The Major Crimes bullpen was a pressure cooker of fragmented dread. It was 2:17 AM, and the air hummed with a low-grade panic held in check by sheer procedural will. Lieutenant Detective Caleb Saye stood before the central case board, a monument to chaos. Two separate, high-profile investigations were bleeding into each other, creating a Rorschach blot of panic for the city and the department.
On the left side of the board were the victims of the "Azaqor" serial killer: Mayor Blackwell, his death a public, grotesque artwork; and before him, Mr Densai, a reclusive watch brand seller found in his store arranged with similarly unnatural, symbolic precision.
On the right side of the board were the Missing Persons. Two faces, pinned just hours apart, their disappearances devoid of the killer's artistic flair, but no less terrifying.
The first: RHEA DENSAI. The photo was a candid shot, likely pulled from a university directory. A young woman, mid-twenties, with sharp, intelligent features and dark, focused eyes. Her hair was a sleek black bob. Niece of the first victim, Mr Densai. A graduate student in applied cryptography and baker at Crestwood Polytech. Last seen leaving her campus lab three days ago. Her apartment showed no signs of struggle, but her high-end laptop, her personal tablet, and her encrypted backup drives were gone. It could have been a tech-obsessed kidnapper. It could have been a terrified young woman fleeing the spotlight of her uncle's horrific death. The detectives didn't know.
The second: LILY CASSANDRA. This photo was official—her deputy chief badge gleaming on her uniform jacket. Middle-aged, with stern, competent features and greying hair pulled into a tight knot. She'd been leading the task force on the Azaqor killings. She'd walked out of a late-night briefing 36 hours ago, telling her aide she was going to get air and review the files in her car. Her sedan was found parked neatly two blocks away, engine cold, her service weapon and phone left in the locked glovebox. There was no note. No evidence of a struggle. Just an impossible, professional vanishing.
The press was already calling it "The Azaqor Abductions." The theory was seductive: the killer had evolved from murder to collecting people connected to the case. It created a narrative. It also paralyzed the department with a fear that was both professional and deeply personal.
Caleb's own team was operating on fumes and fear. He watched them now, moving through the bullpen with a grim, hunted look.
Detective Owen Kessler, a bear of a man with a surprisingly gentle touch on a keyboard, was at his terminal. His screen wasn't full of reports; it was a live feed from a facial recognition sweep of the city's traffic cameras, keyed to the two missing women's photos. The software churned in a sidebar, a rolling cascade of percentages and timestamps as it tried to match the static, smiling image of Rhea Densai against the blurred, grainy stills of a thousand nighttime pedestrians. Every few minutes, a potential match would flash—a 68% correlation with a woman in a hoodie near the bus depot, a 72% match with someone caught in the background of a gas station security feed. Each one was a tiny spike of hope that died as Kessler zoomed in, his broad shoulders slumping. "False positive. Hairline's wrong," he'd mutter, or "That's not her walk. Height's off." He was chasing digital ghosts.
At the adjacent desk, Detective Nia Halloway worked a different angle. Her screen was a spiderweb of financial and digital records. She was tracing the last electronic footprints. For Rhea: the final, unflagged login to a secure campus server at 11:47 PM. A ping from her phone near the 24-hour library that coincided with no camera footage. For Lily: the last credit card charge for coffee eight hours before she vanished. The final email sent from her department account—a routine administrative update. Holloway was building timelines out of absences, trying to find the shape of the hole left behind. Her fingers tapped a relentless, quiet rhythm on the desk, a counter-beat to the silence.
Caleb's own anxiety was a more private, sharpening knot. He pulled his personal phone from his pocket, his thumb hovering over a familiar contact. AUBREY.A young lady who her mother and him shared complicated past that makes him feel regret every day of his life . For Aubrey She'd had been keeping tabs with her since after that horrific murder of her mother at hands of Azaqor.Since then though he has had estranged relationship of kinder of daughter and father between the two each day they would always converse with each other over the phone but strangely today Aubrey has been rather quite as she didn't call him as usual and she is currently not answering his phone call which is raising his suspicions.
Caleb had assigned a uniform to take the report—another missing college kid, probably sleeping off a bender somewhere, a low priority against the tsunami of the Azaqor case. He'd told himself that. Now, staring at the faces of Rhea and Lily, a cold doubt slithered through his gut. He hit dial.
The phone rang. Once. Twice. Five times. It went to voicemail, Aubrey's cheerful, recorded voice a cruel artifact from a simpler time. "Hey, you've reached Aubrey! You know what to do!"
"Aubrey, it's Caleb again. Call me back as soon as you get this. Any word at all." He hung up, the frustration a hot coal in his chest. He was about to turn, to bark an order at Kessler to widen the facial rec parameters, when the world dissolved into static.
