Chapter 18 - "Second Hands"

A Chapter by HaleyB

The seventh body hadn't dropped yet-but the city was holding its breath.

Brandt felt it in the silence between passing cars, in the way store owners lowered their voices when the clock carvings came up. The people weren’t waiting for justice. They were waiting for the next hour to be claimed.

He looked up from his desk. Marcus stood at the case board, arms crossed, eyes scanning the array of names and photos - six victims, each tied to a specific time. Overnight, the pins and string had shifted. The lines didn't connect people anymore. They outlined something else.

A clock.

“What if it’s not random,” Brandt said. “Not even symbolic.”

Marcus raised a brow.

“I mean the times themselves," Brandt went on. "What if they point to something real - factory operations, permit filings, public hearings - things that actually happened at those hours?"

Marcus was already moving to his laptop. “I’ll pull the permit logs for 2011 and 2012.”

-

The victims weren't random.

Bryce Denton, 6:00. Factory Supervisor. First to sign off on the 2011 operational expansion, and the man who reclassified safety checks as "non-essential." Under his watch, complaints about headaches, nausea, and visible pipe corrosion went nowhere.

Ronald Teague, 8:15. Building Inspector. Took bribes to falsify safety inspections during the factory's scrutiny period. His signature in Grace Delany's work section - logged exactly three days before Denton's approval.

Darren Kravitz, 3:11. Contractor. Specialized in removing safety labels from pallets of lead-based materials. His body was staged - photo alive in a café, body later found at a train station. Movement to stillness. A deliberate shift in the killer's language.

Ernest Harrow, 2:06. Foreman. Once petitioned for a lead exemption to keep his section open. Officially died of "natural causes" in 2016. Now exhumed, the carving was fresh. The only surviving document with his signature was a zoning memo, initialed simply "M."

Eleanor Voss, 1:06. Board Member, corporate lobbyist. Suppressed early lead-toxicity research to shield RollinChem Industries from lawsuits. She never received a carving - just a shattered clock in her photo. "She's not a gear," LeClair had murmured. "She filed the plans."

Grace Delaney, 3:06. Factory Line Worker. Youngest victim. Terminal lead poisoning. No sign of struggle, no trauma - just clean carving, almost...gentle. "She wasn't taken," the ME had said. "She was released."

Marcus scrolled through a archived scan of meeting minutes from 2011.

"Wait," he said, tapping the screen. "City council, October 14th. They finalized all zoning exceptions to before six o’clock that day."

“Bryce’s time," Brandt said.

“And Teague’s? Logged at 8:15 a.m., three days earlier.”

The timestamps weren’t just thematic. They were real.

“This is a ledger,” Brandt said. “Not a message.”

Marcus nodded grimly. “Every time is a receipt.”

Third floor of the municipal library. Quiet as bone.

The teen sat with a yellowed report - misfiled decades ago - on lead's effects on developing minds. It described how exposure slowed time inside the body - reflexes dulled, memory fractured, motion lagging.

"Time moves wrong when you're poisoned," the boy in the article had said.

He underlined it in pencil. It reminded him of Grace.

He had watched the true crime video, followed the case forums. But now he followed something else: the law beneath the crimes. A shape in the string. A rhythm in the rot.

He hadn't carved. Not yet.

But he had bought a clock from a secondhand store. Old. Brass. Broken.

He didn’t fix it.

He just listened.

“Check this out,” Marcus said, waving Brandt over.

A spreadsheet of factory work logs. Most lead-related complaints happened in the early morning - but two appeared after-hours. One, on March 6th, 2012, carried a signature.

Amelia Carr.

Brandt froze. “That name keeps surfacing.”

“She didn’t die like the others. At least, not yet. But she’s not innocent.”

“Or she was the wrong kind of guilty.”

Marcus turned back to the board. “You ever wonder if we’re late to this? If it started before the first carving?”

Brandt didn’t answer.

Because he already felt it - something ticking in reverse.

Inside a bookstore trash bin, a torn receipt fluttered.