CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Ella Dark stared at the evidence board like it was a winning lottery ticket written in hieroglyphics. Her eyes burned, gritty as sandpaper from too many hours of staring at crime scene photos and chicken-scratch notes. The precinct coffee, a brew that could strip paint at twenty paces, had long since lost its punch. Now, it just sat in her gut like battery acid, eating away at what little remained of her patience.

The board was a nightmare collage of death and drought. Victim photos, map pins, red string connecting the dots like a demented spider"s web. It should"ve made sense by now. Should"ve revealed its secrets like a cheap stripper at last call. But the pieces refused to fit, mocking her with their stubborn resistance to logic.

Faces stared back at her. Toledo, smug as a cat in the cream. Ayers, all pocket protector and nervous smile. Clancy, rough-hewn and weathered as old leather. Three dead men with a dam and a watery grave in common.

Luca materialized at her elbow and put a hand on her shoulder. Under other circumstances, such contact might get her heart fluttering, but right now it did nothing.

‘Anything new?' he asked.

‘Yeah, I cracked the whole case wide open. Turns out it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe. We can all go home now.'

‘Cute.' Luca rolled his eyes. They were running on fumes now, and gallows humor was the only thing keeping Ella from screaming into the void. ‘I've got guys looking into people who worked on the dam. Any name that crops up, we'll get a squad car outside their house. Tucker said we might have to call in help from some other districts.'

‘Good job,' Ella said. ‘What if we're dealing with someone who's never interacted with the victims until the last two days? What if there is no personal connection?'

‘Then we're at the mercy of forensics. Maybe we should run it down one more time, see if we missed anything?'

‘Or maybe we"ll drive ourselves even crazier than we already are.'

Luca grabbed a marker and made for the whiteboard anyway. Ella sighed but guessed it was all they could do right now. No stone unturned and all that jazz, even if it felt like they were just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

‘Alright, let"s start from the top. Victim one: Ricky Toledo.' Luca began scrawling in handwriting that could make even a doctor squint. He scrawled Toledo's name in bold letters. ‘Slick politician, championed the dam project like it was the second coming. Probably kissed a few babies and pocketed more than a few kickbacks along the way. Found face-down in a cornfield.'

Ella nodded, her mind conjuring up the image of Toledo"s bloated corpse. ‘No wife or kids. Lived alone in that palace in Bristol. Last seen alive leaving a fundraiser around 10PM the night he died. Tox screen showed his blood alcohol level was through the roof. Body was drenched, but with no water source nearby. Died around midnight last night.'

‘Don"t forget the smell on Toledo,' Luca added. ‘Like stagnant water.'

‘Yeah. Lab couldn"t pinpoint the source, just said it was some kind of stagnant water. Not from any river or lake in the area.'

Luca nodded, moving on. ‘Victim two: Marcus Ayers. Engineer who designed the dam. Left to rot in a riverbed that hasn"t seen water in an age. According to his wife, she last saw him the previous morning heading to work. God knows when or where the unsub abducted him.'

‘And Ayers was found in the old riverbed on the south side of town. Same deal as Toledo – soaking wet, no water source in sight. Concrete blocks ziptied to his ankles.'

‘Lab"s still analyzing the concrete, seeing if they can trace it,' Luca said.

‘Let's not hold our breath,' Ella muttered. ‘This guy"s too smart to leave that kind of trail. What about the latest vic? Jeremiah Clancy?'

Luca attacked the whiteboard again. ‘Construction worker, 38. Found in Peterson"s old apple orchard earlier today. Same MO as the others – drowned, dumped in a place hit hard by the drought. Married, two kids. Worked for Blueridge Construction, the company that got the contract to build the dam. According to his boss, Clancy was one of the foremen on the project.'

‘Jesus,' Ella breathed. ‘So we"ve got the politician who pushed for the dam, the engineer who designed it, and now one of the guys who actually built the thing. Our killer"s working his way down the food chain.'

