Revenge14 min read
I Found the Rhyme — He Thought He Was Invisible
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"I found the rhyme carved into the wall," I say, holding the little black notebook up like evidence.
"Read it," Kaia Martin leans closer, her voice so low it almost shakes.
I clear my throat. "Big rabbit sick. Two rabbit looks. Three rabbit buys. Four rabbit boils. Five rabbit dies…" I stop. My hand trembles and the letters blur.
"Keep going," Emiliano Kuhn says from the doorway, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
I flip the page. "Six rabbit carries. Seven rabbit digs. Eight rabbit buries. Nine rabbit sits and cries. Ten rabbit asks why. Nine rabbit says, ‘Five rabbit never came back.’"
"That's a child's song," Camilla Harper says, but her face is white. "Not a coincidence."
"This room is a shrine," I say. "Someone kept every page. Someone kept lists. He didn't just kill. He counted."
Gustav Blanchard is strapped to a gurney in the next room. His face is a mess of bruises and dried blood. He keeps muttering numbers under his breath.
"Who is he?" Kaia asks, fingers tight around the notebook.
"One of them," I say. "Not the author."
Emiliano drops into a chair. "You think he's the Vanisher?" he asks. "The old man who set the fires to erase traces ten years ago?"
"I know what he used," I say. "I know the chemistry for burning trace evidence. I know the rhythm of those attacks. But I also know how fake a confession can be when someone wants to die on a stage."
"Are you saying he faked it?" Emiliano looks up at me. "You mean to say he lied about everything he said on that recorder?"
"He lied about being the leader," I say. "He wanted us to think the Vanisher was a lone old man with a broken past. He wanted to take the fall. He wanted us off the trail."
"Then who uses a shrine? Who keeps a room like that?" Camilla asks.
"I don't know yet. But 'TXY' is stamped on the wall," I say. "Three letters. Someone left a mark for himself."
Kaia looks at the letters. "TXY. Could be initials. Could be a code."
"Or a map," Emiliano adds. "People make codes to feel clever."
"We'll figure it out," I say. "First, we get Gustav to talk. Then we find the ledger. Then we find the man who taught us how to pick apart evidence — and who learned how to burn it better."
"You're saying he learned from someone inside," Kaia says. "From a lab. From someone who reads reports."
"Yes." I close the notebook and tuck it into my jacket. "This is personal."
*
"You're going home," Marco Richardson tells me at the station. "We have to be careful. You nearly got people killed with that explosion."
"You were there," I say. "I was protecting the scene. I was protecting evidence."
"You crossed a line." Marco is the kind of boss who frowns with his whole face. "We all respect your work. But right now you're off the team. Take your leave."
"Three months," I say. "Three months is supposed to be rest."
"Three months on leave," Marco corrects me. "Paid. That is your only mercy."
I walk out. The corridor smells of coffee and paper. Kaia grabs my arm.
"Don't be an idiot," she says. "Three months is not a sentence; it's a new kind of work."
"I don't get to work on this," I say. "They put someone else in."
"They won't stop you," Kaia says. "You just have to be careful."
"Careful isn't in my skill set," I say, and she punches me in the shoulder.
*
We drive to my old neighborhood in the afternoon. The sun is thin, a late dull warmth. I pull up at the park where I almost drowned when I was a kid.
"Show me again," I say, pointing at the well where I fell.
Kaia looks at me like I am a boy again. "It's a monument to stupid heroes," she says. "You didn't die. You have me."
I laugh. "And you have me."
She smiles and then becomes quiet. "Per, what if the Vanisher is closer than we thought?"
He used to show up on the margins, in other people's reports, in the tiny notes the dead left behind. If he had been planning for years, he had knowledge. He had a hand in something that had nothing to do with chance.
"Then we start with the hand that writes," I say. "Follow the paper. Follow the orders."
Kaia nods and presses her lips to my cheek. "We do this together."
"Promise me you'll be careful," she says.
"I promise," I say.
*
We call in a favor. Not from the bureau, not yet. From a man who still believes in getting his hands dirty: Ismael Miller.
"You look worse than your case files," Ismael says when I open the door. He is sweat and caffeine and a habit of shouting into phones.
