He'd been mapping these tunnels for years—first as a junior engineer fresh out of college, then as a systems analyst, then as a senior infrastructure consultant. Decades of documenting, photographing, cataloging every inch of the network that snaked beneath the city like a circulatory system. The official maps showed seventeen access points and two miles of primary corridors. His maps—the real maps, the complete ones—showed twenty-three entrances and nearly four miles of forgotten passages that the city had lost track of decades ago.
He paused at Junction G-7, consulting the hand-drawn schematic he always carried in his weatherproof notebook. This section dated back to 1924, part of the original network built when Duluth's downtown was expanding rapidly. The city had renovated and rerouted over the years, abandoning older sections as they built newer, more efficient systems. But the old tunnels remained, hidden and forgotten by everyone except him.
The water here was knee-deep in places, accumulating in low spots where drainage had failed long ago. He'd brought waders today, anticipating the conditions. The rubber boots kept him dry as he splashed through pools that reflected his headlamp beam like black mirrors.
Linda Graves had been surprisingly easy.
He'd studied her for three weeks, learning her routines, her vulnerabilities, her sense of professional duty that he'd known would be her undoing. Social workers were predictable in their way—they wanted to help, wanted to save, wanted to be the hero who showed up in a crisis. All he'd had to do was create the crisis. He’d chosen a random name—Jessica. Surely, there was someone in her practice she’d treated with that name.
He had been right.
She’d assumed an identity for him and came to the rescue.
The burner phone he'd used to text her was already at the bottom of Lake Superior, smashed into fragments and scattered across a hundred yards of rocky lakebed. The maintenance coveralls he'd worn—complete with an authentic Public Works logo he'd purchased online—were ash in his fireplace. The key card he'd used to access the tunnels was legitimate, issued to him through his consulting contract with the city. If anyone checked the logs, they'd see his authorized entry at 10:47 PM, marked for a routine inspection of decommissioned sections. Nothing unusual. Nothing that would raise suspicion.
He'd waited for her at Access Point 4, exactly as promised in the text. When she'd arrived—nervous but determined, clutching her phone and pepper spray like they could protect her from what was coming—he'd been the picture of helpful professionalism. Just a maintenance worker doing late-night rounds, happy to escort the concerned social worker to wherever her troubled client was waiting.
She'd trusted him instantly. The uniform did that. The badge clipped to his belt, the official-looking clipboard, the easy familiarity with the tunnel system. He was authority, safety, someone who belonged in this underground world. She'd followed him without question, even as he'd led her deeper into the network, away from the active sections and into the cold, abandoned corridors where her screams would never be heard.
The blow from behind had been quick and efficient—a section of pipe he'd positioned weeks ago in that exact chamber, waiting for the right moment. She'd dropped like a stone, her phone skittering across wet concrete to land face-down in a puddle. He'd held her under the water for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, counting in his head while her body convulsed and then went still.
He felt nothing as he'd done it. Not satisfaction, not pleasure, not even the clinical interest he might have felt performing any other necessary task. Linda Graves had simply needed to be removed from the world, and he'd removed her. Simple as that.
Because her soul was wrong.
He could see it when he looked at people—had been able to since childhood, though he hadn't understood what he was seeing until much later. Some people's souls shone clean and bright, properly aligned with their bodies, everything functioning as it should. But others... others had souls that were twisted, corrupt, misaligned. Dark things that didn't belong in human vessels.
Linda Graves's soul had been particularly offensive. He'd seen it the first time he'd encountered her, three years ago when she'd processed his sister's case with cold efficiency and clinical detachment. His sister had been in crisis, desperate for help, and Graves had treated her like a form to be filled out, a problem to be categorized and filed away. He'd watched the interaction, seen the way Graves's eyes stayed flat and disinterested while his sister cried, and he'd understood: this woman's soul was rotten.
