Chapter 10 - Meet The Killer

As the first light of dawn brightened the dark sky, Castle woke up. Drowsy and still disarranged from the deep sleep, he pulled the blanket off his body and sat up straight on the sofa. He wasn't a morning person, but he was so used to waking up early that it didn't disturb him anymore. What made him feel sleepier than usual was the fact that he never slept that deep. Witchers rarely felt safe enough to afford a deep sleep and he wasn't an exception. He was so used to being woken every now and then, that one full night of blissful ignorance messed him up big time.

He ran his hands through his hair, finding it matted from the residues of the night before, and groaned. "Fuck…" he cursed under his breath.

He needed another bath. Or at least enough water to wipe the grime off his face and hair. And shave. Damn he needed to shave. Unfortunately, he didn't grow a full beard; his beard was spotty and when it grew he looked more like a teenager with albinism than a full grown man. And he was close to his ninetieth birthday.

Sighing, he stood and walked to the window of the living room, opening it to let in some fresh air. It faced a small garden, away from the busy street. In the dim gray light, he noticed tidy bushes of medicinal herbs, a juniper tree and other plants used in alchemy. All the tools to care for them were lined with care on the wall at his right and on the other side of the garden he saw, through a window, an alchemy table. He hadn't seen that room yet, but it looked like her private laboratory.

"Maybe I'll ask her if I can use it. Stocking up some potions would be nice."

With that, he walked away from the window and looked around. Wiping a still sleepy eye with one hand, he used the Igni Sign to light a candle, so he could see better as he searched for some supplies in his backpack. The living room was wide and spacious, with one door that led into a small kitchen. From there, he could access the basement, where Beckett kept all the gear for bathing and stuff. And if he had heard correctly the day before, she had conjured a whole barrel of water to keep down there, in case of necessity.

Sorceresses would never stop to amaze him, he thought as he walked downstairs.

There, he found a bowl and a jug he promptly filled with water. It was cold, but it would work better to wake him up. Setting the candle on a small table, he proceeded to wash the remains of the fight from last night away, then shaved. He found a mirror hanging on the inside of a wardrobe door, and he was more than happy to shave away the bristly white hairs that had been covering his chin and cheeks for days now. Most of all because the skin of his throat was constantly itching. The dump in the sewers and the fight hadn't helped it.

As he passed the sharp razor on his skin to remove the hairs and the foam, he noticed something in the wardrobe. A rectangular piece of parchment, laid on top of a pile of linens. It was a charcoal drawing, a detailed depiction of the landscapes around Tretegor, with the city in the background and a bucolic meadow in the foreground. A nice postcard, one of those that cost quite a sum of money since they are hand drawn. He gently turned it. Scrawled in quick handwriting, there was a short message.

We just learned about your mom. We're sorry for your loss Kate. She was a great woman. Feel free to teleport here in Tretegor any time you want, in case you need a shoulder to cry on. Or two. We're here for you. With love, Triss and Yennefer.

Both women had signed the postcard in their handwriting. That meant they were behind their words one hundred percent, if he knew those two well. There was no date on the postcard, but it was referring to the death of Beckett's mom, that had happened ten years before. She was probably apprenticing with one of them at the time, or maybe both. Ten years before, he had stayed in the Skellige archipelago for a long while. That meant he had sort of lost contact with his brother and the two sorceresses. No wonder he had never met Kate. But he remembered something Geralt had mentioned, when the three of them, along with Dandelion, were dealing with something big in the city. They had left her behind so she could continue her studies, he thought.

He made a mental note to ask her about her years at the academy, then finished with the last patches of his beard. When he finally was done, he felt himself again. Gone were the bristly white semblance of a beard he never had, gone was the scruffy look that made him look like a beggar. And since he had washed and combed his hair, gone was the whole dirty, violent mercenary sometimes you meet on the road.

Well, he was a mercenary of sorts, could turn violent at times and his line of work often had him covered in dirt, but that wasn't the point.

When he felt like he was presentable, he wiped the remains of shaving soap from his face with a towel, combed his now nearly dry hair once more time then, after he wore his trousers and boots, finally walked upstairs. There, a quite startled, still not so dressed Kate Beckett welcomed her with a scared yelp and a fireball already levitating over her stretched palm. She was ready to incinerate him, turn him into charcoal good to shove in the stove in front of her.

