The single Greek letter glowed under the medical examiner's lamp, an elegant, alien symbol branded onto the victim's nail. It was more than a clue; it was a declaration. A spotlight had been thrown onto the darkest corner of Miles Corbin's life, and he felt as exposed as the body on the steel table.
Serrano, ever the pragmatist, was the first to break the charged silence. "Okay, so he's a classics nerd with a laser pen. It's a signature, a brand. We run it through ViCAP, check for similar markings on cold cases. Maybe he's a member of some fringe group, a cult." He spoke with the hollow confidence of a man who thought the world could be neatly filed away into manila folders.
Miles barely heard him. His gaze was locked on the Lambda. It was a perfectly balanced symbol—two lines descending from a single point. An apex. A summit. Or perhaps, two separate paths converging on a single, inevitable conclusion.
He knew what it meant. It meant the killer knew about his "gift." It meant the performance at the gallery, the serene expression, the carefully chosen method of death—it was all a private show for an audience of one. The etching on the thumbnail was the killer's knowing wink, a signature on a playbill left on Miles's specific seat. He hadn't just discovered a clue; he had received a message.
"Miles?" Izzy's voice was a low murmur beside him, cutting through the fog. She had seen the look on his face, the transition from professional curiosity to a deep, personal dread that hollowed out his eyes. She didn't know the full extent of what he experienced, but she knew his demons intimately. "What is it? It's more than just a signature to you, isn't it?"
He pulled his gaze away from the body, from the glowing Lambda, and met hers. "He knew where I would touch, Izzy," he whispered, the words feeling like shards of glass in his throat. "There are a hundred points of contact on a body. He put that mark on the one, single spot my fingers would land to balance myself while taking the echo. He knew."
Serrano let out a dismissive snort. "Oh, come on, Corbin. You're not that important. It's a coincidence. A lucky guess."
"He's not guessing," Miles said, his voice hardening, a ghost of his old detective's authority returning. He turned to face Serrano, his eyes burning with a cold fire. "This killer is meticulous. He flash-froze a woman in the middle of a public gallery without leaving a trace. He drugged her with an unknown substance to make her feel peaceful as she died in agony. He does not believe in coincidence. He believes in control."
The conviction in his voice silenced Serrano. Even Thorne looked up from his instruments, a grim understanding dawning on his face. The room suddenly felt smaller, the air thicker. The crime wasn't just a homicide anymore; it was an intimate, psychological violation directed squarely at the man in the room who was already broken.
Izzy put a firm hand on Miles's back. "I'm taking you home."
The drive back to his apartment was a descent into a familiar, suffocating silence. The city lights smeared across the passenger window, a watercolor of a world he no longer belonged to. He could feel Izzy's worried glances, but he kept his face turned away, watching the phantom figures of pedestrians move through the neon haze.
Every reflection held a potential ghost. A flicker of movement in a shop window brought back the echo of a purse-snatching victim, the sudden, sharp jolt of her shoulder as the strap was ripped away. The bass thump from a passing car made the phantom bruises from an old domestic abuse case ache on his ribs. His life was a palimpsest of other people's pain, and the Lambda killer had just started writing on a fresh page.
"The jumper case," Izzy said softly, her voice barely disturbing the car's quiet hum. "That's the only time your… condition… was ever part of an official record. The psych evaluation, the incident report. It was all supposed to be buried."
Miles closed his eyes. He didn't want to go back there.
The rooftop. The wind whipping his coat around him. The body of the young man, a college student named Kevin Annan, sprawled on the asphalt twenty stories below. It was his first case back after the accident, a simple, tragic suicide. But the moment his hand brushed Kevin's arm, the world had unraveled. He felt the rough grit of the rooftop ledge under his fingertips, the dizzying, terrifying vertigo as he looked down, the final, desperate intake of breath before stepping into nothing. But he also felt something else. A push. Hard and deliberate, in the center of his back. It wasn't a suicide. It was a murder.
He had started screaming. The echo was too strong, too new, his mind too raw to process the violent sensory overlap. He had felt the impact, the sickening crunch of his own imagined skeleton. They'd pulled him off the scene, raving about a push that no one saw, about a killer who didn't exist. The M.E. ruled it a suicide. The department ruled him unstable. Case closed. Career over.
"The report was sealed," Miles said, his voice a dead monotone. "Only a handful of people ever saw it. You, me, Captain Davies, and the department shrink, Dr. Alcott."
"Davies is retired in Florida, and Alcott died two years ago," Izzy finished for him, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. "I know. Which means either the report was leaked, or… the killer was there that day. He was at the Kevin Annan scene."
The possibility hung in the air between them, as cold and heavy as the ice in the gallery. A killer who had been watching him for over three years. A killer who had studied him, learned his secret, and had waited for the perfect moment, the perfect canvas, to finally introduce himself.
When they reached his apartment building, Izzy put the car in park but didn't turn off the engine. "You can't stay here alone tonight, Miles."
"This is the only place I can be," he countered, his hand already on the door handle. "He's not going to break down my door, Izzy. That's not his style. His stage is out there. My apartment… this is just the box seat."
He got out before she could argue, the slam of the car door feeling unnervingly final.
He walked into his apartment and was met by the hum of his white noise machine. But the comforting drone sounded different now. It sounded fragile, insufficient. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed deeper, longer. He had built this fortress to keep the ghosts out, but he'd never considered what would happen if the monster was already inside, whispering his name through the static.
He collapsed into his armchair, but didn't put on his headphones. He sat in the manufactured silence, listening. Waiting. For what, he didn't know.
An hour later, his phone buzzed. It was Izzy. He let it ring, but it immediately buzzed again. He answered, his throat tight. "What?"
"I've been digging into Alita Romero," she said, her voice fast and urgent, crackling with adrenaline. "She was clean. No drugs, no criminal record. A prodigy at the conservatory. But she had a secret. For the past six months, she's been making weekly payments—five hundred dollars, cash—to a private wellness clinic."
"A clinic?"
"That's what they call themselves. It's more like a new-age support group. Very exclusive, very expensive. They specialize in treating patients with extreme sensory and anxiety disorders. Acrophobia, agoraphobia, chronic pain syndrome… the kinds of things traditional therapy can't touch."
Miles sat bolt upright. A cold dread, colder than any echo, washed over him. "What's the name of the clinic, Izzy?"
He could hear the rustle of papers on her end, then a sharp intake of breath. "It's called the Somatos Institute," she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. "Their philosophy is that emotional pain is a cognitive illusion. They believe the only true reality is physical sensation. They teach their patients to… embrace it. To control it."
The word hung in the air. Somatos. From the Greek. Meaning "body."
"And their logo, Miles," Izzy continued, her voice trembling slightly. "The symbol on their letterhead, their website, the sign on their front door. It's a stylized Lambda." She paused, and Miles could practically hear her heart pounding over the phone line. "And I just cross-referenced their patient list with cold cases. In the last two years, five of their former patients have died in unexplained accidents. Falls, fires, drownings. All of them… deaths that would involve an overwhelming final sensation."
Miles looked around his dark apartment, at the prison he had built to shield himself from sensation. He wasn't a pariah. He was a prototype. The killer wasn't just taunting him.
He was showing him his work.