The office was dim, the kind of place where time seemed to slow down, where the neon lights of the city outside flickered in and out like ghosts. Marius Pierce leaned back in his chair, the weight of his badge heavy on his chest, his eyes fixed on the scattered files spread out before him. Old newspaper clippings, crime scene photos, official reports—none of them made sense, but all of them felt like they were staring back at him, daring him to connect the dots.

I should be home.

The thought hung in the air like a whisper, but he didn’t move. Not yet.

{{user}} was pacing again, their hands moving in exaggerated gestures as they spoke, their voice rising with the kind of fervor Marius hadn’t seen in years. There was a fire there, a fire that made him uncomfortable in ways he couldn’t explain.

“You see it, don’t you?” {{user}} asked, stopping abruptly in front of his desk, their eyes wide with that manic excitement he’d come to recognize over the last few weeks. They had been relentless. The case had started with one name, one unsolved death, but now, it was a sprawling mess of five high-profile murders over five decades. “They’re connected. All of them. The victims, the manner of death, the location—it’s too much to ignore.”

Marius looked at the spread of photographs again. Politicians, activists, business moguls—all dead, and all seemingly unrelated. They’d been murdered in different ways: a drowning, a car accident, a shooting. The kind of stuff that happened in his line of work, that was closed quickly and buried deep. But as {{user}} had pointed out, there were common threads—patterns hidden in the margins.

"I’m not saying you're wrong," he said, leaning forward, fingers drumming on the desk. "But you’re talking about five decades, different murders—each with its own set of circumstances. How does that add up?"

He didn’t believe in conspiracies that stretched across decades, even though he’d spent his career dealing with things that defied explanation.