"Castle! Damn it you scared me!" she screamed, extinguishing the flames. She was cooking breakfast, and the table behind here was already prepared. The air was filled with the scents of fresh bread, sizzling bacon and freshly churned butter. Not to mention all the spices and the herbs she had hungup above the stove to dry. It was mesmerizing.

"Sorry Beckett, I thought you would sleep a little longer," he apologized.

Shaking her head, she turned to the stove again, where she was cooking breakfast. "I'm an early riser. And you? Like to creep out of basements at dawn?"

He chuckled. "I like to keep myself clean and presentable, most of all if a nice lady is taking good care of me." He sat at the table in the kitchen. "May I help you in any way?"

She shook her head again. "No, thank you. Just sit down, breakfast will be ready in a moment."

"Good… Listen, I didn't want to pry or anything, but while I shaved I found a postcard from Yennefer and Triss. And you said you know them both, well… when did you meet them?"

She took a deep breath. Evidently, she wasn't thrilled about his discovery. "What were you even doing with that wardrobe open if you didn't want to pry?"

"It has a mirror inside one of the shutters."

"Oh…" she murmured. "I see. Well, I met Yennefer at the Academy. I was ten or eleven years old, I had been studying there for a while at the time and we all knew of the legendary Yennefer of Vengerberg, the most headstrong, determined and ambitious sorceress that ever walked those halls. That was, according to one of the teachers. I was practicing I can't remember which spell and she helped me to perfect it. We met again about twenty years later, while I was doing my apprenticeship."

"I agree with your description of Yennefer, I'd only add bitchy somewhere in there too," he said, humorously. "Anyway… Triss?"

"I was due to split my apprenticeship in two, two years with Triss and two years with another mage, but I ended up with her for all four years. The other mage died at the battle of Sodden before I could even get there to help and that left me without a tutor. When Triss found me at the bottom of the hill after the battle, busy sewing wounds and making potions for the soldiers, knee-deep in bloody mud, she took me back under her so I could finish my studies with her."

She took two plates from a nearby shelf and filled them with the contents of the pan, then lay them on the table and sat in front of him. "Hope you like bacon and eggs, there wasn't much left in the icebox this morning."

"Don't worry. As long as it isn't some kind of tasteless mush, I'm not picky about food." He swiftly ate a forkful of scrambled eggs and bacon. "But yes, in general I like bacon and eggs."

"Good. I'll buy some groceries after work, for tomorrow."

Castle swallowed a bite. "I can do that. I'll be around town all day, picking up some stuff to fill your pantry isn't a big deal."

"Searching for my mother's killer and picking up the grocery? Damn Castle, a girl can get used to this!" she laughed softly. She poured a dark, steaming liquid from a kettle into a tall mug and added some milk. The smell was inebriant, so strong he could almost taste it on his tongue.

"You pay me quite a hefty sum, but most of all you're treating me like a human being and that's more than enough for me to willingly pick up your groceries. By the way, what's that?" he asked, nodding at her cup.

"Oh, it's coffee. Comes from Zerrikania, Lanie had some delivered years ago and from then on I couldn't give it up. I regularly teleport there just to buy it, want to try?"

He nodded, chugged the milk in his mug to empty it and then let her pour a small quantity the liquid in the cup. "It's bitter, when pure. I usually add a spoonful of honey and some milk, but first try it as it is. You may like it that way."

Warily, Castle reached for the cup and inhaled deeply before taking a tentative sip of the hot beverage. It was hot and bitter at first, but as he let it roll on his tongue, it quickly began to unravel all the undertones of its rich taste. The spicy tint and that faint but persistent aroma of vanilla that it left in his mouth when he swallowed made him fall in love with the beverage.

He set the cup down and pushed it towards Kate. "Fill it, to the brim."

Smiling, the sorceress obliged. "Glad you like it."

He nodded before taking a long sip. "Is it just me or there's something in it that gives a kick?"

"It's not just you, I've noticed it myself. I helps me waking up, Lanie told me that back in Zerrikania there's a legend that says a shepherd noticed his goats became hyperactive after eating the seeds of a certain plant and he did the same. With poor results. He ground the seeds and put the powder in hot water, like we do with barley up here and this is the result."

"Wow. I must start travelling down to Zerrikania myself, from time to time." He set the cup, now half empty, down and returned to the pile of scrambled eggs and crispy bacon slices in his plate.

