2. Echoes of the Dead

The text message glowed on the screen for a long time before Vance moved. Three sentences, each one heavier than the last. Eleven more names. The second already waiting. He read them until the words lost their shape, until they became something closer to a physical weight pressing against his sternum. Then he stood, pulled on his coat, and walked out into the night that had already swallowed Ashwick whole.

The police station was nearly empty at this hour. Only the night dispatcher, a middle-aged woman named Sigríður who had been with the department longer than anyone could remember, sat behind the front desk, knitting a sweater the color of moss. She looked up when Vance entered, her needles pausing mid-stitch.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.

Vance handed her his phone. “I need you to trace this number. Whatever resources we have. I don’t care if it’s blocked, I want to know where it came from.”

Sigríður examined the message, her expression unchanging. “You think this is real?”

“Brewer is dead. That’s real enough for me.”

She nodded and began working at her computer, her fingers surprisingly fast for a woman who claimed to despise technology. Vance retreated to his office and spread the printed news article on his desk. He found a notepad and began transcribing every name that appeared in the comments section, separating the real names from the pseudonyms. It was slow, painful work. The comments were vicious, each one a small dagger aimed at a girl who was already bleeding. Vance had investigated homicides, sexual assaults, domestic violence—he had seen the worst that people could do to one another—but there was something uniquely cruel about this, the way strangers had gathered like vultures to pick at the bones of a child’s reputation.

By the time he had compiled a list of twelve distinct commenters who appeared to use their real names, Sigríður appeared in his doorway. Her face had lost some of its usual composure.

“The message was routed through an encrypted server in Switzerland,” she said. “Untraceable. Whoever sent it knew what they were doing.”

“A professional?”

“Or a very determined amateur. Either way, we won’t find them through technical means. Not with what we have.”

Vance nodded. He had expected as much. He handed her the list he had compiled. “I need full identity profiles on everyone here. Addresses, phone numbers, places of employment. Everything you can find by morning.”

Sigríður looked at the list, then back at Vance. “These are the people who commented on the article. You think they’re in danger?”

“I think one of them is already dead. And I think whoever killed him isn’t finished.”

She took the list without another word and disappeared into the records room. Vance spent the next hour reviewing everything he could find on Lena Dahl. The police file was thin—her death had been ruled a suicide, and the investigation had been closed within a week. The officer in charge at the time was a man named Halldór Bjarnason, who had since retired and moved to a nursing home in the Westfjords. Vance made a note to call him. The school had conducted its own internal review, which concluded that while Lena had experienced “peer conflict,” there was no evidence of systematic bullying. The report was a masterpiece of bureaucratic deflection, each sentence carefully crafted to absolve the institution of responsibility.

What struck Vance most was the silence around the case. Eight years had passed, and no one in Ashwick spoke of Lena Dahl anymore. Her name had been scrubbed from memory, buried beneath the town’s determined amnesia. In a community this small, secrets were currency, and the Dahl family’s tragedy had been devalued to nothing.

At three in the morning, Vance drove to the Brewer residence. The house was a sprawling modern structure on the eastern edge of town, all glass and steel and sharp angles, designed to command a view of the mountains. It was dark now, the windows reflecting only the pale glow of the snow-covered yard. Agnes Brewer had been given a sedative by the family doctor and was asleep in a guest bedroom at her sister’s house. The daughters had been sent to stay with relatives. The house was empty.

Vance let himself in with the key he had taken from Agnes earlier that day. The interior was immaculate, every surface clean and uncluttered, as if the house itself had been staged for a real estate showing rather than lived in. He moved through the ground floor slowly, cataloguing the details of Brewer’s life: the expensive furniture, the framed photographs of ski trips and sailing excursions, the bookshelf filled with business management titles and leather-bound classics that looked unread.

The home office was on the second floor, at the end of a long hallway lined with abstract art. Brewer had been a man who wanted the world to see him as cultured, sophisticated, above the petty concerns of a small fishing town. But the office told a different story. The desk was cluttered with papers, construction contracts, geological surveys, letters from lawyers. The geothermal lodge project had been eating him alive. Debt notices from two different banks were stacked beside the computer, their red stamps stark against the white paper.

Vance searched the desk drawers first. Most contained the expected debris of a businessman’s life—pens, business cards, expired credit cards, a bottle of prescription painkillers. But the bottom drawer on the left side was locked. He found the key on Brewer’s key ring, still in his coat pocket at the morgue, but a quick call to Dr. Sokk arranged for its delivery by a patrol officer within thirty minutes.

When the key arrived, Vance unlocked the drawer and pulled it open. Inside was a single object: a black three-ring binder, thick with pages. He lifted it out and set it on the desk. The cover was unmarked, but when he opened it, he found himself staring at a photograph of Lena Dahl.

The binder was a meticulously organized archive. Someone—and Vance suspected it was Brewer himself—had collected every scrap of information related to Lena’s death. There were printed copies of the original social media posts accusing her of theft. There were screenshots of comment threads from the Ashwick Herald, the same ones Vance had been reading earlier. There were photographs of Lena, some from school yearbooks, others that appeared to have been taken from her family’s social media profiles. And there were names. Page after page of names, each one linked to a comment, each comment annotated with a real identity. Brewer had been tracking the commenters. He had been documenting the very people who had destroyed Lena Dahl, including himself.

