Chapter 16 Six Months #2
“Well. It’s clearly a targeted attack, which is unusual in a town like Sweetwater Falls.
The most exciting crime we typically process is cattle trespassing and the occasional bar disagreement that results in a broken window.
A car bomb on law enforcement property?” She shakes her head.
“That gets noticed. The state police were notified within the hour, and I’m told the federal agencies got involved not long after. ”
She lowers her voice.
The shift is subtle but intentional—the volume dropping from professional narration to the quieter register of someone sharing information that exists in the space between official channels and community knowledge.
“The word going around,” she says, “is that someone targeting you may have been operating in this area for some time. Longer than your arrival. The working theory seems to be that whoever is behind this has been hidden in these parts, and your investigation may be getting close to uncovering them.”
She pauses.
“The term I’ve heard used—and I want to be clear, this is community intelligence, not official briefing—is serial killer.”
The words land in my hospital bed like a dropped weapon.
Serial killer.
I frown.
The expression is deep, structural—the cognitive engagement of an investigator who has just received a data point that illuminates a pattern she’d been circling without naming.
Because the pieces are there. They’ve been on my corkboard since day one.
The missing Omegas—three in eighteen months, all new to Sweetwater Falls, all cases closed as “voluntarily relocated” within forty-eight hours.
The shell companies acquiring their properties.
The suspiciously low crime statistics that suggested someone was managing the numbers rather than managing the crime.
I’d started connecting it. The files. The photographs. The timeline that showed disappearances clustering around property transactions, the cases that were closed before anyone could ask the questions that would make closure impossible.
But I hadn’t put it together as a single actor. Hadn’t framed it as predation. Had been thinking in terms of institutional corruption—departments covering tracks, systems protecting systems—rather than the simpler, darker possibility.
That someone in this town is killing Omegas.
And that the town knows.
“Dr. Winters.” I lean forward in the bed, the IV tugging at my hand, the monitoring equipment adjusting its chirp to accommodate the change in my cardiac output. “You know this town. You’ve been here—how long?”
“Twenty-two years,” she answers. “Longer than most of the officers at your station.”
“Then you know things that aren’t in any file I’ve been given.”
She holds my gaze.
The smile hasn’t left her face, but it’s changed—shifted from the beaming warmth of a physician greeting a conscious patient to the careful, measured curve of a woman who is deciding how much to share and with whom.
“All the stations are interconnected, right?” she says, and her voice stays low, the volume calibrated for the room and the room alone.
“Sure, some people come to Sweetwater Falls to start over. Their grandparents left them property. Their departments sent them here to decompress after professional burnout. It’s a common trajectory—city officer gets reassigned to a rural posting, spends six months resenting the pace, eventually decides the mountains aren’t so bad, stays. ”
She uncrosses her legs. Leans forward.
“But what about the ones who come here because they’re running from something? Omegas who have bounties on their heads from packs they’ve left, from systems they’ve escaped, from people who consider an Omega’s departure a personal insult and a recoverable asset.”
The words are careful. Precise. Each one selected with the deliberation of a woman who has been thinking about this for longer than my investigation has existed.
“The problem with small towns,” she continues, “is that they’re not afraid to keep secrets.
As long as the secret doesn’t disrupt the town’s equilibrium—as long as the disappearances are quiet, the property transfers are clean, and no one has to confront the fact that people are vanishing from a community that prides itself on safety—the town will maintain the silence.
Because the silence is comfortable. And comfort is the currency that small towns trade in. ”
I nod.
Slowly. The picture reshaping itself in my head with the irreversible clarity of a puzzle piece snapping into its correct orientation.
“But this isn’t quiet anymore,” I say. “The fire. The bomb. That’s disruption. That’s the secret becoming loud enough to threaten the comfort.”
“Exactly.” Her smile sharpens. “The town doesn’t like that.”
“Which could work in my favor.”
“Out of pity, yes.” She nods with the pragmatic frankness of a woman who understands that in a community governed by social currency, sympathy is a resource as valuable as evidence.