"Ever been there?" she asked.

He shook his head, chewing his food. "Never."

"You should. Great place, lots of culture… not so many monsters… you could take a vacation there. I can teleport there and back if you wanted."

Smiling, he kindly refused. "No thank you. I'm not one for such hot climate. I'm more of a cabin on the ArdSkellig shoreline type of man, if I want to take a vacation."

"Seems lonely."

He shrugged his shoulders. "There's only so much of being treated like a plague ridden dead weight a man can take," he mused. "My line of work forces me to stay among other people that constantly deride me, shove me away or try to swindle me when it's time to pay me for getting rid of a monster, but I don't exactly like it. From time to time I take some time off, sail to ArdSkellig, to an abandoned lighthouse I purchased some years ago and that I refurbished. There, I recharge and write. It's not different from what I do when I come here to Vizima, only it's not meant to stress me with studying or dealing with my overbearing publisher."

"You guys have a tough job, really."

"Don't remind me. But… back to my job. Do you know if there's a tailor somewhere near that could have clothes my size ready? I want to go up to the embassies and at the Eternal Fire temple to look around for our man in black but if I go this way, I'd look a little out of place."

She smiled, showing a wicked glint in her eyes that shone like an autonomous source of light. "I can do better."

"How?"

"I can create an illusion, a long lasting illusion that will make you look like you're dressed with the sharpest doublet and the nicest boots. I can also make you look like you never underwent the mutations."

To say that he was upset was way too little. "What kind of sorcery is that?"

The pun was not lost. "My personal touch to a vast array of magic formulae I perfected through the years. It's based on the formula mages and sorceresses use to alter their aspect that Keira Metz modified so it would create an illusion of change that isn't permanent, but only applied to clothes. I perfected it, adding a personal touch. It creates an illusion of change in the physical look of a person, lasts until the counter spell is used and only others can see it, you still see yourself as you are, unless you look into a mirror," she explained. "That way, you won't look like a Witcher at all."

Yes, he was definitely upset, in a very positive way. "Wow. You're that talented?"

She shrugged. "I told you I had a knack for magic. I'm no Source, but what I lack in raw potential I make it up with committed. I might have abandoned the typical ways of a sorceress for the time being, but hey, that's who I am, I can't do much about it."

"Must be a talent. I bet you can make tons and tons of money if you patent it."

"It needs a little more work, I'd like to work on a timed version, but I don't have much time in my hands at the moment."

"I perfectly understand, but I highly suggest to complete this project. You really could patent it and retire happily ever after in your own private mansion with that type of spell. Now… let us finish with breakfast so you can go to work and I can go and do my Witcher'switchering for the day."

She laughed, softly, at the description of his work, but then returned to her own breakfast. After they were done, she cleaned up and walked upstairs to get dressed for work, and Castle did the same. He fished a shirt out of his backpack, a ratty, once-white piece of cloth falling apart at the seams with just as many repairs as his scars, and donned it. He looked outside, noticed some dark clouds threatening to create a downpour, and decided to add his only jacket. A frayed piece of leather held together by fishing line and spit, but at least it was still somewhat waterproof. In case of rain, he didn't like to be wet so much.

He was buckling the harness on his back when she appeared on top of the stairs, wearing the heavy gambeson and the sword at her hips. The whole thing was definitely unflattering, with the heavy padding, the horrible red and white stripes made her complexion look sickly pale. No, it didn't suit her much.

"You ready?" she asked as she came down to the living room.

"Yep, all set. Ready to be the subject of your still not completely stable spell."

She shoved him, playfully, on the shoulders. "Bugger off, idiot. Now, stay still for a moment."

She positioned herself at his side, placed one hand on his chest and the other in the corresponding spot on his back and murmured a magical spell, but he couldn't make out the exact words. Not that he could have done much with them anyway. As she finished the incantation, a soft blue hue appeared between her hands and his jacket, but other than that, he hadn't seen anything else change.

But then she stepped away from him, hands on her hips and an examining look in her eyes as she scoured his figure from head to toe. "Yeah, not bad. I think I managed to pick up how you'd look without the mutations and the scars."

"You think?" he asked, a bit dubious. "Or you're sure? I don't want the spell to wear down while I talk to a very pious Eternal Fire priest."