Vance flipped to the back of the binder and found a single handwritten page, torn from a notebook. The handwriting was not Brewer’s—it was too precise, too deliberate, each letter formed with careful intent. It was a list of twelve names, arranged in a column. Brewer’s name was at the top. A neat line had been drawn through it, and beside it was a single word: “Ice.”

Vance stared at the page. The person who had written this list was not Brewer. This was the killer’s handwriting. This was a message left for the police to find, a deliberate breadcrumb in a trail that was meant to be followed.

He photographed the page and the binder’s contents, then sealed everything in evidence bags. As he was leaving the office, his phone rang. It was Einarsson.

“Detective, there’s been a fire. A house on the south side of town. One fatality.”

Vance felt his stomach tighten. “Who?”

“A woman named Susan Hale. The fire crew is still on scene, but they’re saying it looks like an accident. A space heater, maybe.”

Susan Hale. Vance had seen that name on his list. She had been one of the commenters, one of the voices that had called Lena a thief and demanded she be expelled from school. “I’m on my way,” he said. “Don’t let anyone touch the scene until I get there.”

The south side of Ashwick was older than the rest of town, a cluster of wooden houses built in the early twentieth century when the fishing industry had still been profitable. Susan Hale’s home stood at the end of a narrow lane, its facade blackened by smoke and its windows shattered. The fire had been extinguished, but the smell of wet ash and burned plastic hung heavy in the air. A fire truck was still parked outside, its lights painting the snow in alternating flashes of red and blue.

Vance found the fire chief standing near the front door, a heavyset man named Ólafur Gunnarsson who had been fighting fires in Ashwick for thirty years. His face was smeared with soot, and his eyes were tired.

“What happened?” Vance asked.

“Neighbor called it in around four in the morning. Saw flames in the kitchen window. By the time we got here, the whole ground floor was involved. We found the victim in the living room, near the front door. Looks like she tried to get out but didn’t make it.”

“You said it might be an accident.”

Ólafur nodded. “There was a space heater in the living room, close to a stack of newspapers. That’s the most likely ignition source. But the fire spread faster than I’d expect for a single space heater. Almost like something accelerated it.”

“Will you be able to determine that for certain?”

“We’ll have an investigator come down from Reykjavik. But if you’re asking for my gut, I’d say this doesn’t feel right. The burn patterns are off. And there’s something else.” He led Vance around the side of the house to a small window that had been left open. “The kitchen window was open when we arrived. In January. That’s not something you do by accident.”

Vance crouched beside the window. The snow beneath it was disturbed, but not by firefighting equipment. There were footprints, partially melted and refrozen, leading away from the house toward the main road. They were too degraded to be useful, but their presence confirmed what Vance already suspected. Someone had been inside Susan Hale’s home before the fire started.

He entered the house through the front door, picking his way carefully through the debris. The living room was a blackened shell, the furniture reduced to skeletal frames, the walls coated in a thick layer of soot. Susan Hale’s body had already been removed, but the outline of where she had fallen was visible on the floor, a ghostly silhouette against the charred wood.

On what remained of the coffee table, Vance found a melted lump of plastic and metal that had once been a mobile phone. Next to it was a small framed photograph, its glass cracked but its image still visible. It showed a young woman with dark hair and serious eyes, standing beside a bicycle. Lena Dahl.

The photograph had not been there by accident. Just like the article in Brewer’s pocket, it was a signature. The killer was not merely executing his targets; he was forcing them to confront their guilt in their final moments. He was making them remember the girl they had helped to destroy.

Vance knelt in the ash and examined the melted phone. The damage was too severe to recover any data, but he could see that the SIM card had been removed before the fire. Either the killer had taken it, or Susan Hale herself had removed it. Either way, it was another piece of evidence that did not fit the narrative of a tragic accident.

Outside, the sun was beginning to rise over the eastern ridges, painting the smoke-stained sky in shades of pale gold and bruised purple. Vance stood on the frozen lawn and watched the light spread across the mountains. Two deaths in less than twenty-four hours. Two of the twelve names on the killer’s list. And somewhere out in the vast, silent landscape, a man who had lost everything was moving toward his third target.

Vance’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, expecting a call from Sigríður or Dr. Sokk. Instead, the screen displayed another message from the blocked number. Three words this time:

“Fire was second.”

He stared at the message, the cold seeping through his coat and settling into his bones. Then, before he could respond, the screen flickered and a fourth word appeared, each letter appearing one by one as if typed in real time:

“Wind.”

The message vanished, replaced by the default lock screen. Vance stood alone in the smoking yard, the wind rising around him, and understood that the killer had just announced the third death. And this time, unlike Brewer and Susan Hale, the victim was not yet dead. The killer was giving him a chance to stop it. Or, perhaps, an invitation to watch.

He called Einarsson. “Pull up the list I gave Sigríður. I need to know which of those names has a connection to wind. Wind energy, wind sports, anything. And I need to know where they are right now.”

“What’s going on?” Einarsson asked, his voice tight with alarm.

“The killer just told me how the next one is going to die,” Vance said. “And if we don’t find them first, we’re going to be pulling another body out of the dark.”