"Sit," I say. "We have eight years of broken cases. We have a shrine. We have a riddle song. We have a burnt ledger. Help me dig through the public records."
He sits and hums like a loaded gun. "I like riddles. I like men who don't give up. What's the first clue?"
"The chess games," I say. "The table on the wall matched some public match dates. Someone used a performance pattern to mark victims."
Ismael whistles. "That's cold. Not random at all."
"Not random means motive. And motive means a pattern."
"Where to start?" he asks.
"Start with people who loved order," I say. "People who know how to set rules and keep scores. People who keep lists."
"Like referees. Like judges. Like statisticians," Ismael says.
"Or like a man who taught others how to read a print and never forgive the one he thought took his truth," I say. "I think of a man who loved the lab more than people."
At that name — the name my father used to curse under his breath — the room tightens.
"Rafael Barrett?" Ismael asks.
"No," I say. "Not him. The other one. The old teacher."
"Gregory Daugherty?" Ismael guesses.
"Gregory," I say. "But not as suspect. He taught, but he didn't hate. Another man did. Someone who sat in the back row and measured, who learned the burn method and perfected it."
"Then we go look for students who had a grudge," Ismael says. "We look at who changed jobs, who disappeared, who bought distillation equipment and didn't tell anyone."
"Exactly."
*
We comb shipping records. We comb online accounts. Kaia sorts data like a librarian with a gun. Emiliano tracks purchases. Camilla analyzes the rhyme — a code, she says, and shows me how the rhyme matches dates from the ledger. The rabbit song is not about rabbits; it is a map of bodies.
"Five rabbit died," she says. "That means the fifth victim in a list. Nine cried because they watched five die. The numbering is the order the Vanisher chose."
"Order, control, judgment," Kaia says. "He makes himself the judge."
"Who else keeps a ledger like that?" Emiliano asks. "Who else keeps lists that small-town people can't understand?"
"A teacher," I say. "A master of evidence. Someone who loved his students and then lost respect."
We follow a faint trail: a brand of distillation glass delivered to a private research lab ten years ago. The sender's name is a shell company — but the corporate contact is a man named "Kingston Ward," a visiting chemist who left the lab under a cloud.
"Kingston Ward," I say. "I remember that name. He lectured at a conference once. He had a paper on solvent recovery that was elegant. A shy man."
"People like shy men," Ismael says. "They hold grudges like trophies."
We dig deeper. Kingston wrote to Gregory Daugherty once ten years ago, complaining about a case that he said had been handled badly. He signed "T. W."
"T.W.," I say. "TXY on the wall?"
"Possible," Emiliano says. "X is a variable."
Kaia frowns. "He had access to labs. He had the skill to cook a burn method. He had a grudge if he thought his careful measurements were ignored."
"It lines up," Camilla says. "But we need proof."
"We'll get proof," I say. "We will trap him."
*
We set a net. Camilla leaks a piece of bait to an online forum we watch. Ismael calls in favors to watch bank transfers. Emiliano and I track a regular pattern of movements in spent chemical purchases that match Kingston's old research notes. He has been buying small amounts, not enough to raise alarms, from different vendors across months.
"He's careful," Emiliano says. "But he is proud enough to use old brands. He trusts patterns."
We follow those patterns to a house on the edge of the city — a neat white house with a yew hedge and the sort of tidy mess a man who loves order would keep. There, among rot and mildew, a child’s paper with the rabbit song sits in a box of old stamps.
I pick it up with gloves. The paper smells faintly of chemicals.
"Per," Kaia whispers. "He kept it up until he got sloppy."
We wait. We don't rush. I am a man trained to be patient. I was a student of prints and dust and patient hours.
At midnight, the man returns.
"Stay low," I whisper, and my chest is a drum.
He steps up to the door and fumbles with a key. He is not old. He is neither a broken man nor a raving genius. He is clean-cut, grey at the temple, eyes like a child's old rationality.
"Kingston Ward," Emiliano breathes.
"He's alone," Ismael says into his mic. "No accomplices on the feed."
I step out.
"Kingston," I call. "We need to talk."
