Page 20 of For Mercy (Morgan Cross #16)

The morning sun struggled against the thick glass of the FBI Headquarters, its rays reduced to a pale glow that barely touched the edges of the briefing room.

Inside, the dawn's tentative light was an unwelcome contrast to the oppressive atmosphere hanging over the agents.

Despite the new day, the air felt stale, fraught with the weight of sleepless nights and the pressure of the unsolved.

Morgan sat motionless at the table, save for the unconscious weave of her fingers through her tousled dark hair—a physical manifestation of her mind's relentless spinning.

The case board before her was a battleground of facts and theories, red string zigzagging like scars across the evidence.

On one flank, the stoic visage of Judge Richard Hawthorne; on the other, Michelle Knox's confident smile—two faces etched with the finality of their gruesome ends.

The similarities in their deaths taunted Morgan from the board.

Both victims discovered alone, surrounded by theatrically staged scenes mocking their professions.

Hawthorne's blood had painted a grotesque mural on his own private courtroom, while Knox's life ebbed away amidst the cold sterility of mock medical equipment.

It was as if the killer aimed to underscore their careers with a twisted homage in death.

Morgan's gaze lingered on Hawthorne's image.

A man vested with the power of judgment, now himself judged and executed in a parody of justice.

And Knox—an arbiter of wealth whose decisive hand once played with the fortunes of many, found dead with the means of salvation so close yet tragically ignored.

She tried to pierce through the fog of information, seeking a thread to pull, a connection that might unravel the knot of this enigma.

But the web was complex, and each potential link led only to more questions.

The irony of it all wasn't lost on her—the killer was out there, weaving these intricate patterns, while she sat here, caught in her own tangle of clues and dead ends.

In the dim light of early morning, the photographs of the deceased seemed to whisper of secrets just beyond reach.

Morgan knew better than to rely solely on legal logic.

The law was black and white, but human motivation lived in the grey, and somewhere in that murky realm lay the answers she sought.

As the silence of the room wrapped around her, the memory of her father's words from their clandestine meeting in the woods resonated within her.

John Christopher's revelation about Cordell's vendetta pulsed through her veins, mingling with the urgency of the current case.

She couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, the shadow of Cordell's past actions reached even into this investigation, though the nature of that reach remained elusive.

Patiently, she waited for the spark of insight, the elusive glimmer of connection that would bring the killer's motives into stark relief.

The stakes were personal, each victim a haunting echo of her own struggle against the injustice that had once consumed her life.

She wouldn't rest until the killer was unmasked, until the sins of the past were laid bare for all to see.

Morgan's fingers stilled on the file she had been leafing through, her gaze locked on the clock above the case board.

Hours had evaporated in their relentless pursuit of a connection between Judge Hawthorne and Michelle Knox.

She felt Derik's presence like a steady pulse beside her, his own determination mirroring hers.

The room had grown stale with the scent of old coffee and the recycled breath of two agents too stubborn to pause.

"Nothing," she muttered under her breath, shuffling through another stack of papers that held interviews, alibis, timelines.

Each document was a silent testament to their failure to find the invisible thread that linked their victims. Derik leaned back, his chair creaking in protest, his green eyes scanning the room as if hoping the walls would yield an answer.

They were both chasing ghosts through the labyrinth of evidence, and it was wearing thin on Morgan's resolve.

"Maybe we're looking at this wrong," Derik suggested, though Morgan could hear the weariness in his voice. He had shadows under his eyes that spoke of their shared vigil, and she knew he felt every bit of the exhaustion that clawed at her.

"Then we turn it inside out until it makes sense," she said, but the words sounded hollow even to her own ears. It was the mantra of the desperate, the creed of the sleep-deprived.

Without warning, her vision blurred, letters on the open file before her dancing into an indecipherable jumble.

She blinked hard, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead as if she could physically shove the fatigue aside.

Her body was rebelling, nearly two full days without proper rest, sustained by a cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline that was losing its potency.

Morgan's fingers pressed into her temples, kneading the skin as if she could massage away the fatigue that clung to her like a second skin.

The room around her was a blur of papers and photographs, the evidence board a constellation of red strings and thumbtacks that refused to align into any meaningful pattern.

She felt the weight of every second of the near-forty-eight hours that had slipped by since her last real rest, each one heavy with the urgency of the case.

Meanwhile, Derik rifled through a fresh stack of documents, his movements methodic, almost mechanical. Then, without warning, he froze. The abrupt stillness drew Morgan's gaze, and she found herself locked onto him, her own exhaustion momentarily forgotten.

"Derik?" she prodded, her voice gravelly from overuse.

He looked up, and there it was—that flash of clarity in his eyes that she'd come to know so well. "Morgan," he began, the timbre of his voice cutting through the static of her tired mind, "I think we've been looking at this all wrong."

She leaned in, her weariness pushed aside by the sheer force of her resolve. "What do you mean?"

"Michelle Knox," he said, tapping a finger against a particular sheet of paper. "A few years back, a family tried to sue her under the state’s bystander laws."

Morgan straightened in her seat, the fog in her brain dissipating just enough to let the implication of his words sink in. Bystander laws—the kind that addressed the moral duty of a person to intervene in an emergency.

"Go on," she urged, the cogs in her mind beginning to turn once again.

"Knox was accused of ignoring a man suffering a heart attack right in front of her," Derik continued. "The family claimed she just watched him die, that she had a responsibility to help, or at least call for help."

"And?" Morgan's heart quickened, sensing the tendrils of a connection starting to form.

"Case got thrown out. No legal obligation to act meant Knox walked free. But that family—they lost someone because she decided not to act. And now Knox is dead, in a scene staged like a hospital room, with lifesaving medicine just... out of reach."

