[pls let me know ab any inconsistencies bc my brain is too dumb to notice while I edit thank you]

I arrive at the precinct half an hour early, but it's not early enough. All of the paperwork and junk in the cubicles that I had planned to take care of were already relocated to the storage room in the basement. The two rolling chairs I wanted to dust off had been replaced already with a pair that rivals my own plushy chair.

I also wanted to have a talk with Josh before Jake and Ryan arrived, but Jake and Ryan were already sitting outside of Taylor's office when I stepped through the door. They're sitting in the little stationary chairs lined against the one-way glass wall that looks out over the spacious room, chatting quietly to each other.

Jake has one of the most symmetrical and frustratingly pleasing faces I have ever laid my eyes on. He's dressed business-casual but still sharp and professional. The left corner of his lip tweaks upwards when he talks and smiles. His folded hands twitch on his lap like they should be animating his words instead of being stuck at his sides. His dark hair is cut slightly shorter than mine and it's well-kept. The only hair out of place hangs over his forehead.

Ryan is almost the exact opposite. The collar and buttons of a white dress shirt peek out from under a dark grey hoodie. The sleeves are shuffled up to his wrists, and the string through the hood dangles down the right side more than the left. He has the sun-kissed Miami tan that people cough up hundreds for, even though it's winter. His hair looks like it was styled by a tornado, but it still appears intentional and attractive. When he laughs, I feel the urge to punch his stupid, perfect face.

God, I hate them both already. I knew I would.

If I could take a whiff of the expensive colognes they undoubtedly use, I would hurl on the spot. I'll have to ask Brendon what they smell like. He knows how to describe those types of things.

The door to Taylor's office eases open and she slips out. Her space must be a mess if she won't allow them in. She's a tidy person for the most part, but everything gets to her now and again. I think this is one of those times. She can think too much and the job can freak her out. The note put her on edge, but she doesn't bring it up to us as often as I had anticipated. The investigation is on the down-low, so much so that we all tend to forget about it.

I watch as she hands them each a navy blue lanyard. Their new badges are attached to a retractable clip, laminated and then encased in thick plastic. She lists off the places they can access with it and everything they can't do with it. I know she only mentions what they aren't allowed to do because Josh tried some weird shit and he still does on occasion. The less trouble, the better we can rope Josh back in.

I didn't think she noticed me until she motions for me to come and see her. She doesn't even glance away from the badge she's demonstrating on. I can hear her short painted fingernails tapping against the plastic. Jake and Ryan only look away from her for a split second, but we don't make eye contact at all. I see my name pass by her lips but it elicits no reaction from the new recruits. They're entranced by the badge.

I set down my bag and my cup of Kool-Aid and head towards the ramp to her office. Josh and Tyler aren't in their cubicles yet and I don't think they'll be here for another hour. It's early for either of them to be up.

Pete's territory starts from where the ramp begins, down a long hallway of glass walls and sterile lab equipment. If you squint, his desk is visible past the 'waiting room', which is just an area to keep most people out of his shit. He isn't here yet either. It makes sense when you consider Jake or Ryan have nothing to do with his line of work, but we still have cases running and life doesn't stop for pathologists. He's always present and always working.

It's just me, Taylor, a couple of interns, and the new recruits in the building. I should've stalled and come into work a little later.

When I'm just about five feet away, Jake and Ryan stand and they both reach to shake my hand. I do it out of courtesy but I don't think I'll do it again.

"...And this is the head of your department, Dallon Weekes." Taylor pats my shoulder. "Weekes, this is Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Ross."

"Ryan Ross and Jake what?"

"Gyllenhaal, sir. You can just call me Jake, it really doesn't matter." Jake's foot starts tapping. He's probably had discrepancies regarding his last name before. It sounds like it makes him anxious, but just a little bit.

"Oh, no, I know. Just say it again for me? I'd like to get it right."

"Gyllenhaal."

"Gyllenhaal?"

"No, it's pronounced Gyllenhaal."

"Gyllenhaal."

"Yes, Gyllenhaal." His foot stops tapping.

Taylor shoots me one of the dirtiest looks I've ever seen. "You know we're going to have to go through that again when Josh gets here." She mutters. She's not looking forward to it. Nobody is.

Jake and Ryan exchange moderately confused glances.

"Josh is our newest officer," I say, "he's not in our department but he's always nearby. He's... he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Gotta love him though."

The confused glances continue.

"You'll understand when you meet him," Taylor says, "you both should start to move into your cubicles. Not much planned for today but paperwork and some mandatory friendly bonding time later today."

She's alright with the change in plans. I sent her an email before I left the house, and she was only a little peeved that I messaged her before she was on the clock and getting paid to deal with us.

"Our stuff is in the back of my car," Jake gestures to the parking lot out front over his shoulder, "if you don't need us for anything else right now, we'll go get everything."

