I think about her when I shouldn't.
Steam curling off her skin, towel wrapped low on her hips, slowly slipping. My eyes trace the line of her spine like it's something I've studied a hundred times in silence and only now admit I know by heart. She's not looking at me. That's part of it. No performance. No reaction. Just her, quiet in her own body, letting the heat from the shower drip down her legs. I step up behind her. Not touching—yet. I feel the warmth rolling off her. I want to desperately press my mouth to the curve of her gentle shoulder and taste skin. Tell her that this—her, calm and unguarded and real—is the most dangerous thing I've ever wanted.
And then I'm blinking, hands on the wheel, music low and the taste of guilt already bleeding into the back of my throat. I roll the window down an inch and let the cold slap me clear.
Usually, I enjoy driving through the mist-slick roads just past dawn, windshield streaked with last night's rain, sky still clinging to the kind of gray that never quite becomes day. The trees on either side of the highway drip steadily onto the asphalt, branches heavy, bent low. The road hums beneath the tires, steady and numbing while a random radio station plays blues and soft drums. Background noise for guilt. She's not in the car, of course. That doesn't stop anything.
My hand rests on the gearshift, fingers flexed just slightly, like maybe I'm imagining hers resting over mine. The heat of it. Her weight, her quiet. Her hair still damp from the shower, curling slightly where the ends meet her breasts. Bare shoulders. Soft skin. The kind of softness no one would expect from her.
I've seen her clean a Glock without blinking. Tear through a scene with surgical focus. That mouth of hers is sharp enough to draw blood without ever raising her voice. I wonder what it would feel like to trace the curves of her body slowly, without hurry, without permission, without fear of being caught.
Not when I'm working. I'm a professional, after all. I shouldn't want her. Not like that.
She's my partner. She's married. She's grieving something I'll never fully understand.
But I do want her.
Ahead, the precinct comes into view—concrete and brick, its windows still dark at places. A gray rectangle of poured concrete and weather-warped brick, tucked at the edge of town where the strip malls start to thin. One of the floodlights above the entrance flickers every few seconds, never quite broken, never quite working. The building looks tired. Not rundown, just used, like it's held more stories than it can remember. The flag outside is still soaked from yesterday's rain, its edges snapping softly in the wind, whispering something no one wants to hear. A single cruiser idles out front, exhaust curling like smoke. I pull into my usual spot and kill the engine. For a second, I sit there, hand still on the keys, eyes unfocused. Her voice is in my head, the way she said no when I asked if she was ready last night. Simple. Flat. Honest. None of us is ever ready for what this job brings, though.
I wanted to reach for her hand and say "you're not alone". But I didn't. I never do.
I breathe out slowly, open the door, and let the morning bite down on my skin, wind cutting through my coat. My shoes crunch over wet gravel. I grab the coffee tray from the passenger seat and cross the lot like I haven't just spent ten minutes driving through her in my mind.
Inside, the air smells like damp paper and burnt coffee. The front desk is empty, save for a half-finished report and a Styrofoam cup bleeding ring-shaped stains into the paper. The fluorescent lights overhead buzz in syncopated rhythms while the heating vents hiss just loud enough to remind you they're working, though not very well. Everything in here is a little too gray. Voices murmur down the hall—low, unhurried. A copier clicks in the far room, spitting out pages one slow sheet at a time. I shift the coffee tray in my hands and move toward the bullpen.
I spot her before she sees me. Dalia's sitting at her desk, leaning slightly forward, sleeves rolled, pen in hand. Her hair is tied back tight into a ponytail. Her jacket hangs off the back of her chair, and there's a file open in front of her that she's not flipping through anymore. She's staring but not at anything specific, just into the space between the facts.
I pull in a breath and smile—natural, familiar. Shoulders relaxed. Voice calibrated to "colleague." This is what I do. This is who I am. The partner. The good one. The safe space.
"Brought caffeine," I say, stepping in. She blinks once then looks up at me unhurriedly. The expression doesn't shift much but the tightness in her jaw softens. Barely. I pretend that's enough.
She doesn't smile, but she rarely does this early. I set the cup on the edge of her desk, careful not to shift the papers beneath her hand. Her fingers brush the cup.
"Thanks," she murmurs, turning back to the file, but not fully. Her body stays half-open toward me, like she hasn't decided whether to talk about the case now or later. I think about saying something—about the spiral, the stitching, anything. But her pen starts moving again, and the moment's gone.
The hallway past her desk is cooler, narrower. I quietly pass the break room, silently nodding at the people trickling in. The air changes the deeper in I go, less movement, less noise. More weight.
The evidence room waits at the end, behind a door that sticks at the top left corner. I nudge it open with my shoulder, careful not to spill my coffee and step inside.
Let the silence have me.
The incident board in the back room is half-lit, half-forgotten, yellow bulbs overhead doing more humming than shining. There's a water stain in the corner ceiling tile that's been spreading since spring. I've mentioned it twice. No one cares. I set the coffee down on the edge of the desk and lean over the evidence spread. Photos. Scene maps. Paperwork with too many blank spaces. The woman's image looks worse in print. It's somehow less real, grainier, more like a stage prop than a human being. I shake my head at the dark thought.
The dress shows stark in the flash, while the ribbon in her braid gleams faintly, like someone thought to brush it out before tying it. I flip to the hands. The stitching's rougher than I remember, thick thread pulled tight. Whoever did it wasn't trying to make it pretty—they were trying to make it stay. One hand darker, one lighter. Neither hers. Neither recent, either. The skin tone already fading at the knuckles, the nails dull and hollow. The murderer must have kept it preserved for some time.
