2. Murder on the Colbridge Express

The ferry arrived at dawn, its hull cutting through the mist like a dull blade through gauze. No one spoke on the crossing. They stood apart from one another, huddled in their coats, the way strangers do on elevators and in waiting rooms—united only by proximity and the desperate desire to be somewhere else.

Morris watched the island recede through the salt-streaked window. Sprague Island had become a smudge of green and gray, its Gothic mansion a dark tooth against the morning sky. Behind them, two bodies lay in the estate's cold storage cellar, wrapped in sheets and waiting for the coroner. Harold Finch had been found at three in the morning, floating face-down in the boathouse, his lungs full of river water. The medical examiner would later rule it an accidental drowning—he'd been drinking heavily, his blood alcohol three times the legal limit—but Morris knew better. The figurine on his pillow, the note, the calculated way the killer had waited until the search moved elsewhere before depositing the body where it would be found: none of that was accidental.

Judge Crane's death had been ruled a heart attack. The tiny needle mark behind his ear had gone unnoticed by the island's private physician, a nervous man who'd been treating the Dunn family for forty years and had no interest in complicating a natural death. "He was eighty-three years old," the doctor had said, packing his bag. "His heart was a time bomb." Morris had said nothing. He'd learned, in his years as a prosecutor, that the truth was a fragile thing, easily crushed by convenience.

The slip of paper was still in his pocket. Check the guest list. One of you isn't supposed to be here. He'd checked the guest list that night, after the bodies were discovered. Ten names, including his own. No anomalies. But the doubt had already taken root, winding through his thoughts like bindweed.

Who had left the note? And why had they left it where only Morris would find it?

When the ferry docked, the Colbridge police were waiting. Victor Dunn had used his influence to summon them, though "influence" meant he'd called the police commissioner directly from his private line, the one that had survived the outage because it ran through an independent cable Victor had installed after a labor strike fifteen years earlier. Morris watched the uniforms swarm the dock, watched Victor's lawyers—the Holt brothers—intercept the detectives before they could ask uncomfortable questions. The machinery of wealth ground on, indifferent to the dead.

Morris slipped away in the confusion. No one stopped him. No one even noticed him leave.

Three days passed. The newspapers ran the story on page three, then page seven, then not at all. An industrialist's weekend gathering gone wrong. An accidental drowning. A geriatric heart attack. The public had no appetite for murder mysteries unless the victims were pretty young women or the killers were strangers in the dark. Two dead rich men on a private island was just taxidermy.

Morris tried to bury himself in work. He served eviction notices to families who'd lost their jobs. He tracked down bail jumpers hiding in rat-infested apartments. He drank bourbon in his office and stared at the rain and thought about Elena Dunn's eyes, the way they'd held that ancient, patient knowledge. She'd known everything. She'd told him so herself. And she'd smiled when Judge Crane died.

He was nursing his third drink on a Thursday evening when the phone rang. The voice on the other end was a detective named Curran, a man Morris had worked with in his prosecutor days—back when Curran called him "sir" and Morris called him "detective" and both of them pretended the system worked.

"Dunn." Curran's voice was tight, the way it got when he was standing over something he didn't want to look at. "I need you down at Union Station. Colbridge Express, car seven. There's been a homicide."

"Why call me?"

"Because the victim's wallet had your business card inside it. And because the scene is..." A pause. "You need to see it for yourself."

Union Station was a cathedral of grime, its vaulted ceiling blackened by a century of coal smoke. The Colbridge Express was the city's commuter artery, a serpent of steel that wound through the financial district, the industrial corridor, and the suburban sprawl before circling back again. Car seven was at the far end of the platform, cordoned off with yellow tape that fluttered in the draft from the ventilation shafts.

Morris showed his ID—process server, not lawyer, but Curran had cleared him—and stepped into the car.

The first thing he noticed was the smell. Copper and iron, thick as a butcher's shop. The second thing he noticed was the body.

It was sprawled across a bench seat near the center of the car, a man in his sixties with thinning gray hair and a face that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts. He was wearing a cheap suit, the kind you buy off the rack at department stores that also sell tires and frozen food. And he was covered in stab wounds.