Ryan nods in agreement. He takes a step back towards the entrance. "I brought a lot of things. Like, little trinkets that I probably shouldn't have anymore. I have a collection of fruit stickers with sixty-nine in the—"

"I didn't ask and I don't want to know." Taylor says. She waves them away and they head down the ramp to the parking lot. Then, she turns to me and purses her lips, hands on her hips.

"We need to talk," she says, "about John Doe."

"There's nothing to talk about." I mutter and follow her into her office. "No leads, autopsies haven't done shit, and we haven't heard from Doe since the note."

Taylor's office is a mess, just like I thought. Cans of Red Bull decorate almost every open space. Files upon files stack against the side of her desk and overwhelm around her trinkets. Her posters have been taped over with a sheet of white paper, spattered with photos and clippings from files and drawn together with red string and tacks. A small air freshener spits fragrance in the corner. I hadn't noticed until the light hit her face just right that the bags under her eyes are darker, and her light makeup is smeared and spotty.

I take a seat in the chair in front of her desk. She reaches for her open laptop and turns it around. She's on a Skype call with Pete. He's huddled in a mound of blankets, holding a mug in one hand and a thick stack of paperwork in the other. He looks deathly sick.

"Pete is coming down with something nasty," she hops up to sit on her desk, "he was supposed to come in today to attend our meeting in person, but that obviously didn't work out too well."

"Can't believe I won't be able to help Tyler fuck around with the new guys." He huffs. What a tragedy.

"They're both sticks-in-the-mud anyways. You aren't missing much." I say and Taylor swings a handful of pens in my direction.

She hands me a folder, barely filled but stamped with a red 'confidential' stamp. "We don't know how reliable our information is, but it's all we've got so far."

"So... so we have a lead?"

"I didn't say that."

"I thought you wanted me to stay out of this."

Taylor glares at me. "We don't have much of a choice anymore. The team from Quantico is in New Jersey trying to track down a string of murders related to the dark web. We aren't as interesting, apparently."

They watch as I open the file. The first page is thick card stock, but behind it lays a full diagram of all the wounds and injuries suffered from the body found in the car wreck. It's the decapitated driver from the van. The cut around the neck is circled in red, and a line connects it to two words, underlined and bolded.

"Power saw?"

Pete takes a long drink of blue Gatorade. "Postmortem decapitation. Handmade saw blade, smoothest cut I've ever seen. That's why we couldn't figure out what did it; somehow the blade is unlike anything on the market. I bet it was handmade."

"You do realize this means the driver was either moved to a secondary location and then put back into the ditch, or the power saw was taken into the ditch and the user was most likely watching them the whole time? Do you understand how badly this will fuck up the timeline?"

"I honestly think that's the least of our concerns," Taylor snaps, "why does the timeline matter right now? The driver was intentionally decapitated with a handmade power saw, secondary location or not. This was a targeted attack on this person. Their head was kept for days and then planted in a refrigerator so that we would find it. I know we were praying this was just an accidental death and body dump, but it's clearly not. Everything that was said in that stupid note is important and a threat."

Pete pulls out more paperwork and sifts through it like he's standing in a pool of it. "I know we were putting off the possibility, but it's a reality now. Whoever called in the refrigerator incident needs to be contacted. Maybe she didn't come across it on accident."

The girl that reported it was in her early twenties, jogging with her dog, lived in the area, and cried on the side of the road for hours. I wouldn't imagine she killed a van of people, decapitated one, and then planted the head for later. "It's not her."

"Well, whoever it is has been watching us all. They know where we live, who we spend time with, where we go, and probably everything we do throughout the course of a day. Hell," Taylor throws her hands in the air, "I bet they're watching us right now."

Pete sniffles and fishes out a tissue offscreen. "We also have to take the state of the body into consideration. Marred beyond recognition but the teeth we left behind, and it would've been easy to get rid of them. Those can be key features in the identification process — whoever put her there wanted her to be identified eventually, whether it would scare us or not. Whether or not this murder holds significant to Doe, it was done to freak us out and show us just how much thought has gone into this."

John Doe has been watching us. Their moves are calculated and hold intention. They killed people to get our attention, and once they got it, they carried out a direct and targeted attack.

"My refrigerator broke. Like, last week." I mutter. My fridge broke.

They both fall silent, but not because they're making the same connection I am.

"Sorry? Do you need help moving your new one, or what?" Pete turns to blow his nose, pausing his dive through paperwork to stare at me like I've grown wings.

"No, no, no. My fridge broke just a few hours before the head was found in the woods. We have a new one now but the old one was working perfectly fine before then, and we still don't know why it died on us. Brendon called the company and some representative checked out the photos we took. They have no idea what happened."

The gears start to turn. "You... you don't think those are connected, do you?" Taylor clenches her jaw. Her cheeks turn red and her face pales.

"I don't know if I can disregard the possibility anymore."