"Castle, it won't wear down until I say so. In case I die, you will keep this look forever, or at least the illusion of it. Doublet included. Come, I'll show you a mirror."

"Wait, I'm wearing a doublet?" he gasped. "And what does it mean I'm going to wear it forever?"

Nodding, Beckett dragged him upstairs in her room, where a huge mirror hanged from a wall. "Yes you're wearing a doublet and yes, unless you find another mage that can reverse the spell, if I die today you're going to look like this forever, even if you're buck naked. There, like what you see?"

Castle gasped. He didn't recognize the man in the mirror. He looked like him, but it wasn't him. This man was a ruggedly handsome fellow, with thick brown hair and bright blue eyes. Gone was the raised scar on the bride of his nose, memory of a fairly recent encounter with an archgriffin. Gone was the jagged mark that crept up his neck where a wyvern had slashed his skin nearly half a century ago. But if he touched those spots on his skin, he could still feel the bumps and the creases.

And gone were the old, tattered jacket and shirt, replaced with a state of the art stark white shirt with platinum cuff links at the wrists, a black velvet sleeveless doublet with a high collar and bright red linings. His blood stained pants looked now like a pristine pair of fine black leather trousers, bootcut for comfortable wear with the amazing pair of shiny tanned calfskin boots. His swords didn't reflect in the mirror, though he could still feel their weight on his shoulders.

Never in his life he had worn anything of such quality. Too bad it was an illusion and beneath the spell, he was wearing his terribly simple attire. He sighed. "Do you really think I'd look like this, without the mutations?" he asked, still examining his reflex.

"I think it's a good approximation of how you would have looked like when you were forty."

"Wow." He had no words. It might have been a small, trivial spell that had little uses in the everyday life of a sorceress or a mage, but damn it worked well. The illusion was so real it looked like she had really transformed him. And it had only taken her ten seconds and a couple of words. Damn she was good. "Amazing. Really, I'm shocked!"

"Thank you. Is there anything you want to ask me?"

"Do you think they hold any services today at the Temple?"

They did, only later that morning, before lunch. After Kate left for work, he remained in her living room, studying some more of the case files she had fished yesterday. Not that he learned more, but some of the files had some nice details about the victims. Since they were going to follow the line of the religious motive, he went looking for specific mentions of clashes with the Eternal Fire in the files. He found some, more than enough to justify their choice to go through with that track.

About an hour before the service at the temple, he walked there. The massive building, that once housed an important family who had decided to donate their own home to the Church in exchange of absolution for their past sins, faced out on an enormous square. There, on the other side of the temple, there was a small flower shop. The owner, an old man that gave his life to plants and flowers, was a known herbalist on the side and had often been Castle's source of rare plants for some of his potions. He was in dire need of hellebore and, to kill time until the function, he decided to visit the old herbalist.

But, surprise surprise, he wasn't there. The shop was there yes, and the door was open, but there was no old man behind the counter, or watering the flowers and the plants all around the room. Only a young woman, bustling around some empty terracotta pots and a bunch of sprouting mandrake roots that needed to be relocated in bigger containers.

He knocked on the doorstep to let her know he was walking in. "Excuse me, is the shop open?"

The unknown girl raised her face from the pots and sighed. "Yes," she sighed. "It's open. What do you want?"

The old owner wasn't exactly an example of manners, but even her didn't spark in that field. "I was looking for the old owner and..."

She shrugged her shoulders. "He's dead."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."

Another shrug. "Whatever… had the great idea to go out one night and never come back. A monster took him."

A monster? What the hell? "You mean… the monster that…"

"I don't care. My father left me with more debits that I will ever be able to settle and this shop has little to no customers, so I'm asking… what do you want?"

"A quarter of a pound of desiccated hellebore, thank you."

She gave him a court nod and disappeared in the back, only to reappear a minute later with a small burlap sack. She threw it on the counter. "It's fifty orens."

He pulled the money out of his money pouch and handed it to her then went out with his hellebore. Time to bite the bullet and take part of that farce of religious cult and look for their mysterious man. It was still early, but if he wanted to be sure to find him, he needed to pay close attention to all the people that came in. At the entrance, he was welcomed by a young novice of the order that guided him to what used to be the main hall of the house that had been converted into the Eternal Fire altar. The eponymous eternal fire rested in the huge, restored hearth and it projected some grim shadows all around the place. Heavy brocade banners hung on the walls with elaborate embroideries of the Church's symbol, along with the Order Of The Flaming Rose's one. Along the walls there were statues representing the virtues promoted by the cult, and the sins too. There were portraits of monsters and magicians too, beside the sinful statues. Werewolves and others victims of cruel curses mixed up with murderers, herbalists associated with rapists and other malicious people or creature.

