The office welcomed him in with its glass wall and hush of peace. Only it felt too quiet now without Frank’s low grumble filling the space, the chair opposite his desk conspicuously empty. Even the crime board seemed too cryptic, unfinished. But when his gaze slid to the couch in the corner, he didn’t think of Frank; his thoughts drifted to last night, and the soothing comfort Ash’s presence had brought into the room.
Dammit, kid. Why’d you have to be so stubborn?
He hung his hat and coat, draped his suit jacket over the chair, and dropped into it with a weary creak. He lit a cigarette, smoke curling upward as he powered up the computer. Time to see what the database had on Calgrave’s favorite byline.
Declan Frost: society darling, son of money, hands practiced at spinning copy into gospel. Rick had always hated how he hovered too close at crime scenes, jotting notes with eyes that drank in the carnage. Could those same nimble hands be as skilled with a blade? The thought of the Sculptor lurking behind that polished exterior made his skin crawl.
The silence pressed on him again. He could almost hear Frank filling it, some crack about Frost ironing his socks or buffing his laptop every night before bed. It would’ve cut the tension, kept the tick of the clock from gnawing at his nerves. Without it, the hush thickened. Rick exhaled smoke, loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, and bent toward the grind.
Three hours vanished into files, calls, and the blue wash of screens in the darkened office. He dug into Frost’s employment record, flipping past the suave headshot and contract details until he hit payroll. Deposits routed straight through CalgraveNational Trust, the city’s gilded vault for its upper crust. Rick rang the credit department, asked—politely, then less so—for a rundown of Frost’s card activity on September twenty-eight. No subpoena yet, but the manager had felt Homicide’s heat before and didn’t want to be the one who stalled an investigation. Ten minutes later, the record came through: a charge at 9:23 p.m. at the Green Fairy. Timestamp neat as a nail, Frost’s name inked beside it. Rick printed the slip, labeled it, and added it to the packet with Beth Walker’s statement and Griffin Shaw’s corroboration. One more brick in the wall.
Next, he checked theGazettearchives for the past two months, scouring Frost’s articles, each piece burnished with that barbed prose that made him the city’s dearest, every sentence staged for maximum spectacle. He flagged one column, then another, until he hit the feature on Travis Hall: a glowing treatise of a promising young painter, printed six weeks before Hall turned up faceless in a ditch. Frost had sat across from the kid, asked him questions, maybe even shaken his hand—and now Hall was rotting bare-skulled six feet under. Rick read the piece twice, stomach tightening. That made two victims tethered to Frost so far.
He leaned back, cigarette burning low, eyes tracing the lines he’d drawn between articles, dates, and faces on the wall. It looked convenient. Almost too convenient. The Sculptor’s work had always been clean, his cruelty exact. And now here was Frost, leaving his trail in print, practically waving flags. Sloppy didn’t fit the profile. Unless it wasn’t sloppy at all. Unless he wanted someone to see.
Rick ground the thought under his heel, stubbing ash into the tray. Instinct was a compass, but evidence was the map. And the map kept pointing to Declan Frost, each clue another card in a house Rick was building with firm fingers and too much smoke. He printed the article and added it to the case folder. Judges stillliked paper; so did Rick. It made the probable-cause packet feel real in the hand.
The knock cut through the slog. Kitty edged in, clutching a sheet, her knuckles pale against the paper.
“I’ve got something.” She crossed to his desk, set it down. “Elliot Price and Declan Frost were on the same swim team at Calgrave University. Price graduated two years later, but they definitely overlapped.”
Rick scanned the lines, the facts swimming into a pattern. “So that’s the link.” He slid the paper into the growing stack. “Can you pull Frost’s prints?”
She lingered, adjusting her glasses. “I think so. Journalists go through credential checks… his should be on file.”
Rick rose, the chair scraping against the floor. “Good. Send it to forensics. I’m headed down there now.”
Kitty trailed him across the office, footsteps light but uneven, a faint tang of unease drifting off her skin. At the threshold, she touched his forearm, hesitant, then let her hand fall. “Rick… you don’t really think Frost is the Sculptor?”
He paused to look at her, the weight of it landing heavy. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s pointing that way.”
Rick left her at the door and cut across the bullpen, the hum of phones and shuffle of papers dipping for half a second as gazes tracked him. He didn’t return the stares. Frost’s name clung to him, heavy as the smoke in his lungs, every step pushing him closer to either a break in the case or a dead end he couldn’t afford. For once, he felt the line tightening, pulling him down into the dark where answers lived.
You won’t get another one, you motherfucker. Not if I have something to say about it.
The elevator groaned downward through the Spire’s belly and spat him into the basement hall. The air down here carried its own stamp: antiseptic sharpened by burnt coffee, stale andstubborn as the walls themselves. Old bulbs sputtered and blinked, casting the corridor in a jaundiced glow as he made his way past side offices and old filing cabinets left to rust in place.
He pushed through the glass double doors at the end, the hush of the forensics wing deepening as the lab closed around him. Rows of microscopes sat idle on the counters, their lenses glinting under the low light, the place carrying the solemn air of a chapel. The smell of ethanol made him want to scratch his nose and sneeze.
At the far station, Gloria hunched over her work, goggles shoved up into her hair like a misplaced tiara. She leaned toward the glow of her computer, shoulders curved, fingers dancing over a tray of slides with flamboyant precision. Her copper curls were sculpted into careful waves despite the hour, her red lipstick a sharp, cinematic slash, mascara refusing to smudge even under harsh morgue lights. A half-eaten sandwich sweated under its wrapper by the keyboard, forgotten, as if she fed only on drama and caffeine.
“Hey, G.”
“Slade,” she said without looking up, tone sharp enough to cut steel. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“So am I.” He came a few steps closer, shoes scuffing on the polished tiles, voice flat. “Need you to run Frost’s prints against that cigarette butt from the Burns scene. Kitty should’ve sent them down already.”
Gloria’s sigh was long, dramatic. She tossed a glance over her shoulder and sang, “Gordon, darling? Run this for—” She stopped, frowned at the empty doorway. “I forgot. Kid clocked out.”
Rick leaned against a filing cabinet, pulled a cigarette from the battered pack in his pocket. The rasp of his match flared in the sterile air, throwing a brief glow across stainless steel benches. Smoke curled upward in lazy ribbons. He drew deep,let the weight settle in his chest, then exhaled toward the ceiling’s raw ductwork.
Gloria shoved her sandwich aside with the heel of her hand, grumbling under her breath. “One of these days, Slade, I’m billing Homicide for hazard pay. My eyesight’s going to hell. Can’t tell if it’s the stress or my blood pressure, but either way, you clowns are killing me.”
“Send it to Accounts,” he muttered.
She snorted, her manicured nails already flying across the keyboard. Frost’s fingerprint file bloomed on the display, side by side with the capture from the Ravenholt Park cigarette butt. She zoomed in and ran a comparison software, the ridges and whorls thickening into black rivers.
Rick tapped ash into the tray, noticing her massaging her wrist absently. “You still seeing that chiropractor? Thought he was supposed to fix the carpal tunnel thing.”
