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“You’ve never seen any of those movies?” Agent Hale asked when they were back in Con’s car.

“Nope.”

Con was trying to make sense of Martin Yeo. He seemed slimy, dishonest. Con just had no idea if this was a necessary character trait of a CEO of a large production company or if it hinted at something deeper.

“Well, I’m no Tomatometer approved reviewer, but Quantum Guardian and Eclipse were pretty shit. But Rise of the Titans was pretty good. I’m telling you, Con, you should watch it.”

“It’s Agent Striker,” Con corrected. “And I don’t really watch movies.”

“Oh, yeah?” Agent Hale said.

Clearly, the man was not adept at picking up on social cues. He kept on talking as if he thought that Con was a willing participant.

“You don’t like movies but do you like shows, then? The House of Dragons on HBO is amazing.”

“I don’t watch shows, either.”

“I mean, you should try it. I know a lot of people say that they don’t like magic and dragons, but these are only secondary. It’s like Game of Thrones . It’s a political drama, really.” Agent Hale paused, and then he chuckled to himself. “Politics and incest, I guess.”

It sounded like pure torture to Con.

No shows, no movies. I spend every spare moment I have looking for my sister’s body.

Agent Hale continued to prattle on about some show he’d watched or another for a good five minutes before stopping to catch his breath.

Con was disinclined to encourage the man to continue talking but he couldn’t handle any more of this inane babble.

“What was your last assignment?”

“Last assignment? Oh, I was doing undercover work with the LAPD. I put in my request to join the FBI years ago, passed all the tests, went through the Academy on my weekends and during vacation but they never had any spots open up. Budget cuts, you know how it is.” For some reason this made Agent Hale smile. “But then they said that a new spot was available, and when they told me who was going to be my partner? Constantine Striker? The man who brought down The Sandman? You wanna know what I did?”

Con took this as a rhetorical question and waited for the Owl answer, but when the man just blinked those thickly-lidded eyes at him, he begrudgingly said, “What?”

“I said, listen, guys, I know we’ve been working together on this case for six months— six months —and I hate to leave you in the lurch like this, but I gotta. This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, you know?”

Oh, I bet they were just devastated that you were moving on, Chris. Cried themselves to sleep every night.

Con was being unkind—the man had just offered him a compliment—but what was he supposed to do?

He told Marcus that he wanted to work alone. He told Marcus he wanted only high-priority cases.

He told Marcus that he would find his fucking sister’s bones if it was the last thing he did.

“I bet during that undercover case there was a lot of downtime. A lot of just watching and observing,” Con remarked.

“Yeah, of course. Surveillance was a big part of—”

“In silence,” he interrupted.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of— oh .” The man’s face fell as he finally caught on. “Sorry.”

At long last, the interior of the Ford Taurus went quiet.

Con knew he should be thinking about their current case, he knew that if he fucked it up, Marcus Allen would use it as another reason to try and get him fired.

Well, fat chance of that.

As Agent Hale had just reminded him, he’d brought down The Sandman. Sure, that was eleven years ago, but it still held clout. Helped the mayor, the fucking president get reelected.

But he hadn’t done it alone. Tate had been by his side every hour, every minute, they searched for the killer. And, truthfully, if it hadn’t been for that phone call, Matthew Nelson Neil might still be killing women to this day.

With nothing to go on and the bodies piling up, they had no choice but to reach out to the public for help. The FBI opened a tip line and the calls had flooded in. A task force had been assigned to field these calls, which were automatically categorized into one of three levels: the first was for pure scams, people who were just looking for attention. The second was for tips that might have merit, someone reporting a neighbor behaving strangely, arriving home at odd hours. The third level was reserved for information that warranted immediate investigation.

Sounds of a woman in pain or a near abduction by someone who fit the profile: a large white male in his early thirties.

But none of these bore fruit.

Desperate, working on near zero sleep, Con had listened to thirty-six hours of tips straight. And when he came across the artificial voice uttering just a simple address, he’d nearly done what the task force had: plopped into level one to be forgotten.

But, on a whim, he’d dumped the address into Google Maps. The website showed him a dilapidated home in an area that had long since been ignored by even the most adventurous of house flippers.

Still, this was no big revelation. That came when Con realized that the house was a mere six miles from the last known location of one of the missing girls: Wendy Schneider.

It could have been a coincidence, it probably was a coincidence, but Con was at his wit’s end, and they had nothing else. He dragged a reluctant Tate Abernathy with him, and they staked out the joint.

Six hours later, a car pulled up. It was a delivery boy dropping off an Arby’s bag.

They’d found empty Arby’s wrappers at two of the other locations where the women had been left, naked, lying on a mattress in buildings of similar states of disrepair.

It still wasn’t enough, though.

So, Tate and Con continued to wait.

Forty minutes after the delivery had been made, the door opened and a hand shot out, grabbing the bag.

Con remembered the feeling he’d gotten in his gut upon seeing that hand.

A wrenching, a twisting of his entrails.

Matthew Nelson Neil was inside the house. Later, under the stillness and calmness of night, they’d broken in.

“Go on,” Con said as he pulled up outside the field office.

Agent Hale blinked.

“Go on… inside?”

Con just stared.

“Right, of course. You know what, I’m going to go inside and see if I can find those videos, the pirated ones. You never know, they might still be online.”

“Yeah, good idea. I’ll do the same.”

Agent Hale hauled his fat ass out of the car and Con drove off, the momentum of the car closing the door behind his partner.

He had no intention of watching movies today or any other day.

He had other plans, plans that didn’t include his annoying, obese, owl-looking partner.

Fuck Marcus Allen.