Ryan noticed that everyone around him was very skittish, not meeting his eye. That was fair enough, he supposed; his girlfriend was missing, yet here he was watching an execution. He could practically hear Gwen's voice criticising him for choosing Joe over her again. But he had spent years trying to bring Joe to justice, and there was only one chance to see it happen. It had to end. Not only would this give him solace that Joe could never hurt or inspire anyone again, but he also prayed that seeing him die, the symbolism of it all, would make him stop seeing Joe for good. It would mean actually facing the crumbling state of his life. But he could always throw himself into obsessively chasing down Mark or any of Strauss' students the FBI was aware of. There was still work to be done. He would find an excuse. He always did.

He watched the sight before him like a hawk, terrified at any moment that the executioner would free Joe from his restraints and let him escape, but he didn't. The FBI had done a background check (Ryan had done one, too), and it seemed they had no relation. But as things proceeded to finality, he felt so many emotions rise in him. If Joe knew that, he would be very intrigued, Ryan was sure.

"Joe Carroll, the State of Virginia has sentenced you to die for your many crimes. Do you have any final words?"

Joe sighed, like he was replying to a student's umpteenth question. "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'."

As he said this, Ryan felt like he could hear the words not just aloud but inside of him. Within minutes, Joe was dead. He put up a good fight. The man did not go willingly. But go, he did. Ryan stayed in the room until Joe's body was covered with a sheet and wheeled away. He wordlessly followed the coroner to the crematorium, keeping his expression stoic to prevent anybody from questioning his presence. Before the cremation, Ryan asked to see the body again. Joe was dead. At no point could this have been faked.

All was silent as he drove home. In a way, he almost missed having Joe nag him. He felt empty. Like a part of his soul had died, true to Joe's words. And with Gwen gone, he didn't have anybody to keep up a good reputation for. Mike and Max might care about him, but they knew not to expect miracles, unlike Gwen, whose optimism that he could heal had been almost suffocating. So, Ryan found himself in a dive bar and ordered two shots of whiskey like second nature. He intended to down one and then the other, but as he reached for the second, Joe's hand stopped him. Ryan had never been optimistic that Joe would disappear. But to see him dressed casually and smiling like he was an old buddy put paid to any small hope that he might be able to get rid of him. To hell with it, he thought as he indulged him, even toasting their glasses together. God, he was delirious.

Over the following week, the FBI recovered a record-high number of bodies, including Mark and Gwen. All were found in the Potomac with multiple stab wounds and their eyes gouged out. They weren't Strauss-style murders. They weren't even Mark-style murders. No, they were classic Joe-Carroll-style murders. Ryan took count of the number of corpses and the number of times he had woken up someplace strange covered in blood, and the numbers were very close. But correlation was not causation. He couldn't have had anything to do with this, right? He couldn't have killed these people, especially not Gwen. The notion that he had not just been sleepwalking but able to leave the house, drive, kill someone, and dispose of the body before coming home, was ludicrous, especially when he considered Gwen. He would have woken to her screams and cries of pain. It just didn't make any sense. For starters, he had no reason to kill these people. Certainly not Gwen. The others were followers of Mark and Strauss, but also several innocents. He didn't even know these people. No. He wasn't a killer, nor was he a sleepwalking killer.

"There are some secrets that do not permit themselves to be told," Joe warned.

Ryan was sitting in his office alone, but there were cameras, and he didn't want to look like he was talking to himself. Although the FBI probably didn't consider him a suspect, he was the last person to see Gwen, and they probably already doubted his ability to focus on the case rationally.

"Shut up," he replied without moving his lips. "Just shut up and leave me alone. Why won't you disappear?"

"Because I'm a part of you, Ryan. The reason you keep seeing me is you. You want me here."

"No, I don't," he refused stubbornly.

Joe sighed. "Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. You are a real arse when you want to be, aren't you?"

Ryan didn't know what about that did it for him, but he couldn't take it anymore. He slammed his hand on the desk.

"What do you want?" he asked, gritting his teeth.

"Well, to help you, of course." Joe moved to stand behind the desk, looking over the screen. "I want to catch this killer as much as you do, especially since it seems they're not a student of Strauss but rather a student of mine. That is some of the tidiest eye gouging I've ever seen."

