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He gaped like a fish, and I wondered if I’d broken him. Reapers weren’t common. I’d been in the SED over a decade and encountered only a handful. But while in the military, they were a fairly regular occurrence. Mass casualties brought them out like ants kicked from a hill.

“I wondered,” he muttered, his gaze distant. “His fuzziness makes sense now.”

“What did you want to tell me that you couldn’t say in the office?” I prodded.

“Oh, right.” He pulled up his phone. “The list of the dead.” He leaned closer to show me the screen. He pointed to Melody’s name. “When browsing the list her name was familiar and I dismissed it, because of Jude.” He glanced in the direction Jude had been, but Jude lingered behind me now, reading over my shoulder. “But that wasn’t it. It was because of the Bowman case.” He opened another file, and clicked through a few things to pull up a picture of an unfamiliar woman. “Lydia Bowman. The now deceased wife, was Melody’s PA.”

I blinked at the revelation. We’d all been thinking Melody was another victim, but maybe she was one of the perpetrators?

Hardy plowed ahead while I was still processing. “I started down that trail and kicked a hornet’s nest.” He lowered his voice. “Found out Cassidy was on Holt’s payroll. It’s classified as security in his financials, but damned if I can find what he was actually securing.”

Now it was my turn to gape.

“What?” Jude flailed beside me.

Of course, Hardy didn’t hear him, and kept going. “And Bowman had been recently added, both the cop and his wife. Wife was mostly hired to keep Melody from overspending her allowance. Or at least that’s what I’ve found records for. If the two cops were doing events or something, I can’t find records. Most everyone has dropped the older stuff to work on this new one.” He threw a chagrin expression in the direction he thought Jude might be. “I know Cassidy and Jude were a bit of a thing.”

Jude groaned. “We were not.”

“Not romantically speaking, no,” I agreed with him.

“I thought maybe Cassidy was using their time to keep tabs on Jude?” Hardy finally said.

“My parents threw me out at sixteen.” Jude’s voice was sharp. “Why send a douche canoe to stalk me now?”

“You made a name for yourself in homicide,” I said, connecting a few dots. “Connecting things in cases that most other detectives could only hope to, and maybe they were worried you’d follow their trail?” But that wasn’t all, I was certain. “Your parents tried to send you to that military school as a kid, but something happened…”

“Yeah, my grandparents won custody,” he said, sounding bitter. “I was old enough to choose them.”

If he’d been a powerhouse like he was now, would they have let him go? I doubted it. Did that mean his abilities hadn’t developed until he was older? Or was it something else?

The changeling had given him back a memory of seeing something as a kid, which meant he’d had power. Unpredictable? Or maybe the memories had been stolen from him, keeping him in the dark, making him seem more mentally unstable than powerful.

As an adult, his accomplishments made it harder to hide his power, even if he had no idea how to use it, or even that he was really doing anything at all. That put him on the radar not only of a nasty shadow demon eating people, but the military and anyone else looking for power.

Jude stared at nothing; jaw clenched tight as he worked through the same realization.

“Cassidy appeared after I solved that serial killer case in ‘23,” he finally said, his voice rough. He turned his gaze to me, looking shell-shocked. “A lot of folks showed up after that. And he was hot.” He grimaced, glancing my way. “Superficially. You’re way hotter,” he added quickly.

I snorted. “I don’t need you to stroke my ego.”

“Not the part of you I’d like to stroke.” Jude let out a long breath. “If this all goes back that far… how many more bodies are we missing?”

“What if that serial killer was tied to this too?” I said, the thought crystallizing as I spoke. “If he was one of theirs,” it would tie a lot of this together.

“Serial killer?” Hardy inquired, only getting half the conversation.

“Jude says he solved it in ‘23.”

Hardy’s brow rose. “Oh, yeah. The Scottsdale case. Nine dead. Mutilated.”

“Tortured,” Jude corrected, his voice tight. “What if they discovered it wasn’t enough for their rituals? What if they needed more? Like the fire. The candles and stuff came later.” He cursed. “And I missed it.”

Angel studied me. “Where’s the killer now?”

“Dead,” Hardy answered. “Didn’t even make it to trial despite being in twenty-four-seven solitary.”

“It was suspicious,” Jude recalled. “Though with him dead, the string of murders stopped, and the case got thrown in the solved pile. There was always a backlog of more murders.”