Darren Ashworth died at 4:47 in the morning, approximately nine minutes after Kate Mercer received the photograph of him standing on his balcony. She learned this from Detective Adrian Cross, who called her at 6:15 AM with a voice like broken concrete.
"You want to explain how you knew?" Cross asked.
Kate was already in her car, driving toward Covington through the pale gray light of a city that didn't yet understand what was happening. She'd barely slept. The photograph was still open on her phone, a digital ghost that she couldn't stop looking at.
"An anonymous email," she said. "Arrived last night while I was at the Webb scene. Someone sent me Ashworth's credit report marked with the same red ink. It said 'DEBT PENDING.'"
"And you didn't think to mention this immediately?"
"I told you to find Ashworth. You didn't call me back."
There was a long silence on the line, filled with the ambient noise of a crime scene—voices, footsteps, the distant wail of a patrol car. "He was dead by the time I got your message," Cross said finally. "The medical examiner thinks he died sometime after four. The call came in at five when a neighbor noticed his balcony door was open and a light was on. Patrol found him in his study with a credit report stapled to his chest."
"Stapled?"
"Industrial staple gun. The kind used for upholstery." Cross's voice was flat, professional, but Kate could hear the rage beneath it. "The report was for a woman named Celeste Ashworth. His ex-wife. And there was a message written across it."
"Let me guess. 'Love's Debt Settled.'"
"Close. 'Betrayal Account Closed. Balance Zero.'" Cross paused. "I'm going to ask you a question, Mercer, and I need you to be honest with me. Are you involved in this?"
The question hit her like a slap. "Excuse me?"
"You show up at a murder scene before half the department. You receive encrypted emails predicting the next victim before anyone else knows he's a target. You have a personal history with the exact financial system this killer is using as a signature." His voice dropped. "Tell me why I shouldn't consider you a suspect."
Kate gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles whitening. "Because I called you. Because I told you about Ashworth. Because if I were the killer, Detective, I wouldn't need to send myself anonymous emails."
Another silence. Then Cross exhaled, a long slow breath that crackled through the speaker. "Where are you now?"
"Driving to Covington."
"Don't. The scene is sealed. You won't get within three blocks."
"I'm not going to the scene." She turned onto the Meridian Expressway, the city's glass towers rising before her like a forest of mirrors. "I'm going to Veritas Credit Solutions."
She'd found the name while searching through the Nexus Credit Bureau's dispute records at three in the morning. Both Marcus Webb and Darren Ashworth had used the same credit repair agency to dispute negative items on their reports. Veritas was a small operation, barely a footnote in the credit reporting industry, but its name appeared in the metadata of both victims' dispute histories.
"Never heard of it," Cross said.
"Neither had I until four hours ago. It's a credit repair agency in the Holloway district. Both victims were clients."
"That's thin, Mercer."
"It's what I have." She changed lanes, accelerating past a delivery truck. "Unless you want to share what your investigation has turned up so far."
Cross was quiet for a moment. "I'll meet you there."
"Fine. But I'm not waiting."
She hung up before he could argue and pressed her foot harder on the accelerator.
The Holloway district was a scar on the eastern edge of Ashton Heights, a neighborhood that had been promised revitalization fifteen years ago and had received only neglect. The buildings were brick and rust, their facades covered in faded advertisements for products that no longer existed. The streets were empty at this hour, the residents either still asleep or already gone to jobs that paid too little.
Veritas Credit Solutions occupied a defunct strip mall between a check-cashing store and a boarded-up diner that had once been called Mabel's Kitchen. The agency's signage was faded vinyl, its windows covered in iron security bars that had been painted beige to match the peeling stucco. In the gray morning light, it looked less like a business and more like a tomb.
Kate parked across the street and studied the building. The front door was metal, featureless except for a small placard that read VERITAS CREDIT SOLUTIONS—BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. The windows were dark. No lights inside. No sign of recent occupancy.
She got out of her car and crossed the street, her shoes splashing through puddles that reflected the colorless sky. When she reached the door, she tried the handle. Locked. She pressed her face to the window, cupping her hands around her eyes to block the glare.
