Chapter Text
Malcolm woke gently. That was a rare enough occurrence to be remarkable, rare enough that he wasn’t certain the last time it had happened. When Eve had still been alive, maybe, when she’d gently unfastened him from his restraints in the morning as if there was nothing strange about having a boyfriend that needed to be shackled to the bed every night.
It was an odd memory, but not an uncomfortable one. Not as long as he could keep his thoughts from straying, not as long as he didn’t think of—
Malcolm stopped himself. It was a good morning, the first he’d had in a long time. He wasn’t going to sully it by thinking of the nightmares that for once hadn’t plagued him the previous night, wasn’t going to replace night terrors with daytime terrors, not today.
He sat up, spit out his mouth guard, detached the leather cuffs from their straps. It took a minute to remove each of the cuffs, but the movements were all muscle memory now, an unconscious gesture he’d repeated hundreds, thousands of times. He looked at the clock. He’d slept nearly seven hours, which was all but unheard of for him. Malcolm smiled to himself.
He went about his morning routine with a stubborn sort of optimism—replaced the cuffs so they’d be ready for use again later that night, rinsed and stored away his mouth guard. Poured himself a glass of water, then lined his pill bottles up along the edge of the counter. He picked up each bottle, one after another, downed the pills with the ease of long years of practice. Delicately, with two fingers, he selected an affirmation card.
Today is a new day.
Malcolm read the words silently first, then repeated them aloud. They seemed fitting, for once. When he’d first gotten the cards, he’d scoffed at them, rolled his eyes. He’d studied psychology, of course, but it seemed preposterous to him that positive affirmations could somehow counter everything else he lived with, his serial killer father and the memories that flashed behind his eyes when he slept. The scorn he’d gotten throughout his childhood—and even his adulthood after he’d changed his name, tried his hardest to distance himself from his past.
But the day did feel different, a fresh start. He’d slept, and he hadn’t dreamed. He felt clear and alert and ready to face the day. He wondered if this was how most people felt every day, if most people were simply able to wake up calm and well-rested and go about their daily routines like it was nothing special, without invisible obstacles and hurdles constantly in front of them. Perhaps today he would be like most people; perhaps today would be a small vacation from his own mind.
Today is a new day.
The thought carried him through his morning workout, through pushups and pullups and yoga, and by the end of it, his stomach was even rumbling. It was rare, too, for him to be hungry in the mornings. Most days, he skipped breakfast, despite all the claims of it being the most important meal of the day. Half the time, whatever he’d dreamed the previous night left him shaky and nauseated; if he waited long enough, until late afternoon or evening, the nausea would either abate enough or he’d be hungry enough that he’d be able to ignore it and eat something.
But today, it was a sunny morning, he’d slept, he hadn’t dreamed, and he was hungry.
He took a shower first, for once to remove the sweat of just his workout and not his nighttime tossing and turning beneath his sheets. Clad in only his boxer-briefs, Malcolm opened the refrigerator, shaking his head to himself in fondness and exasperation. There was food inside that he hadn’t purchased—and he was never sure why his mother did this, since he was certain most of the food went bad before he ever managed to touch it. But for just this moment, he was grateful as he pulled out the carton of eggs and a pan.
He was halfway through eating his eggs and toast when his phone began to vibrate against the table, Gil’s name lighting up the display. Malcolm barely wasted a second reaching for it, putting it on speaker.
“Good morning, Gil,” Malcolm greeted, his voice sounding uncharacteristically bright to his own ears. “Do we have a case?”
“We do,” Gil’s familiar voice confirmed over the line. “Will you be ready if I come pick you up in twenty?” Malcolm set his fork down, but before he could respond, Gil’s voice came again. “Are you eating?”
The incredulity in Gil’s voice was a bit of a blow. Malcolm winced, not willing to let it derail his unexpectedly excellent morning.
Today is a new day, he thought to himself, and spoke.
“I made eggs. If you have a few minutes to stop and eat, I can make some for when you get here,” Malcolm offered. After all, if they had a case, that meant someone was most likely dead. They wouldn’t be any more or less dead if Gil stopped for ten minutes to eat. Malcolm wisely didn’t raise that point.
