Page 20 of For Silence

Morgan’s fingers flipped through the files, her dark hair falling over her face like a curtain, obscuring her tattoos that snaked up her arms. Each page she turned seemed to throb with the potential of harboring a vital clue, yet the answers remained elusive, slipping through her grasp like smoke.

"Any case involving a child," Derik murmured, almost to himself, his voice a low rumble in the quiet room.

"Has to be," Morgan agreed curtly, the words laced with the pressure mounting within her. Her keen eyes darted over each name, each verdict. Somewhere amid these inked judgments lay the key to unlocking the identity of a killer driven by a twisted sense of retribution.

She felt it in her bones; the pattern was there, a man who had lost a child—the teddy bear remnants were screaming that sorrowful narrative. But which case? Which shattered life had spiraled into this vortex of vengeance?

"Nothing on this one," Derik said, setting aside a folder with a resigned flick. "Single mother, custody dispute. No child loss."

"Keep looking." Morgan's command was sharp, edged with the urgency of the ticking clock. She knew they were racing against time, against an unknown when this killer might strike again.

Their suspect list narrowed with each dismissal, yet the right connection eluded them. The air grew heavy with the scent of paper and the ghosts of cases past. Morgan’s mind raced, sifting through possibilities, discarding them just as quickly.

"Dammit, there's got to be something here," Morgan muttered, frustration creeping into her typically steely composure.

Morgan's eyes were gritty from the artificial light as she rifled through the stack of court records. Her fingers paused, a chill tracing her spine when a particular case file offered itself up to her weary scrutiny. It was Mariana Torres's, one of her earliest as a judge, and it bore the heavy weight of sorrow within its pages.

"Oliver Denton," Morgan read aloud, her voice a low murmur in the stillness of the room. The name was just another in a long list of the defeated until she flipped further into the dossier. "Sued the hospital over his kid's death."

Derik leaned in, his own exhaustion etched into the lines of his face. "Cancer?"

"Looks like it." She scanned the documents, each page a tale of a father's despair translated into legal jargon. The child was a cipher, unnamed, but to Oliver Denton, undoubtedly the center of a now-shattered universe.

"Any traction on the suit?" Derik asked, his gaze locked on Morgan, seeking a thread in the tangled web of evidence.

"None. He threw everything at them—malpractice, negligence." Morgan's finger traced the lines of text where Oliver had argued, desperately, that the treatment was wrong, too aggressive. His belief that it hadn't been the cancer that stole his child's life, but the cure.

"And?"

She sighed, feeling the weight of the gavel's final fall. "Torres ruled against him. Said the hospital did what they could."

"Could be motive," Derik mused, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Could be," Morgan echoed, though the certainty wasn't there. Not yet. There was a pattern emerging, a dark design woven by loss and vengeance. But was Oliver Denton its architect?

The question hung in the air between them, unspoken but palpable. They both knew what was at stake—lives teetering on the brink of a killer's twisted sense of justice. And with each passing moment, the killer remained a ghost among them, his grievances inked in blood across the city.

Morgan's fingers flew over the keyboard, the click-clack of keys punctuated by the low hum of late-night activity in the FBI headquarters. The dim glow of the computer screen cast a pallid light on her face, etched with determination as she pored over the case details. The timeline was tight but damning—a jigsaw puzzle coming together with grim precision.

"First murder over a week ago," she murmured, eyes scanning the dates like a hawk. "And Denton's trial... two weeks back."

"Could losing the case have pushed him over the edge?" Derik pondered aloud, leaning in to study the screen over Morgan's shoulder. His presence was a steady comfort, even in the thick of uncertainty.

"Could've lit the fuse to his rage," Morgan conceded, her instinct gnawing at her. Mariana Torres, dispenser of justice, now silenced forever. And yet, those who had defended the hospital against Oliver Denton remained untouched. It didn't add up, but the scent of revenge hung heavily in the air, an acrid smell that Morgan knew all too well.

"Everyone else is alive," she continued, her voice steady despite the churn of her thoughts. "But she—Torres—is dead. Could be he's targeting anyone he can reach, anyone connected to his grief."

"Revenge can make a man blind," Derik agreed solemnly.

"Let's see what the database says about our grieving father," Morgan said, her fingers already executing the command. A few keystrokes and the ghostly image of Oliver Denton appeared on the screen, his life reduced to text and digital records. "Single dad," she read, the facts unfolding before them. "Wife died in a car accident years ago." Her eyes lingered on the words, a tragedy compounded by another, a man left to weather the storm of loss alone.

"Car accident, huh?" Derik mused, catching the thread of implication. "Maybe that's why he cut Torres's brakes—his own twisted echo of the past."

"Could be," Morgan replied, though her gut twisted with doubt. Connections in cases like these were often frayed, tenuous links that could just as easily snap under scrutiny.

"Seems thin," Derik admitted, echoing her skepticism. But they had little else to go on, and time was a currency fast depleting.

Morgan's fingers drummed on the briefing room table, her mind a whirl of facts and suspicions. She flipped through the stack of papers detailing Mariana Torres's recent court cases one more time, searching for anything they might have missed, something more concrete. Derik leaned against the wall, his gaze fixed on the digital clock as it flicked later into the night.

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