Inside was a reception area that looked like it had been abandoned for years rather than months. A desk covered in dust. Chairs with torn upholstery. A dead plant in a ceramic pot shaped like a dollar sign. On the wall behind the desk was a framed certificate from the Better Business Bureau, dated 2018.
"Can I help you?"
Kate spun around. A man was standing on the sidewalk behind her, holding a cardboard tray with two coffee cups. He was in his sixties, with a face like worn leather and eyes that had seen too much disappointment to register surprise at anything. He wore a maintenance uniform with the name "Holloway Properties" stitched on the chest.
"I'm looking for the owner of this business," Kate said.
"Then you're about three years too late." The man set the coffee tray on the hood of a parked car and pulled a ring of keys from his belt. "Veritas closed up in 2022. Owner skipped town owing six months' back rent. I'm just the guy who keeps the roof from caving in."
"Who was the owner?"
"Fellow named Nicholas Voss. Smooth talker, fancy suits, always three months behind on payments." The maintenance man selected a key and inserted it into the front door. "Came in promising to help people fix their credit. Near as I can tell, he fixed his own credit and left everyone else's worse than he found it. Why are you asking?"
"I'm a journalist." Kate pulled a business card from her coat—one of the old ones, from before the lawsuit, when her name still carried weight. "Two of Voss's former clients died this week. I'm trying to understand the connection."
The maintenance man looked at the card, then at her, then back at the card. "Died how?"
"Murdered."
He was silent for a long moment. Then he pushed the door open and gestured for her to follow. "Name's Gerald. Gerald Donnelly. I've been managing this building for twelve years. Seen businesses come and go, people rise and fall. But I've never seen anything quite like Nicholas Voss."
The interior of Veritas Credit Solutions smelled of mildew and old paper. Gerald flicked a light switch, and a fluorescent panel in the ceiling flickered to life, illuminating the reception area in a cold, clinical glow. Kate could see now that the dust on the desk had been disturbed recently—handprints, drag marks, the clear evidence of someone searching through files.
"Someone's been in here," she said.
"Probably the owner's creditors. Or maybe just squatters. Hard to keep a place locked up when the neighborhood's this rough."
But Kate was already moving past him, through a door behind the reception desk that led to a narrow hallway. The hallway had three doors. The first opened onto a storage closet filled with empty boxes. The second led to a bathroom with a broken mirror. The third opened onto what had been Nicholas Voss's private office.
The room was larger than she'd expected, with a window that looked out onto the alley behind the strip mall. A wooden desk dominated the center of the space, its surface covered in papers that had been left behind in whatever hurry Voss had made his exit. Filing cabinets lined one wall, their drawers partially open, their contents spilling onto the floor in drifts of manila folders.
But it was the wall behind the desk that stopped Kate cold.
Someone had used red paint—or something that looked like red paint—to write a single word across the faded wallpaper: REMEMBER.
And beneath that word, pinned to the wall with thumbtacks, were photographs. Dozens of them. Faces of men and women, most in their forties and fifties, all well-dressed, all caught in candid moments—exiting restaurants, climbing into luxury cars, walking dogs along manicured sidewalks. Surveillance photographs, taken without the subjects' knowledge.
Kate counted them. Twenty-three faces. The fourth from the left was Marcus Webb. The seventh was Darren Ashworth.
"Gerald," she called, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. "How long has this been here?"
The maintenance man appeared in the doorway, his face going slack as he took in the wall. "That wasn't here last month. I do a walk-through every thirty days. Last time I checked this office, that wall was bare."
"Last month?"
"December 15th. I remember because it was the day before my granddaughter's birthday."
Kate pulled out her phone and began photographing the wall, the faces, the word written in red. "Did Nicholas Voss leave any records behind? Client files, account information, anything that might explain who these people are?"
"He left everything. The landlord was supposed to dispose of it, but the legal situation got complicated. Voss declared bankruptcy in another state. His assets were frozen. Nobody knew who owned what, so everything just... stayed." Gerald gestured at the filing cabinets. "If there's anything left, it's in there."