“Better if you just make it coffee,” Gil responded, and Malcolm could tell he was smiling. Malcolm found himself smiling, too.
“Coffee to go, got it. See you in twenty.”
They hung up and Malcolm set the coffee to brew while he got dressed. Putting on a suit was second nature to him, too, a familiar ritual, soothing in its own way. He’d been tying his own ties since he’d been a child, buttoning himself into his own personal armor. His hand was steady as he went through the motions, slow, meditative.
He picked up his phone to check the time, then poured the coffee into two thermoses. Just a hint of cream and sugar in Gil’s, heaps of sugar in his own, and he was downstairs and waiting at the curb when Gil’s LeMans pulled up. Malcolm opened the door and slid inside, passing Gil his coffee. He didn’t miss the way the older man looked him over.
“You look well-rested,” Gil remarked with a raised eyebrow, and Malcolm fought the urge to roll his eyes. He always felt a mixture of annoyance and fondness when people fussed over him—but with Gil, it was mostly fondness. He still remembered his teenage years, when Gil and Jackie’s had seemed like his only refuge. Gil had seen him at his breaking point and past it, and yet the man had never treated him like he was less than. For all Malcolm knew that his mother loved him, he couldn’t help but find her hovering overbearing, infantilizing even. Gil had a much better sense of when to back off, knew how to express concern without smothering.
Malcolm just hummed and gave Gil a look. The older man smiled back and shook his head to himself, putting the car into gear.
“Anything you want to share about our new case?” Malcolm prodded after a minute of listening to only the low hum of the radio. Gil’s gaze landed on him for a moment before focusing back on the road.
“I’d rather you see it for yourself,” he remarked cryptically, his face slightly pinched. That meant that it was a bad one, although that fact was, perhaps, not surprising; when Gil pulled Malcolm in without Malcolm nagging him for a case, that usually meant that it was. “I’m not sure I could accurately describe—well, I’m not sure it was accurately described to me,” Gil amended after a second.
That had Malcolm’s attention piqued. “Multiple victims?” he guessed, but Gil shook his head.
“Just one.”
That was interesting, interesting enough that Malcolm felt itchy in his own skin, his curiosity wanting to burst out of him. Gil had seen countless murders, far too many for a single murder to have unsettled him in quite the way it had seemed to have. The light, happy mood of a minute before had thoroughly dissipated, but Malcolm felt energized, excited.
Careful now, my boy, a familiar voice chimed. One would almost believe you truly are my son, all your protests aside, with how excited you are about murder.
Malcolm forced the voice away. Even when he wasn’t actively hallucinating, Malcolm hated how much his inner dialogue had become his father’s voice. He’d nearly managed to lock his father away in a corner of his mind, all those years he’d been gone. But the longer he’d been back in New York, the more it seemed as though Martin had seeped into him, into every corner of his mind until he had no peace left.
Today is a new day, Malcolm recalled forcefully, and I am not excited by murder.
Malcolm’s hand was still.
The murder scene was an alleyway outside of a dilapidated block of apartments, the kind of place that it sometimes seemed the rest of the city forgot. The kind of place that people like Malcolm’s mother’s social circle forgot, except when it was politically expedient for them to donate to some cause that benefitted the poor, all so they could get a nice write-up about their philanthropy in the society pages. It was the type of place that Malcolm hated to admit that he forgot, too, the blind spot that his mother’s wealth granted him. Some days, it felt to Malcolm as though all his focus was zeroed in on keeping himself sane, on looking stable and normal to the world. But in moments like this, he knew that was only because he had the luxury to focus on himself.
Most of these people, Malcolm guessed, didn’t have the same luxury. Identical blocks of apartments lined either side of a narrow alleyway, half brick and half peeling paint. Graffiti graced the walls, most of it faded to a dull, washed-out color, as if even the vandals had forgotten the place or deemed it below their notice. It was the type of neighborhood, Malcolm thought, with few traffic cameras and even fewer doorbell cameras. With more and more in the view of cameras every year, it was harder and harder for criminals to get away with their crimes; whoever the killer was, they were smart enough to pick a place like this, a place likely beneath the growing wave of surveillance that marked the modern world.
