Robert Kühl woke to the sound of his own phone buzzing against the bedside table like a persistent beetle. For a moment he lay very still, counting the minutes it had been since Brendon had walked out of his life and into the parts that wore chains. The room smelled faintly of coffee and dog shampoo; the small apartment near the precinct had been the only place he'd allowed himself to keep both creature comforts and case files. He padded to the phone, thumbed it awake, and read the text from Chief Tyson: Station brief at 7:30. Bring your notes. This one is on the mayor's desk.
He dressed in slow, practiced motions. The fur at his nape lifted when he got anxious — a subhuman trait he'd learned to fold into a human's neatness. He ran a hand through his hair, felt the rough pads of his fingers, and reminded himself out loud: You can do this. You handled it before. You can handle it now. It was partly ritual, partly self-ordering, and partly the only thing that stopped the hunger that rose in him whenever the city smelled of blood.
At the station the briefing room smelled like printer toner and stale coffee. Chief Tyson stood at the head of a scrubbing board like someone adjusting a weather map. His face, always having the color of agreed compromise, had a new crease between the brows that spelled worry in capitals. The mayor's office had called; the TV channels had the city's blood on their morning loops; and rank-and-file wanted an answer that would clean the prints off their boots.
"Robert," Tyson said when he saw him. The tone wasn't unkind; it was practical. "We're leading this one, now. You know the territory. I want you on the points. Talk to the people who works on the docks and the people who were close to the victim. Move fast."
"I will," Robert answered, and meant it. He had been Brendon's assistant, the dog to Brendon's wolf — loyal, eager, useful in sniffs and stares. Working with Brendon had taught him how to read the pauses between a man's sentences for clues; it has also taught him the value of patience. That patience felt very luxurious now.
Tyson set out the case file. Photos, terse notes, the coroner's preliminary: Defaced face, partial burns, no ID on body; ID fragment found elsewhere — pending cross-checks. Robert's nose twitched. He scanned the photos: the angle of a cut, the way a limb had been placed, the texture of the wrapping. It made him feel like a scrubbed, exposed nerve.
"Media's calling it a serial," Tyson said. "Of course they are. Panelists with nothing to do will make anything a horror show. But we have to treat it as an isolated event until the evidence tells us otherwise."
A young detective pushed a tablet toward Robert. "We got calls from the public — everyone and their aunt on the feeds. Security footage is patchy. The east gate of the docks was clear around 2 am. Someone dumped the body, I'm told. The ID was found at a separate location."
Robert's jaw worked. Patterns and absence. He'd walk them both until one bent. "Have we got access to the manifests for the south mill shipments and Flim & Flam's recent activity?" he asked.
Tyson nodded. "Internal affairs flagged a rush on permits. I've got an order in but the mayor's office is — well, they're keeping it premium as expected. Politics is the background static." He let the word hang, because everyone in the room heard the same static: lines from the top.
Robert felt the old bruise of loyalty. He'd grown into a badge under Tyson's, then Brendon's shadow; with Brendon gone the job had made him smaller in some ways and larger in others. You can do this, he told himself again.
The day devolved into the kind of practical theater police departments do well: witnesses interviewed, security footage trawled, forensics asked to run the same tests on fabrics until they stopped being visible. Robert did the rounds, his ears open for any human sound that turned into a tell. He talked to a dockhand with cracked knuckles who remembered a light truck that shouldn't have been there.
Between interviews the phone in the briefing room began to ring like a xylophone of bad news. The mayor's press office wanted updates. A local television station wanted soundbites for a panel that would inevitably bring in an armchair criminologist to translate horror into ratings. Robert could still feel the pull of the cameras even when they weren't pointed at him: the city wanted stories that wrapped neatly.
At noon the press began its performance. Outside the station a phalanx of cameras and microphones had assembled like flowers at a grave. A reporter pushed a microphone toward Robert as he emerged.
"Sheriff Robert Kühl," she said, her voice smooth with a hunger that had nothing to do with justice. "Can you tell the public what you've learned about this… apparent pattern?"
He paused. He had learned to answer two kinds of questions: those meant to inform and those meant to inflame. "We are treating the case with the full resources of the RTPD," he said, the words measured. "Preliminary findings are being processed. We ask the public to be patient while we preserve the integrity of the investigation."
The camera's red light blinked. The feed would cut to pundits and panels within the hour, gorging on the worst of human imagination. He turned away before anyone could ask the question about serial killers. It was a loaded phrase that turned detectives into game-show opponents.
Inside the station, Chief Tyson took a call that made his face flatter. Robert stepped closer to his desk, a polite shadow. "Politics?" he asked, the question not entirely rhetorical.
