Page 27 of For Fear

Checkmate,he thought.Checkmate, my dear Tara. Your suffering is almost over. Your brilliance will fade, but yourmemory will live forever, enshrined in the gallery of my conquests.

He smiled, a cold, satisfied thing, and watched her, counting down the moments until the endgame could begin.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a harsh glow on the scattered evidence across the conference room table. Morgan rubbed her bleary eyes, the hours of fruitless searching taking their toll. She glanced over at Derik, his brow furrowed as he pored over the latest forensic report.

"This doesn't make any damn sense," Morgan muttered, tossing aside a stack of witness statements. "How are these victims connected? A washed-up violin prodigy, a gambling addict, and a recovering alcoholic tech mogul. The only thing they have in common is they all ended up with a knife in their gut and some cryptic scrap of paper."

The sudden shrill of Morgan's cell phone pierced the tense silence. She snatched it up, barking out a gruff, "Cross."

"Morgan, it's Lydia. I need you and Derik down at the forensics lab ASAP." Dr. Chen's usually calm voice crackled with an undercurrent of excitement. "I think I may have found something on that paper from the Evan Rhodes scene."

Morgan's pulse quickened, a spark of hope igniting in her chest. "We'll be right there." She ended the call and turned to Derik, who was already rising from his seat, shrugging on his suit jacket. "That was Lydia. Says she's got something for us on the Rhodes evidence."

"About damn time we caught a break," Derik said as they hurried out of the conference room and down the hallway to the elevators.

Morgan jabbed the button impatiently. Please let this be it, she thought, her mind racing with possibilities. The key to unraveling this twisted puzzle, to finally getting ahead of this psycho.

The elevator doors slid open with a ding, and they stepped inside. As the car descended, Morgan caught a glimpse of her reflection in the polished metal - the dark circles under her eyes, the hard set of her jaw. Ten years in prison had left their mark, etched into her features like the ink on her skin. But it had also forged an unbreakable determination. She would crack this case by any means necessary. For the victims. For herself. And for the chance to finally bring down the bastards who framed her.

The doors opened onto the forensics floor and they strode out, making a beeline for Lydia's lab. The petite Asian woman was hunched over a workbench, her face lit with an almost manic intensity as she studied something under a high-powered light.

She looked up as they entered, a triumphant grin spreading across her face. "Guys, come take a look at this." She beckoned them over eagerly.

Morgan and Derik approached, peering down at the workbench. There, illuminated under the light, was the sheet of paper found at Evan Rhodes' scene - a jumble of complex coding scrawled across the page.

"What are we looking at here, Lydia?" Derik asked, his voice laced with confusion.

Lydia adjusted the angle of the light, casting sharp shadows across the paper's surface. "I used a technique called oblique lighting," she explained, her voice brimming with excitement. "By shining the light at just the right angle, it reveals indentations on the page—traces of something that was written on the sheet above it before it was torn out."

As Morgan and Derik leaned in closer, faint lines began to emerge from beneath the coding, barely visible to the naked eye. Lydia traced a finger along the indentations, her brow furrowed in concentration.

"There, do you see it?" she asked, pointing to a particularly deep impression. "It's a logo of some kind, hidden underneath the killer's drawings."

Morgan squinted, trying to make out the shape of the logo. It was small, almost lost amidst the chaotic scrawl of coding symbols, but as she studied it, the lines began to take form—a stylized rose, its petals sharp and angular.

Derik let out a low whistle. "Damn, good catch, Lydia. I never would've spotted that."

Lydia flashed him a quick grin before turning back to Morgan, her expression serious. "I ran the logo through our database, cross-referencing it with local businesses. And I got a hit."

She paused for a moment, letting the anticipation build. Morgan felt her pulse quicken, her mind racing with the possibilities.

"The logo belongs to a place called Black Rose Pawn," Lydia finally said, her words tumbling out in a rush. "It's a pawn shop, right here in Dallas."

Morgan's breath caught in her throat, her heart slamming against her ribs. A pawn shop. It wasn't much, but it was something—a thread to pull, a place to start unraveling the tangled web of this case.

She met Derik's gaze, seeing the same realization dawn in his eyes. This could be the break they'd been waiting for, the key to finally unlocking the secrets behind these murders.

"Black Rose Pawn," Morgan repeated, the name feeling heavy and significant on her tongue. She turned to Lydia, a fierce determination burning in her chest. "Send us the address. We're going to pay them a visit."

As they hurried out of the lab, Morgan's mind was already spinning, piecing together the fragments of the puzzle. The pawnshop was a lead, a direction to move in. And she'd be damned if she let it slip through her fingers.

Morgan and Derik strode into the briefing room, the energy between them crackling with anticipation. Morgan made a beeline for her laptop, her fingers flying over the keys as she pulled up everything she could find on Black Rose Pawn.

Within minutes, she had it. The shop's owner, Marcus Trevino, stared back at her from the screen, his heavily tattooed face set in a hard scowl. Morgan studied his mugshot, taking in the cold eyes, the cruel twist of his mouth.

"Charming fellow," Derik muttered, leaning over her shoulder to get a better look. "What's his story?"

---