The Puppeteer's Game

Chapter 8

Web of the Damned

The precinct felt off—too quiet, too still. No jokes, no chatter by the coffeepot. Just a heavy silence, the kind that comes before bad news hits. Sunlight slanted through the blinds, striping desks piled with reports no one wanted to revisit.

Miguel stood by the evidence board, arms crossed, silent but heavy with meaning. The room moved around him cautiously, sensing something had shifted. Behind him, the monitor flickered with fragmented messages. But it was Mrs. Cordova's death—kind, harmless, and vanished without a trace—that had changed everything.

Emily sat frozen at her desk, red-eyed from staring too long at things that didn't make sense. Her gaze kept drifting to Miguel's office, where the Cordova call came, where everything changed. She hadn't told anyone the voice on the line had known her name, though she'd never given it.

Then, a quiet thud—Miguel setting a folder down in front of her. No words. Just a nod before he turned away again.

She blinked, startled more by how close he'd gotten than by the file itself. Her breath caught, just for a second. She dropped her eyes, grateful for something to focus on.

Photos. Forensic reports. A locksmith's note about a tampered lock that didn't leave evidence. No forced entry, no prints, no signs of struggle. Just... nothing. Like someone had stepped into Cordova's life and erased her from it.

Detective Ramos murmured into his phone, voice low and laced with Spanish and worry. A recruit typed too loudly, then paused under Emily's glance. They were all present, but not united. Just waiting for something unnamed.

Miguel spoke, quiet but sharp: "We move forward—just not the usual way."

Emily looked up and met his eyes. There was a weight behind them—something hardened by experience, by disappointment that had started to calcify.

She nodded. "Understood."

That was all it took. In a heartbeat, the case belonged to them alone. No more standard procedures. No more safety nets.

Just the truth—whatever it would cost to find it.

***

Miguel leaned against his office door, silently signaling Emily. She noticed, smoothed her jacket, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and stepped inside, the door clicking shut behind her.

"No paper trail," he said, eyes on the autopsy report. "Cordova's death stays natural causes — but we know better."

Emily crossed the room and set a thumb drive on his desk, her fingers pausing briefly on the wood. "I ran her name—checked unsolved from the last decade. It's a stretch, but there's a pattern: three of five had ties to private academic programs. Quiet, selective. Easy to miss."

Miguel's brow creased. "Mentorships?"

"Old-fashioned. One-on-one setups, mostly. I dug through department records—found course logs, funding memos. A few were buried under different program names. But get this—every one of those mentorships shut down within a year of the victim's death. No announcements, no archived explanations. Just gone."

He took the drive, plugged it into his laptop, and began to scroll. Names, dates, program details—scrubbed of anything official, but the pattern was there. Subtle. Chilling.

"Looks like a network," he murmured.

Emily's arms crossed in front of her—part defense, part grounding. "Not just that. A recruitment pipeline."

He looked up. Her expression was unreadable for a moment—something in her eyes that might've been concern, or respect, or something harder to name—but it passed. By the time their eyes met, she was all business again.