The notification alert cuts through the predawn silence of my hotel room like a blade. Three-fifteen a.m. according to the digital clock on the nightstand, but I'm already awake, have been for hours, lying in darkness and running through contingencies for approaches I might never make.
I reach for my phone with movements that feel disconnected from conscious thought. The screen's blue glow reveals a news alert from Channel 7: "BREAKING: Second Murder Matches 'Carver' Pattern."
My blood goes cold.
I sit up in bed, fully alert now, my mind immediately shifting into the analytical framework that once kept me alive through two years of active work. Someone has killed again. Someone is continuing to corrupt my signature, to twist methods I developed for justice into something else entirely.
The article loads slowly on the hotel's sluggish Wi-Fi, each pixel revealing information that makes my chest tighter with building rage.
"Rebecca Martin, 29, a nurse at Metro General Hospital, was found dead in her apartment early Tuesday morning by building maintenance responding to reports of a water leak. The crime scene bears striking similarities to the Marcus Chen murder from last week, leading investigators to suspect the work of the same perpetrator."
Rebecca Martin. I scroll through the preliminary details, already cataloging everything wrong with this choice. A nurse—someone whose profession is built around healing, around helping people in their most vulnerable moments. The complete opposite of the predators I once hunted.
The article includes a photo: auburn hair, kind eyes, the sort of face that suggests someone who chose her career out of genuine compassion rather than simple economic necessity. Nothing in her background suggests violence, abuse of power, or any of the pathologies that would justify my attention.
She's innocent. Completely, fundamentally innocent.
And someone killed her using techniques I developed specifically for removing monsters from the world.
I close my eyes and count to ten, forcing my breathing to remain steady while fury builds in my chest like a physical thing. This isn't justice. This isn't even competent murder. This is desecration, the corruption of something that had meaning and purpose into random violence with window dressing.
I pull up additional coverage, cross-referencing between news sources to build a complete picture. The positioning matches my work perfectly—arms extended at ninety-degree angles, head tilted exactly fifteen degrees to the right, legs straight with feet precisely twelve inches apart. Whoever did this has studied my crime scenes with obsessive attention to detail.
But they're missing the point entirely.
The chest cavity was opened and sutured closed, just like Marcus Chen. Just like my historical work. But according to the police sources quoted in the articles, no foreign objects were discovered inside during the preliminary examination. No confession recording, no evidence of the victim's crimes, no justification for the violence inflicted.
Just empty precision. Ritual without meaning. The careful choreography of justice applied to someone who never deserved to die.
I dress quickly and step onto the hotel room's small balcony, needing the cold October air to clear my head. The city spreads below me in grids of light and shadow, millions of people sleeping peacefully in their beds without knowing that someone is using my work to terrorize the innocent.
The copycat understands my methodology perfectly but has fundamentally misunderstood its purpose. They've learned to replicate the external elements—the positioning, the surgical precision, the ritualistic aspects that made my work distinctive—while completely ignoring the philosophical framework that gave those elements meaning.
This is what happens when technique becomes separated from purpose. When method becomes more important than justice.
I pull out my burner phone and search for more detailed coverage, looking for crime scene details that might reveal something about the perpetrator's psychology. The same careful positioning suggests obsessive personality traits, probably someone with medical or surgical knowledge based on the precision of the chest incisions. The victim selection indicates either complete random choice or criteria I don't understand yet.
But it's the timing that concerns me most. Two murders in the span of a week, both designed to draw attention to my historical signature. Someone isn't just copying my work—they're announcing it, making sure the similarities can't be ignored by investigators or media coverage.
Someone wants the Carver to be resurrected in public consciousness. The question is why.
I scroll through reader comments on the news articles, noting how quickly the speculation has turned to fear and fascination. "Serial killer back in action." "Police have no leads." "Two innocent victims with no connection except the killer's signature."
That last comment hits the core of what's wrong here. My victims were never innocent. They were predators who had escaped justice through luck, power, or systematic corruption. Each death served a purpose beyond the simple removal of a threat—it was a message that some behaviors carry consequences even when the legal system fails to provide them.
Marcus Chen and Rebecca Martin have no connection to anything that would justify violence. They're not predators or abusers or corrupt officials who've escaped accountability. They're just people who happened to be in the wrong place when someone decided to use their deaths as a message.
A message directed at whom?
The answer sits heavy in my mind, though I don't want to acknowledge it yet. Because if someone is using my signature to send a message, there are only a few people who would recognize it clearly enough to understand what's being communicated.
Dr. Lila North, for instance. The forensic psychologist consulting on cases that bear remarkable similarities to work she witnessed firsthand nine years ago.
The thought makes my hands clench into fists hard enough that my knuckles crack. If someone is targeting her—if these deaths are designed to draw her into an investigation that might expose our shared history—then this isn't just about corrupting my methods anymore.
This is about threatening the only person who ever understood what my work actually meant.
I scroll through more coverage, looking for any mention of investigative consultants or expert analysis. It takes fifteen minutes before I find it, buried in a Metro PD press release: "The department continues to utilize forensic psychology expertise to develop a profile of the perpetrator."
