Chapter 94 : Suspects
Commissioner James Gordon stood at the edge of the crime scene, his trench coat pulled tight against the chill air.
The warehouse was medium sized, lined with waste and full of dust except for a portion.
But it was the candles that caught his attention first.
Dozens of them, arranged in a perfect circle around where the body had been found. Most were burned down to stubs, their wax pooled on the floor. A few had been blown out—recently, based on the wisps of smoke still visible when the first responders arrived.
Everything about the crime scene screamed RITUAL.
Gordon's jaw tightened as he approached the center of the scene, where CSI techs were photographing and documenting every angle. The body bag was already zipped, ready for transport, but Gordon had seen the photos. Had seen what was left of Michael.
His chest cavity was opened. And his heart was missing. His face was frozen in an expression of pure terror.
And there, on the wall behind where the body had been positioned, written in blood that was still tacky when they'd arrived:
**FOR JUSTICE**
The letters were crude like someone wrote it using their finger . The message wasn't long, but it didn't need to be.
"Commissioner?" A detective approached, "Medical examiner is ready to transport."
"Any physical evidence?" Gordon asked, not taking his eyes off the blood-written message.
"Candle wax, footprints, some trace fibers. CSI is still processing. No obvious DNA so far, but the blood on the wall matches the victim."
"Sir, there's something else. About the victim's son."
Gordon turned to face her. "What about him?"
"Tommy the kid, he was found four blocks from here, alone in a courtyard, waiting for his father. When we interviewed him, he said his father went with his mother—but the mother was at work the entire time. Security footage and multiple witnesses confirm it."
"The boy described someone who looked exactly like his mother, sounded exactly like her, who led them into an alley and then... the father disappeared."
Gordon had a bad feeling. "Shapeshifting?"
"Or hallucination. Maybe some kind of mental manipulation." The detective looked back at the message on the wall. "Commissioner, do you think... could this be the Architect?"
Gordon was quiet for a long moment, studying the scene. The candles. The opened chest. The missing heart. The message written in blood.
"What's the victim's background?" he asked instead of answering.
The detective consulted her notes.
"Michael, thirty-four, systems analyst at Wayne Tech. No criminal record—not even a parking ticket. Married, one child, lives in the Bowery District. By all accounts, a normal guy. Good employee, good neighbor, good father."
"Good father," Gordon repeated softly, thinking of the Architect's previous targets. Rapists, Mobs, Psychos, Corrupts...
Every single target had been a monster. Verifiable, documented evil.
But the victim here, Michael was just anordinary IT analyst with no criminal history.
"This doesn't fit his MO," Gordon said finally. "So far, he had targeted only specific types of criminals." He gestured at the scene. "This is different. The staging, the ritualistic elements, the victim profile—it's all wrong."
"You think it's a copycat?"
"I think someone wants us to think it's the Architect. Maybe its someone who had a vendetta against Michael and made use of Architect's recent chaos." Gordon pulled out his phone and took a photo of the blood message. "But whoever did this doesn't understand what drives him."
"So what do we do?"
"Send the body to Dr. Thompkins for autopsy. I want a complete workup—tox screen, tissue analysis, everything. And get me a list of everyone released from Arkham and Blackgate in the last month." Gordon looked at the blown-out candles one more time. "Whoever did this wanted to create a spectacle. That's ego, not justice. And ego makes people sloppy."
---
**Gotham City Medical Examiner's Office **
Dr. Leslie Thompkins pulled off her latex gloves with a snap and dropped them in the biohazard bin. Behind her, Michael's body lay on the examination table with the standard Y-incision on his flesh for autopsy.
Gordon stood by the observation window, his arms crossed, waiting for the results.
"Well?" he asked.
"Cause of death is pretty straightforward—catastrophic cardiac trauma. The heart was removed while he was still alive, based on blood spatter patterns and the damage to surrounding tissue." Leslie moved to the light box where X-rays were displayed. "But the method is what's interesting. This wasn't hacked out. The incision between the ribs was precise using a sharp instrument, maybe a knife. Whoever did this knew his stuff about human body."
"Why do you say that?"
"The killer knew exactly where to cut to access the heart with minimal interference from bone structure." Leslie pulled up another screen showing microscopy images. "But here's what's really disturbing."
She pointed to a series of graphs and numbers that meant nothing to Gordon.
