Page 86 of That Time I Accidentally Became A Serial Killer

But to her credit, she tracks faster than I expect. Her gaze sharpens, eyes darting between names and timestamps.

And then—fucking hell—she starts touching my board.

“What the hell are you doing?” I snap as she moves a suspect photo and shifts the pins.

“If your version of this worked, you wouldn’t need me,” she says, calm, cutting, maddeningly assured.

I clench my jaw. “There’s a method to this.”

“There’s also a missing month in this timeline,” she replies, dragging a sticky note out of one cluster and dropping it in another. “And this witness contradicts this one.”

Well, shit.

She’s been at this for hours.

I watch, arms crossed, as she rearranges everything like she owns the goddamn board—timeline charts, evidence logs, transcripts, color-coded tabs. Her fingers move fast. Her logic moves faster. It should piss me off more than it does.

She doesn’t ask permission. Doesn’t wait for me to approve her analysis. She just... does it. And worse? She’s right.

I shift in my chair. Sigh. She doesn’t even notice.

She moves two names, draws a line connecting a known trafficker to a missing patrol report we’d written off.

“You dismissed this too fast,” she says, tapping a red-highlighted log. “Whoever’s feeding intel into your chain is covering something. The error pattern’s too clean.”

I glance from the board to her.

This isn’t a prosecutor. This is a wrecking ball in lipstick.

And apparently, I need her.

“I need a clean whiteboard,” she says, already clearing space. “And every color marker you’ve got. No pastels.”

She looks at me—not to ask. Just to confirm I know I’m doing it.

Jaw tight, I walk out. Two minutes later, I’m back with a board and markers. I slam it into place and leave the supplies beside her like she’s hosting a damn art class instead of dissecting a homicide-and-trafficking case.

No thank you. Just writing.

Head down, laser focused. Color-coding sectors like this is what she was born to do. Her handwriting is annoyingly neat.

Within minutes, she’s cataloged it all: corruption leads, aliases, interviews, and the internal reports that have been giving me migraines for months.

Pacing across the room helps but she doesn’t even notice as she works.

Her layout catches me and I stop my path across the room. Not the neon fucking colors—Jesus—but the way she’s grouped the dates. The overlaps. The noise I’ve been staring at for months suddenly has shape.

A pattern.

I step closer, shoulder nearly brushing hers. She notices and her breath hitches as she shifts away.

“Back up,” I say. “What’s the deal with that one?”

She circles a sticky note: a witness alias and a parole officer’s ID.

“This guy. Your informant. He said he was working the night of the drug exchange, right?”

I nod. “Same stash that showed up in the girls who turned up dead. Same chemical signature.”

---