Sojourn

The unmarked Mercedes idled past the last fire truck, its engine a deep purr beneath the wail of radios and the hiss of water on ember. The man wearing an FBI jacket stepped out into the stench of wet charcoal and diesel, the dock’s concrete still weeping heat through the soles of his shoes. SPD cruisers blocked the approach, their light bars washing the scene in arrhythmic red and blue. The warehouse sagged against the night sky, one corner of its roof punched through, smoke threading upward like a wound still breathing.

He walked past a patrolman stringing tape. The officer opened his mouth. The agent’s badge was already out. The tape snapped behind him.

“Zograf,” he said to the next uniform who moved to intercept. “FBI.”

A sergeant materialized from the glare. Gray at the temples, coffee breath, the kind of exhaustion that wasn’t from tonight. “Malone.”

They walked together toward the warehouse’s open mouth.

“Jesus, am I glad to see you.” Malone’s voice carried the gravel of a man who’d seen the inside already. “It’s a bloody mess in there.”

Zograf filed the inflection. Not fire mess. Not arson mess. Something specific.

“Kids with fireworks?” He kept his tone offhand. “Insurance job?”

Malone didn’t answer. Which was an answer in itself.

They stepped over a collapsed beam into the warehouse. The air hit both men like splintered glass. Char and fuel and underneath it all, the copper-sweet density of slaughter. His pupils adjusted, cataloguing the scatter. Four shapes near the far wall, blackened and curled, limbs drawn up in that shrinking posture fire gives the dead. Another two beyond them, facedown in the debris.

“Five or six back there,” Malone said. “All shot.”

Running, he thought. Away from the loading doors. Whoever did this was already inside.

His gaze tracked right. Against the forklift, a body lay twisted in ways that spoke less of impact than deliberate force. The neck angled wrong. The spine too. One leg folded at an angle the living didn’t achieve.

And then the center.

Two bodies. One massive, sprawled on its back, a man-shaped boulder someone had tried to dismantle. The giant’s neck was wrenched at an angle that suggested the spine had gone first, the head followed only because it couldn’t go anywhere else. And the expression frozen on its face was less surprise than outrage. Strange patterns traced the visible skin, not tattoos but something geometric. The other body lay nearby. Decapitated. The head sat two feet from the shoulders in a dark fan of blood that hadn’t been disturbed since it settled.

Zograf stopped. The wound at the throat caught his attention. Not hacks. No repeat strikes, no drag marks where the blade caught and corrected. One motion. Clean as a guillotine but freehand. Blunt force trauma and a clean cut…

Malone came up beside him. “Guy with a samurai sword, maybe?Portland types, y’know? They get into some strange shit down…”

“Excuse me.” Zograf was already turning, pulling his phone with the practiced motion of someone who’d done this at a hundred crime scenes that weren’t. “I have to call this in.”

His thumb found the contact before he cleared the warehouse. The line clicked.

"Adsum... Loquere."

“Seven-six-two. Hic Zograf.”

Static. Then: “Go ahead.”

He let his gaze drift back toward the forklift, toward the giant whose neck had been broken by something that didn’t use its hands. “Claimed activity. Seattle. South side. One confirmed. Others possible.” He paused, the next words settling into their ritual weight. ”Ignotus. Causam novam peto.”

Longer pause this time. A crackle like someone covering the receiver.

"Confirmatum.” The voice held nothing. “Happy hunting.”

The line went dead. Zograf pocketed the phone and stood a moment in the cold salt wind off the Duwamish, watching the spot fires lick at what was left of the roof. Behind him, Malone’s radio squawked. The fire crew repositioned a hose. No one looked at him.

He turned back toward the warehouse. There was work to do.