The sheriff's wife. The woman who filed for divorce three days ago and vanished. Blonde hair, fine-boned features, the kind of face that photographs well for church directories and charity galas. In death, her expression is slack, emptied of whatever she was feeling in her final moments. Her wedding ring is still on.
I observe the scene the way I have every Red Hands scene. With detachment. But underneath, a cold, heavy feeling settles into my gut.
What really happened here?
I study the handprint first, the flashlight on my phone angled to catch the texture of the blood against the grey cinder block.
Red Hands—Allen Webb—wore ultra-thin latex gloves molded with generic fingerprint whorls. It was one of his signatures within the signature, a layer of deliberate anonymity that made the handprint untraceable while maintaining its visual impact. The print he left was always the right hand, always positioned at the victim's eye level, always applied with a single, firm press that left a clean, complete impression.
No smearing. No gaps. No hesitation marks. The man treated it like a stamp, a seal of authenticity on his finished work.
This print is the right hand, but the size is wrong.
Webb's hand measured approximately seven and a half inches from the base of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. I know this because I measured it myself at every crime scene. This print is larger—closer to eight and a half inches, maybe nine. The fingers are thicker, the palm broader. It's the hand of a bigger man.
And the outline itself is wrong. It's not as clean, too faded in some parts where insufficient pressure was applied, too heavy in others where the hand pressed harder to compensate. The thumb print is smudged, dragged slightly to the left as if the hand shifted during application.
Red Hands never shifted. His prints were precise, consistent, as reliable as a fingerprint because, in a way, that's exactly what they were. His identifier. His authorship.
This print is a forgery. A good one, if you don't know what you're looking at. But I've spent months staring at the real thing, photographing it, measuring it, learning it the way you learn the face of someone you're hunting.
This isn’t it.
The realization moves through me like ice water. I photograph the print and include a measurement scale, then move to the nail polish.
Crimson Kiss. The right brand, the right color. That specific, aggressive red that sits between arterial and candy, the color Webb chose because it screamed falseness to him, because it was the loudest, most garish declaration of lies he could paint onto a dead woman's hands.
But the application is wrong. Red Hands used multiple coats and overflowed onto the cuticles intentionally, let the color bleed past the nail bed like it was consuming the finger, because that was the point. The excess was the message.Look how false she was.
This application is hardly an application at all. There are no more than two overlapping coats striped down the center of each nail. The color sits timidly within the boundaries of each nail, faint and translucent where it should be thick and aggressive. The brush strokes are hasty, impatient, the work of someone who knows what the finished product should look like but doesn't have the patience or the skill to replicate it.
I move to the body. The cuts.
Evelyn's blouse has been unbuttoned, and beneath it, her chest and abdomen bear a series of incisions. Parallel lines, evenly spaced. At first glance, they match Red Hands's signature work: the methodical, layered cutting designed to peel back skin in controlled strips.
At first glance.
The cuts are the right depth but in the wrong places. Red Hands knew anatomy intimately from fifteen years of daily practice as a mortuary technician. His cuts followed the natural lines of the body, the planes, the paths of least resistance. They were efficient, even elegant, if you could stomach the word in context.
These cuts fight the body. They cross muscle fibers at awkward angles. Two of them have jagged edges where the blade caught on tissue and was forced through rather than guided. The spacing is close to Red Hands's pattern but not exact—slightly too wide in some places, slightly too narrow in others.
This is the work of someone who studied photographs. Crime scene photos, maybe.
Whoever did this never spent years cutting open the dead.
I stand, my knees aching from crouching. The cold in my gut has solidified into something with edges.
This isn't Red Hands.
Red Hands is dead, consumed by knives and cold and the hungry dark that lives in Sera's house. Allen Webb will never killagain. I know this with absolute certainty because I watched the life left his body.
And Evelyn doesn't fit the victim profile. Not even close. Red Hands chose women in transformation—women who had reinvented themselves, changed names, moved towns, shed old skins. Women who were becoming.
Evelyn Harrow was a Hallmark employee who parked in the same spot every day and ordered the same salad for lunch. She wasn't transforming. She was enduring. The only new thing she'd done in her life was file for divorce from a man only three days ago.
Which is exactly why she's dead.
She knew things, and a divorce means depositions, discovery, attorneys asking questions while under oath. A divorce proceeding would give her every reason and every legal framework to start talking.