It happened simultaneously on every screen in the bullpen.
The traffic camera feeds on Kessler's monitors. Holloway's data streams. The departmental news channel playing silently on the wall-mounted TV. The outdated desktop calendar on the receptionist's computer. They all rippled, as if a stone had been dropped into their digital pond. The images distorted, stretched, and then collapsed into a single, unifying symbol against a black background.
A plain, mask-shaped outline. A suggestion of a face, but empty.
Near its top, a small, inverted spiral, a pinprick of wrongness.
Around the spiral, a stark, white triangle.
Inside the triangle, three short, heavy lines—closed eyes.
From each eye, a single, deliberate drip line fell.
And superimposed behind it all, faint but unmistakable, the outline of a handprint. The proportions were off. The fingers… there were too many. Six.
The lower half of the mask-face was smooth, blank void. No mouth. No nose.
The symbol hung there, perfectly centered. Then, slowly, it began to rotate. As it turned, its color cycled—from a deep, arterial red to a cold, electric blue, the hues bleeding into one another in a silent, hypnotic pulse.
A collective breath was sucked out of the room. Cops froze, mugs of coffee halfway to lips.
"What the hell?" Kessler breathed, his hands freezing above his keyboard.
Before anyone could move, the image shifted again. The rotating logo shrank, taking up the left third of every screen. The right two-thirds filled with a live video feed.
It showed a sterile, white room. A clinical, inhuman space. And in it, five figures.
Caleb's brain, trained for detail under duress, processed it in a fractured second.
A young man with a shock of brown hair, kneeling beside someone on the floor—Richie? From the tennis team?
A dark-haired young woman standing stiffly, arms wrapped around herself—Chloe Halvern. The mayor's daughter's friend. The one from the gala.
Another young woman curled in a ball in the corner, her face a mask of shock.
A fourth young man pacing, gesticulating wildly, his face contorted in anger.
And the last figure, standing calm, too calm, beside Chloe Halvern. A familiar, quiet intensity in the set of his shoulders. The profile Caleb had seen in a dozen photos on Aubrey's mantel.
Elijah.
The coffee mug in a detective's hand clattered to the floor, shattering. The sound was absurdly loud in the frozen silence.
"Wait," a uniformed officer near the back whispered, pointing. "Isn't that… that's Chloe Halvern. The Halverns. Oh, Christ, if her father…"
His words were drowned out by a raw, wounded sound. It took Caleb a second to realize it had come from him. His eyes were locked on the pacing boy. On the sharp, familiar line of his jaw, the way he shoved a hand through his hair in furious agitation.
Marcus.
His son. His boy. In that white room. On every screen.
The professional detachment Caleb had worn like armor shattered. The lieutenant detective vanished, replaced by a father whose world had just collapsed into a two-thirds screen of horror. His hand went out, bracing against a desk, his knuckles white. The confusion was a storm, but it was momentarily eclipsed by a wave of pure, incapacitating fear so profound it was a taste of metal in his mouth.
On the screen, the scene was silent. They were clearly arguing, reacting to something off-camera. Marcus was shouting at nothing.
Then, the artificial voice filled the bullpen, piped from a dozen speakers at once. It was a grotesque pastiche of a gameshow host, a child, and something slick and inhuman. "Let the audience say hello!"
Beneath the live feed, text scrolled: LIVE VIEWERS: 48,302… 48,415… 48,991…
The numbers were climbing. A global audience, watching his son.
"Trace it!" Caleb's voice erupted, not as an order, but as a roar of pure anguish. He slammed his fist on the desk Kessler was sitting at, making the detective flinch. "Find the source! NOW! Kill the feed! Do something!"
Kessler and Holloway were already moving, their hands a blur. But their faces told the story before they spoke. Holloway shook her head, her eyes wide on her own monitor, which now displayed the same horrific split-screen. "The signal… it's not coming from anywhere, Lieutenant. It's being broadcast on everything. It's overriding local protocols. It's in the cable streams, the satellite feeds, the public wifi… It's everywhere at once."
"That's impossible!" Caleb snarled.
"It's Azaqor," Kessler said quietly, his face pale. He gestured to the left side of the screen, the rotating, colorful logo. "It's the same symbol. This is him. He's not just killing them. He's… he's putting on a show."
Caleb stared at the screen. At Marcus's furious, terrified face. At Elijah's unsettling calm. At the blank, waiting void of the mask in the corner. The helplessness that washed over him was colder than any fear. He was a cop, a lieutenant, a man who solved things. And he was utterly powerless.
On the screen, the masked figure's section of the feed seemed to… focus. As if it were not just an image, but a lens. A sentient presence regarding them from the other side.
And in the dead air of the bullpen, Caleb Thorne had the unbearable, certain feeling that it was looking directly back at him.