POV: CASSIE
He talks to her about the women first.
Not the killings. The women themselves—who they were and what their lives were like before the headlines reduced them to into victims and the trial turned them into evidence. He talks about them like someone who has really lost someone, with the specific, slow detail that can't be faked. He knows that Sandra Obi, the first victim, had a window box of herbs on the sill of her apartment. He knows that Carla Weiss, the third victim, drove forty minutes every Sunday to visit her father in a memory care facility, even though her father didn't know who she was anymore.
He knows these things because he used to be a teacher. Damian Cross is the kind of man who pays attention to people without needing a reason to. This is because his students' older sisters, neighbours, and family friends all lived in the same small part of Richmond's Northside community.
Cassie lets him speak.
She doesn't say anything. She doesn't change course. She keeps the same posture she had when she sat down: her hands are loose, her shoulders are level, and her face is open. She listens with her whole body, just like her mother taught her to do in church when she was a little girl. Her mother used to say, "You listen with your spine." Not just your ears.
Her spine hears.
She looks at his hands. Still steady. She looks at his eyes. Still direct. She keeps track of the little things that happen without her knowing, like the microsecond tightening of his jaw when he says Sandra Obi's name, the slight drop in his voice when he gets to Carla Weiss, and the Sunday drives. She does what she always does: she files everything away, gives it a weight, and keeps a running total in her head like a balance sheet.
At this point, the balance sheet is doing something she doesn't fully trust.
He says, "I followed the investigation." It's leaning toward him. "From in here." First through my lawyer, and then through other means. He doesn't say what the other ways are. She writes down that she will come back to this. "I had time." I had a lot of time. I read everything, then. Every piece of news. All the court papers I could find. Every appeal my lawyers made and every reason the courts gave for turning them down.
He stops and says, "I started to see something." "A pattern. There was never enough evidence against me; I think part of me thought that the lack of evidence would save me in the end. A short, dry sound that sounds like a laugh. "It didn't." But the pattern I found didn't fit my case. It was outside of it. In the cases that should have been my case.
For the first time in eleven minutes, Cassie talks.
"Explain that," she says. "The women who died were connected," he says. Not to me. To another person. Someone who lived their life quietly and in a way that made being close to others normal. "Made access invisible." He looks at his hands for a second, then back at her. "Someone who had a professional reason to know things about victims before they became victims. Someone who knew how to use evidence. How it can be found—or not found—depending on where people look."
Cassie says, "You're talking about someone with a background in forensics." "Yes."
"Specific enough to handle a crime scene."
"Yes."
"And linked to the first investigation."
He looks her in the eye and says, "Connected to me." "Directly. In person. Someone I knew.
The fluorescent light makes a humming sound. The red eye of Cassie's recorder doesn't blink as it sits between them.
She doesn't reach for it. She doesn't look at it. She trusts it like she trusts her own hands. "Tell me who," she says.
She will think about what happens next many times in the weeks that follow.
Damian Cross does not lean back. He doesn't put on a show before he does what he is going to do. There is no dramatic pause, no breath gathering, and no sign that something important is about to happen. At one point, he is sitting across the table from her. The next thing she sees is him leaning forward in a way that is so slow and careful that she almost doesn't notice it.
She can see the individual threads of grey at his temples because they are so close. So close that the scar above his eyebrow is no longer a detail but a fact, a raised, certain thing with a history. So close that she can feel the words before she hears them.
He says a name in a low voice.
First name. Then a job. Then three physical details were given with the flat precision of a man reading from a document he had been writing in his head for a long time.
Cassie doesn't move.
Her face stays the same.
Her right thumb is pressing hard into her left palm under the table, where her hands have fallen to her lap. This is the tell she has never been able to get rid of. It's the one physical release valve she lets herself use when something hits her harder than she was ready for. The day her mother called to tell her that her father had been found, she pressed her thumb into her palm. She pressed it at the end of her first interview on death row. After that, when she was in her car, the adrenaline finally broke through the professional surface like water through old stone.
She pushes it now.
She doesn't let it show anywhere above the table. "Say it again," she says. "Clearly." For the record.
Yes, he does.
First name. Place of work. Three things. Then he added a fourth detail that he didn't include the first time: a specific behaviour pattern, a ritual, something so strange and exact that the hairs on Cassie's arms rise slowly and involuntarily under her blouse.
She inhales through her nose. Out of her mouth. One cycle, so quiet that it can't be seen. "How long have you known this?" she asks. "I've suspected it for six years," he says. "I've been sure for two."
"What made you sure?"
He pulls out a folded piece of paper from his uniform pocket. It's thin and worn at the creases, like old cloth that has been folded and unfolded so many times that the edges have started to soften. He moves it across the table.
She doesn't touch it yet. "Read it," he says.
It is an article that has been printed. Or more accurately, a printed transcript of an article—the text only, no pictures. This is the kind of thing that someone would make if they were working from a screen and didn't have access to a printer that could print pictures. The source is a news site in Maryland. The date is fourteen months in the past. The topic is a ceremony at the Maryland Department of Corrections to honour employees.
Cassie reads it once, quickly, like she reads everything else. She looks for the specific instead of the general and moves through the words like a hand moving through water, feeling for the shape of what is underneath.
The fourth paragraph is where she finds it.
It isn't clear. Most people wouldn't know right away. It's just one small detail that could be missed, and it's so specific that it won't mean anything to anyone who wasn't already looking for it.
For Cassie, who has spent six years training herself to see the small things that everyone else misses, this is the loudest thing on the page.
She looks up.
Damian is looking at her. "You see it," he says. "Yes," she says. "That's when I knew for sure."
Cassie puts the paper down on the table and smooths it out with two fingers. Then she takes the longest breath she has let herself since coming into this room.
She currently thinks that the situation is this.
She just heard a man with sixty-five hours left to live say a name. A name, a place of work, a physical description, a pattern of behaviour, and a piece of documentary evidence that, on its face, is circumstantial. But when you put it next to the structure of the original investigation, it fits with the horrible precision of a key in a lock.
This could be the most carefully planned manipulation she has ever seen.
She has sat across from people who manipulate. She understands their grammar. The way they guide you to a conclusion while making you think you got there on your own. They give you just enough to make you want more, to make you lean in, and to make you their collaborator without even realising it.
Damian Cross might be doing all of this.
She runs the possibility all the way through, without flinching, just like she does with every other possibility.
And then she runs the second one.
He might be telling the truth. "Why me?" she asks. "Why Final Words? You have had ten years, three chances to appeal, and a lawyer. Why not them?
He is quiet for a little while.
"I told them," he says plainly. "They based their case on my innocence. They didn't want another theory; they just wanted to discredit the evidence that was already there. Those are different ways to do things. Mine needs someone to think that a certain person did something. That isn't a legal plan. That's a look into.
He stares at her.
He says, "You look into it." Cassie says, "I make a podcast." Damian says, "You made a podcast about Marcus Teller that got him off the hook in 2021." "You made one about the Hargrove family that reopened a case that had been closed in three states. Ms. James, you are not a podcaster. You are what you said you were in your first episode.
She waits. "You're the one who asks the question that no one else had the guts to ask."
The room is very still.
Cassie picks up her tape recorder. Keeps it at level. "Then let's start from the beginning," she says as she points it at him.