"Looks that way. Clancy was last seen leaving his house this morning around seven AM, but his boss said he was on vacation this week."

‘Odd,' Ella said.

‘Right? Maybe Clancy was doing something he shouldn't. An affair?'

‘What kind of affair needs a week off work?'

‘Dunno. Never had one.'

She turned back to the board, eyes scanning the details they"d laid out. Three victims, all connected to the dam. All drowned and dumped in Liberty Grove. The motive was there, but the identity of the perpetrator was still far away. Who hated this dam so much they'd kill for it?

As if in answer to her unspoken question, the door banged open, admitting Sheriff Tucker. The man looked like he"d been ridden hard and put away wet, his usually crisp uniform rumpled and stained. He slammed a stack of papers on the nearest desk.

‘Got the autopsy results on Ayers,' he grunted. ‘Hot off the presses.'

Ella snatched the file, flipping it open with more force than necessary. Her eyes scanned the medical jargon, translating it into something resembling English. ‘Nothing new,' she muttered. ‘Same COD as Toledo. Lungs full of water, no other trauma. Time of death around 8AM this morning.'

Tucker nodded so fast his jowls wobbled. ‘Clancy"s prelim report just came in too. ME puts his time of death at roughly 4PM this afternoon.'

Something tickled the back of Ella"s brain. A whisper of connection, faint as a butterfly"s wings but definitely there.

Toledo. Ayers. Clancy.

The names seemed to pulse on the whiteboard. The fog of exhaustion burned away, replaced by crystal-clear focus. Every detail, every scrap of information they"d gathered during their time in Liberty Grove, flashed through her mind in rapid succession.

The dump sites – cornfield, riverbed, orchard. All ravaged by drought, yes, but was there more to it? She visualized a map of the town, the locations pulsing like nodes in a circuit. A triangle. No, a circle. The victims forming points on an invisible clock face spread across the town.

The water. Always water. Victims drowned, then dumped in the driest parts of town. A sick joke? A message? Both?

And underlying it all, the steady tick-tock of time passing. Lives ending. Water flowing.

Tick. Tock. Drip. Drop.

The pieces began to shift, rearranging themselves like some cosmic Rubik"s Cube. Ella"s heart rate kicked up a notch, adrenaline flooding her system. She could feel it, the answer, hovering just out of reach. Like trying to grab smoke, but with each attempt, the shape became clearer, more defined.

Water. Time. Death.

The three elements swirled in her mind, merging and separating, dancing around each other in a macabre waltz. And then, like a lightning bolt splitting the sky, it hit her.

Time of death.

Midnight for Toledo. Eight AM for Ayers. Four PM for Clancy. Regular eight-hour intervals, precise as a metronome. Not random. Not opportunistic.

Planned.

Timed.

‘Son of a bitch,' she breathed.

Luca perked up, sensing the change in the air. ‘What? What is it?'

Ella snatched the marker from his hand, nearly taking off a finger in the process. She scrawled the times of death next to each victim"s name.

‘It's a clock,' she rasped. ‘A goddamn clock. Every eight hours, like clockwork. A cycle of victims, constantly being replaced.'

Tucker and Luca crowded around the board. ‘Christ, Ella. The clock,' Luca said. ‘The water clock in the town.'

Pieces fell into place with the satisfying click of tumblers in a lock. The steady drip of time, lives snuffed out like tears in the rain. A killer obsessed with water in a town dying of thirst. It was poetry, sick and twisted as a pretzel in hell.

It all led back to that monstrosity of metal and gears. A symbol of progress turned harbinger of doom.

‘Goddammit, Hawkins, I could kiss you.'

‘You think the killer"s using it somehow? As inspiration or-'

‘Don"t know,' Ella cut him off, already moving towards the door. ‘But I"m gonna find out. You two stay put. I need to see that thing again.'

But Ella was already gone, out the door and into the night. She was onto something big, could feel it in her bones. And somewhere out there, a killer was watching, waiting for the next tick of his demented timepiece.

The hunt was on.