Winter Clues: Library of Lies

The engine cut out and an icy wind shoved against the car like a wet fist. Leo muttered behind me, “We were supposed to be at the courthouse—wasn’t that where the last killing happened?” His breath fogged in the air; he sounded impatient and small.

I stayed silent. The brick façade of the municipal library loomed under a smear of gray sky. January had a habit of making everything seem sharper: the chill, the headlines, the people. Five deaths in as many weeks, each body left with the same strange signature. Whoever — or whatever — was behind this left a pattern like a printed watermark. I’d been assigned alongside Leo to trace that pattern and stop it. In truth I’d been close before they pulled me off to give Leo “his first solo exposure.” I didn’t mind mentoring, but I resented being shadowed.

“Hello? Anyone home?” Leo jabbed again as I tightened my scarf. I climbed the marble steps, watching hairline cracks braid across the stone where frost had worked its way in. Poor material choice, I thought. It looked impressive until it started to split.

“Research,” I said, heading for the historical stacks.

“Research for what? You finished your thesis ages ago. Don’t we need to be at the scene?” Leo’s questions were small stones tossed into a still pond. I had to ignore them.

“I’m tracing a lead,” I said. “Old records, circulation notes, anything that ties a name to these victims.”

He snorted. “Who’s the suspect? Julia again? She’s been acting weird.”

Julia. Fine. Julia had been close to two victims. You’d look distant, too, if your friends kept dropping dead. I let it sit.

I sheltered into the long aisle of past newspapers and public registries. Leo, never far behind, brightened as if he’d found a trophy.

“Hey—these are from my old paper!” he crowed. “Haven’t seen one of these since I left reporting.”

“Miss it?” I asked, leafing through headlines from December, each one a small, hard thing.

“Sometimes,” he said. “But detective work’s better. Though if this case keeps giving me grief…”

He went on about old colleagues, drinks, gossip. I poked through a stack, and a neat, dull pattern sketched itself out across several articles — a series of numbers, obscure and deliberate, that threaded each death together like a code. Any competent mind could map it, and yet it hadn’t been picked up in the mainstream coverage, which struck me as weird.

“Isn’t it odd your old paper’s the only one running this story?” I asked, careful not to show a grin.

“Not really,” he shrugged. “One outlet latches to a juicy piece. It sells. They might have exclusive interviews, contracts — you know how it goes.”

But I knew how it went differently. I’d been conducting interviews yesterday without Leo’s shadow—closed rooms, quiet confessions. I’d collected the brittle truths people left behind. Leo’s chatter grated but it also filled silence, and I cataloged each small contradiction he produced. He’d told me he’d been ill Friday, out Saturday with former colleagues. Little things like that were easy to verify.

“Friday you were out sick,” I said now, stepping closer. “You left early on Friday. But you said you saw friends Saturday. That true?”

“Yeah. Fever broke. I went out,” he said, eyes steadying. He offered a doctor’s receipt if I wanted one. He sounded practiced.

We sat and worked some more. I cross-referenced dates. A clean thread of numeric spacing appeared — a cadence that most would call random. Someone was composing a message with corpses. I kept my mouth shut; the pattern had an elegance that annoyed me.

By the time we left the library the sky had bruised into evening and snow whispered down in small conspiratorial flakes. I suggested going back to the office. Leo surprised me by staying. “I want to see this through,” he said. “Let me in on your suspicions.” He had that look—too earnest, too keen.

Back at the firm, the lights were low. The library fireplace sent a lazy glow into the dark. Someone had left a fire burning. On the mantel a sealed envelope lay propped up, addressed in a crisp hand: Mara Ellis. I sat, coat still on, thumbed the flap and slid the letter free. The date on the top read today.

Before I could read more Leo was at my side. He snatched the paper and—without a word—tossed it into the hearth. The heat licked the edges, blackening ink.

“Why the hell did you do that?” I demanded.

“Because it needed to go,” he said, voice too calm.

“Because you’re a murderer?” I asked, and the way he looked at me then was not the look of a frightened rookie.

“So what if I am?” Leo stepped forward. He smelled faintly of stale coffee and sharpened anger. He reached inside his coat. I saw the gunbulge.

“They deserved it,” he said. “They ruined lives. They protected their own. I fixed that.”

He spoke fast, tripping over grief into righteous fury: a prosecutor who stonewalled, a defendant’s son let go, a little sister who stopped leaving the house. His hands trembled, but his anger had a mechanical precision. He’d cobbled a crusade out of private pain, and each death was a hammer blow.

“You set out to be judge, jury and executioner?” I said. I needed time—an opening, a chance to disarm him.

“I burned evidence,” he said. “I engineered the investigations. I left the paper so I could be on the case. I planned it so you’d never see. Tonight I end it. I destroy the rest.”

I tried to reason, then lunged when he shoved his gun toward Julia—she had come in during the struggle and frozen by the doorway, face pale, a figure of helplessness. Leo pressed the barrel to her temple.

Everything narrowed—sound compressed. There was a snap and a single, terrible report. I felt a shock like a hammer; something broke between us. The scuffle knocked us both down. The pistol skittered across the rug and lay a foot away. I slammed into Leo, felt the contortions of his weight and the strain of muscle. Feet pounded in the hall and then retreated. Someone—Julia, perhaps—ran for help.

Leo was faster back to his feet. He landed a punch that knocked the wind from me, but I wrapped my sleeve around the weapon and pulled it under me. Pain flamed across my ribs and I tasted blood. I could hear my pulse in my ears, wild and small.

He kept coming, flailing, enraged and methodical in turn. I had sworn never to let my badge turn me into what I hunted. But blackness hovered. If I let him take the gun…

I fired. Not at his chest; at his foot. He screamed, dropped to his knees, the sound a raw animal noise. I hit him again with the butt of the gun, each blow adding distance between us until his rage dissolved into sobs and curses. He sat on the floor, clutching an injured ankle, breath ragged and wet against his own face.

Minutes stretched sticky and thin. Sirens cut through the night like knives, then blue lights painted the blinds. I learned later that Julia had called 911 the moment Leo took the letter. Police filled the office, efficient, silent. They cuffed him without resistance. As they led him out, his eyes met mine.

“I’ll never forgive them,” he said, voice small in the doorway.

“And the world will never forgive you,” I answered, lungs burning.

He said nothing more. The door closed. The echo of his footsteps faded, leaving the smell of smoke and the brittle stillness of what we’d lost.

They took his statement. They took mine. They taped off the library and the mantel where the letter had burned. In the weeks that followed we pieced together what Leo had done and why, and in court the scale of his vengeance—like so many things stripped of context—seemed monstrous and sorrowful in equal measure. He’d written himself into the story and then tried to erase everyone who could tell it.

I kept thinking about patterns: how pain repeats, how a string of deaths could be stitched into a message, how someone’s belief in justice could curdle into something else. In the end the cold didn’t stop—the city still had winters—but something else warmed in me: the complicating fact that villains are sometimes made from grief, and the job isn’t only to stop them. It’s to understand how they became what they were, and to make sure we don’t create another.

Julia visited the office the next week. She stood before the mantel, hands folded, and left a single, small card where the letter had sat. No flames this time—only paper, and the long, quiet breath of someone who’d survived.