Page 13 of Forsaken

"Oh God," he whispered, pushing back from the table. The legs of his chair scraped against the floor, the sound triggering a memory of cell doors sliding shut at lights-out. "That's—that's not what my research is about. This is obscene."

Morgan caught a whiff of his fear-sweat, distinct from the nervous perspiration of earlier.

"You confronted Emily at Marshall's Market," she pressed, leaning forward. Through her rolled sleeve, other marks were visible: the phoenix rising from ashes, the barbed wire transformed into flowering vines, each one a chapter in her story of survival. "Witnesses say you were angry, aggressive. Why?"

"She was going to publish an exposé." Victor's voice cracked like thin ice over deep water. His hands shook as he ran them through his hair, academic pride crumbling into something rawer, more honest. "About how I'd built my career on stolen knowledge. She'd interviewed indigenous farmers who claimed I'd taken their traditional practices and published them as my own discoveries." His shoulders slumped, defeat written in every line of his body. "She was right."

Morgan studied him, reading the shame in his hunched shoulders, the fear in his darting eyes. She knew guilt. This was genuine remorse, but not for murder. This was the guilt ofa man who'd compromised his principles for professional gain, not someone who mixed seasons with blood.

Behind her, she heard the interrogation room door open with a familiar hydraulic hiss. Derik stood in the doorway, his expression carefully neutral but his eyes conveying urgency. The silver at his temples caught the night, a reminder of the years they'd lost. "Cross? A word?"

In the hallway, the lighting was no less harsh, but at least the air felt cleaner. Morgan noticed the tension in Derik's jaw, the way his fingers flexed at his sides—tells she'd learned to read during their years of partnership.

"His alibis check out," Derik said quietly, angling his body to shield their conversation from passing personnel. "Security footage shows him at an agricultural conference in Houston the night Laura Benson died. Multiple witnesses place him there until morning. He's not our guy."

Morgan's jaw tightened as she processed this information. She glanced back through the two-way mirror at Hale, who sat slumped in his chair, looking more like a defeated academic than a ritual killer.

"So we're back to square one," she muttered, frustration edging her voice. “All that stuff in his greenhouse… a coincidence.”

“Lots of people grow flowers out of season,” Derik reasoned.

Morgan sighed. She had been looking for evidence, so sure it was Hale… but it wasn’t him.

"We pulled his publishing history—papers in peer-reviewed journals going back fifteen years."

The fluorescent light flickered overhead, a subtle reminder of impermanence. Morgan thought of Cordell, of his shadow looming over her life, over the Bureau itself. How many other investigations had been steered toward convenient suspects?How many other agents had been fed evidence that was too perfect to question?

When she returned to the interrogation room, Victor had composed himself somewhat, though his hands still trembled slightly as they rested on the table. He looked smaller now, diminished by confession rather than guilt. The afternoon sun slanting through the high window cast shadows across his face.

“Well, Victor, your alibi has checked out,” Morgan said.

Victor let out a breath of relief.

“I told you, I didn’t kill anyone.”

Morgan sighed. “Then why did you run?”

“I was scared. I knew Emily had passed away—I saw it in the news. I saw how it happened, and I knew it would look like I could’ve had something to do with it. But I swear, I didn’t.”

“We believe you now,” Morgan said. “And I apologize for all this.”

"No," Victor said, "I shouldn't have ran. I should've trusted in my own innocence that it would set me free."

He took a breath.

"But—I can help," he said before she could speak. "Not with Emily's death—I swear I had nothing to do with that. But these ritual elements your killer is using? They're all wrong."

Morgan paused in the act of gathering her files, her instincts suddenly alert. "Wrong how?"

"The mixing of seasonal symbols—spring flowers with autumn harvests? That's not how the ceremonies worked." Victor leaned forward, academic enthusiasm momentarily overwhelming his fear. His hands sketched patterns in the air as he spoke, describing ancient cycles of death and rebirth. "Each season had its own specific rituals, its own sacred timing. Combining them would have been seen as blasphemous."

He pulled a legal pad toward him, beginning to sketch diagrams with the precision of someone who'd spent yearsstudying these patterns. "Traditional agricultural societies understood the importance of boundaries—between seasons, between life and death, between sacred and profane. Your killer isn't following traditional practices. He's perverting them."

Morgan watched him draw, her mind racing. If the killer wasn't following authentic rituals, then what was his pattern? What drove him to mix spring flowers with autumn harvests, to blur the lines between seasons? She thought of her own case—how evidence had been twisted, how truth had been perverted to create a perfect lie.

“Perverting them how?” she asked. “What do you make of it?”

Victor furrowed his brow, tapping his pen against the legal pad as he considered Morgan's question. "It's like... he's trying to force the cycles to overlap, to accelerate the process of death and rebirth. In nature, these transitions happen gradually, each season flowing into the next. But your killer seems to be compressing them, creating an unnatural convergence."

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