"Doe did brag that they have our addresses," Pete holds up a photo of the back of the note, littered with the pictures of us, "and we didn't take the van accident too seriously, even though we should have, knowing what we know now. They could be trying to grab our attention again and force themselves into the spotlight."

"I don't know why they would want to be seen."

"The handwriting analysis pointed out that large letters means they're an attention-seeker. I think we should ask for the new psychologist's input on this, but I think the graphology department is pretty reliable."

The only sound in the room is the hum of Taylor's laptop working overtime. She has so many tabs open.

"This literally wasn't even what I wanted to talk about." She habitually picks at the skin around her fingernails. She used to do it when she was first promoted as Lieutenant, but I had only noticed her doing it during worrying and stressful times. "The second dental record tests finally came back from the first autopsy. We know who the van driver is. Was. I think this only confirms that the incident was intentional and targeted towards us."

I turn the page and find a scrap piece of paper, scribbled with red ink around a small photograph paper clipped to the top. The driver is young and striking, brown hair falling just below her shoulders and blue eyes making direct eye contact with the camera lens. Her cheekbones are high and well-defined, as is her nose and jawline. I recognize her. I studied her for months; her face, her life, her relationships. Everything.

There's something about seeing the photo that stirs deep anger. "You expect me to believe that this is the driver? Seriously? You're fucking with me. It's not funny."

"I personally triple-checked the dental records." Pete says. "The other passengers weren't identifiable. We ran the license plates a thousand times and came up with nothing. We're still searching databases, but at least we have one of them. It kind of making sense, doesn't it? The disappearance and everything, I mean. If all of this is intentional, it makes sense that Doe would want the body to be identified eventually."

No, it doesn't. There has to be a mistake. "There is no way the driver is the girl that went missing two years ago. I followed through with her case until it went cold. It's not her. The circumstances don't make sense, at all. Why was she driving, who was she with, where has she been, and why did we find her like this? This is a mistake."

"It's not a mistake."

"It is. Do you remember how long I spent trying to track her down? How many nights I spent here going through records and security camera footage? How many gallons of gas I wasted from driving across the state on the shittiest lead? What about the hours upon hours I spent tearing apart crime scenes and picking through all of her personal belongings? All the relatives and friends that gave me dead-end answers? I know her inside and out, backwards and forwards. It isn't her. It can't be."

My hands start shaking and heat rises to my cheeks. I try to blink away hot tears but it's difficult.

Taylor slides off the desk and gently takes the file from my hands. She closes it and sets it on her laptop keyboard, sitting on the armrest and pulling me into a hug. Her arms wrap around the nape of my neck and the side of my head. I can hear her heart beating.

"I'm sorry, Dallon," she squeezes tightly, "you did everything you could—"

"Apparently I didn't."

"And that's okay. Now we know what happened. We can let her family know and they can finally find some peace."

No they can't. How could anyone find peace in knowing their missing family member had probably been held captive for years and then decapitated by a handmade power saw in an attempt to attract the attention of law enforcement? How are they supposed to sleep at night when they find out?

Pete ends the call and the laptop screen reverts to the Google homepage. The second hand of the clock ticks louder than usual. What did I miss? What piece of evidence did I gloss over, how many times did I drive by her and not notice?

Why did I ever stop looking for her? She was alive this whole time, and I stopped looking. I didn't even give her a chance to survive. I stopped searching years ago. She was depending on someone to help her for so long, and I gave up.

"I'm sorry to have dropped this on you today. I didn't think you would take it so badly." She whispers but her voice cuts through the silence like a knife. "I think you should go home."

I shake my head. "I don't want to."

I don't want to break down in front of Brendon. I never told him about her disappearance, and now that she's dead I certainly don't plan on doing it now. I haven't even told him that there's the strong possibility we're being watched. I can't tie those two things together and expect him to be okay with it.

"I'm really sorry." She says. "I really think you should go home. Help your fiancé prepare for tonight. Take a nap. Eat some ice cream."

"I don't really like ice cream."

"I said, go eat some ice cream." Taylor raises her voice slightly and I can't help but smile. "I won't call unless we need you."

"You always end up calling me."

"Yeah, sorry about that." She pulls away and cups my cheeks. The pad of her thumb swipes away a lone tear at the corner of my eye. "But I mean it. Swear on my life, I won't bother you unless it's important."

She pats my shoulder and collapses in her desk chair, grabbing her laptop and getting back to work as I try to collect myself to walk out of the room with some dignity.

With my hand on the door, she holds up her hand and points to me. "Hold on. Wait."

I can't bring myself to turn around and look her in the eyes. "What?"

"Don't forget why you're the head of the department." She lets her hand drop and the laptop screen flicker back to life. "Those statistics are high for a reason."

"Yeah, yeah. I know." I wave her off and carefully shut the door behind me. I can feel her eyes on me the entire time.