Chapter 4 (Continued): A Dead Girl's Ghost and a Missing Boy
The world had split into two parallel investigations, each pulsing with its own frantic, desperate energy. In the stale safe-house air, Pennyworth and Nancy were mapping the vast, silent conspiracy of "The Author." Downtown, the precinct was a roaring storm of old-fashioned, screaming panic.
Morsh's voice, strained from yelling, barked through the speakerphone, yanking Pennyworth back from the labyrinth of corporate assassination. "Hale, listen to me. We have a new murder. And it's a bad one. And before the body was even cold, we got a kidnapping call. It's a goddamn circus down here."
"Slow down. Start with the murder," Pennyworth said, his mind compartmentalizing, creating separate case files. The Author. The new murder. The kidnapping. Three puzzles, demanding simultaneous focus.
"Girl. Nineteen. Stacy Forester. Pre-med student at the University of Michigan. Found in her apartment this morning by her roommate. Stabbed. Overkill. Dozen-plus wounds. Not clean, Hale. Messy. Angry." Morsh's description was a stark, violent contrast to the surgical edits of the Author.
Pennyworth processed it. Young. Female. Brutal. It didn't fit the cold, editorial pattern. This was raw id. "Suspects?"
"Boyfriend's in the wind. Roommate said they had a screaming fight last night. He has a history. Restraining order from a high-school girlfriend. We're treating it as a domestic gone fatal."
It made sense. It was a tragically common story. But the timing, amidst everything else, felt like a dissonant chord. "And the kidnapping?"
Morsh's voice dropped, heavy with a different kind of dread. "Ten minutes after we got the call on Forester. A 9-1-1 from a woman hysterical. Her eight-year-old son, Leo, didn't get off the school bus. The bus driver said a man in a generic blue sedan—no plates—cut them off, showed a badge, said there was a family emergency and he was taking Leo. Kid went willingly."
A cold fist clenched in Pennyworth's gut. A child. Taken by someone impersonating authority. It was every parent's nightmare, and a detective's worst kind of case—the clock screaming louder than any siren.
"The mother and father?" Pennyworth asked.
"Clean.Middle-class, no debts, no enemies. Father's an accountant, mother's a teacher. They're shattered. No ransom call yet. This feels… opportunistic. Or random. Which is worse."
Two cases. One hot, one cold. One driven by passion, the other by predation. Both consuming the department's resources, attention, and emotional bandwidth.
Nancy had been listening, her face pale. She mouthed a silent question: Coincidence?
Pennyworth gave a minute, almost imperceptible shake of his head. Coincidence was a luxury he could no longer afford. The universe wasn't this narratively clumsy. "Morsh, send me the files on both. Everything. Forester's crime scene photos, witness statements. The kidnapping report, the bus driver's description, any traffic cam footage near the stop."
"Hale, you're neck-deep in this Briggs-McAfee-Page mess. The brass wants you focused. I can handle—"
"Send me the files,Lieutenant," Pennyworth said, his tone leaving no room. "Now."
He hung up and looked at Nancy. The Vance corporate conspiracy glowed on her laptop, a hidden war. Now two fresh, urgent tragedies had erupted on the surface. "They're distractions," he said flatly.
"You think the Author did this? A stabbing and a kidnapping? It doesn't fit their profile."
"Not the acts themselves,"Pennyworth said, pacing again, his mind trying to connect three disparate dots. "But the timing. They're floodlights. They're designed to pull every police resource, every headline, every ounce of public sympathy into a completely different channel. While we're chasing a jealous boyfriend and a missing child, no one is looking at the quiet, natural death of a federal prosecutor or the 'suicide' of a grieving activist."
Nancy's eyes widened in understanding. "They're creating noise to cover a silent edit."
"Exactly.They're not committing these crimes. They're orchestrating them. Leveraging existing pathologies—a violent ex, a child predator—and maybe… nudging them into action at the perfect moment." The thought was monstrous. It meant the Author didn't just clean up messes; they engineered chaos as a smokescreen.