Everything mixed up into a crazy bunch of things they considered intrinsically evil. Little did they know that there were werewolves that spent all their lives dealing with their curses without ever tasting the flesh of another human being, or that there were herbalists that devoted their lives to saving others from fevers, cold, infections and other diseases.

Oh well.

He settled in a corner, standing beside a pedestal, to wait and observe.

The hall was quickly filling, people of all social extractions were crowding the place. Still, no sign of the black clad man. There was a small crowd of rich elderly women, sitting in a pew not too far from him, discussing the arrival of a Witcher in town.

"Apparently, he caused quite a ruckus yesterday, at the Hairy Bear!" commented one.

"That happens every other week, no need for Witchers to come and make a mess," continued another one.

"Yes, I know, but apparently he beat a soldier of the Order. I heard a patrol this morning telling another one that he got a kick in his… nether regions, and that it was so hard he won't ever have children, so bad was the damage."

"Oh, that's horrible!" came a third voice, muffled by a gasp. "I wonder what caused such a terrible aggression!"

The first speaker grunted. "Witchers don't need a reason to assault someone. They're more monsters than human."

If only he had a coin for every time Castle had heard a variation of that same sentence, he'd be the richest man in the Northern Kingdoms.

By that time, the hall of the Temple was quite packed. People of all social extractions were flooding in the large room, to the point Castle was surprised. Temerians, culturally, had always been very devoted to Melitele, the Temple on the other side of the city once housed enormous gatherings of worshippers, and the traditional religion was so deeply rooted in everyone's day-to-day life that he'd never think that one day a foreign, extremely strict cult would gather such a large quantity of people.

The rite was about to start when a small group of three men entered. As soon as they had set foot inside, the door was closed and a surreal silence fell on the crowd. The three men, two heavily armed escorting a black clad third, settled not far from Castle, on what looked like a reserved pew. The armed men stood at each end of the pew while the other man sat, silent as a statue, in the very center of it.

There he was. Right when he had lost hope to actually see him, there he was. Now he only needed a reason to talk to him, just to see if he could catch a good look of his face.

Then the rite started. A self-righteous, pole-stuck-up-his-ass priest appeared and did his thing, splitting the function in two with a long sermon that included some ramblings about the impurity of fornication and pre-marital sex, a blatant racist rant against elves, dwarves and halflings, and just in the end a never-ending tirade about how worshippers of the Eternal Fire were called upon to donate money to the Church, to keep the cleansing fire burning.

Castle doubted all the money that those people devoted to the church went into the funds for firewood. More probably, it went straight to Novigrad, in Vimme Vivaldi's bank, in the account of some high ranking priest of the order.

Castle wasn't a man prone to hate, despite his grim and taxing life, he was a pretty positive person, everything considered. He didn't hate religions per se. He was very open minded to the various cults and tried to respect the beliefs of every person he met, but the Church Of Eternal Fire sickened him. Its values were nothing but racist, sectarian rubbish that promoted violence against those less fortunate, therefore those not born human, that shoved away those in need and, in the end, was only there to promote their interests.

Most of their money and riches was bloodstained. Some of it, dripped with the blood of innocent non-humans, mages or simple herbalists burned at the stake for heresy.

He couldn't do much about it, he hated that cult with all his might and withstanding a whole rite of it nearly caused him a metaphorical appearance of urticaria.

Sure his skin prickled every time the priest mentioned the sinful nature of magic and how those trained in its used were a threat to all the pious men and women in the room.

As a skilled user of magic, albeit very basic magic, he was personally offended by such remark, but he simply gritted his teeth and endured it. He was waiting for the right chance to talk to that man.

That chance came right after the priest declared the end of the function. The man, backed by the two bodyguards, walked towards one of the altars, close to where he was stationed.

Castle took some time to observe him as he moved. He was the personification of unnerving. The long, heavy cape didn't show his legs, so he looked like he was hovering on the ground as he walked. Not to mention the cowl, that left only the lower part of his face visible. The stern line of his mouth and the chiseled chin made him look like a marble statue. At least what part of his face Castle could see.

