CHAPTER NINE
The second call came days after the first, and this time Sarah Vaughn wasn’t holding coffee.
She was holding a glass of Merlot in her apartment on Piedmont Avenue, shoes off, television murmuring something she wasn’t watching, when her phone lit up on the kitchen counter with the dispatch number she’d been hoping not to see again for a while.
Homicide at the Armory building. Security guard on scene. Responding units en route.
She set the wine on the counter and stared at it for exactly two seconds. Then she put her shoes on and drove.
The Armory looked different at night. That was her first thought as she pulled into the gravel lot and saw the patrol cars already gathered, their lights painting the old brick facade in alternating washes of blue and red.
During the day the building had a stately, slightly tired dignity—the grand old veteran settling into its renovation with grudging patience.
At night, it looked like what it was: a fortress.
The Romanesque arches became dark mouths, the crenelated roofline a jaw of broken teeth against the low clouds, and the scaffolding on the eastern wall cast skeletal shadows that shifted with each sweep of the light bars.
She clipped her badge and crossed the lot. The air was raw, cold and damp in the particular way that late March specialized in, and the wind blew off the lake. Officer Raye was at the entrance again. He looked older than he had ten days ago, or maybe that was the light.
“Second floor,” he said. “Mezzanine level. It’s—” He stopped himself from saying something and settled for holding the door open. He’d learned that much, at least.
Sarah pulled on nitrile gloves as she entered the main hall.
The work lights were on, casting their harsh industrial glare across the stripped interior, and in their light the space looked both larger and emptier than she remembered.
The framing for the mezzanine had progressed since her last visit—more lumber, more structure, the skeleton of a second floor taking shape above the hall.
The construction stairs led upward to a plywood platform that would eventually become the gallery level.
She climbed them. Carefully, the way she’d climbed every set of stairs at every crime scene for fifteen years—watching where she stepped, reading the surfaces, looking for what didn’t belong. Halfway up she could already see the blood.
Clara Hartley lay on the mezzanine platform; her position told a story that Sarah didn't want to read.
The woman was on her side, one arm extended as though reaching for something, the other pinned beneath her body.
She was mid-thirties, slender, wearing jeans and a light jacket over a sweater—not construction clothes.
A sketchpad lay face down on the plywood three feet from her head, its pages ruffled and dark with blood that had soaked through from underneath.
A pencil had rolled to the edge of the platform and stopped against a two-by-four.
The medieval mace lay beside her, discarded or placed—Sarah couldn’t tell yet—with its flanged iron head resting against the plywood in a small pool of blood.
It was an ugly weapon, even by the standards of things designed to kill.
The head was roughly the size of a fist, studded with protruding flanges meant to concentrate the force of impact into narrow points that could defeat armor.
The wooden handle was dark with age and, near the grip, darker with something fresher.
Sarah crouched at the edge of the blood pattern and studied it.
Thomas Lane’s scene had been almost surgical—a single wound, minimal blood spread, the precision of a thrust delivered with intent and competence.
This was different. The blood pattern on the plywood told her the mace had struck more than once.
She could see the spray arcs, overlapping, fanning outward from the body in directions that suggested the victim had been moving—trying to get away—when the blows landed.
The first impact appeared to be on the left side of the skull, just above the ear, consistent with someone looking up or turning toward a threat.
But there were at least two more points of visible trauma, maybe three, the damage extensive enough that Sarah had to look away for a moment and breathe through her mouth before continuing.
This was not precise. This was not controlled.
This was violence that had continued past the point of necessity, delivered with a weapon designed to destroy through blunt, crushing force.
Thomas Lane had been killed with a single thrust of an 1861 bayonet—clean, deliberate, almost elegant in its economy.
Clara Hartley had been beaten to death with a fifteenth-century mace in a way that suggested rage or frenzy or a killer whose confidence had outpaced their composure.
Or, Sarah thought, a killer who chose the weapon first and let it dictate the method.
She straightened and looked across the mezzanine toward the east wall.
From up here she had the same vantage Clara Hartley would have had—a clear line of sight down to the alcoves with their display cases.
She could see the second case from where she stood, its glass door hanging open, the interior empty except for a strip of aged velvet with the impression of where something heavy and flanged had rested.
Same method of access. No visible damage to the lock, no broken glass. Opened cleanly, the way the bayonet’s case had been opened.
Sarah pulled out her phone and called Henley.
“I’m already on my way,” the medical examiner said. “I heard the address on dispatch.” A pause. “Is it the same building?”
“Same building. Different weapon. This one’s from the medieval collection.
” Sarah heard herself say the words and felt the particular chill that came from a pattern declaring itself.
“Patricia, the first killing used a Civil War bayonet. This one used a mace from the fourteen hundreds. Both weapons taken from locked display cases along the east wall. Both cases opened without visible damage.”
Silence on Henley’s end. The medical examiner was not a woman given to dramatic reactions, but Sarah could hear her processing.
“You’re telling me someone is selecting weapons by historical period.”
“I’m telling you what I’m seeing. Two murders in ten days.
Two different eras. Both weapons from the Armory’s collection.
” Sarah looked at the body on the platform, at the mace with its iron flanges dark with blood, and said what she’d been thinking ever since she reached the top of the stairs. “I think we have a serial.”
She ended the call and stood alone on the mezzanine, looking down at the main hall and its display cases, its scaffolding and construction debris, its high arched windows black with night.
Two weapons. Two periods. Two people dead in a building that housed relics of organized violence, killed by those relics as though the Armory’s collection was being activated one piece at a time by someone who understood its inventory with the intimacy of a curator.
The remaining cases held cavalry sabers. Antique pistols. There were other pieces in storage, she remembered—the historical society’s full catalog included items spanning centuries.
The thought settled into her stomach like cold water.
This wasn’t going to stop. Whoever was doing this wasn’t finished.
They were working through a collection, and the collection was large, and each piece in it was a weapon that had been designed, at some point in history, to end a human life.
She was dealing with someone who had intimate knowledge of the building’s layout, access to the cases, and either the keys or the skill to defeat the locks without a trace.
Someone who chose their instruments the way an artist chose brushes—deliberately, with an eye toward effect.
Sarah had been a homicide detective for fifteen years.
She was good at her job. She knew her limitations.
And standing on the mezzanine of the Duluth Armory at eleven o’clock at night with a medieval mace and a body that had been struck so many times the skull had caved inward, she knew—with the particular certainty that came from honest self-assessment rather than weakness—that this was beyond what her department could handle alone.
She didn’t like the thought. She didn’t have to like it to know it was true.