Chapter 4

• “You Michael Reynolds?” the detective asked.
• “Yeah.”
• “See anything off this morning?”
• “A body got snagged on the downstream trash rack. Female. White puffer jacket. I filed the report like I’m supposed to.”
• “Your sonar pick up anything?”
• I pulled it up on the screen. Waveforms, timestamps, frequency analysis—everything lined up perfectly with drowning. I’d been faking data for three years. My phony logs looked better than the real thing.
• The detective stared at the screen for a long time. His brow tightened, then eased. He turned and traded a look with the young patrol cop. Quick, but I caught it. They were confirming something.
• “Can you export this recording?” the detective asked.
• “Sure," I confirmed. "But I need the chief to sign off. Rules are rules.”
• He nodded, took a few photos with his phone. At the door, he paused and glanced back at me.
• “You on duty here alone?”
• “Yeah.”
• “Not scared?”
• I shrugged. “Used to it.”
• He didn’t say any more and just left.
• But the young patrol cop—Jason Moore—he looked back at me too.
• That look lingered. It wasn’t suspicion. It was something else. Like he couldn’t stand what he was seeing. Like a warning.
• I’d seen all kinds of looks: families’ despair, coworkers’ indifference, bosses’ impatience. But the way Jason Moore looked at me—I’d never seen that before.
• It put me on edge.
• That night, the Fisherman wired me a thirty-five-thousand-dollar deposit.
• I stared at the payment notice on my phone and burned through half a pack. There was an old enamel mug on the window ledge in the monitoring station. I used it as an ashtray. By the time I was done, a dozen butts were piled in there like a little graveyard.
• At two in the morning, I killed every light in the station and walked up to the levee.
• No one was at the trash rack anymore. They’d pulled the body. All that was left on the water was a faint ring of oil, the moon turning it into a skin of thin ice.
• The wind came off the river with a particular smell—not fishy. The smell of things that had been rotting in the water a long time. I knew that smell.
• I stood on the levee, looked at the river, and said something only I could hear.
• “Who are you?”
• No answer.
• But behind me, in the monitoring station, the sonar system pinged.
• Not an alarm. A playback.
• I’d set the system so if it caught a repeating audio fingerprint, it would auto-compare it to the archive.
• Meaning, if today’s body’s audio fingerprint matched one from three years ago by more than ninety percent, the system would auto-play it.
• It found a hit.
• Today’s woman’s audio fingerprint matched another one from three years back. Ninety-seven point three percent.
• Three years ago.
• I ran back to the station, hands shaking, opened the historical database, and pulled it up.
• ID: GR-20190712-004.
• Timestamp: July 12, three years ago, 4:21 a.m.
• Tag: Jane Doe, female, about twenty. Found two miles downstream of Greenwood Dam.
• Notes: Advanced decomposition. Face unrecognizable. No family located. Processed per protocol.
• I played the recording.
• First, water.
• Water passing the sonar sensor, like wind through a wheat field.
• Then a woman’s voice. Younger than today’s. Same line. Same word.
• “Dad.”
• Then the same dull thud. A body hitting the water. Bubbles churning up.
• Two audio fingerprints. Three years apart. Exactly the same.
• Not the same victim.
• The same killer.