CHAPTER 2: PATTERNS

The body count accumulated slowly, like water dripping from a faulty faucet. One drop, then another. Then three. By the time anyone noticed the pattern, the floor was already wet.

The second child was found a week after David Chen. Her name was Melissa Rodriguez, six years old, found in the basement of an abandoned apartment building on the west side. The similarities were impossible to miss: clean body, positioned respectfully, no signs of obvious trauma, asphyxiation as cause of death. But the mind doesn't like to connect coincidences into patterns. The mind prefers isolated incidents, separate tragedies with separate causes.

"Could be copycat," Hawkins said during the briefing, which was technically true and fundamentally useless. A copycat killer and an actual serial killer were different problems, except that they weren't—not in terms of the work, not in terms of the bodies.

The third child came ten days later. A ten-year-old boy named Marcus Webb, found in a warehouse basement on the north side. Same cause of death. Same careful positioning. Same absence of obvious torture or abuse, which somehow made it worse—there was no rage in these murders, no passion, just the methodical application of pressure to a child's throat until the breathing stopped.

It was now clear that something had changed in the city. Something had been introduced into the system, some variable that hadn't been present before, and the system had no defense against it.

Mercer and Chen had been assigned to lead the task force—an optimistic term for two detectives and whatever resources they could beg or steal from the rest of the understaffed, overwhelmed precinct. They worked eighteen-hour days, which in a city like this felt almost normal. The precinct was a machine that had been running on fumes and desperation for so long that it had forgotten what efficiency looked like.

"Three different neighborhoods," Chen said. She'd created a map on the wall of the precinct, three red pins marking the locations of the bodies. "Three different schools. No obvious connection between the victims."

"Except they're dead," Mercer said. He was smoking a cigarette, his second pack of the day. "Except they're children. Except someone is killing them."

They were in the break room at midnight. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The coffee in the pot had been there since morning and had taken on the consistency and color of motor oil. Chen was running on adrenaline and the terrible clarity that came from dealing with something real. Mercer was running on bourbon and cigarettes and the detached fury of a man who'd stopped caring about anything except finding something to blame.

"The dumping locations are spread out," Chen continued. "Like the killer is trying to avoid establishing a pattern. Which means he's smart. He knows we're looking for patterns."

"Most smart people don't strangle children," Mercer said. "Smart people tend to use their advantages for other things."

Chen looked at him. "You think he's not smart?"

"I think he's patient. I think he's methodical. I think he's careful. But I don't think intelligence in the traditional sense has much to do with it. I think he's just good at this thing he does. The same way a craftsman gets good at carpentry or a surgeon gets good at surgery. Repetition and focus and the absence of conscience."

The third murder had changed the city's atmosphere. The first had been tragedy. The second had been concerning. The third was confirmation that something was hunting in the streets. Parents began to watch their children more carefully. Schools added security. Newspapers ran stories with headlines like "CITY ON EDGE: SERIAL KILLER FEARS MOUNT" and "WHO IS TAKING OUR CHILDREN?" The public was afraid, and afraid people were dangerous, and the police were caught in the middle.

Hawkins had called in the FBI, which meant a behavioral analyst had been assigned to the case. His name was Dr. Philip Lancaster, and he wore expensive suits and had the confident bearing of someone who believed that the mind was a mechanism that could be understood through the right framework. He met with Mercer and Chen in a conference room that smelled like institutional coffee and resignation.

"The killer is likely a loner," Lancaster said. He was projecting notes onto a wall with a slide projector, speaking in the measured tones of someone accustomed to being listened to. "Probably between thirty and fifty years old. Likely has a job that allows him access to isolated spaces—maintenance work, construction, security. He may have experienced early loss or trauma related to authority figures."

"That describes about ten thousand men in this city," Mercer said.

Lancaster didn't seem bothered by this. "The killer selects victims at random or based on opportunity rather than specific targeting criteria. The respectful positioning of the bodies suggests he may feel some sense of care for his victims, which is not uncommon in serial killers. It's a form of psychological compensation—he kills them, then he cares for the body, then he leaves it for us to find. It creates a narrative where he's both killer and protector."

"He's neither," Chen said. "He's just a murderer."

"That's the difficult truth," Lancaster agreed. "He's not a hero in his own mind, but he's not a villain either. He's just someone doing what he's decided to do, completely detached from the moral implications of those actions."

They left the conference room with no new information and with the horrible understanding that they could profile a killer until they were blue in the face, and none of it would help them catch him. A thousand descriptions that matched thousands of men. A thousand possibilities that led nowhere.

Father Michael Donnelly was older now, or at least he felt older. He'd been a priest for thirty-two years, and in that time he'd performed confirmations and confessions and funerals, and he'd believed—truly believed—that faith meant something, that the church meant something. But David Chen had been one of his parishioners. David had come to Sunday school and sung in the choir, off-key but enthusiastically. David had believed in God.

When they brought David's body to the church for the funeral, the priest stood before the small white casket and tried to find words that meant something. He couldn't. He stood in the pulpit and looked at David's parents and at all the children in the church and at their parents who were afraid for their lives, and he said the things you were supposed to say about heaven and eternal peace and the grace of God. But the words were hollow. They fell into the silence like stones.

