Chapter 4
Melissa Wagoner’s apartment was exactly what Silas expected from a twenty-four-year-old barista living in Blackridge—small, neat, decorated with thrift store finds and string lights.
A couch draped with a colorful throw blanket.
Plants on the windowsill. Photos tacked to a corkboard showing a smiling young woman with friends, family, a golden retriever.
A life interrupted.
The crime scene techs had already been through, dusting for prints, collecting evidence. Now it was Silas’s turn to read the space, to understand who Melissa had been and how the killer had found her.
He stood in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust, taking in the layout. Studio apartment, maybe four hundred square feet. Kitchenette to the right, Murphy bed pulled down from the wall, bathroom in the back. One window overlooking the parking lot. Fire escape access outside.
“No signs of forced entry,” Harper said from behind him.
Silas glanced back. She’d pulled on latex gloves and was examining the doorframe, running her fingers along the lock mechanism. Her movements were precise, professional. Someone who’d processed hundreds of crime scenes.
“No,” he agreed. “Which means either she let him in, or he had a key.”
“Or she was taken somewhere else and never came home.” Harper stepped inside, careful to avoid the evidence markers the techs had left. “What time did she leave work?”
Silas checked his notes. “Manager says nine p.m. Drive from The Daily Grind to here is about seven minutes. She should have been home by nine-fifteen.”
“But she wasn’t.” Harper moved to the kitchenette, studying the counter. “Coffee mug in the sink. Looks like it was used yesterday morning but never washed. Mail on the counter from two days ago, still unopened.”
Silas joined her, looking at the small pile of envelopes. Junk mail mostly. A bill from the power company. Nothing that screamed stalker or threat.
“She didn’t make it home that night,” Harper continued, more to herself than to him. “Taken between work and here. Question is where.”
“Parking lot at The Daily Grind, most likely. We’ll pull security footage.” Silas opened drawers in the kitchenette, finding the usual detritus of daily life—takeout menus, batteries, a tangle of phone chargers. Nothing useful.
Harper had moved to the corkboard, studying the photos. “She was social. Lots of friends. Active life.” She pointed to one photo. “That’s The Daily Grind in the background. And this one—hiking somewhere. Olympics, maybe?”
“Could be.” Silas moved closer, studying the photos with a profiler’s eye. “Background figures. If he stalked her first, he’d insert himself into her routine. Work, coffee shop, gym. Become part of the landscape before making contact.”
“Exactly.” Harper pulled out her phone and started photographing the corkboard. “With the family’s permission, I can run these through facial recognition. Cross-reference anyone who appears in multiple photos across different locations and dates.”
Silas considered it. Thorough. Methodical. The kind of groundwork that caught organized killers. “I’ll get the family’s permission.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes, Silas going through the apartment methodically while Harper studied the space with an intensity that was almost unsettling.
She’d pause in odd places—by the window, near the bed, in front of the bathroom mirror—and just observe.
Like she was trying to see what the killer had seen.
It reminded him of how he’d worked crime scenes in Afghanistan. Not just looking for evidence, but trying to understand the enemy’s mindset. What did they want? How did they think? What would they do next?
He’d been good at it. Good enough that the Army had pulled him into intelligence, then into psych-ops. Good enough that he could usually predict where the Taliban would strike next, which villages would be compromised, which informants would turn.
Good enough that when he’d gotten it wrong, people died.
Silas shoved that thought away. Focus on the present. Focus on the case.
“Her laptop’s gone,” Harper said from the desk area—really just a small table shoved against the wall.
Silas looked over. She was right. Charging cable, mouse, a notebook with coffee-stained pages, but no computer.
“Could be at work,” he suggested.
“Maybe. But look.” Harper pointed to the dust pattern on the table. “The laptop was here recently. You can see the outline. And it’s an irregular shape, which means it wasn’t moved carefully. Someone grabbed it in a hurry.”
Silas moved closer. She was right. The dust pattern showed a rectangle that had been disturbed, not by someone closing the laptop and taking it to work, but by someone snatching it quickly.
“He took it,” Silas said.