Ryan decided to ignore that and try thinking aloud about the case. "Why dump the body in the river? They took the time to clean up the scene but then rushed to the river when their profile tells me they would have burned or disintegrated the bodies. They knew it would have only been a matter of time until someone found them. Unless the river is symbolic somehow..."

Joe hummed in approval. "Oh, how I love watching your mind at work. In another life, perhaps we could have been colleagues at an Ivy League university."

The coroner had summarised that the same kind of murder weapon had been used for each murder: a sharp but wide blade, possibly a utility knife. Nothing special. It was similar to the proposed murder weapon for Strauss — whose murder was also unsolved. But Strauss had not been killed Carroll-style, so maybe it was a coincidence. Ryan started to look for nearby hardware stores. Most talented killers were smart enough to use a generic weapon but add their own flair to the method. It was easy to do with knife wounds. The location, the intensity, the number of stabs, could all be orchestrated to convey just the right message. He found a handful of relatively cheap and popular utility knives. When he brought up the purchase history for those knives over the last month, he was unsurprised to see hundreds of names listed. Most of these people were probably innocent. Owning a knife wasn't a crime. He decided to cross-reference it with a list of known aliases of their suspects, but who was to say they hadn't used a new one? Ryan also couldn't deny the possibility that someone at the FBI was involved. He'd never stopped thinking about that being a possibility. How else were any of the followers able to be so elusive? Feeling like no harm could be done, he decided to throw in the list of FBI personnel in DC for referencing, and only then did he get a match.

Mike Weston.

He had purchased one of the contenders for a murder weapon about two days before they had gone to Beacon. Maybe he killed Strauss. He shook his head. What was he thinking? Mike couldn't have done this. It had to be a coincidence or a set-up, a distraction to deter the FBI from the real killer.

"Or maybe he really did it, Ryan," Joe suggested, making him scoff. "Think about it. After you, I dare say he's the second-best scholar of my work. If anybody wanted to go along and do all these wonderful killings to honour me… they would have to be well-informed, and Mike certainly is."

Ryan hadn't really thought of it that way, the killings being a tribute to Joe, a way to honour him one last time before his execution. Given that the killer had started by eliminating Strauss, then the last of Strauss's students, then Mark, and now innocents, it made sense. The killer wanted to eliminate all imposters, everyone who had tried to reach Joe's infamy but failed. They wanted to prove that the only worthy serial killer was Joe.

"Awful quiet, aren't we?" Joe said with a chuckle. "I don't hear you defending dear Mikey."

He rolled his eyes. "Because there's no point. It's stupid. I'm not entertaining this with you."

"But the fact that I'm even suggesting it means you must not think it's impossible, Ryan. Years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute."

"Mike isn't the killer!" he snapped, no longer caring about keeping up appearances. Yelling at himself was probably not the craziest thing people might expect of him. "This is insane. No matter how desperate we are to find the people who did this, I'm not going to suspect Mike."

"Then why would he buy the knife?"

Why would he? Was he really letting Joe get in his head and create doubt? For all he knew, Mike could have bought the knife for self-defence (as if he didn't have one, being an FBI agent), or for hunting (although he didn't have a life outside of work, so hollowed out by the grief over his father).

Mark was one of the bodies they recovered.

Could Mike have killed Mark, then killed others to make it look like a straggling follower of Joe's?

He had the means to. He had the anger. He had the kind of pain to make him go insane enough to do so. Ryan wasn't the only one who had been slowly spiralling into madness. This was crazy. He couldn't possibly be considering that Mike was the killer here. He needed more evidence. Or did he? If this were another suspect, the credit card record would be enough to go on.

But before he could talk himself out of it, another quote came out of Joe's mouth. "Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of intelligence. Think about every regret you've ever had, Ryan. You could argue those instances came from not trusting your gut. But you know what your gut is telling you now: to listen so you can make the right choice even if it goes against what you want to believe."

He didn't want to admit it, but Joe was right. He couldn't rule this out. He had to get to the truth.

However, the FBI wouldn't sanction this. Which meant it was up to him.

Did he trust himself right now? Not really.

But was he going to let this go? Absolutely not.