The pieces clicked into place, a cold realization washing over Morgan. Michelle Knox, left to die with salvation so close yet ignored—just as she had done to that man. It was poetic, cruel justice, the kind that spoke of a meticulous and moralistic killer.

Morgan's frown deepened as she heard Derik recount the incident with a measured gravity that seemed to pull the air heavy around them.

In the lobby of her opulent office building, Michelle Knox had been on her way to an important meeting when a crisis unfolded before her very eyes.

A man, just an arm's length away, had collapsed, his hands clutching at his chest in silent horror.

The onset of a heart attack was unmistakable.

As if caught within a tableau of indifference, Knox had glanced at the stricken figure and simply continued on her path without breaking stride.

Morgan pictured the scene—bystanders frozen in shock, the man's anguished gasps fading into stillness, and Knox, whose life was governed by the ticking of a clock rather than the beating of a heart.

"Didn't even call for help," Derik added, flipping through the case details with a frustration that echoed Morgan's own. His voice held a note of disgust, a sentiment that clashed with the typically unflappable demeanor of his professional facade.

The family of the deceased had sought justice, their grief channeled into a lawsuit that accused Knox of failing to fulfill a moral responsibility that any decent human being would shoulder instinctively.

But the law had no room for morality; it was cold, clinical.

It stated that Knox had no duty to act, and the judge had concurred.

Their case crumbled, and Knox walked free, untouched by the tragedy she'd dismissed with a callous gait.

"Law is one thing, humanity another," Morgan muttered, her words barely audible as they were absorbed by the thick carpet beneath her feet. She stared at the photographs and reports scattered across the table, each one a fragment of a puzzle that was slowly aligning itself within her weary mind.

"Exactly," Derik responded, sensing Morgan's train of thought. "It's not about whether it was legal. It's about whether it was right."

A sharp edge of clarity cut through Morgan's exhaustion.

She knew too well how the tendrils of corruption could strangle justice, how the law could be manipulated and contorted until it served only those with the power to bend it.

Her past, the years stolen from her by the very institution she served, had taught her the bitter lesson that justice and legality often traveled divergent paths.

And now, it seemed, someone else understood that too—someone who dealt punishment where the law had failed.

"Derik," she said, her voice hoarse but resolute, "we're looking at someone who's not just killing. They're sending a message. We need to find out what message Hawthorne sent... or didn't."

Morgan's spine snapped to attention, her physiology betraying the fatigue that had clawed at her for hours.

The room spun briefly as she sat up straighter, the weak morning light doing nothing to ease the shadows beneath her eyes.

Her hands, adorned with traces of ink from years past, trembled faintly as her pulse quickened.

It was a visceral reaction to an unspoken truth that gnawed at her conscience.

Knox had passed by a dying man, her indifference as lethal as any weapon.

It wasn't about what was legal. It was about what was right. And Hawthorne?

Her gaze swept across the table, coming to rest on another file, one that bore the name Sarah Reeves.

The secretary-turned-law-clerk who had found peace—or so it seemed—in the embrace of death; a last resort to silence her despair.

Morgan had initially dismissed Sarah's demise as a tragic coincidence, a thread dangling with no clear end in sight.

But now, doubt crept into the crevices of her certainty, seeping through like water through cracked concrete.

The case file sat there, a silent testament to a life extinguished prematurely.

As Morgan scanned the details once more, the facts danced mockingly before her.

She could feel the walls of her resolve being chipped away with each sentence she reread.

The suicide note, the meticulously arranged belongings, the untroubled history—all elements of a narrative she had categorized as irrelevant.

But something clawed at the back of her mind, insistent and impossible to ignore.

Could she have been too quick to dismiss the significance of Sarah's death?

If the killer's motive was rooted in moral judgment, retribution for sins not paid in the eyes of the law, then perhaps Sarah Reeves had been more than a casualty of her own war.

Perhaps she had been a statement, a prologue to a series of orchestrated condemnations.

This new realization was a puzzle piece that Morgan hadn’t even known she was missing.

Yet here it was, fitting snuggly into place, making the image clearer, sharper, more horrifying.

There was a pattern emerging, one that suggested a killer moving through a list of selected targets—not at random, but with deliberate intent.

A vigilante who had taken upon themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner.

"Derik," she began, her voice barely above a whisper, yet heavy with implication, "what if Hawthorne ignored Sarah's cries for help, just as Knox did with that man?" She felt the weight of her own words settle in the room.

Derik turned his eyes away from the documents, their contents now secondary to the gravity in Morgan’s tone. He knew that look, the one where her instincts were piecing together a larger, more sinister picture.

"Could be," he admitted, his brow furrowing. "We can't rule it out. Not with a pattern emerging."

The silence stretched between them, punctuated only by the quiet hum of fluorescent lights above.

A killer haunting the moral fringes, punishing those who had transgressed an unwritten code of ethics—it made a twisted kind of sense.

Sarah Reeves's suicide, once a sorrowful footnote in Hawthorne's career, now glimmered with potential significance.

It was a lead that demanded exploration, a path that could unravel the enigma of these calculated deaths.

"Sarah's family," Morgan said decisively, the fatigue that clung to her frame cast aside by the surge of adrenaline. "We need to talk to them." Her dark eyes locked onto Derik's, conveying an urgency that needed no further explanation.

"Let's do it," Derik agreed, standing up, ready to follow Morgan's lead.

Their journey would take them into the heart of Sarah's past, sifting through memories and secrets in search of the truth.

There, they hoped to find the catalyst that sparked this lethal chain of events—to understand why Sarah died and to prevent the killer from exacting their brand of retribution on anyone else.

Somewhere amidst the threads of Sarah's life lay the answer to the riddle that now consumed Morgan Cross, and she wouldn't rest until it was uncovered.