Chapter 10 #2
Holloway hesitated, clearly weighing whether that was a good idea given Harper’s obvious emotional state. Then he nodded. “Five minutes. Don’t touch anything.”
The others stepped back, giving her space. All except Silas, who stayed at her side like a silent sentinel. Harper was grateful for that. She wasn’t sure she could do this alone.
Harper approached the body slowly, studying every detail with the trained eye of a profiler.
The symbols were identical to the Nevada case—the interlocking circles she’d spent five years trying to decode, the geometric patterns that meant something to the killer even if Harper couldn’t crack the code.
The medical examiner back in Nevada had theorized they represented some kind of belief system, some personal mythology the killer had constructed.
But it was the message that held Harper’s attention now. YOUR FAULT HARPER. Just those three words, carved so deep she could see the white gleam of rib bone beneath.
“He wanted to make absolutely sure I knew,” Harper said quietly. “That this death is on me. That I’m responsible.”
“You’re not,” Silas said, his voice firm.
“She died because I set a trap. Because I tried to catch him at that coffee shop and he saw through it. Because I failed.”
“She died because a serial killer murdered her.” Silas stepped closer, forcing Harper to look at him instead of the body. “That’s on him, Harper. Not you. He made the choice to kill. He cut her throat. He carved those symbols. Those are his actions, his choices, his evil. Not yours.”
“But the message—”
“Is him trying to manipulate you. Trying to make you feel exactly what you’re feeling right now—guilty, responsible, like you caused this.” Silas’s eyes were intense, focused entirely on her. “Don’t give him that power. Don’t let him win.”
Harper wanted to argue. Wanted to explain that he didn’t understand, that Jennifer really would be alive if Harper had just been smarter, faster, better.
But looking into Silas’s eyes, she saw that he did understand.
He’d carried the same guilt over his team in Afghanistan. He knew exactly what this felt like.
“You’re exactly where he wants you,” Silas continued, his voice gentle now. “Drowning in guilt, blaming yourself, thinking you’re somehow responsible for his actions. But this woman deserves better than that. She deserves justice. And you falling apart doesn’t help her get it.”
Harper took a shaky breath. He was right. She hated that he was right, but he was. She could fall apart later. Right now, she needed to be the FBI agent who caught serial killers. Not the traumatized woman staring at her own failure carved into dead flesh.
“Okay,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “Okay. What do we do next?”
“We work the case. We find the pattern he’s following. We figure out what he’s building toward.” Silas glanced back at the body. “And we catch the bastard before he does this again.”
***
By six a.m., they were back at the station.
The sun was just starting to rise, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold that felt obscene given what they’d just witnessed.
The conference room had transformed into command central over the past week, every wall covered with victim photos, detailed timelines, geographic maps marked with pins and string connecting locations.
Jennifer’s photo had been added to the board—a professional headshot provided by her employer, taken maybe six months ago. She was smiling in it, confident and alive and vibrant. So jarringly different from the last time Harper had seen her that it made her stomach turn.
The team was running on fumes. No one had slept.
They’d spent two hours processing the crime scene, then another hour doing the notification.
Jennifer’s parents lived in Salem, about an hour north.
Holloway had made the call himself, his voice heavy as he delivered the news that no parent should ever have to hear.
Harper tried not to think about that. Tried not to imagine Jennifer’s mother getting that phone call at five in the morning, hearing that her daughter had been murdered, carved up, used as a message board for a serial killer’s vendetta. If she let herself think about that, she’d break completely.
“Four victims in six days,” Holloway said, staring at the board with exhausted eyes. “This kind of acceleration is extremely unusual for an organized serial killer.”
“He’s building toward something,” Harper said, forcing her brain back into profiler mode. “Coming to some kind of climax. The escalation in violence, the increasingly personal messages—he’s not just killing anymore. He’s trying to prove something.”
“That he’s smarter than us,” Morris muttered darkly from his desk.
“No.” Harper studied the timeline they’d constructed, the pattern of deaths growing closer together.
“That he has complete control. Over the victims, over the investigation, over me specifically. He’s demonstrating his power.
Showing us—showing me—that he can do whatever he wants and we can’t stop him. ”
“Then we need to prove him wrong,” Dax Mercer said from the doorway.
Harper had met him briefly yesterday—former Army Ranger, now Blackridge detective, and from what Silas had said, one of the few people on the force he actually trusted completely.
“We need to take back control of this investigation.”
Silas was standing by the geographic map, studying the victim locations with the intense focus Harper had come to recognize. His mind was working, connecting dots in that way that made him a good detective.
“We’ve been looking at this as hunting grounds,” he said slowly. “The gym, the coffee shop, places where he selects victims. But what if we’re thinking about it wrong?”
“What do you mean?” Harper moved to stand beside him.
“Look at where the bodies are being found.” Silas pointed to the pins on the map. “Paper mill, alley behind a downtown bar, construction site, now a parking garage. All of them are public spaces but isolated at night. All places where he could work undisturbed for hours.”
“He’s not killing them where he takes them,” Harper realized, her mind racing ahead. “There’s a secondary location. Somewhere completely private where he can spend time with them, do the initial kill and the carving work. Then he transports the bodies to the dump sites for us to find.”
“Which means he needs several things,” Holloway said, moving to the map. “A vehicle large enough to transport bodies. Access to a private location where screaming wouldn’t be heard. And enough time that neighbors or coworkers wouldn’t notice his absences.”
“We need to expand our search parameters,” Harper said. “Look at surrounding counties for similar murders with the same MO. Cross-reference vehicle registrations, property ownership, anything that might point us to his kill site.”
Morris was already pulling up databases on his laptop. “On it. And I’ll reach out to Oregon State Police, see if they have any unsolved cases matching our victim profile.”
“Good.” Holloway checked his watch. “It’s six a.m. I want everyone to go home, get some sleep, be back here by noon. We’re no good to anyone if we’re running on empty.”
“Captain—” Harper started to protest.