His computer chimed as Morsh's files arrived. Pennyworth opened them side-by-side. Stacy Forester' crime scene photos were gruesome, a portrait of rage. The kidnapping report was clinical, a void where a child should be.
His eyes, trained to see the invisible, scanned the chaos. In the Forester photos, amidst the blood and disorder, something on the victim's desk caught his eye. A textbook, a coffee mug, a folded piece of bright pink notepaper. The top edge of the paper had a printed logo. He zoomed in.
It was the crest of the University of Michigan Medical School. And beneath it, a department name: Cardiac Research.
Stacy Forester was a pre-med student. Maybe she worked in a lab. Maybe she had access.
Emily Page. Cardiac arrest. Induced.
The connection was a thin, silvery thread, but it was there.
He switched to the kidnapping file. The bus driver's statement was vague. The man looked official. He had a badge. He drove a blue sedan. But in the officer's supplementary notes, a single line stood out: Driver stated the man was "calm, like he'd done it before."
Calm. Professional. Like it was a procedure.
Pennyworth's phone rang. Blocked. He answered, putting it on speaker.
The weary,authoritative voice of the "Editorial Board" member returned. "Detective Hale. You have received the new case files, I see. A tragedy and a nightmare. So much raw human drama. It demands your full attention, does it not?"
"What did you do?" Pennyworth's voice was a low blade.
"We? We did nothing. We are editors, not authors of such… pulp fiction." The voice dripped with disdain. "But a good editor understands pacing. When the main plot becomes too intense, a skillful diversion into a gripping subplot can give the reader necessary relief. It also," the voice added, "occupies the protagonist so he cannot see the final edits being made to the chapter's climax."
"You had that girl killed. You took that boy."
"You have no proof of that.You have a violent boyfriend and a faceless predator. The world is full of them. We merely… highlighted these existing storylines. Suggested their dramatic potential." The voice hardened. "Your twelve hours are now ten, Detective. Your resources are now divided. Your emotional capacity is now strained. The choice is clearer than ever: take the offered pen and help us write a calmer, safer ending for everyone… or watch as the narrative spirals into uncontrollable tragedy. The murder. The kidnapping. Your parents. The journalist. All loose ends, fraying in a storm of your own making."
The call ended.
Nancy stared, horrified. "They're using innocent lives as plot devices. To pressure you. To bury the Vance story."
Pennyworth stood perfectly still, the weight of three separate horrors pressing on him. The vast, silent conspiracy. The butchered girl. The stolen child. The Author had weaponized the very concept of tragedy itself.
He could chase the boyfriend, try to find Leo, pour himself into the noise as they intended. Or he could ignore the screaming distractions and stay focused on the silent war, gambling two more lives as collateral damage.
It was an impossible calculus.
But in that impossible space, Pennyworth saw a sliver of a third path. The Author thought in narratives. They saw the murder and kidnapping as subplots to divert from the main plot.
What if he could turn their subplot against them?
He looked at Nancy, a dangerous, focused light in his eyes. "You're still publishing the Vance story. Now. But we're adding a postscript."
"What postscript?"
"We connect the dots for the public.Not with proof we don't have, but with questions. We ask: Is it a coincidence that a medical student is brutally killed the same day a prosecutor dies of a 'heart attack'? Is it random that a child vanishes as a detective closes in on a network that 'edits' inconvenient people?" He began typing a new message to Morsh. "We make their distractions part of our narrative. We shine the spotlight they created right back into their eyes."
He typed to Morsh: Lieutenant. Triple the forensics on Forester. I want every fiber, every chemical trace from that apartment. And I want the bus route mapped. Every private security cam, every doorbell camera within a mile of that stop. We're not just solving these cases. We're treating them as crime scenes for a different crime.
He hit send.
The Author had written two brutal subplots to distract him.
Pennyworth Hale was going to edit their draft, and make them co-authors of their own exposure.