“A targeted Omega chief is a sympathetic figure. Particularly if the targeting is visible enough to make residents uncomfortable. People who didn’t care about your investigation will start caring when the investigation’s enemies are setting fires and detonating vehicles on their Main Street. ”
I chew on this.
“But wouldn’t people also be suspicious of me? Now that I’m clearly a target, I’m also clearly a liability. Why would a town rally behind someone who’s bringing violence to their doorstep?”
Dr. Winters thinks about it.
The pause is brief—the processing speed of a mind that has been navigating small-town politics for two decades and has already run the scenario I’m proposing through every relevant variable.
Then she smiles.
And this smile is different from the others. This one has strategy in it.
“How would they be suspicious,” she says, “if you transferred here to be with your pack?”
I stare at her.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re with the detective, the commander, and the deputy officer, aren’t you?”
I nod.
Slowly. The word with performing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, carrying implications that range from “temporarily registered for medical access” to “emotionally entangled in ways that I am not currently equipped to quantify.”
I don’t correct the “rookie” characterization of Oakley.
He looks young. The auburn hair and the easy grin and the winks that he deploys like punctuation make him seem like someone fresh out of certification.
But the man holds a third-degree black belt, administers medication with field-medic precision, and outran my attacker across a paddock last night while I was unconscious in the bushes.
Oakley Torres is many things. A rookie is not one of them.
“Then obviously,” Dr. Winters continues, leaning back on the stool with the self-assured posture of someone presenting a closing argument she’s already won, “it would make sense for you to have transferred here. Not as a reassignment. Not as punishment. As a choice. An Omega officer relocating to be with her newly registered pack. That’s a narrative this town understands.
That’s a narrative this town sympathizes with. ”
She lifts a finger.
“What if the real story is that you were never in a relationship in the city?”
I want to ask how she knows that.
The question forms in my mouth, fully loaded with the defensive suspicion of a woman who considers personal information a security asset and does not appreciate unauthorized access.
But Dr. Winters gives me a look—the specific, knowing, slightly amused expression that answers every question about her information sources with two words.
Small-town gossip.
Of course. In a community this size, the information network operates faster than any official channel. She probably knew my coffee order before I arrived.
“It wasn’t a truthful relationship,” I admit, and the words come out flatter than I expect—clinical, diagnostic, the language of a woman who has already processed the grief and is operating on the post-mortem. “It was for benefits. Institutional access. Heat management. Never registered.”
“But now you’re registered,” Dr. Winters says, and the emphasis on the word lands with the percussive precision of someone placing the final piece in a strategic framework.
“With the guys. On the system. Official. If anyone does a simple records check, they’ll see that the registration was processed and confirmed the day of the explosion. ”
She lets that sink in.
“Which gives off a very specific impression. Someone targeting a newly registered Omega on the day her pack becomes official? That reads as personal. As vendetta. The town won’t look at you and see a liability—they’ll look at you and see a woman whose fresh start was violently disrupted by someone from her past. That makes your pack look protective, not guilty.
And it makes the town wonder if the violence is because you decided to leave your old life and live your new one. ”
She’s good.
She’s really, really good.
This woman has been running community intelligence operations from a private medical center for two decades and nobody’s caught on because she does it with a stethoscope and a smile.
I see where this is going.
The strategy crystallizes in my mind with the same clarity that case architecture does when the evidence finally cooperates—the pieces arranging themselves into a structure that serves multiple objectives simultaneously.
“You want me,” I say slowly, each word testing its own weight, “to act like none of this is bothering me. While I start being more…obvious…with my relationship with my new Alphas.”
Dr. Winters’ grin widens.
“So that whoever is targeting me gets extra mad,” I continue, the tactical implications unfolding with the accelerating logic of a plan that is simultaneously dangerous and brilliant. “And when they’re mad, they’ll fuck up.”
“Exactly.”
I want to argue.