?”
Marcus’s jaw tightened, but he let her continue.
“She didn’t want it,” Maya said. “She tried, but she didn’t want it. She leaned on the senior trustees. Trusted them. And they—” Maya’s face twisted. “They stole from her. From the Foundation. For years.”
“How long?”
“A decade. Maybe more.” Maya rubbed her forehead.
“By the time anyone realized… the IRS got involved. Audits. Investigations. Court cases. Sarah had to sit through humiliating hearings while those men blamed her for everything. And even after it came out that they’d bled the Foundation dry, the legal fees and accounting costs ate what was left. ”
“And the Foundation?” Marcus asked.
“Gone,” she whispered. “Stripped to the bones and dissolved. And Sarah always said she was relieved. Free. But…” Maya shook her head.
“She wasn’t free. Not really. She carried this— this belief that she’d failed them.
Our parents. Failed what they had trusted her with.
Failed the Brennan name. Failed the legacy. ”
Maya’s voice wavered again, but she powered through.
“She did so many incredible things later — the tech work, the start-up, the mentorship programs — she built worlds out of nothing. But underneath…” Maya closed her eyes. “She never stopped feeling like she’d let them down.”
Silence settled between them — heavy, reverent, unbearably sad.
Marcus exhaled slowly.
He thanked her quietly, stood, and assured her he'd let the hospital's administration know she needed the afternoon. She didn't resist. She only nodded, hollow, grateful, stunned.
Out in the corridor, he leaned against the wall for a moment, letting the clinical smell clear from his mind.
Legacy. Duty. Failure.
Honor thy father and thy mother.
Suddenly the shift in the killer’s theme snapped into sharper focus.
This wasn’t just about children neglecting aging parents.
It was about failing the parental legacy — gifts squandered, promises broken, duties abandoned.
He took out his phone and dialed Kate.
It rang twice.
Then went to voicemail.
He swallowed, waited for the beep, and spoke low and urgent.
“Kate, it’s Marcus. Call me when you get this — it’s important.
I’ve just spoken with Maya Brennan. Her sister Sarah was carrying guilt for years about failing their parents’ legacy.
The Foundation. The trust. It all fell apart under her watch.
” He hesitated, feeling the weight of what he was saying.
“I think the killer’s expanding the Fifth Commandment — not just honoring parents in life, but honoring what they built.
Their contributions. Their purpose. Their name.
This isn’t just about neglect. It’s about inheritance. Legacy. What parents leave behind.”