Page 34 of For Mercy

He turned back to his laptop, fingers hovering over the keyboard."This is far from over," he whispered, a new fire lighting in his eyes."Michelle, Richard - they were just the beginning."

As he began to type, plans forming with each keystroke, a grim smile spread across his face.The true work, he knew, was only just beginning.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The morning sun struggled against the thick glass of the FBI Headquarters, its rays reduced to a pale glow that barely touched the edges of the briefing room.Inside, the dawn's tentative light was an unwelcome contrast to the oppressive atmosphere hanging over the agents.Despite the new day, the air felt stale, fraught with the weight of sleepless nights and the pressure of the unsolved.

Morgan sat motionless at the table, save for the unconscious weave of her fingers through her tousled dark hair—a physical manifestation of her mind's relentless spinning.The case board before her was a battleground of facts and theories, red string zigzagging like scars across the evidence.On one flank, the stoic visage of Judge Richard Hawthorne; on the other, Michelle Knox's confident smile—two faces etched with the finality of their gruesome ends.

The similarities in their deaths taunted Morgan from the board.Both victims discovered alone, surrounded by theatrically staged scenes mocking their professions.Hawthorne's blood had painted a grotesque mural on his own private courtroom, while Knox's life ebbed away amidst the cold sterility of mock medical equipment.It was as if the killer aimed to underscore their careers with a twisted homage in death.

Morgan's gaze lingered on Hawthorne's image.A man vested with the power of judgment, now himself judged and executed in a parody of justice.And Knox—an arbiter of wealth whose decisive hand once played with the fortunes of many, found dead with the means of salvation so close yet tragically ignored.

She tried to pierce through the fog of information, seeking a thread to pull, a connection that might unravel the knot of this enigma.But the web was complex, and each potential link led only to more questions.The irony of it all wasn't lost on her—the killer was out there, weaving these intricate patterns, while she sat here, caught in her own tangle of clues and dead ends.

In the dim light of early morning, the photographs of the deceased seemed to whisper of secrets just beyond reach.Morgan knew better than to rely solely on legal logic.The law was black and white, but human motivation lived in the grey, and somewhere in that murky realm lay the answers she sought.

As the silence of the room wrapped around her, the memory of her father's words from their clandestine meeting in the woods resonated within her.John Christopher's revelation about Cordell's vendetta pulsed through her veins, mingling with the urgency of the current case.She couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, the shadow of Cordell's past actions reached even into this investigation, though the nature of that reach remained elusive.

Patiently, she waited for the spark of insight, the elusive glimmer of connection that would bring the killer's motives into stark relief.The stakes were personal, each victim a haunting echo of her own struggle against the injustice that had once consumed her life.She wouldn't rest until the killer was unmasked, until the sins of the past were laid bare for all to see.

Morgan's fingers stilled on the file she had been leafing through, her gaze locked on the clock above the case board.Hours had evaporated in their relentless pursuit of a connection between Judge Hawthorne and Michelle Knox.She felt Derik's presence like a steady pulse beside her, his own determination mirroring hers.The room had grown stale with the scent of old coffee and the recycled breath of two agents too stubborn to pause.

"Nothing," she muttered under her breath, shuffling through another stack of papers that held interviews, alibis, timelines.Each document was a silent testament to their failure to find the invisible thread that linked their victims.Derik leaned back, his chair creaking in protest, his green eyes scanning the room as if hoping the walls would yield an answer.They were both chasing ghosts through the labyrinth of evidence, and it was wearing thin on Morgan's resolve.

"Maybe we're looking at this wrong," Derik suggested, though Morgan could hear the weariness in his voice.He had shadows under his eyes that spoke of their shared vigil, and she knew he felt every bit of the exhaustion that clawed at her.

"Then we turn it inside out until it makes sense," she said, but the words sounded hollow even to her own ears.It was the mantra of the desperate, the creed of the sleep-deprived.

Without warning, her vision blurred, letters on the open file before her dancing into an indecipherable jumble.She blinked hard, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead as if she could physically shove the fatigue aside.Her body was rebelling, nearly two full days without proper rest, sustained by a cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline that was losing its potency.

Morgan's fingers pressed into her temples, kneading the skin as if she could massage away the fatigue that clung to her like a second skin.The room around her was a blur of papers and photographs, the evidence board a constellation of red strings and thumbtacks that refused to align into any meaningful pattern.She felt the weight of every second of the near-forty-eight hours that had slipped by since her last real rest, each one heavy with the urgency of the case.

Meanwhile, Derik rifled through a fresh stack of documents, his movements methodic, almost mechanical.Then, without warning, he froze.The abrupt stillness drew Morgan's gaze, and she found herself locked onto him, her own exhaustion momentarily forgotten.

"Derik?"she prodded, her voice gravelly from overuse.

He looked up, and there it was—that flash of clarity in his eyes that she'd come to know so well."Morgan," he began, the timbre of his voice cutting through the static of her tired mind, "I think we've been looking at this all wrong."

She leaned in, her weariness pushed aside by the sheer force of her resolve."What do you mean?"

"Michelle Knox," he said, tapping a finger against a particular sheet of paper."A few years back, a family tried to sue her under the state’s bystander laws."

Morgan straightened in her seat, the fog in her brain dissipating just enough to let the implication of his words sink in.Bystander laws—the kind that addressed the moral duty of a person to intervene in an emergency.

"Go on," she urged, the cogs in her mind beginning to turn once again.

"Knox was accused of ignoring a man suffering a heart attack right in front of her," Derik continued."The family claimed she just watched him die, that she had a responsibility to help, or at least call for help."

"And?"Morgan's heart quickened, sensing the tendrils of a connection starting to form.

"Case got thrown out.No legal obligation to act meant Knox walked free.But that family—they lost someone because she decided not to act.And now Knox is dead, in a scene staged like a hospital room, with lifesaving medicine just...out of reach."

The pieces clicked into place, a cold realization washing over Morgan.Michelle Knox, left to die with salvation so close yet ignored—just as she had done to that man.It was poetic, cruel justice, the kind that spoke of a meticulous and moralistic killer.

Morgan's frown deepened as she heard Derik recount the incident with a measured gravity that seemed to pull the air heavy around them.In the lobby of her opulent office building, Michelle Knox had been on her way to an important meeting when a crisis unfolded before her very eyes.A man, just an arm's length away, had collapsed, his hands clutching at his chest in silent horror.The onset of a heart attack was unmistakable.

As if caught within a tableau of indifference, Knox had glanced at the stricken figure and simply continued on her path without breaking stride.Morgan pictured the scene—bystanders frozen in shock, the man's anguished gasps fading into stillness, and Knox, whose life was governed by the ticking of a clock rather than the beating of a heart.

---