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She wasn’t acting. There was no scripted smile. Her eyes were wet, focused on something beyond the camera—a person, maybe, just off-camera.

“Only secretaries know where the bodies are.”

Soft. Breathless.

The whispers stopped. The lamp died. And in the sudden dark of her office, Mara heard someone type one last key.

Detective Mara Vance stared at the string of text on her screen, the cursor blinking beside it like a judgmental heartbeat. The file sat on a encrypted USB drive, one of fifty-two she’d pulled from a wall safe behind a rotting painting of a clown. The clown was the least unsettling thing in the room.

A desk. Oak, late ’90s. A banker’s lamp with a green shade. And fingers—long, manicured, typing on a keyboard just out of frame. The sound was wrong. Not clacks. Whispers. Each keystroke produced a soft, breathy syllable.

The door opened.