The alleyway was cordoned off with police tape, uniformed officers standing guard, but people were already crowded around the periphery, some neighbors hanging unabashedly out of their doors to try to get a peek at what was going on. Malcolm catalogued their faces quickly—a thin man with a greying beard and messy hair behind a torn screen, a slight woman with limp blonde locks holding a baby on her hip. Two children trying to peek out a second-floor window without being caught by their parents, most likely, eyes wide and expressions rapt. Malcolm wondered if those kids would end up like him, worse even; Malcolm, at least, had not seen the bodies as a boy.
Malcolm reached the mouth of the alley and ducked under the police tape. He blinked, then blinked again.
“Wow,” was all he managed.
JT, already on the scene, snorted. “You know it means something when even Malcolm Bright is speechless,” he murmured, looking at Dani with a raised eyebrow. Edrisa, crouched carefully next to the victim’s body, looked up at them. Even she seemed uncharacteristically rattled.
“Victim hasn’t been formally ID’d yet, but she fits the description of a missing person, Gwen Brooks,” Edrisa said stiffly. “Thirty-three, a graphic designer, missing for eight days.”
Malcolm’s eyes scanned the woman’s body slowly. It was clear that the killer had made the most of the eight days. The woman was nude, her skin pale and bloodless beneath a canvas of tiny slashes over every exposed inch. What must have been hundreds distinct slashes covered each leg, both arms, her torso, her breasts. None of the cuts looked deep enough to cause death on their own, and some had scabbed over, as though the killer had let them begin to heal. The only part of the woman’s body free of marks was her face; her thin lips were bloodless, her cheeks sallow but unmarred, her eyelids puffy and swollen as if she’d been crying for days. She probably had been.
“Do we know how many wounds there are?” Malcolm pressed when no one else spoke. Edrisa shook her head.
“We’ll have to wait to get her back to the lab if we want to count them properly,” she said carefully. “Her whole back side looks like this, too.”
Behind him, Malcolm heard Gil take a slow, steadying breath. “What do you think?” he asked delicately.
Malcolm let his eyes sweep over the woman’s body again, taking the scene in with renewed focus. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was brushed free of any tangles, though oily at the scalp from what was likely days without a shower. Her once-manicured nails were half ripped and torn, as though she’s struggled to get away from her killer. A tattoo of what may have once been a snake wrapped around the outside of her right thigh, but the killer had given that no regard, slashing through it the same way he had the rest of her body, with careful strokes. The cuts weren’t all even, weren’t even parallel, but none of them intersected, a careful centimeter or two between each one. Very little blood marred the scene.
“The killer staged this scene carefully,” Malcolm began after a pause, leaning down to regard her cuts more closely. “Her body was washed before she was dumped here, though it’s hard to say whether it was an aesthetic choice or a forensic countermeasure. Her hair was brushed and her face left unmarred, so her appearance was important to the killer.
“This is meticulous, calculated. It wasn’t a crime of passion. It’s as if the killer was trying to find out how many times he could cut her before running out of room on...his canvas. It would have taken a great deal of time to make this many incisions, but the killer took...longer than necessary. He let some of the cuts begin to heal. He wanted it to last.”
The silence that fell after Malcolm’s analysis was heavy, uncomfortable.
“Are there signs of sexual assault?”
The question came from Dani. Edrisa shrugged. “She is nude, so of course we have to consider it. But from just the cursory medical exam, no obvious signs. I’ll take a closer look at autopsy.”
“So this is...what? Some sick art project?” JT pressed. Malcolm tilted his head and continued to stare at the body. Something about it wasn’t adding up, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. There was a sense of spectacle about the way she was displayed, the carefulness of the array of incisions on her body, but there was something detached about it, almost clinical.
“I hate to say this—” Malcolm prefaced.
