Chapter 12: The Investigation of the Carters
The Purchase
The key was cold and heavy in Luna's hand, a sliver of metal that felt less like an opportunity and more like a sentence. She turned it in the lock of 16th Avenue, Unit 201, the click echoing in the vast, empty space like a starting pistol shot.
They stood inside, side-by-side, two figures adrift in a sea of polished hardwood and sun-bleached walls. The house was good. Better than good. It was clean, modern, and silent, with large windows that flooded the interior with a pale, unforgiving light. It was a blank slate, a pristine shell purchased with the grim, determined capital of a life insurance policy. To any observer, it was a fresh start, a brave attempt by a grieving couple to build anew.
It was a lie.
This was not a home; it was a command post. A strategic relocation from the haunted theatre of their old apartment, where every scuff mark on the floor and every faded patch on the wall whispered their son's name. They had tried to outrun the trauma, to pack it away in cardboard boxes, but they had only succeeded in moving its headquarters. It lived in the new silence between them—in the way Luna's eyes would dart towards a closed door as if expecting it to splinter, in the way Noah's shoulders remained perpetually tense, braced for an impact that had already happened.
The pleasant facade of a new beginning was a necessary deception, a curtain drawn for the outside world. Now, hidden from the pitying glances and hushed condolences, they could shed the skin of passive victims. The time for mourning was not over, but it was being forcibly retired. In its place, a colder, more focused energy began to hum.
It was time for justice. It was time for their investigation.
The Police Department
The air in the Eldridge Police Department had curdled from determined urgency into a thick, stagnant brew of frustration and burnt coffee. The case files on John Carter, once a vibrant, urgent puzzle, were now a monument to failure, their pages dog-eared and their leads bleached bone-dry.
'Which meeting is it today?' Michael asked, the words gritted out between his teeth. He didn't look up from the file permanently fused to his desk, his eyes tracing the same lines of evidence that had long since ceased to yield meaning.
Andrew let out a long, weary sigh, the sound of a man trying to exhale his own exhaustion. He rubbed at his temples, where a permanent ache had taken root. 'I guess, the fourteenth.'
'What the hell,' Michael snarled, finally slamming the folder shut. A plume of ancient dust motes erupted into a shaft of pallid light, dancing like tiny ghosts. 'We have no trails. Nothing. And they're systematically dismantling our independence with these pointless, circular meetings.' His rage was a low, constant burn, more dangerous for its containment. He knew, with a sickening certainty that had become his new normal, that the meeting would be a ritualistic rehashing of dead ends. The department's collective knowledge was a stagnant pool: John Carter was murdered. The how was a perfect, locked-room mystery staged by a phantom. The who was a statistical zero, a man who had never existed.
'What if they find one this time?' Andrew's question was feeble, a token gesture of hope he no longer felt.
'They won't,' Michael cut him off, his voice a shard of glass. He stood up, his chair screeching in protest, and began to pace the cramped confines of their shared office. 'They fuc*ing won't. He's out there. He's moving, planning, probably laughing, knowing we're in here, chasing our own tails in ever-tighter circles while he gets further away with every second we waste in that room.'
Andrew placed a steadying hand on his own desk, his knuckles white. 'This anger is reasonable, Michael. God knows I feel it too. But do not let it become the pilot. We need clear heads now more than ever. An emotional cop is a blind cop.'
'Clear heads?' Michael whirled around, his eyes blazing. 'How can we be clear-headed when the entire department is useless? When the only thing we're building is a thicker file of everything we don't know? He's a ghost, Andrew. And we're trying to handcuff a gust of wind.'
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Two hours later, the fourteenth meeting convened in the briefing room. The air was thick with a collective resignation, a shared understanding of their own impotence. The room felt emptier. It was a subtle change, noted only by a silent, grim glance exchanged between Andrew and the Head of Department, Arthur Stirling. Michael's chair was conspicuously vacant. His frustration had finally boiled over, the pot tipping after one too many fires had been lit beneath it.
