The newspaper office smelled of ink and old paper and the faint, acrid residue of cigarettes long since extinguished. Mara Kincaid led them through the darkened front room, past stacks of back issues tied with twine, past a printing press that looked as if it had been old when the century was young, and into a cramped back office lit by a single green-shaded lamp.
She cleared a stack of galley proofs from two wooden chairs and gestured for them to sit. Adrian took the chair nearest the door, his body angled so he could see both the entrance and the single window that looked out onto the fog-shrouded street. Old habits. Julian sat beside him, the canvas bag cradled in his lap like a child.
Mara leaned against her desk, her sharp eyes moving between them. She was younger than Adrian had expected—perhaps thirty, with dark hair pulled back in a practical knot and ink stains on her fingers that looked permanent. Her face was the face of someone who had learned to listen more than she spoke.
"I need to know if this is real," she said. "I've been chasing rumors about the Mercy Killer for months. I've filed a dozen freedom of information requests. I've been stonewalled by your chief, by the mayor's office, by everyone in this town who has something to hide." She looked at Adrian. "You're a detective. How do I know this isn't a setup?"
Adrian reached into his coat and withdrew his badge. He set it on the desk between them, the metal gleaming dully in the lamplight. "Detective Adrian Crowe, Hartwell Bay Police Department, badge number four-seven-one. I've been undercover for three weeks, posing as a suicidal sculptor named Elias Vane. The operation was authorized by Chief Elara Vance. It was designed to lure the Mercy Killer into revealing himself."
Mara picked up the badge and examined it. "And did it work?"
"Better than I ever intended." Adrian glanced at Julian. "This is Julian Voss. He is the Mercy Killer. He has killed five people over the past seven years, beginning with his mother. He believes he was releasing them from suffering."
Mara set the badge down carefully. Her hands were steady, but her eyes had widened fractionally. "You're telling me you caught the killer, and instead of arresting him, you brought him to a journalist?"
"I didn't catch him. He caught me. He knew I was a police officer from the first day I arrived in town. He let me get close because he wanted someone to understand." Adrian reached into the canvas bag and withdrew his journal, the one he had been keeping since his first night in the Wraith's Perch. "Everything is in here. Everything he did. Everything I did. Everything we became."
Mara took the journal and opened it. She read the first page, her lips moving silently. Then she looked up, her expression unreadable. "You're in love with him."
"Yes."
"And you helped him. You helped a serial killer evade capture."
"I helped a man who was drowning in his own grief. I helped him tell the truth." Adrian met her eyes without flinching. "I know what I've done. I know what it will cost me. But I also know that if Julian's story dies in a prison cell, the world will never understand. They'll see a monster. They won't see the suffering that created him, or the mercy he was trying to give."
Mara closed the journal and set it on her desk. She was silent for a long moment, her ink-stained fingers tapping against the leather cover. "I've been a journalist in this town for eight years. I've written about fishing quotas and city council meetings and the annual herring festival. I've been waiting my whole career for a story that mattered." She looked at Julian. "I think this is that story."
Julian spoke for the first time since they had entered the office. His voice was quiet but steady, the voice of a man who had accepted what was coming. "I will tell you everything. The names. The dates. The reasons. But I want you to understand something before you write a single word."
"What's that?"
"I am not a hero. I am not a martyr. I am a man who did terrible things for reasons that I believed were right. Whether they were right or not, I cannot say. I have been asking myself that question for seven years, and I still do not have an answer." Julian's winter-sea eyes met Mara's. "If you write this story, you must write the truth. Not the truth the police want. Not the truth the town wants. The truth I lived."
Mara nodded slowly. "I can do that. But you need to understand something too. Once I publish this story, there's no going back. The police will arrest you. The prosecutor will charge you. You will be front-page news in every paper from here to the capital. You will be the most famous killer this country has seen in a generation."
"I know," Julian said. "I am ready."
"Are you?" Mara looked at Adrian. "Are you ready, Detective? Because your career is over. Your life as you know it is over. You will be charged as an accessory. You will go to prison alongside him."
Adrian reached over and took Julian's hand. The gesture was unconscious now, as natural as breathing. "I've been ready since the night I found the Rilke on my doorstep."
Mara looked at their joined hands, and something in her expression softened. "I've never seen anything like this," she said. "I've covered murders. I've covered trials. I've never covered a love story between a detective and a killer."