“Probably. Killers often take trophies, but they also take anything that might link them to the victim. If he’d been messaging her, emailing her, establishing contact, he’d want that evidence gone.”
Silas pulled out his phone and called the tech team lead.
“Sanchez. We need Melissa Wagoner’s laptop.
Check if it’s at her workplace. If not, we’re looking for it as evidence.
” He paused. “Also, get me her email records, cloud storage, anything backed up. If the laptop’s gone, maybe we can still recover the data. ”
He hung up and found Harper watching him with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “What?”
“Nothing. That was good thinking.”
The compliment caught him off guard. “I know how to work a case, Sinclair.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t.” She turned back to the apartment. “But you’re right to pursue the digital angle. That’s where we’ll find his contact point. That’s where he became real to her, stopped being part of the background and became someone she knew.”
Silas studied her as she moved through the space. She was good. He didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to acknowledge that Harper Sinclair—the agent who’d gotten her partner killed—was actually brilliant at her job. But the evidence was right in front of him.
She saw things he missed. Made connections he hadn’t considered. Thought like the killer in a way that was both impressive and slightly disturbing.
“You said in Nevada, he posed the victims specifically,” Silas said. “Arms at sixty degrees, head tilted left. What does that mean?”
Harper paused by the window. “I don’t know.
I’ve never been able to figure it out. The symbols I can rationalize as his personal language, something meaningful only to him.
But the positioning...” She trailed off, staring out at the parking lot below.
“It’s like he’s trying to recreate a specific moment.
A memory, maybe. Something he saw or experienced that he’s trying to duplicate. ”
“Someone he lost,” Silas said, echoing her words from the conference room.
“Yes. Someone who’s either dead or inaccessible.
He can’t have the original, so he’s creating substitutes.
” Harper turned to face him. “That’s what makes him so dangerous.
He’s not killing out of rage or sexual gratification.
He’s killing to fulfill a need. And that need will never be satisfied because the person he really wants is out of reach. ”
“Which means he won’t stop.”
“Not until we catch him. Or until he gets what he really wants.”
The words hung in the air between them. Silas ‘s phone buzzed—a text from Morris, one of the officers who’d been canvassing the area near the paper mill.
Then his phone rang. Captain Holloway.
Silas answered. “Kane.”
“We have a problem.” Holloway’s voice was tight. “Another body. Found an hour ago at Riverside Park. Same MO.”
The world tilted sideways. “What?”
“Young woman, early twenties, posed the same way, symbols carved into the skin. Silas, he’s escalating. Two victims in three days.”
Silas’s mind raced. Serial killers didn’t work this fast, not usually. They took time between kills, let the fantasy build, savored the memory of the last victim before taking the next. Two in three days suggested something had changed. The killer was speeding up, losing control, or—
“He’s on a schedule,” Harper said quietly.
Silas looked at her sharply. She’d been close enough to hear Holloway’s voice through the phone.
“What?” Holloway asked.
“Put me on speaker,” Harper said.
Silas hesitated, then did. “You’re on.”
“Captain, this is Agent Sinclair. If he’s taken two victims in three days, he’s not cooling off between kills. He’s on a compressed timeline. He’s killing to a schedule, which means he’s either been triggered by something specific, or he’s building toward an endgame.”
“What kind of endgame?”
“I don’t know yet. But we need to see the second victim immediately. We need to determine if the pattern holds, if he’s accelerating or if this is the pace he’s planned all along.”
Silas was already moving toward the door. “Captain, we’re heading to Riverside Park now. What’s the address?”
Holloway rattled off the location—the north end of the park, near the playground. Silas knew it. Knew it was public, visible, the kind of place where dumping a body took massive balls or complete desperation.
“Get there fast,” Holloway said. “And Silas? The press is already circling. This is going to blow up.”
The call ended. Silas was out the door, Harper right behind him. They took the stairs two at a time, hitting the parking lot at a run.
In the car, Silas drove faster than he should, weaving through traffic with the kind of controlled aggression that came from years of tactical driving. Harper braced herself against the dashboard but didn’t complain.
“Two victims in three days,” Silas said, more to himself than to her. “That’s not normal.”