The security lights cast yellow pools across the snow, but beyond their reach lay impenetrable darkness. Bit's flashlight beam cut through the whiteout in jittery arcs as he sweptit across the clearing.His first step sank him ankle-deep in fresh powder, requiring an awkward high-step to advance. Each subsequent footfall created a sucking sound as the snow compressed beneath his weight.
“This is insane,” Bit muttered, the words visible as puffs of vapor that the wind immediately shredded and carried away. He trudged around the corner of the cabin, sweeping his light across the casing. The generator’s hum was louder out here, and he kept his beam steady in front of him, searching for whatever had made that noise.
He even took time to check each camera mount.
The third camera, the one that had captured the dark blue, was tilted slightly downward. Its field of view had been slightly altered by accumulated snow on its housing. He carefully brushed it clean and readjusted the angle, scanning the tree line so he wouldn’t be ambushed out of nowhere.
His toes were beginning to numb despite the insulated boots, and each breath was like inhaling shards of glass. There was nothing out here, and he could now pat himself on the back for a job well done in securing the perimeter.
Bit followed his own rapidly disappearing footprints. The wind had already begun filling them in, smoothing the depressions he'd made just minutes before. He increased his pace, the beam of his flashlight bouncing erratically across the snow as he moved. His teeth were beginning to chatter, and the tip of his nose had lost all feeling. He wasn’t a coffee drinker, but he might steal one of Sylvie’s hot chocolate packets.
He finally rounded the last corner. Two things happened at once. His cell phone immediately started to vibrate, and had his gaze not been on the ground in front of him, he would have missed the irregularity in the snow.
There was a depression where none should be, but there was no denying it was a footprint.
A boot print, to be precise.
Bit didn’t need his flashlight once he stepped beneath the pale wash of the security lights. The divergence in the snow was unmistakably a second set of tracks branching off from his own. The footprints were distinct, leading away from his path toward the dense tree line.
No movement.
No sound beyond the steady hum of the generator.
Whoever had been out here had chosen their moment carefully, waiting until Bit was on the far side of the cabin before making a move. He crouched low, breath ghosting in front of him as he studied the tracks. A man’s boot, size eleven or twelve, the tread deep and clean with a small notch in the heel—distinct enough to match later, if they ever found the shoes.
A sharp gust swept through, flinging icy crystals against his face. Already, the edges of the prints were softening beneath the relentless fall of snow. Five more minutes and the trail would vanish completely, as if it had never existed.
“Evidence disappears, memory distorts, but documentation persists,” Bit muttered, tugging off his glove with his teeth.
He retrieved his phone, opened the camera, and began taking pictures. Some with a flash, and some without. Once he finished, he didn’t linger.There also hadn’t been a need to click on the notification that someone had triggered the sensors.
Bit turned and trudged back through the drifts, the wind snapping at his coat. Inside, the warmth was almost like a sweltering sauna, but he didn’t bother peeling off his layers before heading straight to his monitors.
“Got you,” Bit muttered as the footage made his pulse kick.
A dark figure, ski mask pulled tight over his face, sprinted alongside the far side of the cabin. It was obvious the intruder hadn’t anticipated Bit’s sudden emergence into the cold night, and in his panic, he had veered into the cameras' line of sight.
Brook had been right all along.
The first victim was most always key—and somewhere inside the cold silence of Harrowick, Heather Moore was still holding the answers.
16
Brooklyn Sloane
January 2026
Thursday – 9:53am
The photograph in Brook's hand spelled it out for her. She held it up once more, studying the dark figure against the harsh white glare flooding through the cabin window. The man’s need for information revealed part of the profile that the initial profiler—and she—had never been certain about.
Death wasn’t the reason the unsub had stopped killing women.
Outside, the storm had exhausted itself into sporadic flurries, but its aftermath had effectively sealed them inside this remote corner of Ohio until the plows could carve through the drifts piled along the narrow access roads.
Brook turned back around, mindful of the mug in her other hand, and leaned against the door of Bit's cramped cabin. Theo and Sylvie sat on Bit's half-heartedly made bed, tablets balancedon their laps, while Bit occupied his swivel chair in front of the cluttered table.
“If we go on the assumption that the intruder is our unsub, he is concerned enough about our presence to risk exposure,” Brook said as she leaned forward to set the photo on the table. There wasn’t much room to maneuver inside the cabin. “That’s to our advantage.”