David Langford had been the same. He'd seen it in the man's face during a service call two years ago, when Langford had come to fix a heating issue and treated him like an idiot for not understanding the complex system. The condescension, the casual cruelty, the complete lack of basic human courtesy—allsymptoms of a soul that had gone wrong somehow, turned dark and twisted inside its human shell.
They needed to be corrected. Or if correction wasn't possible—and it never was, he'd learned—they needed to be removed.
He emerged from the water into a drier section, checking his notebook again. This area connected to the newer tunnels through a maintenance junction that had been sealed off in 2008 but remained accessible if you knew where to look. He did. He knew everything about this underground world.
A sound echoed from somewhere behind him—footsteps, the splash of someone moving through water. He froze, his hand moving instinctively to the pipe wrench in his tool belt. But then he heard voices, two men talking about pressure readings and valve assemblies. Just maintenance workers on their rounds.
He relaxed. Even if they saw him, they wouldn't question his presence. His credentials were impeccable, his authorization legitimate. He was supposed to be down here, conducting his routine inspections and updates to the unofficial maps the city relied on. If anything, the maintenance workers would defer to him—he was senior in years and experience, someone who'd forgotten more about these tunnels than most current employees would ever learn.
The voices faded as the workers moved in a different direction, and he continued his exploration. He was looking for a specific chamber, one he'd marked in his notebook six months ago as potentially useful. The city had installed new temperature sensors throughout the active sections, monitoring systems that could detect anomalies and send alerts. But the abandoned sections had no such surveillance. They were perfect—isolated, controlled, invisible to anyone who didn't know they existed.
He found the chamber at the end of a long corridor that required him to crouch to pass through. It was smaller than theone where he'd killed Linda Graves, but the ceiling was lower and the space more confined. Perfect for what he had planned.
His next target was already chosen. He'd been watching her for weeks, studying her routines and vulnerabilities the same way he'd studied the others. Her name was irrelevant—what mattered was her soul, which shone with the same corrupt darkness he'd seen in Langford and Graves.
She worked at City Hall, third floor, processing permits and building applications. He'd interacted with her twice, and both times he'd seen the way she treated people who needed her help—the dismissiveness, the casual cruelty hidden behind bureaucratic efficiency, the sense that anyone seeking assistance was an interruption in her day. Her soul was wrong. She needed to be removed.
He'd already purchased a new burner phone, already crafted the messages he'd send to lure her to the tunnels. He'd studied her schedule, knew when she left work, knew the route she took to her car in the parking structure adjacent to the old maintenance building. It would be easy to intercept her, to present himself as helpful city infrastructure consultant with urgent information about a permit she'd processed, to guide her into the tunnels where her soul could be properly dealt with.
He pulled out his phone—his real phone, the one registered to his actual name—and checked the time. 10:23 AM. He had a meeting at City Hall at noon, a routine consultation about proposed upgrades to the heating system in the municipal building. He'd need to head back soon, change out of his tunnel gear, transform himself back into the professional consultant everyone trusted and respected.
But first, he wanted to prepare this chamber. He needed to gather materials, position tools, create the conditions that would make the next correction as efficient as Linda Graves's had been. The pipe he'd used on her was still down there in that abandonedsection, wiped clean and positioned to look like debris. He'd need something similar here.
He spent twenty minutes setting up, moving with practiced efficiency. When he was finished, the chamber looked innocuous—just another abandoned space in a forgotten section of tunnel. But he knew its potential. He knew what it could become when the time was right.
As he made his way back toward Access Point 11—one of the hidden entrances only he and a handful of old-timers knew about—he thought about the FBI agent. Rivers. She'd been at both crime scenes, he was certain of it. He'd seen the additional security measures at the access points, the increased police presence near the tunnels. They were looking for him now, trying to understand what he was doing.
They wouldn't. They couldn't. Because they'd be looking for logic, for rational motive, for connections that made sense in their world of evidence and procedure. They'd construct profiles of angry former employees or traumatized citizens seeking revenge. They'd look for conventional explanations because that's what their training taught them to do.