Stirling stood before the team, his face a roadmap of stress. He introduced new theories, his voice a flat, bureaucratic monotone against a map of the city studded with red pins that marked only graves and questions. A possible, tenuous connection to a cold case from three states over. A forensic re-analysis of the Braille note's paper stock, a hope so microscopic it was pathetic. Each idea was a flare shot into a starless night, extinguished by the same impenetrable silence that had swallowed all the others.
They hadn't gotten a single, viable trace of the criminal in the past week. They were trying their hardest, giving their best hours and their worst nightmares to the cause. But the pressure was an invisible vise, and it was cracking the foundation. As Stirling spoke, his eyes scanned the room, and he noted, with a sinking heart, two more empty chairs that hadn't been vacant the meeting before. Two more officers, their patience and hope exhausted, had quietly resigned from the task force. The hunt for the Auspicious Criminal was not just stalling; it was disintegrating from within.
Davenport: The Unraveling
While Eldridge grappled with a single, perfect crime, the city of Davenport was engaged in a very public, very messy suicide. The protests had metastasized, shedding their skin of civil disobedience to reveal the raw, snarling face of an insurrection. The cryptic prophecy—"the world will end in 2012"—was no longer a slogan; it was a battle cry, a fever-dream mantra that justified any and all action. The chaos had escalated from marches to bombings, leaving scorched scars on post offices, police precincts, and power substations. America was bleeding from a self-inflicted wound, a new kind of civil war fought not along geographic lines, but along the fault lines of a shattered psyche.
The federal response had escalated in kind, a classic, heavy-handed play from a panicked government. Firings—first warning shots cracking over heads, then lethal volleys tearing into the crowd—had become commonplace. But the violence acted not as a deterrent, but as an accelerant. Each bullet seemed to oxygenate the movement, each act of state suppression proof positive of the very tyranny the protestors decried.
The police barricades in South Eldridge, a last bastion of order, were not just overrun; they were pulverized. A human wave, no longer interested in persuasion, poured into the district, their intent not to protest but to reveal a hidden truth through the catharsis of pure, unadulterated chaos. They came to baptize the streets in fire, believing it was the only way to be reborn.
The response, when it came, was absolute, final, and terrifying. Military officers and Air Force personnel, their faces impersonal behind visors, moved in with the grim efficiency of a surgeon amputating a gangrenous limb. Armored vehicles sealed off thoroughfares. The ultimatum, broadcast on every official channel and through loudspeakers that drowned out the mob's roar, was chilling in its simplicity: "Disperse immediately. Return to your homes. This is your only warning. Failure to comply will be met with lethal force."
Confronted with the naked, uncompromising machinery of the state, the fervor of the mob broke. The animal instinct for survival momentarily overrode the ideological fever. The crowd, which had seemed an unstoppable force, began to ebb, dissolving into frightened individuals retreating down side streets. It was a brutal, ugly victory for order, but a victory nonetheless. For three tense hours, a fragile, armed quiet settled over the city. It felt, for a fleeting moment, as if the rebellion had been cauterized.
The respite was an illusion.
As dusk fell, the new billboards flickered to life across Davenport. They were identical to the ones that had haunted New York—stark, minimalist, and profoundly unsettling. Against a dark background, a single, stylized, unblinking eye stared out, and beneath it, a time, a date, and a location for a new Gathering.
The Architect, watching from his unseen perch, saw the army's brutal stand not as a setback, but as a gift. They had handed him the perfect narrative tool. He would not galvanize his followers with calls for peace or retreat. He would gaslight the entire situation. He would twist their necessary brutality into the ultimate proof of his thesis. His message would be one of vindication, not fear. He would call the protestors to rejoice, to see the army's lethal presence not as a defeat, but as irrefutable evidence that their rebellion was just, necessary, and righteous. He would march them forward again, their anger refined by martyrdom, their resolve hardened by the enemy's face.
The Carters: The First Thread
The artificial quiet of their new home was a canvas, and upon it, the Carters began to paint their own investigation. The television was off. The boxes remained unpacked. They sat opposite each other in the living room on a pair of folding chairs, the only furniture in the room, two generals planning a covert war.
