Detective Mara Voss pressed herself against the cold brick wall, listening to the rain hammer the cobblestones below. She had to hasten — the killer had already claimed two victims this week, and her informant's message had been clear: a third name was already chosen.
She climbed the fire escape to the fourth floor, her breath shallow. Most detectives would have kicked the door open without hesitation, but Mara carried a secret that complicated everything. Her phobia of enclosed spaces had nearly ended her career twice before. Dark, cramped rooms made her chest seize and her vision blur. The suspect's apartment was, according to building records, a single-room studio barely larger than a closet.
She forced herself forward anyway.
Inside, she found him — Fletcher Dunne, a crooked loan shark the neighborhood called a swine for the way he bled desperate families dry. He was slumped in a chair, a playing card tucked into his breast pocket. The Jack of Spades. The same card left with the other bodies.
Mara's hands steadied as she scanned the room. A half-eaten meal. A tipped-over glass. And there — muddy boot prints leading toward the window, not away from it.
Someone had been waiting for Fletcher.
Someone who knew his routine.
She photographed the card and stepped back into the open hallway, pulling in a long breath of relief. The killer wasn't finishing a list.
They were working through a partnership.
And Fletcher Dunne had been the last one to know it.