Kate moved to the nearest cabinet and began pulling files at random. Most were standard credit repair documentation—dispute letters sent to credit bureaus, correspondence with collection agencies, copies of clients' credit reports with negative items highlighted in yellow marker. The work was meticulous, thorough, the kind of attention to detail that suggested Voss had actually tried to help his clients, at least for a while.
Then she found the ledger.
It was in the bottom drawer of the desk, beneath a stack of outdated tax forms—a leather-bound book, the kind used by accountants before everything went digital. The cover was embossed with a single word: DEBTORS.
She opened it.
The pages were filled with handwritten entries, each one documenting a romantic betrayal in the precise language of a financial transaction. There were dates, amounts, descriptions of the relationships, and a column labeled STATUS that contained notations like "UNPAID," "DISPUTED," and "SETTLED."
Entry fourteen read: Marcus Webb, Attorney at Law. Represented husband in divorce proceedings against wife, 2019. Concealed marital assets totaling $2.4 million. Wife died destitute, 2021. STATUS: UNPAID.
Entry twenty-one read: Darren Ashworth, CEO Ashworth Properties. Attempted to arrange wife's murder, 2021. Paid witness to recant testimony. Settled divorce for fraction of marital assets. STATUS: UNPAID.
Kate turned the pages, her heart hammering. There were entries dating back to 2019, each one documenting a specific act of romantic or marital betrayal, each one assigning a dollar value to the damage done. The handwriting was precise, almost calligraphic, and after a few pages she realized it matched the red ink on the credit reports pinned to the dead men.
She reached the final entry. The ink was darker, fresher, as if it had been written more recently than the others.
Entry twenty-three: Nicholas Voss, Owner Veritas Credit Solutions. Exploited vulnerable clients for personal enrichment. Abandoned business owing restitution to forty-seven families. STATUS: UNPAID.
Beneath the entry, in red ink, was a single word: Collecting.
"Gerald," Kate said, her voice barely a whisper. "When was the last time anyone saw Nicholas Voss?"
The maintenance man didn't answer. She turned to find him staring at something on the floor near the window—a dark stain that had soaked into the floorboards, almost invisible against the aged wood. He knelt and touched it with his fingertip, then brought his hand to his nose.
"That's blood," he said. "Not fresh, but not old either. Maybe a week. Maybe less."
Kate looked at the ledger in her hands, at the word "Collecting" written in red beneath Voss's entry. The killer had been here. The killer had found this ledger. And the killer had used it to begin settling debts.
She pulled out her phone and dialed Cross. He answered on the first ring.
"Where are you?"
"Veritas Credit Solutions. I found something. It's a ledger, Detective. A list of betrayals. Webb and Ashworth are in it, and there are twenty-one more names. Some of them are marked 'UNPAID.'"
"Twenty-one?" Cross's voice sharpened. "You're saying there could be twenty-one more victims?"
"No. Some are marked 'SETTLED.' But at least a dozen are still listed as unpaid." She looked at the wall of photographs, at the faces of men and women who had no idea they'd been marked. "The killer used this office. They've been here recently. There's fresh blood on the floor, and I think it might belong to Nicholas Voss."
"Don't touch anything else. I'm five minutes out."
"Cross, there's something else." She turned the ledger to a page near the beginning, where the entries were dated 2019. "The first entry in this book. It's not a client. It's not a betrayal."
"What is it?"
She read the entry aloud: "Evelyn Thorne, Credit Analyst. Victim of romantic fraud, 1998. Fiancé Julian Cross stole identity, destroyed credit, attempted murder. Justice denied by Crestfall Financial legal intervention. STATUS: UNPAID. Priority: Maximum."
The name hit her like a physical blow. Julian Cross. She looked up at the word on the wall, the red letters that seemed to burn in the fluorescent light.
REMEMBER.
"Detective," she said slowly, "what's your first name again?"
The silence on the line was different this time. Heavier. When Cross spoke, his voice had lost its professional edge.
"Adrian," he said. "My name is Adrian Cross. And I think you need to tell me exactly what you just read."
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