After the funeral, he sat in the rectory and thought about the nature of evil. He thought about how evil didn't announce itself or come with warning signs. It just existed, like water existed, like air existed, like gravity. And sometimes evil took the form of a person, and that person did terrible things, and all the prayers in all the churches in all the world couldn't undo what had been done.

Mercer was at the funeral. He sat in the back pew and didn't pray. He just looked at the small casket and at the parents' grief and at the other children in the church who were learning, for the first time, that the world was not safe and that sometimes people just disappeared and died and didn't come back. Their innocence was being murdered as surely as David Chen had been murdered, just more slowly and with less obvious violence.

Ghost Reid was his street name, not his real name, but everyone called him Ghost because he had a way of appearing and disappearing without anyone quite seeing him. He was thirty-eight years old and had been in and out of prison, and he'd learned a long time ago that survival meant knowing things—knowing where the police were going to be, knowing which criminals were dangerous and which were just pretending, knowing the rhythms of the city and the patterns of predation.

Ghost dealt drugs on a small scale, enough to survive. He also served as an informant for various police, which was how Mercer had first met him years ago. They had an understanding: Ghost provided information, and Mercer didn't bust him for the low-level dealing. It was symbiotic, which was as close as anything got to genuine in the world they inhabited.

Ghost spent his time on the streets, watching, listening. He heard things in the bars and on the corners, rumors and whispers and the kind of idle gossip that sometimes turned out to be relevant. Three days after the third body was found, Ghost reached out to Mercer through the usual channels.

They met in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant that had closed down years ago. Ghost was thin, nervous energy, always moving, always looking around like he expected violence at any moment. He probably did. In his world, you usually did.

"There's a guy," Ghost said without preamble. "Been seeing him around the neighborhoods where the kids went missing. Brown van. Nondescript. I've seen him parked in the area three separate times, and the timing lines up with when the kids disappeared."

Mercer lit a cigarette. "You sure?"

"No," Ghost said. "That's why I'm telling you instead of being sure. I remember the van from the Rodriguez kid's neighborhood. Woman on the corner said she saw it the day the girl went missing. Didn't think anything of it then, just a van. But then I heard about the Webb kid, and someone mentioned a van in that area too. Brown. Dented on the side. Plates I didn't quite catch."

"Make?"

"Chevrolet, maybe. Or Ford. I'm not great with vehicles."

"License plate?"

"I said I didn't catch it."

Mercer took a drag on his cigarette. A brown van in three neighborhoods where children had gone missing. It was a thread, thin and possibly meaningless, but it was something to pull on. It was work. It was hope, which in this business was just another word for delusion.

"I need you to keep looking," Mercer said. "If you see the van again, follow it. Note the license plate, the times, the locations. Be careful. Don't get made."

"I'm always careful," Ghost said.

He wasn't, but Mercer didn't argue. He gave Ghost an extra fifty dollars and told him to stay safe, and Ghost disappeared into the night the way he always did, like he was never quite real to begin with.

By the time the fourth body was found, the city was in genuine panic. Parents kept their children home from school. The streets were emptier in the afternoon hours when kids were usually outside. Businesses reported lower sales. The mood was like waiting for a bomb to go off, the knowledge that something terrible had already happened and could happen again at any moment.

The fourth victim was a seven-year-old girl named Emma Porter. She was found in a basement beneath an apartment building on the south side. And this time, there was something different.

"She was hidden," Garrett said during the autopsy. "The previous bodies were left in places where they'd be found. This one was under a tarp, beneath some boxes. She wasn't positioned; she was concealed. The killer was covering up, trying to hide the body rather than display it."

This suggested something had changed. Either the killer was getting scared, or he was changing his methodology, which meant he was adapting, which meant he was thinking, which meant he was learning.

Mercer and Chen cross-referenced everything. The neighborhoods, the schools, the times of disappearance. There was no logical pattern. David Chen had disappeared at lunchtime from a school. Melissa Rodriguez had vanished on the way home from school. Marcus Webb had gone missing from a playground. Emma Porter had disappeared from her front stoop while her mother was inside for five minutes.

No pattern meant no way to predict where the next child would be taken from. No way to set up surveillance or lay a trap. The killer was random, which made him unpredictable, which made him nearly impossible to catch.

On the fourteenth night of the investigation, Mercer sat at his desk and stared at the four photographs of the four dead children. David Chen. Melissa Rodriguez. Marcus Webb. Emma Porter. Four lives, four deaths, four failures that his department had accumulated like bad debt.

Chen came by with coffee, which was probably a waste of time because neither of them slept anymore and caffeine just made them jittery instead of tired. She set the cup down on Mercer's desk and didn't say anything. They were past the point where words meant much.

"He's out there," Mercer said. "Right now. In this city. Breathing the same air as a hundred thousand other people, and nobody knows he's a killer."

"We'll find him," Chen said.

"No, we won't," Mercer said. "We'll find him when he wants to be found, or we'll spend the rest of our lives looking and find nothing. Those are the options."

Chen left without responding. She was still at the stage where she believed in things like determination and hard work and the fundamental triumph of justice. Mercer had left that stage years ago and had no intention of returning.

He stayed at his desk until midnight, then went to Murphy's bar and drank bourbon until the bartender told him it was last call. Then he drove home to his apartment, where he would sleep poorly and wake up tomorrow and do it all over again.

The city was gray. The future was gray. Everything was gray, and the killing continued in the darkness, patient and inevitable as the tide.