Morris counted them automatically, the way he'd counted knife wounds in autopsy photos during his prosecutor days. Twelve. Twelve stab wounds, arranged in a pattern that was almost geometric—three clusters of four, radiating outward from the chest like the points of a compass.

"Who is he?" Morris asked, though he already knew. The face was older, more weathered, but the nose—that crooked nose, broken in a bar fight when the man was nineteen—was unmistakable.

Curran flipped open his notepad. "Rowan Keene. Small-time con man, did a stretch in Hartford for check fraud back in the eighties. Worked as a janitor at the courthouse the last few years. No family, no known associates." He paused. "You know him?"

Morris's throat had gone dry. Rowan Keene. The name hit him like a physical blow, bringing with it the smell of the courtroom, the sound of the gavel, the sight of Eleanor Voss being led away.

"The witness will state his name for the record."

"Rowan Keene, sir."

"And you were present at the Voss residence on the night of March fourteenth?"

"Yes, sir. I was doing some handyman work. I saw Mrs. Voss come home around eleven. She had blood on her blouse, sir. I didn't think nothing of it at the time, but later, when the police asked..."

The memory unspooled like a damaged film reel. Keene had been the prosecution's star witness, the man who'd placed Eleanor Voss at the scene with blood on her clothes. Without his testimony, the case would have collapsed. Morris had known Keene was lying—the timeline didn't match, the blood evidence was never tested, Keene himself had a grudge against the Voss family over an unpaid debt—but Morris had coached him anyway. Had fed him the right answers. Had buried the exculpatory evidence in a mountain of paperwork.

And now Keene was dead, stabbed twelve times on a commuter train.

"Twelve stab wounds," Morris said, his voice coming from somewhere far away. "Twelve jurors. Twelve people on a jury."

Curran frowned. "What are you talking about?"

Morris didn't answer. He was looking at the seat across from the body, where someone had left a folded piece of paper. He picked it up with hands that barely trembled.

The handwriting was the same cramped script from the island.

"Twelve stab wounds, twelve jurors, twelve good men and true. But what happens when the jurors are the ones on trial? And what happens when the judge is already dead? The verdict was guilty. The sentence was death. But the wrong person died, didn't she, Mr. Dunn?"

Morris folded the note and put it in his pocket.

"Did you find anything else?" he asked.

Curran shrugged. "The usual. No murder weapon. No witnesses—the train was mostly empty, end of the line run. The conductor found him when they reached the yard. Security cameras were off, some kind of power surge in the car." He hesitated. "There's one thing, though. A vagrant was spotted near the platform around the time of the murder. Drunk, muttering to himself. Transit cops have picked him up before. Name of Albert Sikes."

Albert Sikes. Another name from Morris's past. A homeless man he'd defended on a petty theft charge years ago, back when Morris was still doing pro bono work to pad his conscience. Sikes was harmless—a sad, broken man who talked to pigeons and collected bottle caps. He'd never hurt anyone in his life.

Morris could feel the trap closing around him. The killer—whoever they were—had handed him a choice. Sikes was the obvious suspect, the convenient scapegoat. If Morris pointed the police toward him, they'd close the case quickly. No one would look too closely at Rowan Keene's past. No one would dig up the Voss trial. No one would ask why a process server's business card was in the dead man's wallet.

And if Morris didn't point the police toward Sikes? If he told the truth, revealed the note, confessed what he knew? Then everything would come out. The perjury. The suppressed evidence. The innocent woman dead. He'd lose what little he had left—his job, his freedom, maybe his life.

Morris looked at the body again. Twelve stab wounds. Twelve jurors. A killer who'd transformed a commuter train into a courtroom, a dead con man into a verdict.

"I might know something," Morris said slowly. "Albert Sikes. I defended him once. He had a fixation with juries, talked about how they'd wronged him, how the system was rigged. I always thought he was harmless, but..." He let the sentence hang.

Curran's eyes sharpened. "You think he could've done this?"

"I think you should talk to him. Search his things. See if he kept any newspaper clippings about famous trials. Any... lists of jurors."

