Chapter 6: The Pattern

Chapter 6: The Pattern

The AIB’s digital archives were not a room full of dusty boxes, but a refrigerated server farm buried five stories beneath the sterile facade of their Virginia headquarters. The only sound was the constant, low hum of cooling fans, a white noise that was supposed to be calming but which Marcus Thorne found endlessly oppressive. It was the sound of secrets being kept cold. He sat at a terminal in the adjacent observation room, the sole point of light in the darkness a large monitor reflecting his own tired, determined face. It had been three days since the woman in the red dress, and sleep had been a luxury he couldn't afford.

His codename, "Shepherd," had been a shot in the dark, a gut feeling born from the transactional coldness of the crime scene. He’d expected the search algorithm to return nothing, to mock his intuition. Instead, it had opened a Pandora's Box of dead ends. His initial searches for keywords like "rectangular wound" or "geometric excision" across federal and local databases yielded thousands of results, all of them false positives: industrial accidents, bizarre suicides, unsolved but ultimately conventional murders. The pattern was hidden, deliberately buried under a mountain of irrelevant data.

He took a sip of bitter, lukewarm coffee. He was missing something. The killer wasn't working with tools from this world; why would the evidence be filed under conventional terms? He leaned forward, his fingers tapping on the keyboard. He had to think like the Bureau. He had to use their language, the esoteric lexicon developed over decades of cataloging the impossible.

He deleted his previous search terms and began again.

SEARCH QUERY: "Non-Euclidean Laceration" AND "Exsanguination" > 0 RESULTS

SEARCH QUERY: "Cellular Absence Event" AND "Organic Tissue" > 2 RESULTS. [LEVEL 7 CLEARANCE REQUIRED]

Thorne’s eyebrows raised. Level 7. That was high. His own clearance was Level 5. The files were locked, but the system had acknowledged their existence. He was getting warmer. He recalled Dr. Aris's phrase, how the tissue seemed to have simply "ceased to exist." He was on the right track.

He tried a new combination, a long shot based on the sheer strangeness of the wound’s precision.

SEARCH QUERY: "Acausal Incision" OR "Topological Severance" > 14 RESULTS. [LEVEL 5 CLEARANCE GRANTED FOR 1 FILE]

A single file blinked into existence on his screen. It was a cold case from thirty-two years ago. The case number was long, the location listed as a municipal underpass in the very same city he was investigating. The victim was a John Doe, a transient. The file was a ghost, stripped of almost all its data. Most of the fields were filled with a single, stark entry: [REDACTED].

But some fragments remained. The coroner's report was a masterpiece of obfuscation, using phrases like "focal tissue discontinuity on the upper thigh" and "unexplained rapid fluid loss." It was the same wound. Thorne felt a cold certainty grip him. This was it. The first thread.

He ran a cross-reference, pushing his clearance to its limit, asking the system to find any links, any intersecting data points between this John Doe file and any other incident. For a moment, the system seemed to resist. Then, a single line of text appeared.

CROSS-REFERENCE FOUND: INCIDENT-04B-SILAS. STATUS: CONTAINED/RESOLVED.

The name. Silas. The system had identified the John Doe. Thorne tried to pull the new file, INCIDENT-04B-SILAS, but a wall of digital red tape slammed down.

ACCESS DENIED. [INTERNAL CONTAINMENT DIRECTORATE EYES ONLY]

Internal Containment. Thorne’s blood ran cold. That wasn't an investigative branch. They were the agency’s janitors, the ones who came in after an investigation was over to bury the bodies, scrub the memories, and erase all evidence that anything anomalous had ever happened. They were a department of professional secret-keepers, so insulated that most agents didn't even believe they truly existed. If they had sealed this file, it meant the AIB hadn't just investigated this phenomenon thirty years ago—they had understood it. And then they had hidden it.

Frustration warred with a primal, investigative hunger. Thorne didn't try to hack the file; that would be career suicide. Instead, he worked the edges. He ran a search on the name "Silas" linked to the date of the incident. He found a single, non-redacted document: a copy of a beat cop’s initial witness report, filed before the AIB had taken over and sanitized everything.

Most of it was useless, but one paragraph stood out, a quote from another transient who had known the victim.

“Old Silas was always talking crazy. Said he had a passenger. Said there was a monster living under his skin, looking out at the world through a little window he could open in his leg. Said it was singing to him, and one day a Shepherd would come to let it out…”

Thorne froze, his fingers hovering over the keyboard.

A window in his leg. A Shepherd.

The words echoed in the silent, cold room. His hunch. The codename. It wasn’t a guess. It was a memory, an echo of a thirty-year-old case that had been deliberately, systematically erased from the Bureau’s collective consciousness.

He scrolled further down the old report, finding one last fragment, a note from the responding officer.

“Subject expressed no fear of death. Witness claims subject spoke of his impending demise as a ‘liberation.’”

Liberation. The word clicked into place with the others, forming a terrifying mosaic. A Shepherd. A window in the flesh. A passenger. Liberation. This wasn't a series of murders. This was a philosophy. A religion. And its gospel was being written in blood on the streets of the city.

Thorne leaned back in his chair, the hum of the servers suddenly sounding like a single, held note of warning. This was no longer just about catching a uniquely skilled serial killer. This was about a conspiracy that reached into the very heart of the AIB. His own agency had encountered this before, and their response was not to stop it, but to cover it up.

He was hunting a monster, only to discover that the people who had built his cage had seen that monster before and had chosen to pretend it didn't exist. The question was no longer just "who is the killer?"

It was "what the hell did they find thirty years ago that was so terrifying they decided to let the world forget?"