The darkness lasted for exactly four seconds. That was how long it took Merrick's training to override his panic. Four seconds of absolute void, and then he did what any good soldier did when the lights went out and the enemy was in the room: he dropped to the floor, rolled sideways, and came up against the concrete wall with his back protected and his flashlight scanning in a slow, systematic arc.
Nothing.
The room was empty. The table, the crates, the jade heart—all still there. But no Voss. No hidden door that had opened and closed. No footsteps retreating. The man had simply vanished into the same darkness that had swallowed the light bulb.
Merrick's heart hammered against his ribs, but he forced himself to breathe. Slow. Deep. The way he had learned in a different life, when breathing meant the difference between a clean shot and a body bag. He swept the beam across the walls, looking for seams, for hinges, for any sign of another exit. Nothing. The room was a concrete box with a single entrance, and that entrance was the bookshelf he had come through.
He pushed himself to his feet and crossed to the false bookshelf. His fingers found the seam again, pressed against the same spine. The mechanism groaned, and the section swung outward, spilling emergency light back into the chamber. Merrick stepped through, closed it behind him, and stood in Voss's empty office, trying to make sense of what he had just seen.
The voice. He had heard a voice. Clear, calm, close enough to touch. But no one had been there. The room was too small to hide a man. The crates were too shallow to conceal a human body. Merrick had been in enough ambushes to know when he was being played, and this felt like a game with rules he hadn't learned yet.
He pulled out his phone and took photographs of the office. The desk, the bookshelf, the hidden passage. Then he stepped back into the secret room and photographed everything in it—the crates, the artifacts, the jade heart, and especially the obsidian shard with the spiral glyph. He documented the word "Next" scrawled beneath it. Then he carefully wrapped the shard in a handkerchief and slipped it into his pocket. Evidence. Physical, tangible evidence that connected Voss to the murder weapons.
He didn't know if it would hold up in court. He didn't know if any court would accept an obsidian shard as a murder weapon when the official cause of death was myocardial infarction. But he knew that the shard had been placed on that table between the time he entered the room and the time the lights went out, and that meant Voss had been there, in the dark, watching him.
Merrick left the building the same way he had entered. The rain had stopped. The campus was quiet, the kind of quiet that made every footstep sound like a gunshot. He made it back to his car without incident, started the engine, and drove three miles to a twenty-four-hour diner on the edge of town.
He ordered black coffee and a plate of eggs he didn't touch. He laid the handkerchief on the table, unfolded it, and studied the shard under the harsh fluorescent light. The spiral was intricate, almost hypnotic. It reminded him of something he had seen in a museum once—a petroglyph from the American Southwest, maybe, or a Celtic knot pattern. But this was different. This was precise in a way that felt almost mechanical, as if the carving had been done with a laser rather than a stone tool.
Merrick took out his phone and pulled up the photos from Voss's secret room. He zoomed in on the crates. The labels were in Spanish, but he could make out the shipping information: "México, Yucatán, Izamal." A town in the Yucatán Peninsula, known for its colonial architecture and its proximity to several significant Maya archaeological sites. The dates on the labels ranged from 2018 to 2024. Voss had been importing artifacts for at least six years, probably longer.
He scrolled to the jade heart. The carving was exquisite, the kind of craftsmanship that took months, if not years. The three shards inside it matched the ones he had found in the victims' offices. He now had four shards in total—three from the crime scenes, and this new one with the spiral glyph. He didn't know what the spiral meant, but he knew it wasn't a coincidence that it had appeared after the third death.
His phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
"You should have stayed in the car."
Merrick stared at the screen. No sender ID, no location data. Just those six words, delivered with the kind of precision that suggested someone was watching him right now. He looked up from the table, scanned the diner's windows, the parking lot, the street beyond. A few cars. A couple of pedestrians. Nothing that looked like a tail.
He typed back: "Who is this?"
The reply came in less than a minute: "You know who. Leave the shard. Walk away. Or the next name on the list is yours."
