The first one died on a Tuesday.
Jack Merrick knew this because he had spent the Tuesday after that Tuesday reading the autopsy report in a motel room that smelled of bleach and regret. The report said myocardial infarction. Natural causes. No signs of trauma, no toxins, no struggle. Just a fifty-three-year-old man named Harold Baines who had been in excellent health according to his last physical, dropping dead in his office while reviewing a quarterly earnings projection.
Merrick had been hired by Baines's widow, who didn't believe in natural causes. She believed in her husband's paranoia. Harold Baines had told her three days before his death that someone was going to kill him. Not in so many words. He had said, "They want the license back, Ellen. They want it so badly they'd do anything."
She had no idea what license he meant. Neither did Merrick, at first.
That was eight weeks ago. Now Merrick sat in a rented Ford Taurus across the street from the University of Millbrook's administrative building, watching the rain smear the windshield into a watercolor of gray and amber. He had been sitting there for four hours. His back ached. His coffee had gone cold two cups ago. But he had learned, over fifteen years of military police work and another seven of freelance investigation, that patience was the only currency that never depreciated.
The second victim was a woman named Diane Rosenthal. She died on a Thursday, eleven days after Baines. Same cause of death on the certificate. Same pristine medical history. Same corner office with a view of the campus quad. Her husband found her slumped over a keyboard, her fingers still resting on the letters that would never form another sentence. The police called it a fluke. Two executives from the same wireless firm, both succumbing to cardiac events within two weeks? Statistically improbable, but not impossible. The insurance company launched a quiet inquiry and then quietly closed it when the actuarial tables shrugged.
Merrick had been paid to dig deeper. He had found nothing. No poison in the coffee cups. No tampering with the HVAC systems. No trace of forced entry or electronic surveillance. The offices were clean. The victims were clean. The company, Utopian Wireless, was so aggressively clean that Merrick had started to suspect the whole thing was a setup—until the third victim.
Marcus Webb. Died on a Monday, while giving a presentation to the board of trustees. Fifty-eight years old. Collapsed mid-sentence, right in front of seventeen witnesses. The paramedics arrived in six minutes and pronounced him dead on the carpet of the university's conference room. His heart had simply stopped, like a clock that had run out of springs.
Three executives. Three fatal arrhythmias. Three autopsies that offered nothing but the same unsatisfying conclusion: idiopathic. Doctors loved that word. It meant "we don't know," but it sounded like a diagnosis.
Merrick had spent the last three weeks learning everything he could about Utopian Wireless and its relationship with Millbrook University. The connection was a spectrum license. Not the kind of spectrum that meant radio waves and cell towers—well, technically yes, but that wasn't the point. The point was that the Federal Communications Commission had granted Millbrook University an Educational Broadband Service license back in 2007 for a slice of the airwaves covering a six-county region. The university didn't use it. They couldn't. They didn't have the infrastructure, the capital, or the expertise. So they leased it to Utopian Wireless under a twenty-year agreement that gave Utopian exclusive rights to develop and sublease the spectrum.
The deal was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-two million dollars over its lifetime. Not a fortune by telecom standards, but enough to make people careful. Enough to make people competitive.
And enough, apparently, to make people dead.
Merrick had reviewed the lease agreement six times. He had highlighted clauses, cross-referenced amendments, and traced the signatures through three layers of university bureaucracy. The central figure, the one whose name kept appearing in the margins and the minutes and the quiet footnotes, was a man named Elias Voss.
Dr. Elias Voss. Chair of the Department of Anthropology. Tenured professor. Published author. And, according to the university's own records, the person who had originally recommended the spectrum lease to the board of trustees back in 2007. Voss had written a white paper arguing that the revenue from the lease would fund a new archaeological research center. The board had approved it unanimously. The center had been built. Voss had directed it for seventeen years.
Merrick had never met Voss. But he had watched him from a distance. He had seen the man walk across campus with the measured stride of someone who had never been questioned. Silver hair. Rimless glasses. A tailored blazer that probably cost more than Merrick's car. He had the kind of face that belonged on magazine covers—distinguished, intellectual, faintly amused by the world's inability to keep up with him.
Merrick didn't like him. That wasn't evidence. But it was a starting point.
The rain began to taper off as the afternoon bled into evening. Lights flickered on in the administrative building, one window at a time, like a slow-motion domino chain. Merrick watched the fifth-floor corner office. That was Voss's domain. The anthropology department had its own building three blocks east, but Voss kept an office in the administration wing because, as one staffer had whispered to Merrick, "The man likes to watch the machinery."
Merrick checked his watch. Six-forty-seven PM. The campus was emptying out. He had been watching Voss's schedule for a week, and he knew the pattern. The professor stayed late on Wednesdays. Not for grading or research—Merrick had checked. The man sat in his office, lights off, for hours. Sometimes he left at nine. Sometimes eleven. Once, at two in the morning.
On three of those nights, an executive had died within seventy-two hours.
Merrick opened the glove compartment and pulled out a slim leather case. Inside were six obsidian shards, each no larger than a fingernail, each carved with an intricate glyph that looked like something between a hieroglyph and a circuit diagram. He had found them in the offices of the three victims, wedged into corners or taped under desks. The first was in a potted plant. The second was behind a filing cabinet. The third had been glued to the underside of a keyboard tray.