"Mayor's office wants assurances," Tyson said. His voice had that hollowed tone of someone being polite to a man whose ledger you cannot touch. "Opposition has smelled blood and wants a head. The council wants deliverables. This keeps getting talked about on breakfast shows with charlatans. The mayor is asking for quick wins."
"Quick wins?... It's simply not possible under these circumstances. Plus we all know that this kind of hurriedness don't result in good scenarios." Robert said.
"No," Tyson agreed. "But they make for headlines. We have to run the leads. We'll check the manifests, the trucks, the cameras for now. We'll build a case. But understand this: if the press screams and the mayor wants someone named, the department will feel the squeeze. Keep your head low and your reports clean. And, Robert?"
"Yeah?"
"Keep an eye on the mayor's office. I don't want politics in evidence rooms. But we're short-staffed and stretched."
The implication was a thin wire: watch them but don't get close enough to be seen touching the wire. Robert understood it. He had been human enough to have seen powerful hands rearrange the city before; he had been dog enough to sniff the pretence out.
---
The next morning the news cycle outdid itself. The lead anchor on one of the national channels used the words serial and ritual in the same sentence. An expert — a professor of criminal psychology with the soft charisma of someone who liked to talk about monsters at length — sat on a panel and suggested viewers lock their doors. Social media fed the fear like a machine that churned interest into donation dollars for opinion. Mayor Guerieo issued a carefully curt public statement: Our town-cum city is safe. Our department is on it. We will not allow rumor to choke the life from Ridgecliff.
At the same time, an opposition councillor called for the mayor to open his records and for an independent inquiry into the permit approvals that had allowed a certain company, Flim & Flam Enterprise to operate. The council chambers became a theater of virtue and accusation; cameras crowded the public gallery like flies. The municipal office released a bland statement about cooperation and progress, and the mayor's PR cleaned the edges with the practiced hands of someone who dealt in optics for breakfast.
Robert watched it all from his window at the station. He felt the press close in like a tide: it made the town small and loud, and it made investigations into a performance. He had always believed that facts got messy when you tried to make them pretty for voters. Tonight the facts would have to withstand the pressurized air.
He returned to the coroner (Scott Wright) with a small team. Forensics had bagged and tagged everything reachable from the dock: fibers, a fragment of plastic, trace DNA. The lab work would take time; the press didn't have patience for time. Robert ran his nose over the scene's paperwork like a hound following an old scent. He looked for an angle no one else would: times when the gate logs were tinkered with, a courier who signed for a crate with a fake name, the pattern of pickups at hours when surveillance was low.
At one point a junior officer came in shaking. "Sir, the mayor's office called. They want expedited checks. They want us to prioritize retrieval and public reassurance."
Robert wanted to say something stronger than we do our best. Instead he pinched the bridge of his nose where fur and flesh met and chose his words. "We handle evidence according to the ranking of risk," he said. "We don't prioritize for optics. If there's undue pressure, we make a note of it. It's recorded, obviously."
The young officer's relief was small; he'd only wanted permission to do a good job without losing his head to politics. The world of the badge offered too few such permissions.
When the day blurred into evening, Robert sat at his desk and wrote lines of inquiry that read like prayers. He scripted who to talk to next: truckers, mill foremen, the manager at Flim & Flam, the transport broker who lived in a different borough but had fingers in enough ledgers to choke a man. He closed the file and — without letting anyone see — took a pen and wrote a name on the inner margin in his own cramped handwriting: Brendon. The name was both a help and a wound. He had no idea where Brendon was. He had no right, perhaps, to loan that wolf the trust of his joint instincts. And yet the old truth persisted: Brendon had seen what Robert sometimes could not.
He reached for a coffee and stopped. The radio in the corner was airing a panel; an expert declared the pattern "ritualistic," a phrase designed to petrify. The mayor's PR officer had shown up on the screen, soothing the public with practiced hands. Opponents in the council called foul. Robert switched it off. He had to do work that did not need a microphone.
Before he went home that night he walked to the West dock. He needed to smell the place again, in the way only a hybrid could do: the salt, the oil, the flattened human perfume where someone had lain. He scanned for a tell — a cigarette butt not like the others, a slip of paper tucked under a crate, a smudge on bollard paint. He would search, he told himself, with the steadiness of a dog with a job. He would follow the ledger until the line met a name.
He would keep his head low. He would keep his reports clean. And he would do the thing that got him out of bed in the morning: breathe in the city until facts came into focus.
Because politics could make noise, but it could not change the stubbornness of evidence. It could not alter the way a human-dog hybrid's nose remembered the scent of a man's last breath. And that, Robert thought as he leaned against the cold metal of a gangway and watched the water slow under the dock, was where the hunt began.