Merrick felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He had been threatened before. He had been shot at, stabbed, and once, memorably, thrown out of a moving vehicle in the middle of a desert. But this was different. This wasn't a thug with a gun or a rival investigator with a grudge. This was a man who had killed three people without leaving a trace, who had somehow appeared and disappeared in a sealed room, and who now claimed to have Merrick on his list.
He finished his coffee, paid the check, and drove to a different motel—one he had never used before, a fleabag place on the south side that took cash and didn't ask questions. He paid for three nights, locked the door, and spent the next two hours researching Elias Voss with the intensity of a man who knew his life depended on it.
The public record was impeccable. Voss had earned his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2002. His dissertation was on Maya burial practices in the late Classic period. He had published sixteen peer-reviewed articles, three books, and numerous book chapters. He had received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Getty Foundation. He was a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and a consultant for the Smithsonian. By every measure, he was a distinguished scholar and a pillar of the academic community.
But Merrick knew that public records were only part of the story. He called a contact—a journalist named Sarah Chen who had written about academic fraud and corruption for a trade publication. She owed him a favor from a case two years ago, when he had provided her with documents that exposed a pharmaceutical company's ghostwriting practices.
She answered on the second ring. "Jack. It's late. What do you need?"
"I need you to dig into a professor at Millbrook University. Elias Voss. Anthropology. I need to know if there's anything in his background that doesn't match the official narrative. Unpublished controversies, graduate student complaints, suspicious funding sources—anything."
Sarah was silent for a moment. "Voss? The Maya guy? He's a big name. What's your angle?"
"Three people are dead," Merrick said. "I think he killed them. I don't have proof I can use, but I know he's connected to artifacts that shouldn't be in this country. I need leverage."
"I'll see what I can do. But Jack—if Voss is as clean as he looks, I'm not going to risk my reputation on a fishing expedition."
"I understand. Just find me something."
He hung up and stared at the ceiling of the motel room. The paint was peeling. The air conditioner wheezed like a dying animal. He thought about the spiral glyph, about the word "Next," about the voice in the darkness that had spoken his name with the familiarity of an old friend.
He had been an MP for fifteen years. He had interrogated insurgents, tracked down deserters, and once pulled a colonel out of a burning vehicle while taking small-arms fire. He had seen the worst that humans could do to each other, and he had never once believed in ghosts or curses or any of the supernatural nonsense that civilians clung to when they couldn't accept the banality of evil.
But that room. That voice. That shard appearing where nothing had been before.
He didn't believe in curses. But he was starting to believe that Elias Voss had found a way to make curses real.
The next morning, Merrick drove back to campus. He didn't go to the administrative building. Instead, he went to the anthropology department, a squat brick structure that had been built in the 1970s and hadn't been renovated since. He walked in, nodded at the receptionist, and asked to see Dr. Voss's office hours.
The receptionist, a young woman with glasses and a nervous smile, checked a schedule. "He's not in today. He canceled his classes for the rest of the week. Personal reasons."
Personal reasons. Merrick filed that away. "Can you tell me if he's been receiving any unusual deliveries lately? Crates, packages from abroad?"
The receptionist's smile tightened. "I'm not authorized to discuss that. Are you a student? A journalist?"
"I'm a private investigator. Here's my card." He handed it over. "I'm looking into a matter that involves some artifacts Dr. Voss imported. If you hear anything, or if you notice anything unusual about his office, please call me."
She took the card with visible reluctance. Merrick thanked her and left, but he didn't go far. He circled around to the back of the building, where the loading dock was located. A pair of wooden crates sat on the dock, their labels partially obscured by duct tape. He squinted at them. The shipping origin was Mexico, and the return address was a museum in Merida.
He didn't try to open them. That would be breaking and entering, and he had already pushed his luck far enough. Instead, he took photographs of the crates, the labels, and the serial numbers. Then he walked back to his car and called Sarah Chen again.
She picked up on the first ring. "Jack, I've got something. It's not much, but it's weird."
"I'll take weird."
