But there was nothing conventional about what he was doing. He wasn't angry. He wasn't traumatized. He was simply correcting errors in the fabric of reality, removing souls that had gone wrong and shouldn't exist in human bodies. It was maintenance, really, no different than the work he'd done for four decades keeping the tunnel systems functional. Some parts wear out, some components fail, some things need to be removed and disposed of so the larger system can continue operating properly.
David Langford and Linda Graves had been faulty components. The woman at City Hall would be another. And after her... well, he had a list. A long list of souls he'd identified over the years, people whose corruption he could see as clearlyas he could see the rust on these pipes or the cracks in this concrete.
The work would continue. Patiently, methodically, one correction at a time.
He emerged from Access Point 11 into the December morning, blinking in the weak sunlight. His truck was parked three blocks away, exactly where he'd left it. He stripped off the waders and packed them in his equipment bag, changed into the clean clothes he kept in the truck's cab, transformed himself back into the respectable consultant everyone trusted.
By the time he pulled onto the main road heading toward City Hall, he looked like any other professional heading to a routine business meeting. Clean-shaven, neatly dressed, carrying a leather portfolio that contained decades of expertise and institutional knowledge. No one would suspect. No one ever did.
He smiled slightly. Let them search. Let them build their profiles, analyze their evidence, and hold their press conferences. It wouldn't help them understand what was really happening in Duluth.
Because they couldn't see what he could see. They couldn't perceive the corruption in people's souls, the wrongness that wore human faces and went about daily life pretending to be normal.
But he could see it. He'd always been able to see it.
And he would continue his work until every wrong soul had been corrected.
The city was counting on him, even if they didn't know it yet.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The coffee had gone cold again, but Isla lifted the mug to her lips anyway, the bitter liquid cutting through the fog of exhaustion that had settled over her thoughts like a physical weight. The clock on her computer screen showed 11:07 AM, which meant she'd been staring at personnel records for nearly three hours straight, cross-referencing names and access codes until the data points began to blur together into meaningless patterns.
James appeared in her doorway, and from the tension in his shoulders, Isla knew he'd found something.
"Dr. Samuel Pritchard," he said, moving to her desk and setting down his laptop so she could see the screen. "Age fifty-eight, research scientist. He's been consulting with various city departments for the past six years on psychological screening protocols—specifically, developing assessment tools to evaluate personnel fitness for high-stress positions in emergency services and public safety roles."
Isla straightened in her chair, her exhaustion momentarily forgotten. "Psychological screening. So he would have had contact with—"
"City employees across multiple departments," James finished. "Police, fire, EMS, public works. According to his consulting contract, he's conducted personality assessments and stress response evaluations for hundreds of municipal workers over the years. He's built up quite a database of psychological profiles on people working for the city."
Isla pulled up Pritchard's profile on her own computer, scanning the details James had compiled. Born in Duluth, educated at the University of Minnesota with a PhD in biomedical engineering, thirty-two years of research experiencespanning multiple institutions. His LinkedIn profile showed a career focused on developing diagnostic technologies, with particular emphasis on non-invasive measurement systems.
But it was his publication history that made Isla's pulse quicken.
"Look at this," she said, clicking through to a research paper Pritchard had published three years ago in a journal of experimental psychology. The title alone made her stomach tighten: "Physiological Markers of Moral Deviation: Detecting Antisocial Personality Traits Through Autonomic Response Patterns."
James leaned closer, reading over her shoulder. "Jesus. He's trying to measure people's character."
Not quite, but close enough to be deeply troubling. Isla skimmed through the abstract, her investigator's mind cataloging the implications. Pritchard's research focused on developing technology that could allegedly identify psychological and moral deficiencies through physiological measurements—heart rate variability, skin conductance, pupil dilation, dozens of subtle biological markers that supposedly revealed a person's true character beneath whatever social mask they wore.
"It's pseudoscience," Isla said, though her voice carried doubt. "You can't measure morality with sensors."
"But if someone believed you could?" James pulled up another article, this one from a fringe psychology journal that Isla had never heard of. "Here's a paper from five years ago where Pritchard argues that certain people are fundamentally 'defective'—his word—at a neurological level. Says their brain architecture produces what he calls 'empathy deficits' that make them incapable of genuine prosocial behavior."
Isla read through the paper, her unease growing with each paragraph. Pritchard's writing was dense with technical jargon,but the core argument was disturbingly clear: he believed some people were biologically predisposed to cruelty and selfishness, that their capacity for empathy was structurally compromised in ways that made them dangers to society. And more troubling still, he believed his diagnostic technology could identify these people before they acted on their worst impulses.
"This is dangerous thinking," Isla said quietly. "Deciding that some people are fundamentally broken, that you can detect and categorize them based on physiological measurements—that's eugenics dressed up in modern technology."
"It's also exactly the kind of worldview that could justify murder," James said. "If you genuinely believe you can identify people who are neurologically incapable of basic human decency, then removing them starts to look like a public service rather than a crime."
Isla pulled up Pritchard's consulting records, tracking his assessments and evaluations over the past six years. The logs showed regular sessions with city employees—sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly—all properly authorized and documented. He'd conducted an evaluation as recently as last week, according to his notes describing "personality assessment for fire department promotion candidate."
"We need to know if he ever crossed paths with our victims," Isla said, already pulling up David Langford's work history. "If the city required psychological evaluations for maintenance workers—"
"Found it," James interrupted, pointing to an entry in Langford's employment file from fourteen months ago. "Langford was required to undergo a psychological fitness evaluation after multiple workplace complaints. The evaluator was Dr. Samuel Pritchard. According to Pritchard's notes, Langford was 'hostile and defensive throughout the assessment,' refused to engage meaningfully with the testing protocols,and made 'dismissive comments about the legitimacy of psychological evaluation.'"
Isla's heart rate picked up. "That's a direct interaction. And given what we know about Langford's interpersonal skills, I'm guessing that evaluation didn't go well."
