The second victim is a man named Owen Shelby.
In Chapter 14 — the one I have not posted — I named the character Wendell Bligh. He runs a bookstore. He likes recommending unbound nineteenth-century editions to lonely customers at closing time.
Owen Shelby, in life, owns Beacon & Belle Books on Magazine Street. Late forties. A widower. He is found behind his counter at five-thirty in the morning by a delivery driver, posed exactly the way I posed Wendell Bligh in a draft saved to my private Dropbox folder.
I have not posted Chapter 14 yet.
The draft is in my Dropbox. That's it.
Ember's eyes change when he tells me. They have been suspicious. Now they are certain.
"Unpublished draft," he says. "Who has access."
I am sitting in the soft-questioning room at Major Crimes, which is meant to look like a hotel lobby and does not. My fingers are cold.
"Me. Daphne Lascelle. Substack's backend, in theory."
"That all."
I think.
"Tessa Boudreaux. Daphne's assistant. She has the shared Dropbox."
Ember picks up his phone and walks out. Forty minutes later Tessa is in the room.
She is twenty-three. Tulane English, class of '24. Her mascara is on her cheekbones. She has not stopped crying since they put her in the cruiser.
"Miss Wren, I swear to God I have never read your drafts. I drag the files to the cover-design folder. That's all I do."
I believe her. So does Ember; he is watching her hands.
Daphne arrives ten minutes after that, and her face is worse than Tessa's.
Ember closes the door behind her.
"Ms. Lascelle. Do you have access to Wren's unpublished drafts."
"Yes."
"Have you read Chapter 14."
"Yes."
"Have you sent it to anyone."
Her voice cools twenty degrees. "Detective. I am an editor. Not a fan account."
Ember sets two evidence photos on the table. The second envelope, the one that came with the Shelby photograph. A latent print pulled clean off the kraft paper.
"Then explain why your fingerprint is on this envelope."
Tessa's crying stops.
So does mine.
Daphne looks at the print and her composure cracks for a second — just a second, the way a hairline crack opens in a glass before the glass actually breaks. Then she pulls it back.
"I didn't mail it."
"Prints don't lie."
"It could have passed through my hands."
"When."
She does not answer.
Ember taps the table once, hard. "Ms. Lascelle. Obstruction is a charge."
Daphne looks at me. The look is so awful I feel it in my teeth.
She has been carrying something for years. I can see her decide to put it down.
"Wren."
She breathes in.
"The first manuscript of The Seventh Night you sent me, three years ago, was not called The Seventh Night."
"What was it called."
She looks at me. Her voice is flat the way it goes when she has rehearsed a thing and still hates saying it.
"The St. Anastasia Death Log."
I don't remember.
Every file in every backup of mine, going back to my first laptop, calls the book The Seventh Night. There is no earlier title in my Dropbox version history. There is no earlier draft in my Gmail. There is no notebook in the apartment.
Daphne logs into a personal email account that she has not used since 2023. She finds a thread.
The subject line:
The St. Anastasia Death Log — please read all the way through.
The attachment is a synopsis with seven names listed at the bottom.
Margaux Ridley. Owen Shelby. Quentin Hargrove. Hollis Vane. Porter Judd. Wendell Ashe. Wren Mosely.
My name is last.
I look at the list and my chest closes around a fist.
Ember turns the laptop toward me. His voice is quiet now. Steady.
"You drafted this synopsis," he says. "Did you intend to kill seven people."
"No."
It comes out small. Each word is exact.
Daphne is talking over me, fast, to Ember.
"I read that synopsis when she sent it. It is not a hit list. It is a trauma memoir she wanted to fictionalize. She said she grew up at a Catholic children's home outside Slidell that burned down. She remembered fragments. She wanted to write through it."
"Why did the title change," Ember says.
Daphne looks at me. Her face has too many things in it.
"Because the day after she sent it, she was in an accident."
I go still.
"Outside our office," Daphne says. "Magazine Street. Nine at night. Black SUV with cloned plates clipped her in the crosswalk and kept going. When she came out of the hospital she didn't remember writing me. She didn't remember the names. The neurologist called it dissociative amnesia, six months retrograde, plus older fragments. We let it stand."
My back is cold from the inside.
I remember the accident. I have always called it an accident.
Daphne goes into her bag and pulls out a thumb drive in a small kraft envelope.