He turns, startled, then smiling, as if I had called politely to ask for help.
"You must be Per Branch," he says. "I've read your papers. You love evidence."
"Read them to make excuses?" I ask.
He drops his smile. "You think you know me. You do not."
"You're the Vanisher," Kaia says. "We have evidence. Purchases, notes, ledger patterns."
He laughs, weak.
"You want to believe in monster stories," he says. "You want a villain you can catch at the end of a long road. But I'm not the mastermind you want."
"Then who is?" I say.
He swallows, and the laugh fades. "You think a man like me would play puppet to himself? Look at my hands."
I register the nervous twitch of his fingers. "You set fires. You burned evidence."
"I learned," he says. "From men who taught me how to reveal the world. From men who taught me purity. But they did far worse. They pretended truth was all that matters while people's lives were ground into meat beneath their shoes."
"You mean Gregory," I say. My mouth tastes like metal.
Kingston's face goes strange. "Gregory? No. It was…they hid him with more than excuses. They took a man who taught me the beauty of prints and turned colleagues into judges who did not care about the living. I promised to make them see."
"You killed for it," Kaia says.
"I closed cases they closed as neat," Kingston says. "I burned traces so the world would see what happens when evidence is all you trust. I made the scene speak in a new language. I left notes because I wanted to be seen."
"Why the square tables?" Emiliano asks.
"A code of losses," Kingston says. "A record. A ledger for the ashamed."
"You left 'TXY' on the wall," I say. "Why?"
"T stands for Truth," he says. "X is the unknown. Y is your years. Or maybe it's a child's fool mark. I wrote things to amuse myself. I am nothing if not theatrical."
"You're theatrical," Ismael says. "You're violent."
Kingston nods. "Yes. I am violent."
"You will come with us," I say.
He doesn't resist. He even lifts his hands, resigned.
*
The trial happens in a month. We present the evidence: ledgers, shipping records, chemical receipts, bank transfers. We show the CCTV loop of Kingston buying brand-name chemicals and the handwriting analysis that ties the rhyme to a slow, patient penmanship. We show the ledger that marks each victim with a number and a column for "cleansed" and "marked."
"Your honor," Marco says at the hearing, his voice careful like a man handling glass, "we ask for the court's full attention to this evidence."
Kingston sits with a kind of strange calm. He lets the prosecutor paint him as a madman. He does not weep. He rarely speaks.
"Why did you spare some victims?" Kaia asks in court, her voice steady until the last question when she breaks and we all lean forward.
"I never spared any," Kingston says. "I made my choices. I am not proud."
"You don't deny killing?" the prosecutor asks.
"I am ashamed," Kingston answers. "Yes."
The jury takes two days. The city watches. The news anchors use words like "monster" and "genius" with the same cheap breath. The families of the victims sit in the front row; their hands hold paper tissues.
When the verdict comes — guilty — Kingston does something I did not expect. He smiles a tiny smile, as if his work had been appreciated.
Then the worst part begins.
"This is all," he says as they read the sentence — life without parole for multiple counts. "This is the justice you have. It will not undo what you lost."
His lawyers appeal. The judge denies bail. The wheels turn.
But the public thirsts for more than a sentence. They want destruction. They want roots dug out.
One of the reporters tracks down Kingston's collaborators online. They are not many. Some are students who learned from him but later moved on. One gave him shelter after a disagreement. Social media digs up letters Kingston wrote to a studio orchestra and a list of names of colleagues who praised his lectures. They call them "enablers." The firms that used his research freeze donations. His university suspends him posthumously from the faculty records. His wife's name becomes a headline.
A week after the verdict, I get a call.
"It's on every screen," Kaia says. "Watch."
We watch a video: Kingston's college presentation. The video cuts to a hidden camera outside his house. Kingston steps out to buy bread. A mob finds him. They don't attack him at first. They shout. They hold signs. They bring recordings of his confession and of him rehearsing the song. A local newscaster stands on the edge, eyes bright.
Someone pushes him into the street. He falls.
"He's not worth it," I tell the screen.
