2. The Discarded

The second body was found by a groundskeeper named Emilio Rojas, who had worked the Claiborne University night shift for eleven years and had learned to expect the unexpected: drunken sophomores, stolen bicycles, the occasional raccoon in the ventilation system. He had not expected to find a dead man in the drainage ditch behind the maintenance shed for the second time in twelve days.

He stood at the edge of the concrete culvert, his flashlight beam trembling over the body. The man lay on his side, one arm twisted beneath him, his coat soaked through with dew. His face was turned toward the sky, mouth slightly open, eyes half-closed. He looked, Emilio thought, like a man who had simply lain down and forgotten how to get up.

He called campus security. Security called the Loxford City Police. By seven in the morning, Detective Maeve Flynn was standing in the same spot where she had stood over Corin Ashby’s body less than two weeks earlier, watching the same coroner’s team erect the same white privacy screen.

“This is getting to be a habit,” she said.

The morning was cold and grey, the kind of November dawn that made Loxford look like a photograph left too long in developing fluid. Maeve pulled her coat tighter and crouched beside the body as the coroner, a tired man named Fischer, began his preliminary examination.

“Male, late forties to early fifties,” Fischer said, dictating into a recorder. “No obvious signs of trauma. No bruising on the face or neck. Possible exposure death, consistent with the previous case.”

“Check the left forearm,” Maeve said.

Fischer glanced at her, then pushed back the dead man’s sleeve. The burn mark was there, small and round and precise, a perfect circle of damaged tissue just below the elbow.

“Same as Ashby,” Fischer said quietly.

“Same as Ashby.” Maeve stood and pulled out her phone, photographing the mark from three angles. “Run a full tox screen this time. I want to know if he was drugged before the shock was applied. And pull fingerprints—I don’t care if he’s homeless, everyone has a file somewhere.”

She left the scene as the coroner’s team loaded the body into the van and drove to the university library, which opened at eight. The student at the front desk barely looked up as she flashed her badge and asked for the campus newspaper archives. She spent two hours scrolling through microfilm, searching for any mention of Professor Marcus Crane, the psychology department, or human subject research at Claiborne.

What she found was a forty-year-old photograph from a faculty newsletter, yellowed and grainy, showing a group of children in institutional pyjamas seated in rows before a one-way mirror. The caption read: “State Youth Conformity Study, Whitmore Institute, 1964. Lead researcher: Dr. Harold Crane.” The boy in the front row, no older than eight, had silver-grey hair and eyes that stared at the camera with a flat, unchildlike stillness.

Maeve printed the photograph and added it to her growing file.

The identification of the second body came faster than the first. Fischer called her office on Friday morning with a name: Drea Kostopoulos. Female, twenty-seven years old, formerly a patient at the Breckinridge Psychiatric Residence until its closure six weeks prior. No fixed address. No emergency contact listed in her discharge paperwork. The fingerprints had matched a state health database that Maeve had specifically requested Fischer check.

“Female,” Maeve repeated into the phone, her voice sharp. “The first two were male. I assumed a pattern targeting homeless men. Why would he switch?”

“Maybe the victim profile isn’t gender,” Fischer offered. “Maybe it’s something else.”

“No known next of kin,” Maeve said slowly. “That’s the connection. Ashby had no one. Voss had no one. Kostopoulos had no one.” She stared at the photograph of the Whitmore children on her desk. “He’s selecting people no one will look for.”

She hung up and drove to the Breckinridge site, a shuttered concrete complex on the north side of the city. The building had been closed for two months, its patients discharged with thirty days’ notice and a list of shelters that were already full. The director, a harried woman named Simone Verner, agreed to speak with her in a office still half-packed with boxes.

“Drea was one of our quieter residents,” Simone said, flipping through a file. “Deaf since childhood. Communicated through writing, mostly. She had no family—her mother died when she was young, and she’d been in state care ever since. When the funding cuts came, we had to let her go. We tried to find her a bed at the mission, but…” She trailed off, her expression guilty. “There are too many people and not enough beds.”

“Did she ever mention participating in a university study? Anything involving Claiborne?”

Simone frowned. “Not that I recall. But she spent most of her days at the public library on Halstead. She liked to read the newspapers, even though she couldn’t hear. She said it made her feel connected.”

Maeve drove to the Halstead library next. The librarian on duty, an elderly man with ink-stained fingers, remembered Drea immediately.

“Quiet girl,” he said, “always in the periodicals section. She sat by the window. I noticed her because she stayed until closing every day, even after the weather turned cold. One afternoon, she spent a long time looking at a flyer someone had taped to the window. I thought nothing of it at the time.”