"Neither have we," Adrian said. "We're figuring it out as we go."
Mara laughed, a short, surprised sound. Then she stood and walked to a filing cabinet in the corner of the office. She unlocked it with a key from around her neck and withdrew a bottle of whiskey and three glasses.
"I think we're going to need this," she said.
They talked for six hours.
Mara set up a tape recorder, its reels turning slowly in the green lamplight, and Julian told her everything. He started with his mother—Helena Voss, the woman with the dark hair and the sad eyes, the woman who had blinked once and changed his life forever. He described the seven years of caring for her, the seven years of watching her body become a cage, the seven years of feeling his own soul erode one day at a time.
He described the night he held the pillow over her face. The way she had not struggled. The way the silence afterward had felt like both an ending and a beginning. The way he had sat with her body until the sun came up, holding her hand, whispering apologies that she could no longer hear.
He described the plague journal that Miss Grimshaw had given him, the soldier who had written that mercy was not a crime. He described the night he had read it in the Boat House, the way the words had seemed to reach across a century and touch the deepest, darkest part of him. The part that had been looking for permission to believe that what he had done was not monstrous.
And then he described the others. Arthur Pym, the retired schoolteacher with bone cancer. Margaret Holm, the botanist who had been too afraid to ask for release. Thomas Aldridge, the lighthouse keeper with dementia. Lydia Crane, the violinist whose hands had been stolen by nerve disease. Samuel Parrish, the fisherman with lung cancer.
Each name was a wound. Each story was a confession.
Adrian listened, his hand resting on Julian's knee, his thumb tracing small circles through the fabric of his trousers. He had heard most of these stories before, but hearing them told to a stranger, hearing them spoken aloud into the whir of the tape recorder, gave them a weight they had not had before. They were no longer secrets shared in the amber light of the Boat House. They were evidence. They were history.
When Julian finished, Mara turned off the tape recorder and sat in silence for a long moment. The whiskey bottle was half empty. The sky outside the window had darkened from gray to black.
"I've been a journalist for fifteen years," Mara said finally. "I've interviewed politicians and criminals and people who were both. I've never interviewed anyone who told me the truth the way you just did."
"The truth is all I have left," Julian said. "I've been hiding for seven years. I'm tired of hiding."
Mara looked at Adrian. "And you? What's your part in this?"
Adrian told her. He told her about his father, the painter who had walked into the sea with stones in his pockets. He told her about the three years since, the gray weight that had pressed down on him every morning, the voice at the back of his mind that whispered it would be easier to stop. He told her about the operation, the false identity, the journal he had written in the voice of a grieving sculptor.
And then he told her about Julian. About the Rilke on his doorstep and the scalpel in the wooden box. About the portraits on the wall of the Boat House and the vials in the drawer. About the night he had watched Julian hold Silas Crane's hand as the old fisherman slipped away. About the moment he had realized that the line between hunter and prey had dissolved, and that he was no longer sure which one he was.
"I came to Hartwell Bay to catch a killer," Adrian said. "Instead, I found a man who understood me in a way no one else ever has. I found a man who had done terrible things but was still capable of tenderness. I found a man who made me want to live."
Mara set down her glass. "That's either the most romantic thing I've ever heard or the most disturbing. I'm not sure which."
"Neither am I," Adrian said. "That's the point."
Mara stood and walked to the window. The fog had thickened, pressing against the glass like a living thing. Somewhere in the distance, a foghorn sounded, low and mournful.
"There's something I need to tell you," she said, without turning around. "Something I should have mentioned earlier."
Adrian felt his pulse quicken. "What?"
"I've been receiving anonymous tips for weeks. Letters, slipped under the door of the office. They've been feeding me information about the investigation—about the victims, about the roses, about the notes carved into their chests. I thought it was someone inside the police department. Someone who wanted the truth to come out."
"Miss Grimshaw," Julian said.
Mara turned, her expression sharp. "The librarian?"
"She's been helping us. She gave Julian the plague journal. She warned us when the police were coming." Adrian leaned forward. "What else did the letters say?"
Mara walked to her desk and opened a drawer. She withdrew a stack of envelopes, each one addressed in elegant, looping script. "The last one came yesterday. It said there was a sixth victim. Someone named Silas Crane. It said the police were covering it up."
Adrian felt the blood drain from his face. "Silas Crane left a note. He said he died by his own hand. The nurse found it."