Luna broke the silence, her voice soft but firm, cutting through the meaningless calm. "We have to start, Noah. But where? How do we even begin an investigation with just the two of us?"
Noah's gaze was fixed on a point on the pristine wall, as if he could see the ghost of their old life projected there. "We start with what we know. With the people. We recall every single person we encountered from the moment we left John alone to the moment our world ended. We look for the crack in the performance. The criminal was there, Luna. He was in our orbit. He had to be."
Luna closed her eyes, the memories washing over her like a toxic tide. "Dr. Voss," she said, the name tasting clinical and cold. "The forensic examiner. Detective Michael. Sergeant Andrew... and the paramedics. The other officers, their faces are a blur." She opened her eyes, her frustration showing. "That's it. A handful of people, all of them there to help. Or so we thought."
"Now we interrogate that list," Noah said, his voice dropping into a low, analytical register. "We question not just who they were, but what they said. Their words, their demeanor. We look for the note that doesn't belong in the symphony."
He fell into a deep silence, his mind a darkroom where the film of that horrific night was being developed anew. He replayed every interaction, every glance, every syllable of condolence and procedure. He was no longer a grieving father listening for comfort; he was a detective listening for a slip. And then, he found it. A single, discordant note in the chorus of official statements, a connection that sparked with the brilliance of lightning.
His head snapped up, his eyes locking with Luna's. "Do you remember what Dr. Voss said to us? In the lab, with John's postmortem report between us?"
Luna flinched at the memory. "He said... he said John was murdered. That it was manual strangulation. That the fingerprints weren't his."
"Go on," Noah urged, leaning forward, his intensity a physical force. "What else? After he confirmed it was a professional, an intentional killing. What were his exact words?"
Luna's brow furrowed as she dove back into the nightmare. "He said... he said the killer was 'skilled, deliberate, and calculated.' That the scene was staged." She paused, her eyes widening slightly as the memory crystallized. "And then he said... 'This is only the beginning.'"
The words hung in the empty room, suddenly pregnant with terrifying new meaning.
"Exactly," Noah whispered, the word a blade. "'This is only the beginning.' Luna, at that moment, John's was the only murder we knew of. It was a single, isolated, devastating tragedy. The series? The one hundred and eight other children? The national pattern? We knew nothing about that. The police were only just starting to piece it together. So how did Dr. Voss, a forensic examiner in a lab, know that our son's murder was not an endpoint, but an opening chapter?"
Luna felt a cold dread slither down her spine. "It could have been... a figure of speech? A way of saying our nightmare was just starting?"
"Coincidences do not happen at the scene of a perfect crime," Noah countered, his voice grim and certain. "Not when every other detail is meticulously planned. And especially not from a man who presented himself as a dispassionate scientist. He wasn't offering sympathy; he was stating a fact. A fact he should not have possessed. He knew. He knew John was the first of many."
"You are correct," Luna conceded, the logic of his suspicion forming an inescapable cage around the image of the calm, sharp-jawed doctor. The pieces fit with a horrifying click. "So, what are you saying? That Dr. Voss is... the criminal?"
"Most probably," Noah stated, the weight of the accusation settling in the room. "Or he is not the architect, but a vital piece of the machinery. A person under the criminal's direct agency. A accomplice. He had access, he had the knowledge, and he gave us a prophecy he had no business making."
A new, chilling certainty solidified between them. The vast, faceless enemy had just been given a potential name, a face, a profession. The diffuse cloud of their anger and grief was now coalescing into a laser beam of purpose. They were no longer victims pleading for answers from a disinterested system. They were hunters, and they had their first, tangible scent.
The official investigation was foundering, suffocating under its own bureaucracy and lack of imagination. But in the quiet of a new house on 16th Avenue, a private, desperate investigation had just found its confidential target. The hunt for Dr. Domain Voss had begun.
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Chapter 12 Ends
To Be Continued...