Chapter 22 - "The Preparation Room"

The rain had washed the chalk lines away, but the ghost of the scene still clung to the alley: police tape fluttered like shredded ribbon, and the shadow of a body remained etched into the minds of the detectives who stood there.

Elijah Brandt held a file in one hand, its pages damp and curling. The name printed at the top now carried weight.

Richard Carrow.

Not R.C.
Not initials on a forgotten form.

Not a whisper in a logbook.

A man. A name. A record.

Marcus LeClair stared at the grainy photo clipped to the file - a man in his late forties, clean-shaven, narrow-framed, glasses perched like a signature. The sort of face you'd forget in a crowd but trust in a crisis.

Carrow had served as a state medical examiner for nearly fifteen years. Resigned in 2014 with no formal inquiry, no write-up. But the resignation followed several questionable autopsies - redacted remarks, missing tissue samples, and a sealed malpractice suit that never reached trial. The record was bound with the same neat precision that seemed to govern his life, as if the truth itself had been filed into alignment.

LeClair flipped the photo over.

Written in faded pen: Time is a structure. All breaks must be set.

Brandt looked up from his copy. "The lead came from an old clerk at the municipal archive. Said something felt wrong with how R.C. signed out the zoning files on the Carr project back in 2012. Said he always wore gloves. Even in the summer."

"And this?" LeClair asked, holding up a second envelope-one that had arrived anonymously through the precinct dropbox.

Inside: a note typed in a narrow serif font. No fingerprints. No return address.

I was left alive, but not untouched. He said I was broken time, and that’s why he couldn’t finish.
He called it mercy. I called it calibration.

Attached was a second page: a witness statement from a Jane Doe. No name. No location. Only a year: 2013.

He said if I could walk again without stuttering, I’d prove the moment hadn’t fractured me. That time could be rebalanced. He kept talking about wristwork and alignment. He touched his watch more than he touched me.

Brandt lowered the page. “So this wasn’t about killing. Not always.”

LeClair’s voice was gravel. “No. It was about correction.”

-

Amelia Carr was not dead.

She had been missing for three months. But now they had confirmation.

In the final pages of the Carr project’s file - long assumed purged - someone had scribbled:

She drew the blueprint, but she is also the flaw. The final tick. Before correction comes release.

Attached was a scanned image from a warehouse camera: a figure restrained to a steel gurney. Face obscured. Time stamp digitally corrupted.

But the watch on her wrist was unmistakable.

Custom-made. One-of-a-kind. A retirement gift from the city after ten years in zoning enforcement.

Amelia Carr was being kept.

Prepared.

-

LeClair sat at the case board, now a patchwork of names, hours, photos, and contradictions.

Each clocked victim had led them back to zoning exceptions and inspection bribes - some obvious, some buried under red tape. But Amelia had always been something else.

He whispered, almost to himself, “She wasn’t incidental. She’s the culmination.”

Brandt nodded, exhausted. “And Carrow? He’s the mechanism.”

They were past the theory phase now. This wasn’t just ritual. This wasn’t madness in the wild.

This was engineered.

-

Somewhere else, below the hum of civilization, a metronome ticked in a dark room. The air was cool, metallic, with a faint trace of antiseptic that caught in the throat. The walls were lined with surgical instruments - tools cleaned so obsessively they no longer bore the weight of their function, their edges gleaming like frozen light.

A voice echoed in the steel.

“Time doesn’t stop. But it can be corrected.”

Amelia Carr stirred against her restraints. The vinyl beneath her stuck faintly to her skin, cold through the thin fabric of her clothes. Her eyes, unfocused, locked briefly onto the carved face of a clock nailed to the far wall.

4:06

She didn’t scream. Not yet.

She began to count the seconds, marking each like a pressure point on a fault line.

Because something in her remembered how zoning worked - how you could condemn a space with the right pressure, and rebuild it with the right form.

And she knew now - this wasn’t her ending.

It was her placement.

And placements could shift.