Page 23 of Wrong Way

The homepage featured a large photograph of Valdez herself, taken in what appeared to be her studio. She was standing with her hands slightly raised and her eyes partly closed, positioned in front of a large decorative mandala in amber and violet neon that glowed behind her on the wall. She was a woman in her late forties with long dark hair and a composed expression that was calculated to suggest peace rather than display it. She was quite pretty, and her best features were highlighted by the white dress she wore.

Of course she wore white.

The text beside the photograph read: Awakening begins with awareness. Catherine Valdez has guided hundreds of individuals toward deeper energetic alignment, spiritual clarity, and authentic transformation through personalized aura cleansing, chakra alignment therapy, and intuitive energy work. Each session is a sacred space for healing.

He read it twice. He had read it before, on earlier visits to the site, but repetition was part of the process. The language had a specific architecture. Every word was selected to perform two functions simultaneously: to promise something and to make that promise unverifiable. Energetic alignment. Authentic transformation. Sacred space. None of these phrases had a measurable referent. There was no standard by which you could determine whether the alignment had been achieved, whether the transformation was authentic, whether the space had been genuinely sacred or simply quiet and expensive. The client paid the fee and left with a feeling, and the feeling was the entire product.

He scrolled down to the Services section. The rates were listed in a clean, minimalist font that seemed designed to soften the numbers before they fully registered. A single aura cleansing session ran one hundred and sixty dollars for fifty minutes. A chakra alignment series, described as a recommended minimum of four sessions, came to seven hundred and twenty dollars. An extended intuitive energy work package, which included six sessions and what the site called a personalized energetic blueprint, was listed at thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.

He looked at the numbers for a moment, feeling slightly disgusted. Then he scrolled further.

The testimonials section was long, and the reviews were far too flowery and puffed up to be real. He read them systematically, moving from the top of the page downward.

"After three sessions with Catherine, I finally felt like I could breathe again. I had been carrying so much that I didn't even know was there, and she helped me release it. I can't recommend her enough."

"I came to Catherine during the hardest year of my life. I was skeptical at first, but something shifted after our second session. I felt genuinely lighter. She has a gift."

"I've tried therapy and it helped some, but the work I've done with Catherine has reached places that nothing else could reach. She sees things about you that you haven't figured out about yourself yet."

He stopped on that last one. She sees things about you that you haven't figured out about yourself yet. He had read variations of this claim across all of them, in different language but built on the same foundation. The healer perceives what the client cannot perceive. The healer accesses something the client cannot access independently. The client's improvement, therefore, depended entirely on the healer's continued presence, continued sessions, and continued payment.

This was the mechanism. Not the neon, not the white clothing, not the studio with its mandala on the wall. The mechanism was dependency. The client arrived in distress, seeking something practical and solid, something that would actually help, and was instead given a framework that kept them returning. More sessions needed. Another package recommended. The energetic blueprint requiring ongoing recalibration.

He clicked over to her Instagram page. It had been active for four years and had a following of roughly thirteen thousand—nothing big by any means, but a decent number or a small, niche business in a mid-sized city. She posted regularly, usually four or five times a week. The posts followed a consistent pattern: a photograph of the studio, a short text overlaid on a soft-focus image, an occasional testimonial screenshot repurposed as content.

One post from six weeks ago showed the neon mandala in the back of her studio, photographed in near darkness so that the amber and violet light dominated the frame. The caption read: Some lights don't need to shout. They simply hold the frequency. Come find yours.

He looked at the image for a long time. And he had to admit, the wording was enticing.

She had chosen that light with care. The mandala was not incidental decor. It was part of the presentation, part of what she was selling: the suggestion that her space held something luminous, something rarified, something the client could not find on their own. People photographed it. He had seen it reposted by clients in their own accounts, tagged with her studio name, drawing other clients toward the glow.

He had been watching her studio for three weeks. He knew her schedule. He knew the layout of the space from what was visible through the front window and from the photographs she posted online, which were more useful than she likely understood. The neon mandala was mounted on the east wall of the primary treatment room, its transformer installed behind the mounting panel on a bracket he had identified clearly in a behind-the-scenes post she had uploaded two months ago, captioned with something about the beauty of craftsmanship.

He closed the laptop and sat in the near-dark with the lamp warm on the table beside him.

The transformer on the worktable was ready. He had confirmed the modification twice. He had studied the studio's layout until he could move through it accurately in his mind with his eyes closed, and he had identified the point of contact that would complete the circuit.

He was not angry. He had not been angry in a long time. Anger was a response to surprise, and nothing about Catherine Valdez surprised him. She was exactly what she appeared to be. The people who left her reviews had been desperate and she had taken their desperation and turned it into a revenue stream, and she had done it with such consistency and such apparent warmth that they had thanked her for it.

He turned off the lamp and sat in the dark, smiling…and thinking about the visit he’d be making to see Valdez in an hour or so.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Kowalski came in at a few minutes past two, carrying a coffee and a slightly satisfied expression. Miles had quickly come to find that Kowalski was a quiet man unless he was asked a direct question, so to see him with a bit of excitement on his face made Miles dare to think he may be bringing some good news.

"I've got three officers pulling additional records," he said. "Business licensing, city permit databases, and one of them has a contact at the Better Business Bureau. They’ll be able to pull complaints filed against wellness businesses going back five years. Anything that might help us sort the list faster."

Miles sat back and pressed his palms flat against his lower back, arching against the pressure that had been building there for the last two hours. The chair was not a good chair. None of the chairs in the borrowed workspace were good chairs, and he had been in this one since before noon. He stood and stretched properly, walking a slow circle around the table while his back resettled.

"That's a huge help," he said. "Particularly the complaints piece. If any of these businesses have a history of clients who felt defrauded or misled, that's potentially a connection to why the killer is selecting within this category."

Kowalski nodded. "My thought exactly. Not that a complaint proves anything, but it might narrow the pool further if we're looking for businesses with a pattern of that kind of customer experience."

"We may not be able to narrow it much more," Miles said. He was still standing, one hand on the back of the chair. "At some point we’ll have to just bite the bullet and call the ones that are left—and I’d prefer to get started on that today. But if your people can get anything in the next hour, it's worth the delay."

"They'll be fast," Kowalski said. He picked up his coffee and looked at the whiteboard, where the working list was reproduced in Miles's handwriting. He studied it for a moment without commenting, then looked at Vic. "You find anything interesting?"

"Maybe," Vic said without looking up from her laptop. She had been on the same entry for the last several minutes, opening tabs and cross-referencing. She turned the screen slightly so both men could see it. "This one, in particular. I just came across it about five minutes ago. Catherine Valdez, Luminary Wellness Studio on East Cesar Chavez. She offers aura cleansing and chakra alignment. The site describes her work as providing both enlightenment and guidance to clients seeking deeper awareness."