"I kept the file. I had a backup."
Ember calls a tech up from downstairs. The tech plugs the drive into an air-gapped laptop. The first page of the document opens on the wall display.
Three lines, all caps, in the cold flat font I used to use for outlining.
MARGAUX RIDLEY IS NOT A DOCTOR. SHE IS THE FIRST PERSON WHO HANDED ME OVER.
OWEN SHELBY DID NOT OPEN A BOOKSTORE. HE WAS THE RECORDS CLERK WHO BURNED THE FILES.
THEY SHOULD ALL STAND TRIAL. BUT NOT BY MY HAND.
The conference room does not breathe.
Ember's eyes come back to me and something in them has shifted — not trust, but the suspicion has loosened a notch.
The tech clears his throat. "Detective. There's an encrypted MP4 on this drive too."
He keys past the prompt. The video opens.
A child sits in a white-walled room. Strips of cotton are tied around her wrists. She is twelve. Her face is wet. The camera is hand-held, off-angle.
An adult voice says, off-camera: "Wren. Who started the fire."
The child lifts her head.
Her mouth opens. Her voice is small and flat, the voice of a kid reciting an answer she has been told is correct.
"It was me."
Everyone in the room looks at me.
I want to say I don't know what fire she means. I want to say I have never seen that child before.
But I know the wallpaper behind her. I know the way the cotton is tied — over the wrist bone, twice, with the knot pressed against the pulse. I know the way her hair sits matted on her temple.
White tower.
Fire.
Death log.
The words come up from somewhere under the floorboards and lock around my ankles.
Ember closes the video.
"St. Anastasia Children's Home," he says. He has a folder open already. He is reading from a printed page that is fifteen years old and has been on his desk somewhere for most of that time. "Catholic-run children's home outside Slidell. Burned October fourteenth, 2009. Nine children deceased. Official cause: faulty wiring. Diocese closed the file."
He fans three more pages.
"After the fire: the director, Wendell Ashe, disappeared. The contract clinical psychologist who handled trauma debrief for the survivors was Dr. Margaux Ridley. The home's records clerk, Owen Shelby, took a severance check and opened Beacon & Belle Books eighteen months later."
I look at the synopsis on the screen. The third name.
Quentin Hargrove.
Daphne says it before I can. "Hargrove."
Ember nods once. "Volunteer firefighter on scene the night of the home fire. Currently vice-chair of the St. Anastasia Children's Trust."
He says the name of the charity flatly. He does not need to underline it.
My phone, on the table beside the evidence sleeve, lights up.
Not a Zelle ping this time. An email.
Sender: Nightwatch.
Subject: You're almost there, M. Wren.
The attachment is an audio file, 0:41 long.
The tech routes it through the conference room speakers.
Forty-one seconds of static and small sounds. Then a boy's voice, twelve or so, pitched against tears.
"Wren. Don't say it was you. It wasn't you."
A man's voice, much closer to the mic, low and furious.
"Shut the fuck up."
Something hits something. A heavy soft sound.
The audio cuts.
The room is silent for a long second.
Ember presses pause. "The boy. Who is the boy."
My throat closes.
"I don't know."
The body of the email says one sentence.
The third member of the audience takes his seat at eight o'clock tonight.
Ember is already on his radio. He gives the dispatcher Hargrove's name and an Audubon Place address and tells them to put two units on it now.
Daphne's phone rings.
She answers, listens for ten seconds, and her face does something complicated.
"What? No. The launch is on Friday. We've been over this. We have a homicide —"
She puts her hand over the mic and looks at me.
"Cypress House moved the launch up. Tonight. Seven."
I stare at her.
"They what."
She bites down on the receiver. "The board saw the trending list. The acquisition firm flew in this morning. Investors, the publicity team, three networks. They are not canceling. They said and I quote, 'the heat doesn't keep.'"
Ember laughs once with no humor. "Dead women make good marketing."
Daphne flinches like he slapped her.
I stand up.
"I'm not going."
A voice from the doorway. A man's. Calm.
"You have to."
We all turn.
A man is standing in the conference room doorway. White oxford shirt, gold-frame glasses, dark trousers that fit too well to be cop or PR. He is holding a single black camellia between two fingers, like a pen.
He smiles at me.
"Ms. Mosely. I'm your special guest tonight."