"These are hormone levels from the victim's blood. Specifically, stress hormones—ACTH, cortisol, norepinephrine, adrenaline." Leslie's expression was troubled. "Jim, I've been doing this for twenty years. But I have never seen anything like this."
"Like what?"
"This amount of ACTH and norepinephrine in his blood? The concentrations are off the charts. The poor man must have been absolutely terrified just before death. Not just scared—I mean primal, overwhelming, system-flooding terror. His body was in full fight-or-flight response, every fear receptor firing at maximum capacity."
Gordon moved closer to look at the numbers, though they still didn't mean much to him. "Could that be from having his heart cut out?"
"That would cause pain responses, shock responses, but not this specific hormone profile. This is pure fear, Jim. Sustained, intense psychological terror that lasted long enough to completely saturate his system." Leslie met his eyes. "Whatever this man saw or experienced before he died, it broke something in his brain. His fear response was pushed beyond what should be normally possible."
Gordon was quiet, processing. "Terrified of what, exactly?"
"That's what I can't tell you. There's no evidence of torture beyond the final wound. No signs of prolonged physical abuse. No drugs in his system that would cause hallucinations or paranoia." Leslie pulled up another image—a close-up of Michael's face.
Even in death, his expression showed traces of that final terror. "Whatever frightened him this badly, it was psychological. Something he saw, or thought he saw. Something that made him more afraid than a human being should be capable of being."
Gordon stared at the dead man's face, thinking about Tommy's description. His mother who wasn't his mother. The figure who could make a child see his own parent in a stranger's face.
"Someone who can make people see things," Gordon said softly. "Someone who can manipulate perception. Make you see your worst fears."
---
**Alex Thorne's Apartment**
Alex sat at his desk, the laptop screen casting blue light across his face in the darkened room.
Around him, papers were spread out—printouts of the crime scene photos, the medical examiner's preliminary report that he'd acquired through careful infiltration of the GCPD database, news articles about the murder.
The photo of the blood message was particularly interesting: **FOR JUSTICE**
Alex's fingers drummed on the desk as he studied it.
This was crude mimicry. Someone trying to copy his methods without understanding it.
The victim bothered him too. He'd already run a complete background check on Michael. Systems analyst. No criminal record. No connections to organized crime or corruption. No evidence of abuse, violence, or exploitation.
That wasn't anything worth killing him for. Certainly not justice.
Alex pulled up another window—a list he'd compiled from public records and carefully hacked institutional databases. Recent releases and escapees from Gotham's various correctional and psychiatric facilities. If this killer hadn't come from outside the city, they'd likely come from inside one of these institutions.
The list was longer than he'd hoped:
**Ronald Dillion**
**Cornelius Stirk**
**Jackson Pressy**
**Irving...**
The list continued, seven names in total. Everyone with their own unique histories of violence, mental illness, or both.
Alex leaned back in his chair, his expression thoughtful.
How many of these people are really treated? How many just learned to act the part and to say the right things, to convince doctors and parole boards that they'd changed?
The question was rhetorical. He knew the answer from his psychology studies, from his own experience manipulating perception. People could fake recovery. They could hide their true nature behind masks of compliance and cooperation.
And if one of them had decided to kill in his name, using his philosophy as justification for their own pathology...
He'd built something with the Architect persona—a specific kind of justice, brutal but purposeful. If someone was perverting that, using it as an excuse for random killing, they needed to be stopped.
And if any of these people are still the monsters they pretended to recover from, they need to be removed anyway.
His eyes went back to the top of the list.
Ronald Dillion - "The Hooker" - Released last week, Blackgate Penitentiary. Served 15 years. Original conviction: Four counts of first-degree murder of police officers.
Alex clicked on the file, pulling up the details. Ronald Dillion, age forty-three. In 2010, during a drug raid gone wrong, Dillion had murdered four police officers with a fire axe. The brutality of the killings had shocked even Gotham's jaded population. He'd been sentenced to life without parole, but a technicality in the arrest procedure had gotten his sentence reduced on appeal. With good behavior and psychiatric evaluation claiming rehabilitation, he'd been released last week.
Hacked four policemen to death with an axe, and now he was free.
Alex's fingers hovered over the keyboard, already pulling up current addresses, known associates, tracking data.
"Guess I'll start with Ronald Dillion, aka 'The Hooker,'"
"Lets see how good was your rehabilitation."