The crowd turns ugly. A woman with a phone pushes forward. Kingston stands, bleary, and the woman slaps him hard across the face. He stumbles. People laugh and film. Children cry. The woman screams, "You killed my sister!" Someone else screams that he has taken everything from them.
The police step in late. The footage goes viral.
The next day, Kingston's university announces immediate termination of every last paper referencing his name. His accounts are frozen after lawyers demonstrate his transfers. His pension is suspended. His wife files for divorce. The firm that published his books withdraws them. His name vanishes from the playsheet of the conferences that once worshipped him.
At the courthouse steps where the press gathers, Kingston's former colleagues arrive. One by one, they read statements. They talk about professional pride, about trust, about how clean science cannot be used as blood. The letters of endorsement they wrote for him are rescinded.
"Please stop," Kingston begs into a mic. "Please record me. I don't want this."
They ignore him. His life collapses on camera.
"Do you feel better?" Kaia asks me, voice low.
"No," I say. "We didn't get him to confess to the core. We got him to break. But we also let the mob be judge."
"Justice is messy," she says. "But the worst thing would be to forget why he did it."
"Yes," I say. "So we must keep asking."
*
Months pass. The courts grind and grind. Kingston sits in a cell. We work on the remaining threads. We find payments from a dead account that lead to a small private security consultant: Basilio Laurent.
"Basilio was Kingston's front," Emiliano says. "He moved funds. He rented rooms. He knew how to keep parts quiet."
Basilio is shocked when arrested. He shouts about loyalty. "We were scientists, Per. We were trying to flush rot. We thought we were right." He thrashes in the single room, pleading to anyone who will listen.
I look at him and remember the shrine. "You burned evidence," I say. "You destroyed people."
"We destroyed what had to be destroyed," Basilio says. "We believed in pure data."
"You judged people by tests," I say. "Not by mercy. You didn't get to decide."
Basilio's wife divorces him the day before his hearing. His company fires him. His investors pull out. His name becomes a stain.
"Is that justice?" Kaia asks.
"It is punishment," I say. "And it's also proof that evil hides in neat suits and resumes."
*
We keep picking at the edges. We get a list of names Kingston had circled in his ledger. They are not all the dead. Some are people who walked away. Some are people who were tainted in small ways. We track one down: Hugh Devine, a retired prosecutor who made a call ten years ago that sealed one victim's fate.
Hugh walks into court and collapses. He cries and says they made mistakes and that he lives with them every day. He resigns. His wife leaves with half the money. The law firm he worked for distances itself. We publish the facts. People glare at the old prosecutor as if his sudden guilt is a fresh wound.
The hard truth makes headlines: a fraction of the system is corruptible. Some people make choices that break others, and someone like Kingston, broken by principle, clutches a hammer.
"Does exposing them make you feel better?" Kaia asks. We sit on the roof of a courthouse bench and smoke a cigarette we shouldn't.
"It makes me honest," I say. "If the only result of all this is a pile of broken lives and no understanding, then we fail. We must tell the truth and keep the law."
She nods. "You put yourself at risk."
"I did," I say. "But I have you."
She reaches and takes my hand. "Me too."
*
We go back to the shrine in the village after the dust settles. The village has a new man watching the entrance. People look at us like the world is normal again.
"The rhyme," Emiliano says. "It was a ledger for him. A story for himself."
"People who keep lists want control," Camilla says. "They write because they fear forgetting."
"Maybe that's why he kept the wall," I say. "He needed proof he existed."
Kaia puts a white flower on the floorboard where the rabbits were painted.
"One for Lauren," she says.
I shut my eyes. "One for all of them."
She squeezes my hand. "We did a terrible thing," she says. "We made a spectacle of pain."
"We also gave name and faces back to people who were killed," I say. "We made the city see them. That matters."
"Does it?" she asks.
"It will," I say. "It has to."
*
Months later, an appeal grows. Kingston's lawyers argue the mob ruined their client's rights. The court upholds the conviction. But something else happens at the edge of our case: an internal audit finds that several people in the old lab misused state equipment to create chemicals that could mimic the burn method.
