ONE

From Most Wanted in Gravity City anthology

Planet: Nebuna – Gravity City

Mid-Second Nimic War - Year 3010

Homicide Detective Wayne Nash

***

Detective Wayne Nash stared at the crime scene photos spread across his desk, lit by the dim glow of his desk lamp. The victim—Haley Rasa, 28, waitress from Neptunes Diner—lay arranged with the same ritualistic precision as the others. Leather black belt coiled around her neck, hands folded over her chest, eyes closed as if sleeping. She’s the fourth one in three months.

“He’s evolving,” Nash muttered, running his fingers through his graying hair. The killer becomes more sophisticated with each murder. But something about the scenes felt familiar, like a recurring dream he couldn’t quite shake. He’d been chasing this phantom for months now, always one step behind, finding only echoes and whispers.

The press had dubbed him the Southside Strangler. Seven victims so far, all women between the ages of 25 and 35, all killed by asphyxiation with a black leather strap, all arranged like sleeping beauties in their own beds. No signs of forced entry, no evidence of struggle, as if they had invited death in for a nightcap.

Nash’s partner, Detective Dylan Burcham, knocked on his office door.

“Nash, you’ve been staring at those photos for hours. You look like hell. Don’t make me throw you in a cell so that you can finally get some sleep.”

“I can’t, Dylan. Not until he’s in custody. I can’t let another girl get hurt as long as I have a working bone in my body. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Nash’s hands trembled as he reached for his coffee, finding it empty. Again. When was the last time he had a decent night's sleep?

“You’re obsessed, man. This case is eating you alive. Even good cops need respite from the grind.”

Nash ignored him, focusing instead on the timeline he’d constructed on his office wall. A digital string connected newspaper clippings, photos, witness statements. In the center was a composite sketch based on conflicting witness descriptions—a face that seemed to shift and change depending on the angle from which you viewed it.

That night, Nash dreamed of a black belt and pale hands. The sensation of being whipped by a strap, and the welts it left behind on flesh. He woke up in a cold sweat, his sheets tangled around his legs. The morning paper brought news of another victim—Lena Jann, 32, dancer. The killer had struck again while he slept.

The crime scene was immaculate, just like the others. Lena lay in her bed, hands folded over her chest, a black strap wound taut around her neck. The morning sun streaming through her apartment window cast everything in a surreal glow.

“No signs of forced entry,” Dylan Burcham reported, flipping through his notepad. “Neighbors heard nothing unusual. Same M.O. as the others.”

“Next of kin have been notified,” another form said in passing.

The mechanical canine unit was on the job, sniffing around, their metallic servos whirring as they moved from room to room.

Nash moved through the apartment like a ghost, taking in every detail. The victim’s makeup remained impeccable for such a horrible death. Had the killer reapplied it post-mortem? He was a freak, the bastard.

“Check the security cameras in the lobby,” Nash ordered, though he already knew they would find nothing. The killer was too careful, too methodical. He never appeared on camera, never left fingerprints, never dropped a single hair. They were in and out like smoke.

Back at the precinct, Nash added Lena’s photo to his wall. Eight victims now, each one a perfect tableau of death. He’d interviewed dozens of witnesses, followed hundreds of leads, but the killer remained ethereal. Sometimes Nash thought he could sense him, like a shadow in his peripheral vision, but whenever he turned to look, there was nothing there.

Then there was the letter sitting on his desk, postmarked yesterday with no return address, no clue how it got there. Inside, thirty pages of dense handwriting laid out the killer’s twisted manifesto.

“Did you really think your surveillance would yield results? I’m getting bored watching you fumble your way through these cases,” it read, “so determined, so wrong. Each victim is a brushstroke in my masterpiece of disorder, while you desperately seek patterns in chaos. Keep looking. I’m closer than you think. You’ll never see the pattern until you embrace the chaos. But by then, it will be too late, Detective Nash.”

The weeks blurred together. Nash stopped going home, and instead slept on the couch in his office when exhaustion finally overcame him. His dreams grew vivid—black leather strap, pale skin, the sound of leather striking flesh. He woke with headaches that no amount of aspirin or booze could cure.

Burcham tried to intervene. “Wayne, you need to take a break, man. You’re not eating, you’re barely sleeping. This isn’t healthy. I’ll go to the Captain and have him enforce medical leave if I have to. And I’m saying that as a friend who cares about you.”

“I’m close, Dylan. So close, yet so far. How does he do it? How does he slip away so easily?” Nash’s walls were now covered in evidence, digital red string creating a web so complex it looked like modern art. “I’m fine, I promise. I just need a little more time to see the pattern clearly.”

“What pattern?” Dylan said, withholding his frustration the best he could. “We’ve got nothing. No DNA, no fingerprints, no witnesses who can give us a consistent description. We’re chasing a ghost.”

A ghost. The word echoed in Nash’s mind, triggering something just beyond his grasp. He started going through old case files, looking for similar patterns from before the current spree. His research led him to a cold case from five years ago—another series of murders with scarves, straps, ropes, and various bindings—but those killings had stopped abruptly when the prime suspect, Holden Lockley, committed suicide by strapping an explosive to his neck and detonating it.

Nash visited Lockley’s condemned building in a sinking fire-prone part of town. As he climbed the creaking stairs to Lockley’s former unit, that sense of déjà vu grew stronger.

The apartment door hung open, its lock long since broken. Inside, dust covered everything except—Nash’s heart stopped—a fresh black strap laid out on the floor like a calling card. He approached it, oversized roaches and mice scattering from the scene, his flashlight beam catching motes of dust in the air like code writing itself. The leather seemed to glow in the beam, its color decayed and weathered against the decay of the abandoned apartment.