It was the worst thing Morris had ever done. Worse than the perjury, worse than the suppressed evidence. Eleanor Voss had at least been a stranger, an abstraction—a photograph in a case file, a face in the courtroom gallery. But Albert Sikes was a man Morris had looked in the eye. A man who'd thanked him, in a cracked and trembling voice, for being the only lawyer who'd ever treated him like a human being.

Morris walked out of the train car and into the cold fluorescent light of the station platform. His hands were steady. His breathing was even. The bourbon he'd drunk that afternoon sat in his stomach like a warm stone.

He was still alive. That was the thing that mattered. That was the only thing that had ever mattered.

The arrest made the evening news. Albert Sikes, a homeless man with a history of mental illness, was charged with the murder of Rowan Keene. The police had found a collection of newspaper clippings about jury trials in his cardboard shelter under the Colbridge Avenue overpass—clippings Morris had carefully placed there an hour before the search, wearing gloves and moving in the shadows like the criminal he'd become. Sikes's public defender was already talking about an insanity plea. The case was as good as closed.

Morris watched the broadcast from his office, the bourbon bottle empty on the desk. He'd done it. He'd saved himself. And the only cost was whatever was left of his soul.

The knock on his door came at midnight.

He opened it to find Elena Dunn standing in the hallway, her dark hair pulled back under a scarf, her eyes holding that same patient, knowing light. She was holding a manila envelope.

"Hello, Mr. Dunn," she said. "I believe we need to talk about the next verse."

She stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. The office smelled of bourbon and mildew and old regret. She didn't seem to notice.

"I saw the news," she said, settling into the chair across from his desk. "The murder on the train. The homeless man they arrested. Very neat. Very tidy." She smiled. "Except we both know Albert Sikes didn't kill anyone."

Morris said nothing.

"The killer is still out there, Mr. Dunn. The person who murdered Finch and Crane, the person who murdered Rowan Keene. They're not finished. You know the rhyme as well as I do." She pulled a piece of paper from the envelope and slid it across the desk. "This arrived at my father's house this morning."

Morris picked it up. The same cream-colored paper. The same cramped handwriting.

"Eight little soldier boys traveling in Devon; One said he'd stay there and then there were seven. The businessman stayed in Colbridge, thinking his money would protect him. But money is a poor shield against the truth, and the truth has a long memory, Mr. Whitmore."

Lawrence Whitmore. The portly banker from the island. The man with the fraudulent loans.

"When did this arrive?" Morris asked.

"This morning. I've been trying to reach Mr. Whitmore all day. His office says he's on a business trip. His home number rings to voicemail." Elena leaned forward. "I think he's already dead. And I think the killer is just getting started."

Morris looked at the note, then at Elena. In the dim light of the office, her face seemed to shift again—girlish one moment, ancient the next. She'd known about the secrets on the island. She'd known about Finch and Crane before they died. She'd known about Eleanor Voss and her daughter.

"How old would she be now?" Morris asked quietly. "The daughter. Eleanor Voss's daughter."

Elena's smile didn't waver. "She'd be about my age, I imagine. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Old enough to plan something elaborate. Old enough to be patient." She paused. "Old enough to want revenge."

The rain had started again outside, drumming against the window. Somewhere in the distance, a train whistle sounded—the Colbridge Express, making its endless circuit through the dark.

"Eight verses left," Elena said. "Eight more little soldier boys. Unless someone stops the rhyme before it finishes." She stood up, smoothing her dress. "I thought you should know, Mr. Dunn. After all, you're one of the soldier boys too. And your verse is coming."

She walked to the door, then paused. "Oh, and one more thing. The police found something interesting in Rowan Keene's apartment. An old trial transcript. The Voss case. It was covered in notes, in the margins. Someone had circled your name over and over. Someone wanted him to remember you."

The door closed behind her. Morris sat alone in the dark, listening to the rain, watching the shadows gather in the corners of the room.

He was a soldier boy now. The rhyme was still playing out. And somewhere out there, in the rain-soaked streets of Colbridge, the killer was already writing the next verse.

He poured the last of the bourbon into his glass and drank it in one long swallow. Then he reached for the phone.

It was time to find out who else was on the guest list. Before the guest list found him.