The audit names names: Basilio Laurent, a contractor who now has abandoned accounts; a junior chemist who fled the country and never returned; and one quiet assistant who left a print in the half-fingerprint we saved ten years ago. The half-print matches a man named "Kingston Ward" in the records, but the central ledger shows another name in the loop — Kingston was taught by an even older, remote figure, a professor who passed away decades ago.
In the end, the net tightens: we have the people who made the method and the people who used it. Each loses what they once held dear. They lose jobs, families leave them, their reputations are torn down. They find themselves on the wrong side of the story.
"Is this what you wanted, Per?" Kaia asks late one night when the news loops the last headline.
"No," I say slowly, because the truth is a bitter pill. "I wanted the list to stop. I wanted the ledger to be buried. I wanted the remembered to be remembered."
"You have a thing about closure."
"I have a thing about not letting monsters go quiet."
She kisses my forehead. "Then stop with the speeches. Come to bed."
"Okay," I say. "One last thing."
"What?"
"I want to plant a tree for Lauren in the park."
She laughs. "A tree?"
"A strong tree," I say. "So if I ever fall into a well again, someone will look down and laugh."
She kisses me and we go home.
*
The final law suit concludes. The presses die down. The families hold a private memorial in the park. We stand in a small circle. The bench near the well holds a plaque for Lauren Castillo. Kaia reads the names aloud.
"Lauren Castillo," she says. "Stone set. Per Branch, who remembers. Kaia Martin, who keeps the light. Gregory Daugherty, who taught. Gregory is not on trial. He helped."
I listen to the names and tick off the losses in my head. Some things do not come back. Some people do not get to live again. The law can only do so much.
A child from the neighborhood tugs on my sleeve. He is maybe eight, an eager kind of kid.
"Mr. Branch," he says. "Is that the well you fell in?"
I nod.
"Don't fall again," he says. "You'll get dirt in your shirt."
"You watch your feet," I tell him. "And watch your friends."
He grins and runs away.
Kaia squeezes my hand. "You will be okay."
"I already know I will," I say. "Because I have you. I will sleep tonight."
"I will make sure you do."
She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small folded piece of paper — the nursery rhyme, photocopied. She looks at me, tears in her eyes.
"Let's put it away," she says. "So it can't hurt anyone else."
"Yes," I say. "We file it. We close the box."
We bury the paper in a bench, under the spot where the white flower rests. It's a small action, but it feels like a promise.
"Will they stop?" Camilla asks at the edge of the circle.
"They may not," I say. "But we will be more ready."
"That sounds like a fair ending," Kaia says.
"It is not an ending," I say. "It's a start. We learned that people who judge others without mercy will always find a voice to punish. We must make sure the voice is law, not vengeance."
She nods. "Good speech."
"Bad," I say. "But honest."
She laughs and then grows quiet. "Come home," she whispers. "Let's be selfish and eat bad food and sleep too late."
"I like the bad food part," I say.
She straightens, looks at the sky, and says: "Per, we are not finished."
"I know," I say.
We walk away together. The park fades behind us. The bench, the well, the white flower remain.
Years will pass. Files will close. People will succeed in forgetting. But when I see a child staring at a tree, I will think of the ledger and the rhyme and the white flower, and I will know that we did not let a ledger become a list of forgotten faces.
"One more thing," Kaia says suddenly.
"What?"
"Promise me you'll stop carrying this alone."
I look at her and I nod. "I promise."
We walk into the city, past lights, past memories. The case is over in court. The Vanisher is jailed. The people he hurt remain. We have given them names.
At home that night, I put the black notebook in a small locked drawer. I flip the cover once and close it slowly.
"Good night," I tell the quiet room.
"I love you," Kaia answers from the bed.
"I love you too," I say.
I sleep, for the first time in years, without the ledger on my chest. My dreams are ordinary. A child laughs. A rabbit runs across a field. I wake and I do not rush to the phone.
Outside, a sunrise cuts the sky like paper. The world is the same and not the same. We have scars. We have names.
I get up, make coffee badly, and then go back to the park to water the tree.
"Hello," a woman says as she walks by. "Thank you."
"For what?" I ask.
"For remembering," she says. "For making them people again."
I nod.
"You're welcome," I say, and I mean it.
The End
— Thank you for reading —