“Do you remember what the flyer said?”

“Something about a university study. Paying for participants. I remember thinking it was unusual to advertise here—most of our patrons don’t have much connection to the university.”

Maeve felt the prickle at the base of her skull intensify. “Do you still have the flyer?”

The librarian shook his head. “Someone tore it down a few days ago.”

She left the library with a description of the flyer—yellow paper, black text, the Claiborne University seal—and a growing certainty that someone on that campus was deliberately recruiting the city’s most invisible residents for something far darker than academic research.

The third victim was found before she could return to the station.

Ellis Crane, fifty-five, former textile worker, discovered in the same drainage ditch behind the maintenance shed. The call came in at six in the evening, just as the sun was setting over the campus. By the time Maeve arrived, the coroner’s team was already there, and Emilio Rojas, the groundskeeper, was sitting on the bumper of his truck with his head in his hands.

“Third time,” he said when Maeve approached. “Three times in three weeks. What is happening at this school?”

Maeve had no answer for him. She examined the body—same burn mark, same staging, same absence of identification—and then walked to the maintenance shed and kicked open the door.

The shed was small and cluttered, smelling of fertiliser and old gasoline. She swept her flashlight across shelves of tools and bags of salt for the winter paths, and then stopped at a metal locker in the corner. The lock was broken, hanging loose from the hasp. Inside, she found a coil of electrical wire, a jar of conductive gel, and a stack of folded yellow flyers.

CLAIBORNE UNIVERSITY SEEKS RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS. COMPENSATION: $75 PER SESSION. ALL BACKGROUNDS WELCOME. REJECTED? WE’LL GIVE YOU A PLACE.

At the bottom, in smaller type, was a room number: Grayson Hall, Room 117.

Maeve took the flyers and the jar of gel and walked back to her car. She drove to Grayson Hall with the siren off, parked in a faculty space, and entered the psychology building through the main doors. The corridors were quiet at this hour, most of the offices dark, but Room 117 glowed with light at the end of the hall.

She knocked twice. When no one answered, she tried the handle. The door swung open.

The office was immaculate. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with volumes on social psychology and behavioural conditioning. A mahogany desk sat at the centre, its surface bare except for a blotter, a pen set, and a framed photograph of a man shaking hands with a former state governor. On the wall behind the desk hung a collection of diplomas and a faded black-and-white photograph of children in institutional clothing, seated before a one-way mirror.

Maeve recognised the photograph immediately. She had seen it that morning in the library archives.

“Can I help you?”

She turned. A man stood in the doorway, silver-grey hair combed back from a high forehead, reading glasses pushed up on his nose. He wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and carried a leather briefcase in one hand.

“Detective Maeve Flynn, Loxford City Police.” She showed her badge. “Are you Professor Marcus Crane?”

“I am.” He set the briefcase on a side table and extended a hand. “What brings the police to my office at this hour?”

Maeve ignored the hand. “I’m investigating the deaths of three individuals whose bodies were found on campus property. Corin Ashby, Nolan Voss, and Drea Kostopoulos. Do those names mean anything to you?”

Crane’s expression shifted, a flicker of recognition quickly suppressed. “I can’t say they do. Should they?”

“They were all participants in a psychology study being conducted out of this department. A study that recruited homeless and institutionalised individuals with no known family ties. A study that involved electric shocks.” She held up the flyer. “This has your building on it. Your room number.”

Crane took the flyer and examined it with a frown. “This is not my flyer. My study is a learning and discipline project, yes, but it’s entirely within ethical guidelines. The shocks are low-level, well below any danger threshold. I have institutional review board approval. I have medical staff on standby. I have—” He stopped, his expression changing. “Wait. You said three people are dead?”

“Three. All with electrical burns on their left forearms. All dumped in the same drainage ditch behind the maintenance shed.”

Crane sat down heavily in his desk chair. He looked, Maeve thought, genuinely stunned. “I don’t understand. That’s impossible. The sessions are monitored. The equipment has safety limiters.”

“Then someone has bypassed those limiters,” Maeve said. “And someone has been using your study to recruit victims. Do you have any research assistants who might have access to the equipment without your supervision?”

Crane was silent for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, “I have several. Graduate students, mostly. They help set up the laboratory and run the sessions when I’m not available. But I trust them implicitly.”

“I’ll need a list of names. All of them.”

Crane nodded slowly. He pulled open a drawer and removed a personnel file, sliding it across the desk. Maeve took it and flipped through the pages—photographs, contact information, academic records. She stopped on a young man with dark circles under his eyes and a thin, angular face.

