The alley stank. Rotting garbage, wet pavement, and that metallic tang that always seemed to hang in the air after someone died. Darryl King pulled his collar up against the rain and stepped under the crime scene tape. Cold drizzle dripped from the fire escape overhead.

Another Devil’s Night masterpiece.

Amara was already crouched by the body, camera clicking in quiet bursts. She didn’t look up when he walked over.

“Bad one?” he asked.

“Worse,” she muttered. “You’ll see.”

The girl on the ground looked young. Twenties, maybe. Clothes soaked through. Eyes wide open. Her limbs were all wrong bent and posed like she’d been arranged, not dropped. No signs of struggle. Just precision. Almost artistic.

Darryl crouched beside her and studied the wounds. Neat. No jagged hesitation. Whoever did this didn’t panic. They carved.

The girl’s purse lay a few feet away, half its contents dumped into the rain lip gloss, a notepad, gum wrappers. No phone. No wallet.

Amara pointed to something near the victim’s hand. “That’s new.”

It was a rose. Red. Perfect. Sitting on the wet concrete like it had been placed there in a moment of ceremony. It hadn’t wilted, hadn’t soaked up a drop.

Darryl shook his head. “He’s leaving flowers now?”

Amara didn’t answer. Neither of them needed to say it this wasn’t random. This was personal. Staged. Someone had put thought into every inch of this scene.

The coroner, Ramirez, arrived a few minutes later. Quiet guy. Efficient. He looked over the body like he was reading a really messed-up instruction manual.

“Multiple stab wounds. Chest and stomach,” he said flatly. “Whoever did this knew what they were doing. Nothing sloppy.” He lifted the victim’s wrist and pointed. “And this tiny incision. Clean. Not deep. Like they were checking for something.”

“Or looking,” Amara added. “Whatever they didn’t find… maybe that’s why she ended up here.”

The rain kept coming down, washing everything except the dread out of the alley. Forensics worked fast photos, prints, whatever trace evidence they could gather. The rose got bagged like it was radioactive.

Back at the precinct, the pieces started falling into place fast.

The victim was Sarah Miller. Freelance journalist. Known for getting under the skin of the city’s ugliest institutions. Her last few articles had taken shots at Hell’s political elite including some dirty council contracts and missing persons cases that nobody wanted to talk about.

Her apartment had been wrecked. Not robbed. Tossed. Only thing gone? Files. Drives. Notes.

“She found something,” Darryl said, flipping through one of her reports. “And someone didn’t want it getting out.”

They started connecting dots. Other women had turned up over the last year. Activists. Whistleblowers. All with similar wounds. All staged. Always clean. Always careful.

This wasn’t a spree.

It was a system.

Amara found the link when she pulled a name from Sarah’s synced cloud files: Bianca Payne. Local gallery owner. Missing since Devil’s Night.

“She was digging into her, too,” Amara said. “Gallery’s been closed for days.”

“We got ourselves a list,” Darryl replied. “And someone’s crossing names off.”

Then came the twist. Forensics flagged a blood trace on the rose. Tiny. But not the victims.

It matched Raphael Cortez, a fixer known to run errands for Councilman Victor Martel. A guy with clean suits, dirty hands, and a graveyard full of rumors behind him.

They pushed hard. Surveillance. Wires. Banking records. Eventually, they found Martel’s hidden safe full of hush money payoffs, lists of names, and one thing they didn’t expect:

A file marked Bianca P.

That’s when it got personal.

After that, the roses started showing up everywhere. Not just crime scenes. Desk chairs. Car windshields. Hell, one turned up on the front desk at the precinct, just sitting there like it belonged. Nothing behind but dread and questions. He tucked the pendant into an evidence bag, sealing it like it might somehow answer the million things he didn’t know yet.

Amara exhaled, brushing wet hair from her face. “He’s careful. Too careful. It's like he wants us close, but not close enough.”

They headed back to the precinct, rain still hammering the roof of the cruiser like the city itself was warning them off. But the pendant stuck in Darryl’s mind, a detail that didn’t quite fit with the rest of the killer’s clean, surgical chaos. It felt almost… warm. Human.

Back inside, Amara ran the piece through evidence logs. Nothing flagged right away, but the carving style it had a look to it. Folk art. Maybe local. She started poking through unsolved, anything with a similar tag.

And there it was. A victim from months ago. Same signature pendant. Same wooden craftsmanship. Different bird. That one was an owl. Same carve mark on the back.

Darryl leaned over her shoulder. “So, either we’ve got an artist tying into this somehow, or the killer’s got a new hobby.”

“Or” Amara said slowly, tapping the file, “we’re looking at something bigger than we thought. A pattern no one’s noticed. Until now.”

The room went quiet except for the hum of the rain against the windows and the low buzz of fluorescent lights. The kind of silence that only comes when something clicks, and you both know you just stepped into deeper waters.

“This pendant,” Darryl said, “might be our thread.”