"The letter also said the note was a forgery. That someone else wrote it." Mara looked at Adrian, her sharp eyes boring into his. "Did you write that note, Detective?"
The question hung in the air like a guillotine blade. Adrian thought about the house on Gannet Street, the dark sitting room, the rattle of Silas's breathing. He thought about the notebook on the side table, the spidery handwriting, the declaration that Silas had died alone.
"I didn't write it," Adrian said. "I found it. The nurse must have missed it the day before."
"But you didn't report it. You didn't call it in."
"No. I didn't."
Mara set the letters down on the desk. "You see the problem, don't you? Someone has been feeding me information. Someone who knows everything. And that someone is not Miss Grimshaw."
Adrian looked at the letters, at the elegant script that was so familiar it made his chest ache. It was the same handwriting that had filled the margins of the Rilke. The same handwriting that had written the notes in the vials. The same handwriting that had filled seven journals with the stories of the dead.
"Julian," Adrian said. "What are these?"
Julian was pale, his winter-sea eyes fixed on the letters. "I didn't write them."
"Someone did. Someone who knows your handwriting. Someone who knows everything."
Mara spread the letters across the desk. There were six of them, each one dated, each one containing details that only someone intimately familiar with the killings could have known. The dates of the deaths. The names of the victims. The locations where the bodies had been found.
"This one," Mara said, pointing to the oldest letter. "It arrived three months before the first body was found. Before Margaret Holm. Before any of the public knew there was a Mercy Killer."
Adrian picked up the letter and read it. The handwriting was Julian's, but the words were not. The words were cold, clinical, devoid of the tenderness that filled Julian's journals. They described the Mercy Killer not as a shepherd of the dying but as a predator. A monster. A man who killed for pleasure and called it mercy.
"Someone has been setting you up," Adrian said. "Since the beginning. Someone has been documenting your crimes and feeding them to the press."
Julian stared at the letters, his face ashen. "There's only one person who knows enough to write these. Only one person who has been close enough."
"Miss Grimshaw."
"No." Julian looked up, and his eyes were filled with a horror that Adrian had never seen before. "Not Miss Grimshaw. Someone else. Someone I trusted."
Adrian felt a chill that had nothing to do with the drafty office. "Julian, who else knows? Who else have you told?"
Julian closed his eyes. "There is no one else. I told no one. Except—"
He stopped.
"Except who?" Mara asked.
"Except the person who helped me after my mother died. The person who found me on the cliffs and brought me home. The person who told me I was not a monster." Julian opened his eyes, and they were wet. "There was a man. A doctor. His name was Aldridge."
Adrian's mind raced. "Aldridge? As in Thomas Aldridge? The lighthouse keeper?"
"His brother. Dr. Elias Aldridge. He was the town physician before he retired. He was the one who signed my mother's death certificate. He was the one who told me her death was a mercy, that I had done the right thing."
"Where is he now?"
"I don't know. He left Hartwell Bay three years ago. He said he was moving to the capital." Julian's voice was shaking. "He told me to continue the work. He told me there were others who needed release. He gave me the names."
Adrian stood, his chair scraping against the floor. "He gave you the names? He told you who to kill?"
"He told me who was suffering. The ones the town had forgotten. The ones who had no one else." Julian looked at Adrian, his face a mask of anguish. "I thought he was helping me. I thought he understood."
"He was using you," Mara said, her voice hard. "He was using you to do his dirty work, and then he was documenting it for the press. He was building a story. A story that would make him famous when it finally broke."
Adrian thought about the letters, the cold, clinical descriptions, the way they painted Julian not as a mercy-giver but as a monster. "He's not just building a story. He's building a case. He's going to expose you, and when he does, he's going to look like the hero who was tracking the Mercy Killer all along."
Mara gathered the letters and stacked them neatly. "We need to find this man. We need to find him before he goes public."
"It's too late," said a voice from the doorway.
Adrian spun around, his hand reaching for the scalpel in his pocket. Standing in the entrance to the office, silhouetted by the dim light from the front room, was a figure in a fisherman's coat. The figure stepped forward into the lamplight, and Adrian's heart stopped.
It was Chief Elara Vance.
"I'm sorry, Adrian," she said. "But Aldridge went public an hour ago. The story is already on the wires." She paused, her iron-gray hair damp with fog, her expression unreadable. "The whole world knows about the Mercy Killer. And they're coming for both of you."
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!