Page 16 of Whispers in the Night

Good enough that when he’d gotten it wrong, people died.

Silas shoved that thought away. Focus on the present. Focus on the case.

“Her laptop’s gone,” Harper said from the desk area—really just a small table shoved against the wall.

Silas looked over. She was right. Charging cable, mouse, a notebook with coffee-stained pages, but no computer.

“Could be at work,” he suggested.

“Maybe. But look.” Harper pointed to the dust pattern on the table. “The laptop was here recently. You can see the outline. And it’s an irregular shape, which means it wasn’t moved carefully. Someone grabbed it in a hurry.”

Silas moved closer. She was right. The dust pattern showed a rectangle that had been disturbed, not by someone closing the laptop and taking it to work, but by someone snatching it quickly.

“He took it,” Silas said.

“Probably. Killers often take trophies, but they also take anything that might link them to the victim. If he’d been messaging her, emailing her, establishing contact, he’d want that evidence gone.”

Silas pulled out his phone and called the tech team lead. “Sanchez. We need Melissa Wagoner’s laptop. Check if it’s at her workplace. If not, we’re looking for it as evidence.” He paused. “Also, get me her email records, cloud storage, anything backed up. If the laptop’s gone, maybe we can still recover the data.”

He hung up and found Harper watching him with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “What?”

“Nothing. That was good thinking.”

The compliment caught him off guard. “I know how to work a case, Sinclair.”

“I didn’t say you didn’t.” She turned back to the apartment. “But you’re right to pursue the digital angle. That’s where we’ll find his contact point. That’s where he became real to her, stopped being part of the background and became someone she knew.”

Silas studied her as she moved through the space. She was good. He didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to acknowledge that Harper Sinclair—the agent who’d gotten her partner killed—was actually brilliant at her job. But the evidence was right in front of him.

She saw things he missed. Made connections he hadn’t considered. Thought like the killer in a way that was both impressive and slightly disturbing.

“You said in Nevada, he posed the victims specifically,” Silas said. “Arms at sixty degrees, head tilted left. What does that mean?”

Harper paused by the window. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to figure it out. The symbols I can rationalize ashis personal language, something meaningful only to him. But the positioning...” She trailed off, staring out at the parking lot below. “It’s like he’s trying to recreate a specific moment. A memory, maybe. Something he saw or experienced that he’s trying to duplicate.”

“Someone he lost,” Silas said, echoing her words from the conference room.

“Yes. Someone who’s either dead or inaccessible. He can’t have the original, so he’s creating substitutes.” Harper turned to face him. “That’s what makes him so dangerous. He’s not killing out of rage or sexual gratification. He’s killing to fulfill a need. And that need will never be satisfied because the person he really wants is out of reach.”

“Which means he won’t stop.”

“Not until we catch him. Or until he gets what he really wants.”

The words hung in the air between them. Silas ‘s phone buzzed—a text from Morris, one of the officers who’d been canvassing the area near the paper mill.

Then his phone rang. Captain Holloway.

Silas answered. “Kane.”

“We have a problem.” Holloway’s voice was tight. “Another body. Found an hour ago at Riverside Park. Same MO.”

The world tilted sideways. “What?”

“Young woman, early twenties, posed the same way, symbols carved into the skin. Silas, he’s escalating. Two victims in three days.”

Silas’s mind raced. Serial killers didn’t work this fast, not usually. They took time between kills, let the fantasy build, savored the memory of the last victim before taking the next. Two in three days suggested something had changed. The killer was speeding up, losing control, or—

“He’s on a schedule,” Harper said quietly.