Then, I study the spiral again. In the close-up, you can see where the ash dragged against the floor grain. There's definitely weight behind the lines. The smear ends mid-curve, like the chalk ran out—or like the point was never to finish it at all. Hard to guess what the intent was here.
I scan the rest of the report. Victim: unknown. No ID. No hits on prints. No missing persons match. The body is twenty to thirty, give or take, no recent trauma outside the stitching: wasn't beaten, wasn't choked. No blood, no signs of fight. Whoever posed her didn't kill her with force.
It makes my skin itch.
I sit back and glance at the corkboard. Empty pins scatter like abandoned thoughts, photos from last night pinned center.
"Not the first," I whisper into the empty room. I pull a file from the stack at the back of the desk. I keep coming back to an old case... One of mine, back when I was newer and slower and still said "maybe" too often.
A girl found in an abandoned church just outside state lines. She wasn't posed like this but there was an occult mark near the altar. Deep down I know it's a long stretch to connect these two cases and perhaps it's just my ego trying to do the good old two birds, one stone. It's been bothering me though because back then it was dismissed as graffiti. A kid playing with matches. The whole case got buried in budget paperwork and dead-end interviews. But I remember it. I remember all the unsolved ones.
I flip through the photos. The spiral's not identical, but close enough to linger. It isn't complete either, just the first two curves. Similar thickness. Possibly same material?
I'm reaching. This isn't proof. But it's something.
I sit down on a swivel chair and scoot over to my laptop. The screen lights up and I squint at the digital database, searching archived crime scene markings. Half an hour later, nothing conclusive—but a handful of cases that tug. Marks dismissed. Scrawls misfiled. All incomplete, all in places that shouldn't have been touched for years.
There's a knock—light, habitual.
Dalia.
I don't turn around. The door creaks open slowly and I feel her pause in the doorway, hear the rustle of her sleeves as she crosses her arms.
"Tell me you've got something," she says. "Anything?"
I hear the click of her bootheel against the floor behind me. "Similar to a case I caught four years ago. Abandoned church. Spiral in chalk on the altar. We thought it was a prank."
She leans forward enough for the scent of her shampoo to reach me—faint citrus. "The spiral?"
I meet her eyes, finally. "I don't believe in coincidence."
She studies me. Or maybe she's reading something behind me. Her jaw tenses slightly, that familiar tick.
"I'll pull the autopsy report when it comes in," she says. "We'll build from there."
She turns before I can ask anything else.
And she's gone.
By the time I catch up to her back in the main floor, she's already sitting. Her desk looks the same—papers spread, pen resting diagonally across the corner—but something in the air has changed. Her posture's wrong. Stiff. Like she's waiting for something she doesn't want to deal with, hand hovering over the file.
I don't think. "Let's investigate the church."
Her hand freezes. The file stays where it is. She doesn't look up at first, just exhales slowly through her nose, the way she does when she's disappointed in the universe.
"It's out of jurisdiction," she says flatly.
"It's still a body."
"A four years old one."
"The method—" I stop myself. Adjust. "It's not nothing, Dalia."
Her head suddenly snaps to me. It's not anger, not even frustration. It's the expression she saves for when she's trying not to say something she knows she'll regret. Her eyes are sharper than usual, but not brighter. Exhausted.
"You're seeing ghosts," she says. "We've got enough of the real ones to deal with."
I step closer, lean on her desk with both hands. "Maybe. But what if I'm not?"
She blinks. Once. Slow. Then turns back to her desk like that's the end of the conversation. She picks up a page, skims it without reading. I see her fingers tremble once. Just slightly. She definitely hasn't slept. I know the signs, the morning jitters of too much caffeine. The way her shoulders hold tension too high. The way she's still wearing the same white shirt from yesterday.
Her phone rings. She answers with the kind of clipped professionalism she saves for people she doesn't want to speak to. A pause. A long "hmm". Another pause.
"Autopsy's delayed," she mutters, barely glancing up. "Power outage at the lab. Systems are fine but they're prioritizing cases they can actually close."
I make a weak attempt at levity. "Guess dead bodies aren't getting warmer anytime soon."
She doesn't even look at me for that one. Should I be embarrassed for that one? Weirdly, I don't care.
Dalia is gathering another handful of papers, flipping too fast to actually read them, jaw's locked, muscles ticking.
I try again. Last push. "Just say yes. We go, we check it, we come back. Worst case, it's nothing. Best case... it's something."
She slaps the file closed a little too hard. The sound makes a nearby rookie jump in his chair. I'm stunned, but try my best not to show it.
"Why?" she snaps, voice low but sharp. "So you can drag this through mud and pull symbols out of coffee stains?"
I blink. She doesn't raise her voice, not really. But it's enough to draw attention.
"I'm not chasing ghosts, Wexler. I'm not patching old theories together just to feel like we're getting somewhere."
Wexler.
"I didn't say you were," I reply, calm, even. "I'm saying I see something. And I think it matters."
Dalia picks up the file again, shoves it into the crook of her arm. "You want to drive four hours for a wall scrawl? Fine. But don't expect me to play make-believe when we get there."
She stands and walks off. Fast. Purposeful. Shoulders high, spine straight—but her hands are clenched and white-knuckled. Her boots strike the tile too hard.
I stay where I am.
ns18.117.180.237da2