“Then don’t,” Gil groaned, but as he did in most cases, Malcolm barreled on anyway.
“—but I doubt this is this killer’s first victim. You don’t just come out of the gate with something this elaborate, this meticulous. A first-time killer is excited, nervous. This killer was cool-headed and composed. He spent days making all these cuts, all of them spaced out, washed her body, brushed her hair, and dumped her somewhere which, if I had to guess, has no cameras. This isn’t a first kill.”
Gil let out a slow breath, though Malcolm would be surprised if the Lieutenant hadn’t suspected the same thing. “Well, if it isn’t his first victim, it shouldn’t be too difficult for us to narrow down his other victims. Not if they’re all this elaborate.”
“Lieutenant?”
The voice was an unknown one, unexpected. Malcolm swung around to see one of the officers standing guard at the edge of the scene. He was young, probably not a day over twenty-five, with brown hair and a spattering of freckles across his nose. Gil turned to him.
“Yes, Officer...?” he trailed off.
“Ayers, sir,” the man offered. “I couldn’t help but overhear and...I think I might know who one of your other victims is.”
Malcolm sat alone at the conference room table, leaning back in his chair and staring at the newly-printed crime scene photos on the board. He tilted his head to the right, then the left, wondering what it was about the case that seemed to tug at him, beckoning to him that he was missing something, something familiar. But no matter how long he stared, nothing seemed to come to the surface.
Everything about the kill was contradictory. All the cuts were precise, spaced, controlled, but the sheer number had a flamboyance about it, a demand for attention. The victim had been washed, her hair brushed, laid out as if to be found, but tucked away in an alley as if to be hidden. It was as if the killer had conflicting impulses, desire and logic tugging him in opposite directions.
Malcolm caught movement out of the corner of his eye, breaking his attention away from his contemplation. Gil walked in first, then JT and Dani, and finally Edrisa with a laptop in hand.
“Did we find our other victim?” Malcolm demanded almost as soon as they’d arrived. Gil had disappeared into his office for what had seemed like an eternity, making calls about the tip the officer on the scene had given them. Gossip from a friend at a neighboring precinct, but from the length of time Gil had been occupied, Malcolm suspected it had borne fruit.
“We did,” Gil affirmed, and Edrisa stood at the front of the room, flipping the laptop around so Malcolm could see the screen. JT and Dani came around behind him so they could see as well.
“Tabitha Ramsay, twenty-eight,” Gil presented, and the photo on Edrisa’s laptop screen was a young woman with soft brown eyes and long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. She had an oval face, a straight, narrow nose, and full lips. “She was a medical receptionist, killed approximately five weeks ago. Her body was found one precinct over, behind a motel.”
“Let me guess, no cameras,” JT ventured. Gil pursed his lips and nodded.
“The motel has them, but they weren’t operational at the time. Hadn’t been working in months. No witnesses, either.”
Malcolm tapped his lower lip thoughtfully. “So if it is the same killer, he is thinking about dumping locations where he’s unlikely to get caught on surveillance,” he mused. “Anything from the newest scene?”
Dani piped in. “Officers are still canvasing the neighborhood, but it looks like you’re right so far. No video doorbells.”
“How did Tabitha die?”
Edrisa clicked a button on the laptop and a crime scene photo replaced the smiling picture of Tabitha. In the new photo, she was nude, just like their newest victim, her blonde hair brushed neatly over her shoulder. There were marks all over her body in thick pink stripes—Malcolm leaned in, squinting his eyes to try to get a closer look.
“Are those burns?” JT demanded. Edrisa nodded.
“The ME who did the autopsy said they were likely made with a fire poker, a branding iron, or something equivalent,” she confirmed. “Three hundred and forty-two burn marks total, all over her body except for her face. Cause of death was shock.”
The words settled between them all for a beat, a heavy weight.
“How long was she missing?” Dani prodded.
“Six days,” Gil answered. “ME put the time of death about sixteen hours before she was found, so the killer likely waited for nightfall to dump the body. No signs of sexual assault; the only other wounds were blunt force trauma to the back of her head, indicating she was probably knocked unconscious before she was taken, and trauma on the wrists and ankles from being bound.”