The police hadn't noticed them. Why would they? The shards looked like decorative ornaments, the kind of thing you'd bring back from a vacation in Mexico or Guatemala. But Merrick had traced them. Not through databases or connections—through a former colleague who owed him a favor and happened to have a contact at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
The answer had come back in four words: "Likely pre-Columbian. Possibly Maya."
Merrick didn't believe in curses. He believed in cause and effect. He believed that someone had placed these shards in the victims' offices, and someone had known exactly what they would do. He didn't know how. He didn't know why. But he knew that Elias Voss had published three papers on Maya mortuary rituals between 2009 and 2014, and that the glyphs on the shards matched illustrations in those papers with almost perfect fidelity.
It was thin. It was barely enough to get a warrant, and that assumed any judge in the state would believe a former MP with a private investigator's license who claimed that a tenured professor was using ancient Mesoamerican artifacts to kill wireless executives. Merrick could imagine the look on a judge's face. He could imagine the laughter from the district attorney's office. He could imagine the libel suit that would follow if he made a single accusation without absolute, irrefutable proof.
So he hadn't made any accusations. He had simply watched.
Now he watched Voss's window. The light was off, but the silhouette was there—a dark shape against the gray rectangle of the glass. Voss was sitting still. Waiting. Merrick couldn't see what the man was doing, but he had a feeling. A cop's feeling. The kind that had kept him alive in three different conflict zones and one dishonorable discharge hearing.
The dishonorable discharge had been a lie, but that was a story for another time. The point was that Merrick knew how to read people in the dark, and Voss was not a man who sat still for no reason.
Merrick reached for the door handle. He had a decision to make. He could sit in the car and wait for another executive to die, or he could go inside and find out what Voss was hiding. The first option was legal. The second was not. Breaking into a university office building after hours was a misdemeanor at best, a felony at worst. If he got caught, his license would be revoked. His career would be over. He might even face jail time.
But he had been asking himself the same question for three weeks now, and the answer had never changed. If the law couldn't stop the next death, the law was just a set of rules for the dead to follow.
Merrick got out of the car.
The administrative building had a security system, but Merrick had already mapped it. The front doors were locked at seven PM, but the east entrance had a magnetic latch that could be jimmied with a credit card and a steady hand. He was through in forty-three seconds. The hallway was empty, lit by dim emergency strips that cast everything in a jaundiced glow. He moved to the stairwell and climbed to the fifth floor, his footsteps muffled by the rubber soles of his boots.
The fifth floor was silent. The kind of silence that presses against your eardrums and makes you hear your own heartbeat. Merrick walked to the corner office, his hand resting on the tactical flashlight he carried in his jacket pocket. The door was closed. No light under the gap. He pressed his ear to the wood and listened.
Nothing. Not a breath. Not a chair creaking. Not the click of a keyboard.
He tried the handle. It turned.
Merrick pushed the door open slowly, letting the emergency light from the hallway spill across the floor. The room was empty. No Voss. No silhouettes. Just a desk, a bookshelf, and a single leather chair that was still warm to the touch.
Merrick froze. That was wrong. He had seen Voss in that chair not three minutes ago. The man couldn't have gotten past him. There was no other exit from the fifth floor except the stairwell and the elevator, and Merrick had passed both.
He turned around, his flashlight in his hand, and found himself staring at the bookshelf on the back wall. It was a floor-to-ceiling unit packed with leather-bound volumes and academic journals. But one section—third shelf from the bottom—had a faint seam that didn't match the others. Merrick pressed his fingers against the spine of a book on Mesoamerican ceramics, and the entire section swung inward on hidden hinges.
A passageway. Dark. Narrow. The smell of dust and dry stone.
Merrick stepped into it without hesitation. He had come too far to stop now. The passage led to a small room that was not on any building blueprint he had seen. It was maybe eight feet by ten, with a low ceiling and a concrete floor. There were no windows. The walls were lined with crates labeled in Spanish, and on a metal table in the center sat a collection of items that made Merrick's blood run cold.
Obsidian knives. Ceramic vessels painted with figures that writhed in the dim light. Fragments of stelae covered in glyphs that seemed to shift when he looked at them directly. And in the center of the table, resting on a black velvet cloth, was a stone heart. Not a real heart—a carving, life-sized, made of jade. It was split down the middle, and inside the cavity were three small black shards, identical to the ones Merrick had found in the victims' offices.
A fourth shard was missing. The velvet had an indentation where it should have been.
Merrick heard a sound behind him. Soft. Deliberate. The click of a door latch.
He spun around, but the passageway was empty. The bookshelf had swung shut, sealing him in. The only light came from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling, and it was beginning to flicker.
Elias Voss was somewhere in that darkness. Merrick could feel him. Could almost smell him—the faint scent of cologne and old paper.
And then the bulb went out.
In the absolute blackness, Merrick heard a voice. Calm. Measured. Amused.
"Mr. Merrick. I've been expecting you."
Merrick's hand found the flashlight. He clicked it on.
The beam illuminated an empty room.
No. Not empty. On the table, where the stone heart had been, there was now a single obsidian shard. It was carved with a glyph that Merrick didn't recognize—a spiral that curled inward, tighter and tighter, until it disappeared into a point of absolute darkness.
Underneath it, scrawled in what looked like charcoal, was a single word:
Next.
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