He was heading his way. Right when Castle thought he hadn't even noticed him, probably brushing him off as just another church-goer, when he suddenly stopped. A sudden cloud of cologne assaulted his nostrils, making him gag a little. Also, the wolfhead medallion vibrated against the skin of his chest. There was something magical about him.

"You are not from here." It was a peremptory statement, direct and certain. And the kaedweni accent the beggars had spoken of just the day before was very pronounced.

Lucky Castle, he had grown up in Kaedwen, and though he had kind of lost his accent through the years, thanks to Meredith's useful diction lessons, he still knew how to at least fake it. He just needed to remember to avoid contractions, as high-born people in Kaedwen used them in extra rare occasions. Which meant never. They considered them rude and disrespectful.

"I am just a humble traveler that would not want to lose a service."

A smile appeared on the man's face. "Oh, a fellow kaedweni," he said, the tone of his voice remained flat as a slab of stone, just to add more creepiness to the whole thing. "Rare, these days."

"I arrived this morning," said Castle. "From Redania."

"And you are here for what reason?"

"Business," replied Castle. "I have a meeting with my publisher."

Witchers often had to lie, in their line of work. Vesemir, his mentor back at KaerMorhen, always taught him to keep lies simple and as adherent to truth as possible. In the end, he had come to Vizima to meet his publisher, only it had already happened. That lie wasn't too far from the truth.

"A writer? Interesting. What do you write about, Mister…?"

"Rogers." Castle extended his hand. "Richard Rogers. I'm a novelist."

They shook hands. "Yes, I think I remember seeing some of your books in a bookshop, some time ago. Well, Mister Rogers, it was nice to meet a fellow worshipper of the Eternal Fire, but I have to ask you to vacate this nook, as I require it for private prayer."

Castle nodded curtly, and stepped away from the nook with the altar. "With pleasure… sir?"

"Bracken. William Bracken. Member of the embassy envoy from Kaedwen. As a fellow kaedweni, you are free to come and join me to the private rites held at the Redania embassy, every night before supper. "

Another nod. "I will consider it, if I find the time. Unfortunately, every time I spend time in Vizima, it is always packed with an infinite sequence of matters I have to attend. Mostly, bureaucratic nonsense that, alas, at home would not take place. Too bad the printing industry has little to no presence back in Kaedwen."

Bracken smiled, a stern but seemingly sincere smile. "You are too right, Mister Rogers. Now, I will leave you to the matters awaiting, and I will do my prayers. Again, it was a pleasure to meet you. Coonan, Maddox, you know what to do."

Castle bid him farewell as his bodyguards took their stand at each side of the shrine Bracken had selected for his prayers and walked out of the Temple as fast as he could. That man was creepy as fuck, and if Castle was weirded out by him, it meant it was way beyond the creepiness he had witnessed in his life.

As soon as he was outside, he took a moment to enjoy the fresh, though not perfumed, air. Inside the Temple, the lack of windows, the ever burning fire and candles, coupled with the sheer stench of dirty humanity, the air was unbearable, most of all to a person with a keen sense of smell as a Witcher. He was almost nauseated by the putrid smell that hung in that room. Not to mention that the bodyguards, but also Bracken himself, reeked of blood like a slaughterhouse.

He started fearing the psycho had already kidnapped another victim.

Unbuttoning the collar of his shirt, he headed towards the Temple of Melitele, where a large garden filled with juniper trees allowed him to think clearly.

Scent of blood, both recent and magic hanging off of him, as the medallion had sensed. A distinct sense of impending danger as he talked to him… yes, Bracken was their man. And if he wasn't, he was at least connected. The same smell of cologne he had perceived on the latest victim's clothes wafted everywhere Bracken went. He was a devoted, overly so, follower of the Eternal Fire doctrine.

And he was a mage. Or at least a source not trained to use his powers.

A very frustrated source that couldn't cope with the contradiction of being so well versed in magic and having such a deep faith in a cult that shun away all magic and deemed it sinful and intrinsically evil.

"Fuck…" he muttered, running his hands through his hair.

That man was a ploughing serial killer and they had no evidence to sustain such claim except some vague deduction based on traces only he could see.

They were fucked.