The blinds in Chief Slate's office were drawn so tight they fractured the world outside into thin amber streaks. The radiator hummed low and weary in the corner, a sound that seemed to carry the exhaustion of the building itself. His desk bore the weight of hours—half-drained coffee gone cold and thin, an ashtray full of cigarette corpses, folders stacked like markers in a cemetery. Slate sat behind it with his hands clasped, his shoulders rigid beneath his uniform, his gaze locked on the phone as though it might suddenly demand answers he wasn't ready to give.
Then the door crashed open.
Mayor Otis Blackwell stormed in like something compressed too long, finally rupturing. His expensive suit strained around his midsection, and his face had gone the color of old meat—red, swollen, suffused with the particular desperation of brandy and dissolution. His cufflinks flashed as he gestured violently, and the smell of liquor came with him like an aura.
"Do you have any conception of the hell you've allowed into my city, Chief?" His voice arrived before he'd fully crossed the threshold. "I had investors tonight—foreign money, serious players. We were within reach of a deal that would've lifted Crestwood out of the garbage. And then this mask-wearing psychopath turns my city into a theater of death! The Halvern contracts—months of work—evaporated. Do you understand what that costs me? Not just money, Chief. Reputation. Standing."
He collapsed into the chair across from Slate's desk, his momentum carrying him forward like something that couldn't stop.
Slate remained motionless, his face a carved thing, giving nothing.
But Blackwell's voice kept climbing, each sentence stacked atop the last. "And as if that catastrophe wasn't sufficient, the federal investigators are circling my accounts now. They have photographs, Chief. Pictures of me at dinner with Karan Malhotra—yes, that Karan, the one currently decomposing in the ground after his little clock shop turned out to be warehousing narcotics. You want to explain how those images ended up on a federal desk?"
He slammed a folder onto Slate's desk. Papers scattered like the wreckage of something that had already capsized—blurry photographs, bank statements, numbers underlined in red so fierce the pen had nearly torn through.
"Somebody wants me dismantled," Blackwell said, his voice dropping to something rawer. "Somebody's feeding them ammunition, and they're not stopping until I'm gutted and left bleeding on the street. Now you tell me—who benefits from that?"
Slate flipped through the pages slowly, methodically, while Blackwell's words continued to spill like poison from an open wound.
"Whoever this Azaqor is," Slate said finally, his voice barely above a murmur, "he's not just making a statement. He's constructing one. With intention. Every piece positioned carefully, every act designed to expose the same rot."
Blackwell blinked. "Rot? You're speaking in riddles now?"
"The rot at the top," Slate clarified. His eyes remained on the pages. "You, the Halverns, half the city's aristocracy—all woven together so tight you can't move without the others feeling the strain. The killer's chosen his stage, and every curtain call leads back to the same audience."
The mayor went quiet for a moment. Then a grin spread across his face—something ugly and knowing, the expression of a man who'd been waiting for someone else to finally see what he'd been seeing all along.
"You think I haven't been turning that possibility over in my head?" Blackwell leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiracy's whisper. "Every time blood spills in this city, William Halvern's bank account gets fatter. When his father died—murdered, officially unsolved—he inherited what amounted to a controlling stake in half the city's infrastructure. When his brother fell away? Same narrative. When those Everthorne children went missing last winter? Grieving families sold off property the Halverns then conveniently acquired at fire-sale prices. Each tragedy was a transaction. Each death a business opportunity."
He paused, letting that settle like sediment. "And then there's the wife."
Slate's jaw tightened. "Viola."
"Viola," Blackwell repeated, the name coming out weighted with contempt. "That woman is poison with skin pulled over it. You ever wonder how she landed him? Theodore Halvern's blood hadn't even cooled before she appeared on that family's doorstep with an infant in her arms, claiming it was William's child. But I've seen that boy, Chief. He doesn't look like William. He looks like Theodore."
Slate's pen froze mid-motion.
"I'm suggesting," Blackwell continued, "that the old man had appetites he didn't confine to his marriage bed. Back when I was still working for him—just a driver then, nobody important enough to notice—I'd overhear things. Late-night arrangements. Cash exchanges in the dark. And I saw her once, the girl he was meeting. Viola Saye, before she inherited the Halvern name. Now she sits in that mansion wearing inherited pearls, and everybody's polite enough to pretend she doesn't know exactly where the bodies are buried."
Slate's pulse quickened. Information was arriving too fast, pieces that had never aligned before suddenly locking into place like a mechanism finally understanding its purpose.
"That's quite an accusation, Otis."
The mayor shrugged, but there was no lightness in the gesture. "Truth doesn't care if it sounds like accusation. Theodore's murder was officially closed when they arrested his housemaid—Serena Drayke. She hanged herself in her cell before the trial. Took only days. And right after, William's former fiancée—Gracy something—died in a car accident. Brakes gave out. How many coincidences does it take before you stop calling them coincidence?"
The radiator hissed into the silence that followed, a sound like breath held too long.
Slate leaned back, his mind assembling the architecture of it—the names, the timelines, the headlines that had been carefully buried beneath the weight of official business.
"You're suggesting Viola orchestrated all of this," Slate said quietly. "That she moved through them like a chess player removing pieces."
"I'm suggesting she understands the long game better than anyone," Blackwell said. "She's been the puppet master while William held the strings—or thought he did. He's too infatuated, or too compromised, to see what's really happening. But she sees everything. She moves through that family like she already owns it."
Slate pressed his palms against his temples, the weight of it pressing down. If even half of this had substance, the Halverns weren't just a family of wealth and power. They were a family of predators who'd learned to wear the masks of respectability so perfectly that the city had never noticed the teeth.
"Be careful how you speak about them," Slate warned, his voice carrying an edge that suggested he knew exactly what careful words sometimes prevented. "If any of this has merit, you're not discussing gossip. You're inviting retaliation."
Blackwell laughed—a sound without humor, all bitter edges. "Retaliation? Chief, the retaliation's already underway. My accounts are frozen. My business partners have become ghosts. Every journalist in this city can smell my blood in the water. You think I'm concerned about one masked killer when the entire apparatus is already carving me open? At least the mask's honest about its intentions."
He stood, buttoning his jacket with hands that wouldn't stay steady. "Do what you want with your investigation. But if you're looking for where to dig, start with that house on the hill. The Halverns built this city, sure. But everything they constructed is sitting on a foundation of rot. All you have to do is scrape hard enough to see it."
The mayor turned toward the door, his silhouette cutting through the narrowed light. In that moment, he looked less like a man and more like something that had already begun decomposing—a corpse that hadn't yet received notification of its own death.
When the door shut behind him, Slate remained motionless in the dark.
The smell lingered—brandy, sweat, and underneath it all, the iron tang of fear that had soaked into his clothes. But something else remained too, something harder to name. Truth, perhaps. Or the stain of it, faint and filthy, marking everything it touched.
He reached for the phone. His hand hovered above it. Then he pulled back, leaving it there untouched in the dark.
Outside his window, sirens wailed through the city streets—that rising and falling cry that had become Crestwood's soundtrack, the sound of a body in pain calling for help that might never arrive.
And somewhere beneath that wail, Slate could almost hear it—the soft, relentless whisper of sand moving through an hourglass no one could stop, time slipping away grain by grain, carrying the city toward something none of them were ready to face.