"About fifteen years ago, a graduate student at Chicago named Patricia Holloway filed a complaint against Voss. She claimed he had stolen her fieldwork notes and published them under his own name. The university investigated and found insufficient evidence. She dropped out of the program a year later and moved to New Mexico. I found her obituary from 2015. She died in a car accident. Single-vehicle, no witnesses, ruled an accident."
Merrick felt the cold knot return. "That's it?"
"That's the only blemish on his record. But here's the thing—I looked up his grant funding, and he's been getting money from a private foundation called the Shelby Trust. It's based in Delaware, and it's very opaque. I can't trace the beneficial owners. But the grant amounts are substantial—hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, every year since 2010. That's not normal for an anthropologist, even a successful one."
"The Shelby Trust," Merrick repeated. "Got it."
He hung up and spent the next hour searching for information on the Shelby Trust. It was a shell, as expected. No website, no public filings beyond the bare minimum required by Delaware law. But he found a connection through a cross-reference: the trust's registered agent was the same law firm that represented Millbrook University in its spectrum-lease negotiations.
Merrick sat back in his seat. The pieces were starting to form a pattern, but it was a pattern he didn't fully understand. Voss had access to artifacts, money, and legal protection. He had killed three executives who had signed the lease. But why? What did the lease have to do with Maya burial practices or imported artifacts?
He thought about the victims. Harold Baines, Diane Rosenthal, Marcus Webb. All three had been on the spectrum-lease committee. All three had voted to renew the agreement with Utopian Wireless in 2022. But there were other members of that committee—the university president, the board chairman, the general counsel. Why hadn't they been targeted?
Because they were protected, Merrick realized. The executives were the ones who had actually negotiated the deal on the corporate side. The university officials had merely approved it. Voss was targeting the people who had made the deal happen, not the people who had signed off on it.
But that still didn't explain why. What did a spectrum license have to do with Maya ritual artifacts?
Merrick opened his laptop and pulled up the lease agreement again. He read it line by line, looking for any clause that referenced archaeology, culture, or property rights. He found nothing. It was a standard lease, boilerplate language, no mention of indigenous heritage or historical preservation.
Then he noticed a footnote. A reference to an attached exhibit that had been redacted. The exhibit was titled "Site Assessment and Cultural Impact Statement." It had been prepared by an outside consultant, and the consultant's name was Elias Voss.
Merrick cursed under his breath. Voss had written the cultural impact statement. That meant he had access to the lease negotiations from the very beginning. He had been the one to recommend the deal to the board. He had been the one to certify that the spectrum license wouldn't interfere with any archaeological sites in the region.
But Millbrook, Alabama, wasn't known for its Maya ruins. There were no pyramids, no stelae, no ancient cities buried under the campus. So what had Voss been assessing?
Merrick pulled up a map of the area. The spectrum license covered a six-county region, including a stretch of land near the Tennessee River. He zoomed in on the coordinates listed in the lease. The primary transmission site was located on a parcel of land that the university had purchased in 2006—a hundred-acre plot that had been farmland for generations.
He pulled up the deed history. The land had been owned by a family named Alvarez until the university bought it. The Alvarez family had lived there for over a century. They had originally come from Mexico, according to a local historical society article Merrick found, and they had maintained a small private cemetery on the property.
Merrick's skin prickled. A cemetery. Maya descendants. A cultural impact statement written by a man who had spent his entire career studying Maya burial practices.
He called Sarah Chen again. "Sarah, I need you to look up the Alvarez family. They owned a piece of land near Millbrook that the university bought in 2006. I want to know if they had any connection to Voss—any contact, any correspondence, anything."
"I'll try," she said. "But Jack, this is getting deep. Are you sure you want to keep going?"
Merrick looked at the obsidian shard on the motel room table. The spiral glyph seemed to pulse in the dim light, though he knew that was just his tired eyes playing tricks on him.
"I don't have a choice," he said. "The next name on the list is mine."
He ended the call and stared at the shard. And for a moment, just a moment, he could have sworn the spiral was moving—uncoiling, stretching, reaching toward him like a finger pointing straight at his chest.
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