The morning of the sixth day was particularly grueling. Laith had been giving Captain Olivia Fox his report for a good hour, and the woman had been in her full nightmare form. It didn’t help that the business with Aster Lockwood’s identity and the Farm Hands Machines investigation only complicated matters. But she was adamant that he close his investigation as soon as possible, because the media were beginning to wonder what was taking so long, and why the killer was still roaming freely within the confines of their fair city.

“People are breathing down my neck about this,” she’d grumbled, gesturing to yet another article about Cassia Grove’s murder on her tablet. “It reflects badly on the force, and my supervisors are putting pressure on me to get it solved, which means I’m officially putting pressure on you to get it solved, Laith. I suspect that there are people that are putting pressure on my own supervisors in all of this; it's not like them to rush it otherwise, and I don't like to think what's happening in the background. Get it done, please, and quickly. We have suspects – hunt them down and arrest them. I’m willing to bet that her husband is behind all of this, anyhow.”

“I don’t bet,” Laith had replied absentmindedly, and she’d let out what could only be described as an exasperated snarl in response, as though his mere existence was frustrating her at that moment, which it very well could have been.

“Listen, the media is already questioning us, and pretty soon, that’s going to transform itself into full-blown panic. People are going to be scared. I won’t have a killer on the loose at our expense. Do your job, Detective.”

Though he agreed that having a killer on the loose was a frightening thing, catching him – no, just identifying him – was easier said than done. After all, she wasn’t the one trying to wade through the knee-deep muck of a mess he’d been dropped into. Cassia Grove’s death was perplexing in and of itself, and when viewed in relation to her husband’s ominous disappearance, there were more questions than answers to be found. He’d honestly told Captain Fox that he would continue to do his best, but even Laith was beginning to wonder if he had been the right choice for this case. Maybe Lin would have made a better choice. Or even Roman. Maybe the number of cold cases he’d solved didn’t mean anything in the face of real, live detecting.

He sat at his desk with a deep sigh and pushed his face into his hands, rubbing his forehead and temples in an attempt to stimulate his brain. This was not something he was used to. There was frustration in trying and failing to solve a cold case, but that wasn’t the same thing as trying to solve a fresh murder case – something that had just happened.

It had just happened. How could the perpetrator get away so easily, and evade all of their detection methods? How had this even happened in the first place? It went against everything he’d known about PATET for it to allow for such a huge crime to be committed without even the slightest of a lead. It had been more common, before the establishment of Heliopolis, for such things to happen. People got away with crimes all the time, including crimes as terrible as murder. But it just wasn’t something that happened in Heliopolis. Not under the watchful eye of PATET.

Or so they’d been told, anyway.

He sat there for a while, willing an answer to appear before him, praying for it, until finally his Slate rang and pulled him out of his stupor. His wife was calling him. He took a deep, calming breath and answered her call.

“Laith – you have to come down to the hospital as soon as you can,” Warda said, her voice strained with some kind of anxiety. “We’ve found your victim’s husband. We’ve found Aster Lockwood.”

☀️ ☀️ ☀️

The hospital that Warda worked in, simply called the Central Hospital of Heliopolis, was one of the largest in the city. It was located on the outskirts of the Forest, making it an ideal location for people who lived there as well as those in its surrounding neighbourhoods. It was also just adjacent to the Official Quarter, where Laith worked, though the Quarter was located on a high plateau, while the Central Hospital stood at the base of the plateau. Like many buildings in Heliopolis, it was largely self-sufficient, with a veritable field of wind turbines lined up in rows on its roof, reaching out into the sky and spinning with the wind. They rose out of the verdant lawns like giant flowers, and it wasn’t uncommon for patients to head to the roof for small picnics and walks in fresh air.

Laith found his wife waiting for him near the entrance, and he kissed her cheek in greeting. “What’s going on?” he asked her as they walked together towards the ward Aster Lockwood was being kept in. “Why is he here?”

“He was found near the hospital, badly beaten,” she said. “Someone brought him in – just a passer-by who was on their way to work, I think. He was completely disoriented, bruised all over. He has a concussion. Couldn’t stand up straight, very sluggish, and didn’t seem to know where he was or what he was doing here,” she explained as they turned a corner. “We’ve put him in a private room for now.”

“How do you know it’s him?” Laith asked curiously.

“Fingerprint identification,” Warda replied, pushing through a set of double doors. “He couldn’t remember his name, so we had someone get a fingerprint scanner and identify him. When I saw his name, I decided to call you right away.”

“Is he doing any better?” With any luck, Laith could start questioning him right away. Aster Lockwood was quite possibly the closest thing to a witness and a suspect that he had for this case, and he was itching to get some answers from him. “Can I speak to him?”

