Kate’s breath hitched.Marcus didn’t have to freeze it—the picture had already burned into stillness in her mind.The man’s silver hair was longer than the last time she had seen him, almost shoulder-length, but his face wore the same stark geometry: cheekbones too sharp for comfort, eyes so deepset they might have had their own time zone.
He had taken off the cap and was wearing a dark garment that went down to his knees.He didn't look toward the camera; he looked down at his feet, taking obvious care as he descended.His left hand clamped the rail tightly.His right arm hugged a spot just below his ribs, elbow tucked, as though he were protecting a sore place or cradling something broken.He moved like a man much older.
“It’s him, isn’t it?”Marcus whispered as he froze the screen.
“Who?”asked Torres.“The Cox guy?He’s alive?”
"Alive and taking lives," Marcus said grimly.
Torres made a click with her tongue.“Let me get this straight.This guy is responsible for a whole bunch of killings that reference the Ten Commandments.He nearly died escaping from jail, but he’s survived and started killing again, and you think Brennan was his victim?”
Marcus simply nodded.Torres pointed at the figure on the screen.
“And that… cloak-thing, you think that’s what he was carrying in the other shots?”
“It’s got a hood,” Marcus said.“Look.”He pointed with a pen on the screen.“It’s all bunched up here behind his neck.”
“It's him," Kate said.The words came quietly but absolutely, the way you say your own name when someone else has a hand on your shoulder in the dark."It's Elijah Cox.”
The room seemed to go very still.Somewhere on the far side of the bullpen, a phone rang three times and stopped.Someone coughed.The city sounded like itself through the windows—sirens, horns, a truck downshifting—but inside the silence was taut as a tripwire.
Kate didn’t realize her hand had tightened around the coffee mug until a small arc of liquid broke over the rim and kissed her knuckles with heat.She set the cup down on the desk.She watched herself do it, as if her hands belonged to someone in a training video.
“He hasn’t fully healed,” she said.
“Good,” said Marcus.
Torres hit play and let the man move again: step, grip, draw breath and hold it, step again.The footage filled itself with the tiny betrayals of a body keeping secrets.On the seventh stair, he paused, just enough for the camera to catch it.He shifted, the right hip taking more of the load.He touched the rail with the fingertips of his left hand as if to test the metal’s reality.
Anyone else, anyone not trained to notice a stranger’s pain, would have read it as fatigue.Anyone not hunting him would have missed the calculus he was doing: how much can I ask of this body?How much can I risk?
“So we know now.He’s not using anyone to do his dirty work,” Marcus said.“Not directing from a basement, not puppeteering.He’s moving, he’s out, he’s hands-on.”
The relief that should have accompanied the clarity didn’t come.Kate felt something else instead—something colder, meaner.Cox wasn’t just alive.He was performing.He had come out to be seen.To be seenby her.
“Transit status yesterday,” Torres said, eyes flicking to a note that Marcus’s contact Richie had added to the file header.“North-easterly section only—signal issues past 96th.They were running truncated.That means he had to be Bronx-bound, not south.”
“He went north,” Marcus said, already moving—mentally, physically—to the next grid, the next list.“That gives us a slice of stations to focus on.We prioritize egress cams, street-level cams, token booths, retail on corners.Cross with purchase logs if he tapped a card.He won’t.But we ask.We ask and we ask again.”
“Hydra,” Torres said, already typing into a tasking email.“You chop and two more heads spring up, but you keep chopping.I’ll ping TARU to scrape every station on that branch for this window.I want shoe prints, I want the weird guy at the newsstand who remembers nothing until you buy a paper, I want some lady’s poodle who barked at a man with a cap and long greasy hair.”
Kate found she was standing.She wasn’t entirely sure when she’d left the desk.The screen’s light still made a cold rectangle on her retinas; Cox’s descending shape hung there like an afterimage.He had wanted this.He had stepped into the camera’s eye to put an end to doubts.Her doubts.A gift, wrapped and wired.
Her throat felt tight, as if the air were two degrees heavier.She became aware of Marcus watching her and forced her face back into neutral.“Good,” she said.“Brief all the precincts along that line.Send the BOLO with stills from the subway clip and a caution note—no hero moves.Anybody sees him, they call it in.No giving him a stage.”
Torres’s fingers stuttered.“Copy.”
For a few minutes, the room became all motion.Voices lifted.Laptops clacked.Marcus rattled off station names in a cadence like prayer.Torres carved the city up into tasks.The machinery of response turned, clean and practiced, the way it does when you’ve done this too many times.
Kate stood amid it and felt a different engine start up inside her—the small, stubborn one that had carried her through long stretches of doubt and disbelief.She needed to be outside.Just for a moment.To feel the cold, damp, New York air in her lungs.
“I’m getting some air,” she said, popping a tic-tac.
He nodded without looking up.“Sure.”
She walked the hall and hit the stairs, not the elevator—the urge to feel her own body doing something simple and strong pulled her down the narrow flights.The precinct’s front doors breathed her out into mid-morning Manhattan.The rain had gentled to a mist and the whole block smelled like wet paper, pretzels, and somebody’s cigarette.She stood under the overhang and let the air cool her head and her neck.
Across the street, a deli door jangled.A dog shook itself, ears flapping like applause.A street vendor cursed at a tourist with a hundred dollar bill.This city had so many noises you could hide anything inside them—a groan, a name, someone’s sudden death.
