Wanted

CHAPTER ONE

RED, BY DESIGN

The body is posed like it’s waiting for applause.

Dead men usually collapse; knees buckling, shoulders caving, gravity dragging them down like a verdict.

This one resists.

Chin lifted.

Arms arranged with surgical intent.

Shoes polished to a mirror shine.

The kind of posture reserved for dictators and gallery portraits, not corpses cooling under flickering lights.

Detective Maverick Monroe steps around the body, boots crunching softly against debris the techs haven’t cleared yet.

Hands buried in his coat pockets.

Jaw locked.

Face carved from granite and unpaid overtime.

“Whoever did this,” he mutters, “had time.”

A nearby tech stiffens.

Someone shifts.

That sentence always lands like a slap.

Time means confidence.

Time means control.

Time means the killer wasn’t scared enough to rush.

This wasn’t murder.

This was staging.

Maverick drops into a crouch, coat flaring as he moves and then he sees it.

The red mark.

Not blood.

No splatter.

No smear.

Just a deliberate stroke brushed across the victim’s collarbone, thin and precise, like a lover’s nail or an artist’s final signature.

It curves upward slightly.

A smile.

Maverick angles his head.

Left.

Right.

Leaning closer until the scent of antiseptic and cold metal hits the back of his throat.

“This wasn’t necessary,” he says.

The mark didn’t kill him.

Didn’t restrain him.

Didn’t escalate the violence.

It served no mechanical purpose whatsoever.

Which made it the loudest thing in the room.

Someone wanted this body found exactly like this.

No chaos.

No mistakes.

No chance for interpretation.

The killer hadn’t fled, they’d finished.

Maverick exhales through his nose, sharp and unimpressed.

The closest he ever gets to a laugh.

“Show-off.”

He rises abruptly. “Clear the room.”

Voices fade.

Footsteps retreat.

Radios click off one by one until there’s nothing left but the hum of fluorescents and the quiet accusation of the dead.

Alone now.

Maverick closes his eyes and rewinds the night like a tape only he knows how to play.

Entry was clean.

No forced access.

The victim let them in or believed they were safe enough to do so.

No defensive wounds.

That always bothered him.

Innocent people fought.

Guilty ones froze.

The kill itself?

Efficient.

Controlled.

Intimate in a way that prickled his skin.

Then the mark.

Last step.

Signature.

Maverick straightens and begins to pace the perimeter, mind rifling through old ghosts.

Cartels.

Ritualists.

Serial killers with theatrical egos.

Copycats hungry for headlines.

He discards them one by one.

None of them fit.

That’s when irritation crawls up his spine.

Not fear.

Not thrill.

Irritation; the kind you feel when a puzzle piece keeps insisting it belongs somewhere else.

His jaw tightens.

His fingers tap once against his thigh before he stills them.

“You don’t exist,” he tells the room.

The room doesn’t argue.

The body is lifted.

Zippers hum.

The bag seals shut.

Maverick’s eyes flick back to the red mark one last time, already burned behind his eyelids.

Clean.

Deliberate.

Personal.

A calling card without a name.

Whoever did this didn’t want applause.

They wanted him.

Maverick turns away, annoyed at the thought, angrier that it feels true.

This killer wasn’t following a pattern.

They were building one.

And for the first time in a very long while, Detective Maverick Monroe walks out of a crime scene with something unfinished.

Which, frankly, pisses him off.