As he reached for the strap, movement in his peripheral vision made him spin around. A dark figure stood in the doorway, tall and lean, wearing a hooded coat that seemed to absorb the weak light from Nash’s flashlight. For a split second, their obscured eyes met.

“Police! Don’t move!” Nash’s voice cracked as he drew his weapon.

The figure turned and fled. Nash lunged for the strap, but it was gone. Had it ever been there? No time to think about that now. He bolted after the suspect, his footsteps thundering through the empty building. The figure always remained just ahead, turning corners just as Nash reached them, its coat trailing like smoke.

“GCPF! Stop, or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

The chase led them down five flights of stairs—the figure moving with an unnatural grace while Nash stumbled and grabbed at the railings. Twice he nearly fell, his legs weak and shaking from too many sleepless nights. The hood never turned to look back, but Nash could have sworn he heard laughter echoing off the walls—or was it crying?

They burst out of the building’s rear exit into a narrow alley. The figure darted left, towards the street. Nash followed, his lungs burning. As he reached the sidewalk, he spun in place, gun raised, ready to confront the killer who had eluded him for so long.

But the street was empty.

Nash stood alone on the curb outside Lockley’s tenement, his harsh breathing the only sound in the pre-dawn rain. A taxi passed by, its headlights sweeping across him, and for a moment he caught his reflection in its windows—a wild-eyed man in a long coat, gun raised against shadows.

He lowered his weapon, his hands shaking. That face in the hood ... why had it seemed so familiar? And the strap—he patted his coat pockets and froze. There, in his right pocket, was a coiled-up length of black leather. He didn’t remember picking it up or putting it in his pocket.

Nash staggered back against a lamppost, the cold metal grounding him in reality. Or what he thought was reality. The sun rose, painting the empty street in shades of reds and golds, and somewhere in the back of his mind, a door opened—a door he wasn’t sure he wanted to unlock.

That night, unable to sleep, Nash reviewed his case notes for the hundredth time. Something about the victims nagged at him. He knew them. Not just from the case files, but somehow he knew them personally.

Haley Rasa and Lena Jann danced at the Cabana. How did he know those details? They weren’t in any of the reports.

The breakthrough came at dawn, as Nash stared at his reflection in his office window. The morning sun turning from shades of red to a lemon-yellow glow, and for a moment, his face seemed to shift and change, like the composite sketch on his wall. He reached up to touch his unshaven face, and his reflection did the same. The movements seemed out of sync, moving a fraction of a second too late.

“No,” he whispered, but the truth was already unfolding in his mind like a slow-exploding grenade. He hadn’t been sleeping on his office couch these past months—there were gaps in his memory, nights he couldn’t account for. The headaches, the shakes, the sense of familiarity with each crime scene.

Nash stumbled to his evidence wall, really seeing it for the first time. The red string didn’t form a pattern—it was chaos, the work of a fractured mind trying to create order from its own madness. He looked at the composite sketch again, and now he could see it clearly. His own face distorted and fragmented, but undeniably his.

He thought back to Lockley’s suicide five years ago. He’d been the lead detective on that case, too. Had Lockley been guilty, or had Nash’s other self been responsible for those murders as well? How long has this been going on?

His office door opened, and Dylan stepped in. “Nash? You okay?”

Nash turned, his world tilting on its axis. “Dylan ... I think I need to tell you something. About the case. About me.”

Dylan’s face shifted from concern to understanding as he took in the wild look in Nash’s eyes. “You figured it out, didn’t you?”

“How long have you known?”

Dylan’s posture softened, searching for the gentlest way to break it to his friend of twenty years. Not just his friend, but one of the best cops to ever work for Precinct Three.

“We’ve been watching you for weeks. We wanted to be sure it was you beyond the shadow of a doubt. The surveillance teams never found anything because there was nothing to find. You were always one step ahead of everyone, including yourself, Nash. Part of you was hunting, while another part was killing, outsmarting yourself at every turn.”

Nash sank into his chair, the weight of understanding crushing him. “The victims ...”

“All connected. You were becoming intimate with Haley Rasa and Lena Jann when you drove them home from the Cabana after their shift. Each victim was someone who knew you, trusted you. Your other self chose them carefully. I’ve been working on the case without you knowing.”

Dylan stepped into the center of the room, the grief spreading across his face. “We didn’t know for sure until hours ago. We had to hack into your comm, with the Chief’s approval, of course. Your comm had blank spots during the exact time of the killings. I’m here to inform you that you are relieved of your duties, Nash … effective immediately, and I need you to surrender your badge and weapon. The others will be up here to escort you to detention in a minute. I just wanted this time alone with you, and to tell you myself.”

Nash looked at his hands—hands that had held those black belts and buckles, that had arranged those bodies with such care, that had whipped them. “What happens now?”

“Now we get you the help you need.” Dylan reached for his handcuffs. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t intend to do what you did, but that doesn’t change what happened to those girls.”

As Dylan and the Homicide team led Officer Wayne Nash out of the precinct, Nash glimpsed his reflection in the cracked glass of the precinct door. For a moment, he thought he saw another face superimposed over his own—the face of the killer he’d been chasing all these months. But this time, instead of slipping away, the face merged with his own, two halves of a shattered whole finally coming together.

The morning papers would call it the case of the century—a decorated detective revealed to be the very killer he was hunting. But for Wayne Nash, locked in a secure psychiatric facility, the mystery was just beginning: how to find his way back through the labyrinth of his fractured mind.

In his cell, he kept a single photo from the case file—not of any victim, but of his evidence wall. The red string still seemed to form patterns, but now he understood that the real pattern had been inside his mind all along. The greatest trick his madness had played wasn’t convincing him that the killer was real. It was hiding the fact they were the same.

Outside his cell window—a window that didn’t exist—the sun painted the world in shades of red, and something inside him waited for its chance to hunt again.