Page 12 of Forsaken

Hale's jaw clenched, a muscle twitching beneath his skin. “Look, I can’t help you. Please leave.”

“Actually, I would appreciate it if you’d come down to the station with us,” Derik said, his voice measured.

At that moment, Hale's composure cracked like thin ice.

He bolted toward the greenhouse with surprising speed, shoving past them with the desperate strength of cornered prey.

“Bastard!” Morgan shouted.

Morgan's instincts kicked in, her body moving before her mind could catch up. She sprinted after Hale, her feet pounding the gravel path leading to the greenhouse. Behind her, she heard Derik radioing for backup.

The greenhouse loomed before them, its glass panels no longer mirrors but windows into a world of verdant chaos. As Hale wrenched open the door, a wave of humid air thick with the scent of earth and decay washed over them.

Morgan burst through the entrance, her eyes struggling to adjust to the dim interior. Row upon row of plants stretched out before her, creating a labyrinth of green. The air was heavy, almost suffocating, filled with an unsettling mix of floral sweetness and something darker, more primal.

"Hale!" she shouted, her voice echoing off the glass walls. "There's nowhere to run!"

A crash from her left sent her spinning, weapon drawn. She caught a glimpse of movement through the dense foliage and took off in pursuit. The narrow paths between the plant beds forced her to move carefully, aware that any misstep could give Hale an advantage.

The greenhouse was a maze of steel tables and hanging plants, the air thick with the impossible scent of spring. Grow lights created artificial daylight, casting strange shadows through the dense foliage. Morgan caught flashes of familiar flowers as she pursued Hale—daffodils, tulips, cherry blossoms.The same types of flowers found woven through Laura Benson's hair.

Steam rose from heating vents, creating an otherworldly atmosphere where seasons seemed to blur and merge. The humid air carried the scent of earth and growth, a contrast to the dying landscape outside. Morgan's senses registered every detail even as she ran: the precise arrangement of plants, the carefully maintained temperature controls, the meticulously labeled specimens.

"FBI! Stop!" Derik's voice boomed through the humid air, echoing off glass panels and metal frames.

Hale knocked over a cart of seedlings, sending dirt and plastic pots scattering across their path. Morgan vaulted over the obstacle, her boots finding purchase on the damp floor.

She cut down a parallel aisle, anticipating Hale's trajectory. Through gaps in the foliage, she caught glimpses of him—his salt-and-pepper hair dark with sweat, his face twisted with desperation. He was heading for a side exit, but she'd been in enough chases to know that desperate people made mistakes.

Morgan burst through a row of daffodils just as Hale passed, tackling him into a bed of spring flowers. They went down hard, scattering golden blooms across the greenhouse floor. She had him pinned before he could recover, her knee in his back, the move as natural as breathing.

"I didn't kill her!" Hale shouted as Derik moved in with handcuffs, the steel catching the artificial sunlight. "Emily was trying to discredit my research! She didn't understand the significance of the ancient techniques, the importance of the seasonal cycles!"

Morgan's eyes were drawn to a workbench nearby, taking in details that seemed increasingly significant. Leather-bound books on agricultural rituals lay open, their pages marked with colored tabs. A calendar on the wall was covered in precisenotations, lunar phases carefully tracked. Dried herbs hung from the rafters in neat bundles, each labeled in meticulous handwriting.

But something about the scene nagged at her—the same something that had bothered her about the property's initial appearance. It was too perfect, too precisely aligned with their profile. Like a stage set designed to tell a specific story, or a frame job orchestrated to point blame in a specific direction. She knew something about being framed, about how evidence could be arranged to create an illusion of guilt.

"Save it for the interrogation room," she said, hauling him to his feet. As they led him out, Morgan noticed something that cemented her doubts—a fresh receipt from Marshall's Market, dated after Laura's murder, sitting on the workbench. The same store where Emily had been confronted. It seemed too convenient, too deliberately placed. Like someone wanted them to find it.

They led Hale out into the sun, where the contrast between the greenhouse's artificial spring and the reality of the dying season was stark. Morgan caught Derik's eye over their suspect's bowed head. He gave her a slight nod—he shared her doubts. The greenhouse and its contents were suspicious, certainly, but almost too perfectly suspicious.

As uniforms arrived to process the scene, Morgan watched the greenhouse's glass panels reflect the afternoon light like a hall of mirrors. Inside, spring bloomed eternal while autumn died outside, a perversion of natural law that echoed their killer's methodology. But was Hale truly their man, or just another piece in a larger puzzle?

She thought of Emily in the cornfield, of Laura in the river, of the ritual elements that linked their deaths.

CHAPTER NINE

The interrogation room's lights cast harsh shadows across Victor Hale's face, highlighting the sweat beading on his forehead. Morgan sat across from him, letting the silence stretch between them like a tripwire. She'd learned this technique in the BAU, but prison had perfected it—ten years of watching, waiting, learning when to speak and when to let discomfort do the work for her. The room smelled of stale coffee and anxiety, reminding her of parole hearings and false hopes.

Through the two-way mirror behind her, she knew Derik was watching, probably with that slight furrow between his brows that appeared whenever a case started to unravel. Above them, the ventilation system hummed—the same institutional drone she'd lived with for a decade, though this time she was on the other side of the table.

"Walk me through your research again," she said, her voice deliberately casual. The manila folder in front of her contained crime scene photos she hadn't shown him yet, their corners worn from hours of study. "These ritual elements you study—the seasonal transitions, the symbolic sacrifices. It's fascinating stuff."

Victor's fingers drummed against the metal table, creating a nervous rhythm that echoed off the cinderblock walls. His academic composure was cracking around the edges, like paint peeling from an old facade. The salt-and-pepper hair that had looked so distinguished in his license photo was now disheveled, damp with nervous sweat. "I told you, my work focuses on preserving ancient agricultural knowledge. The ritualistic aspects are just one component of a broader—"

"Like the use of corn silk in harvest ceremonies?" Morgan interrupted, sliding out the photo of Emily in the cornfield. Shewatched his reaction with the hyper-vigilance that had kept her alive, reading micro-expressions the way she'd learned to read other inmates for signs of deception or impending violence. "Or spring flowers in autumn?"

The color drained from Victor's face as he stared at the photo. His reaction wasn't what Morgan expected from their killer—there was horror there, but not recognition. Not the pride she'd seen in countless interviews with ritual murderers. She'd interviewed enough killers to know the difference between genuine shock and feigned innocence.

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