Elias Mercer didn't believe in gut feelings. He believed in patterns, anomalies, repetition. Gut feelings were just instincts sharpened by experience but even instincts needed evidence.
That manuscript? It was evidence.
After Marianne left, he scanned the pages into his system and ran them through his comparative software. Sentence structure, vocabulary clusters, linguistic quirks, anything to confirm authorship.
Results: 92% match to Senna Calix's published works.
Close enough to raise alarms. Far too close to ignore.
He picked up the first page again. Her style was unmistakable, elegant, sharp, layered. She never wasted a word. That alone set her apart.
But something felt… off.
There were shifts in tone he didn't recognize. Sentences that sounded like her but sat wrong in his mind, like they were written by someone trying too hard to sound like her.
He opened his files.
Five years ago, he'd pulled everything on Senna after her disappearance, unofficially. She fascinated him. Brilliant, broken people often did. Back then, he thought she might've staged her own death. Now, he wasn't so sure.
He opened a case folder: The Hollow Season, her last book. The final chapter was full of loose threads, an unnamed killer, an unresolved death, a narrator who claimed, "I'll vanish before I become what I write."
He stared at that line now.
Maybe she had.
Or maybe someone was helping her become it.
Elias drove into the city, down toward West 43rd.
He parked near the alley where the body had been found. Yellow police tape still fluttered at the entrance. A patrol car sat idle nearby, the officer half-asleep behind the wheel. Elias didn't stop. He kept walking.
The crime scene had already been cleaned up. Just a stain left behind, old blood and something darker, something forgotten. He stood there for a moment, letting the place speak.
Then he pulled the printed manuscript from his coat.
He matched details.
The metal dumpster. The flickering streetlamp. The broken fence panel on the east wall. All there. All written before the murder.
Coincidence was now off the table.
He took a photo of the alley, then another of the dumpster's graffiti tags and a line in red ink:
"The story doesn't end here."
Fresh. Definitely not city spray paint.
He narrowed his eyes.
He wasn't dealing with an admirer. This was a message. Or a game.
Or both.
Later that night, Elias sat in his apartment surrounded by case files and Senna's old interviews.
One clip stood out, a panel she did a year before her breakdown.
A moderator asked her, "How do you write such believable killers?"
Senna had smiled, tired and amused.
"I don't invent them. I listen to them. The worst ones never scream. They whisper."
Elias paused the video.
He picked up his phone and dialed a friend at the department. "I need the autopsy on the West 43rd victim. And anything you've got on a second body, if it turns up. This isn't over."
He hung up and stared out his window, city lights flickering like static.
Senna Calix had vanished five years ago.
But now, her voice was back.
And someone, maybe her, maybe worse was whispering through the ink.