“Jude Heller,” she read aloud. “He was present at the first session, wasn’t he? The session where Corin Ashby died?”

“He assists with all the sessions,” Crane said. “He’s my most dedicated student. I can’t imagine he would be involved in anything untoward.”

Maeve studied the photograph for a moment longer, then closed the file. “I’m going to need access to your laboratory. Tonight.”

“Of course. Whatever you need.” Crane stood and retrieved a key from his desk drawer. “The basement lab. Room 004. I’ll escort you myself.”

They walked together through the silent corridors of Grayson Hall, down a flight of stairs to the basement level. The air grew colder as they descended, the walls changing from painted plaster to bare concrete. Room 004 was at the end of a narrow hallway, its door marked with a faded sign: “Social Psychology Laboratory—Authorised Personnel Only.”

Crane unlocked the door and stepped aside.

The laboratory was exactly as Maeve had imagined it from the flyer description—a room divided by a glass partition, a console of toggle switches on one side, a modified wooden chair with leather restraints on the other. But there was something else, too, something that stopped her in the doorway.

On the floor beside the console, half-hidden beneath a rolled-up mat, was a small, dark stain.

She crouched and touched it. The stain was still tacky. Blood.

“Professor Crane,” she said without looking up, “when was the last session conducted?”

“Two days ago. Why?”

“Because this stain is fresh.” She stood and faced him. “And if someone’s been bleeding in your laboratory, I want to know who.”

Crane’s face was pale now, his composure cracking at the edges. “I don’t—I wasn’t here for that session. Jude ran it. He said everything went fine.”

“Jude Heller ran the session alone?”

“Yes. I had a departmental meeting. I trusted him to manage the protocol.”

Maeve took out her phone and photographed the stain. Then she walked to the glass partition and pressed her palm against it. On the other side, the wooden chair sat empty, its leather restraints hanging loose.

“I’m going to need to speak with Jude Heller,” she said. “Tonight. Where can I find him?”

Crane gave her the address of a dormitory on the east side of campus. She left him standing in the laboratory, still staring at the bloodstain, and drove across the university grounds with a sense of urgency that bordered on dread.

Jude Heller’s dormitory room was on the fourth floor of a building called Ashwick Hall. The lights were off when Maeve reached the door, and no one answered her knock. She tried the handle—locked—and was about to turn away when she noticed a slip of paper wedged in the doorframe.

She pulled it free and unfolded it. The handwriting was cramped and hurried, the ink smeared as though the writer had been shaking.

“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. He made me do it. He said if I told anyone, he would destroy me. The bodies are in the shed. I don’t know how many more there will be. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Maeve read the note twice. Then she pulled out her radio and called for backup.

By the time the patrol cars arrived, Jude Heller was gone. His room was empty, his closet cleared of clothes, his laptop missing from the desk. The only thing left behind was a photograph tucked into the frame of the mirror—two young boys, perhaps eight and ten, standing in front of a group home with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

On the back, in the same cramped handwriting, were two words: “Forgive me.”

Maeve stood in the empty room, the photograph in her hand, the note in her pocket, and felt the case shifting beneath her feet. She had arrived at Grayson Hall looking for a killer. She was leaving with the distinct feeling that the killer was not the only monster in this story.

At the same moment, across the city, Jude Heller was walking through the rain toward the Brightmoor Group Home on Kellogg Avenue. His phone was dead, his clothes were soaked, and his mind was a roaring static of guilt and terror. But beneath the fear was something else—a cold, hard certainty that had been growing since the moment Corin Ashby stopped breathing.

Crane was not going to stop. The sessions would continue. More people would die. And Jude would go to prison for all of it, the perfect scapegoat, the obedient student who had done everything he was told.

Unless he found a way out first.

The Brightmoor Group Home rose before him, a squat brick building with bars on the windows and a single light burning above the door. He had not been here in six years. He had not spoken to his foster brother since the day he left for university, promising to come back, promising to stay in touch, promising all the things that ambitious young men promise and never deliver.

He walked up the steps and pressed the buzzer.

When the door opened, Elias Heller stood on the threshold, older than Jude remembered, broader in the shoulders, his face marked with the same wariness that Jude saw every time he looked in a mirror.

“Jude,” Elias said. His voice was flat, neither welcoming nor hostile. “What are you doing here?”

“I need your help,” Jude said. “And I think you might be the only person in the world who can give it.”

Elias stared at him for a long moment. Then he stepped aside and let his brother in from the rain.