Warda shook her head. “We’ve had to sedate him,” she said. “He became quite irritable earlier, and it was made worse by his confusion. He lashed out at a nurse, so we had to calm him down. It was all the concussion’s effects and symptoms, of course, but it’ll be hard to get anything coherent out of him now.”

At last they reached the private room Aster Lockwood had been placed in, and the two of them entered to find him in bed, dozing calmly under the effects of the sedative. He had green-tinged bruises on his face, and going by what Warda had told him, Laith expected that his whole body was riddled with more bruising. His arms, which rested at his sides, not covered by the blue blanket, presented more of the yellowish-green bruising, but what really caught Laith’s eye were the bruises around his wrists, as though they had been tied up.

“Can I get you to give me a report of all of his wounds and injuries?” Laith asked his wife. “I need the details for my case files.”

“Sure,” Warda said quietly. “There’s something else. Those bruises – the color of them – it means that they’re anywhere from five to ten days old. I’m guessing that’ll mean more to you than it will to me, but I thought it might help.”

It did help. It meant that Aster Lockwood might have well been abducted the same day as his wife’s murder, possibly for reasons in connection with Grove’s killing. With all of the bruising, he certainly didn’t look like a suspect. He looked like a victim, though why the killer would have thought to abduct him and beat him – possibly hold him somewhere, by the state of the man’s wrists – instead of doing away with him along with his wife, Laith couldn’t quite understand. It must have had something to do with the blackmail. Or his investigation into Farm Hands Machines. Or something to do with his identity. Nevertheless, he would have to wait patiently for the business magnate to awaken in order to question him.

“Can you place him in a more secure room?” Laith asked his wife. “He could be a witness or a suspect, and either way, I want him in a secure location. I’ll get a couple of officers sent up to guard his door.”

“That can be arranged,” Warda said, and have his shoulder a gentle squeeze. “We’ll take good care of him until he can speak to you. Whether he can give you more information about the murderer or he is the murderer, you’ll get it out of him soon.”

“I hope so,” Laith murmured wearily.

“Why don’t you get some rest in my office?” she asked as she pulled up Aster Lockwood’s file on her tablet. “You haven’t been sleeping very well lately. You toss and turn so much, I can barely sleep myself.”

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll try. But first, I’d like to see him placed in a secure room. I’ll stay with him until the officers arrive.”

Warda didn’t argue with him. She understood that he needed to see to it that his most important lead yet – a live witness, victim, or suspect – wasn’t going anywhere. He waited as she made arrangements, and soon a couple of nurses came in to help her roll Aster Lockwood’s bed to another ward, while Laith followed a few steps behind, trying to keep out of their way.

The whole thing didn’t take very long, and despite being jostled a bit, Aster Lockwood didn’t once rouse from his sleep. He dozed away almost serenely, and if the dark circles under his eyes and the sickly pallor of the man’s skin were anything to go by, he probably hadn’t had a good night’s rest in a long time, either. Soon, he’d been settled into his room, and Laith waited for the officers he’d requested to arrive as he stood outside, trying to piece together everything he knew so far.

I know so much now, but none of it fits together, he thought to himself, watching the sleeping man from the window in the door. It was like playing a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces and realizing he only had half of them in his hands. Too much was missing in this dreadfully obscure picture. He worried that it pointed to something much bigger than he had originally thought he was investigating.

Perhaps this wasn’t just a simple murder. Perhaps it was connected to something larger, something he couldn’t see yet, but that had always been there, right beneath their noses and hidden away from PATET in plain sight. Every piece of evidence he found – every clue or new revelation – seemed to lead him farther away from Cassia Grove. And yet, somehow, it was all linked. Somehow, the answer was staring him in the face and he just couldn’t see it.

His head thrummed with an aching pain that had been slowly growing ever since earlier that morning. When the officers came and relieved him of watch duty, he admitted defeat and trudged to Warda’s office, where he curled up on her armchair and tried to rest his eyes, if only just for a moment.

He’d told the officers and nurses to tell him as soon as the man was awake and coherent enough to question, and now he wondered if it was better to wait here or to go back to the office to try and do a little more digging into Aster Lockwood and his wife – and the Novus Atlantian Aster Lockwood, whose presence in the photograph with a younger Cassia Grove had caused Laith a frustrating amount of confusion.

The man before him was the Aster Lockwood he knew – the one that came up on PATET’s database and records. But the man in the photograph was the Aster Lockwood that the Novus Atlantis authorities knew – the one that came up on their database and records.

Both of them couldn’t be Aster Lockwood.

One of them wasn’t who he said he was, but which one was it?