Malcolm looked up to the ceiling for a moment, eyes trailing along a water stain there.
“So the killer is someone with access to a location where he can hold a victim for multiple days and subject them to torture without being discovered,” he surmised after a pause. “And the ability to dedicate himself to spending time with the victims without being missed.”
“Or maybe he has to go to work, or go home to his family,” JT argued. “Maybe that’s why our new vic has some healed cuts. Maybe he had to take breaks to keep up appearances with his normal life.”
Malcolm frowned. “Maybe,” he mused distractedly. “What about our new victim’s autopsy?”
Edrisa looked sheepish. “Still waiting for the body. Gwen Brooks’ family is coming in to see if they can confirm the victim’s identity.”
Malcolm already knew what the result of that would be. One look at Gwen Brooks’ photos left no doubt in his mind that she was their victim. Her missing person flyer had even mentioned her tattoo, and while he’d been waiting for Gil to come back with the information on the previous presumed victim, he’d even gone through Gwen’s social media and found photos of her on the beach in a bikini, an unmangled snake tattoo along her thigh.
“Any connection between the victims?”
Gil just shrugged. “Unknown as of yet. There is some good news, though.”
Malcolm perked up at that. “Oh?”
Edrisa was nodding brightly. “Forensics found DNA under the first victim’s fingernails, presumably from her killer,” she announced with excitement. “They were actually already running it, said they hoped to have something to send over soon.”
Something about that struck Malcolm as strange. “Under her fingernails?” he parroted. “If it’s the same killer...he washed Gwen’s body, dropped both victims in locations he could be fairly certain had no cameras. In both cases, he was meticulous with the placement of the wounds, was careful and took his time...but he didn’t try to remove DNA from under the victim’s fingernails?”
“Maybe he tried, but he wasn’t very good at it?” JT suggested. At Malcolm’s look, the detective held up his hands. “Look, it’s a lot harder to get rid of DNA than most lay people think. Or maybe he’s just...not that smart to have thought of it.”
Malcolm frowned, looking back at the photos of the newest victim on the board. He stood up and walked over, pulling down a closeup of the woman’s hand. Her fingernails, once carefully manicured, had grown out a few millimeters, and several of the nails were broken. Still, her cuticles were clean, and there was no sign of dirt under her fingernails. The killer had taken his time cleaning her hands, but perhaps it had been for aesthetic reasons rather than forensic. Perhaps he hadn’t been as thorough in his cleaning as he had in his cutting.
Malcolm grabbed the laptop and turned it around, scrolling through the crime scene photos until he found one of Tabitha’s hand. She had long fake nails, painted with several coats of sparkly polish. Three were missing, as if they’d popped off, Tabitha’s unadorned short nails beneath. One was bloody where the end of the nail had ripped off, taking some skin with it. They, too, looked clean, but clearly not clean enough.
The laptop pinged.
“Ooh, maybe that’s the DNA results!” Edrisa squeaked, wresting the laptop from Malcolm’s hands and turning it back toward her. Malcolm blinked with a sudden feeling of whiplash. Everyone in the room stared at Edrisa expectantly as she clicked a few times, and her face brightened.
“Yep, looks like there’s a partial match in CODIS for the killer’s DNA, but...oh, this is weird...” Edrisa trailed off, her expression becoming slowly alarmed. They all waited a beat for her to elaborate, but when she didn’t, JT spoke up.
“Well, what is it?”
Edrisa’s eyes flicked up, landed on Malcom for a second, then darted away. “Well...it says that the killer’s DNA is a close familial match with...Martin Whitly.”
Malcolm felt his heart pounding in his chest, an odd sensation of vertigo sweeping through him. His hands suddenly felt clammy, his skin too tight.
“Close familial match?” Dani repeated. “What does that mean?”
Edrisa hesitated again. “A close familial match would be a parent, a sibling...or a child.”
Everyone’s gaze swung to Malcolm as he clenched his fist to stop the shaking.