A FRACTURE IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS ✓

JOSH

Another day passed before any answers began presenting themselves.

"Hey, guys?" Mark called out, grabbing the team's attention. "I think I found something."

He held up his stack of files, one reading EINSTEIN KILLER VICTIMS. Josh, Brad, and Jenna crouched down around him, the others looking over from their spots. It was the file Tyler had been using for late night reading.

When he opened the thickest file in his stack, there was an additional, much thinner one inside, one that hadn't been there before. POTENTIAL VICTIMS was scrawled on the margins in Tyler's handwriting.

"Tyler was always five steps ahead of us without him even knowing it," Jenna mumbled as Mark shuffled through the papers, holding up each one for them to examine.

Surprisingly, the contents in the file weren't about the victims. There were full of other murder cases not connected to the killer they were chasing. Josh read the names off to himself, recognizing two of them as similar to the murders.

"Hey, Heaton." Josh looked up and could see the color drain from his leader's face when he saw the paper he was holding. "How possible would it be for some of these murders to be connected to Urie?"

"Too possible." Brad looked over Josh's shoulder at the list of potential unknown murder victims that Tyler had created. The others watched intently as he read the names aloud.

"Max Schneider, Katherine Marsh, Ryan Ross-"

Jenna made a noise in the back of her throat like a strangled ballon. "Wait a minute. Ryan Ross. I've heard that name before," she said.

"Wasn't that one of Urie's roommates?" Sarah spoke up. "He was found dead on the steps of Northwest University three months ago. You think it was him?"

"MO looks about the same," Brad said. "Tortured for days on end, found at the steps of the university he attended. The only thing difference is he's not a prodigy of any kind and he has no records of mental illness. He's just a normal college student."

"Normal except for the fact that his roommate's a serial killer," Dallon said bitterly.

"Why didn't we catch that before?" Jenna asked, flipping through the files.

Josh swallowed, his throat aching. "Tyler did."

There was a pause, a still in the air around them.

"Sarah, get a more in-depth analysis from local PD about these cases. Find out everything you can about Ryan Ross and the other roommate."

The newbie nodded and left her stack of papers on the ground, rushing up to the first officer she came across. Brad looked over the team and waved at them. "Keep searching. There has to be something else Tyler left behind."

With another wave of his hand, Josh went back to his desk and others searching for clues.

The afternoon turned to dusk then to black night fairly quickly. Josh's eyes slipped shut for a moment and when they opened again, it was 15 minutes past midnight. Everyone from his team was still there, yawning yet still shuffling through the papers for anything they could've missed.

When he fell asleep, he'd made it halfway through his second reading of the files for victims four and five- a pair of genius twins from New York. A yawn forced its way out of him as he tossed the file aside, opting for searching Tyler's bag. Josh pulled out the binders and papers that were oddly enough shoved haphazardly. Tyler was usually organized in everything he did. He must've found something, but didn't have time to tell them.

Josh noticed that there was a book sticking out of the front pocket. When he pulled it out and examined the worn down exterior, Josh let out a small laugh at the sight of the title. Paradise Lost.

"How many times have you read this book?" Josh had asked on their way to Los Angeles in their private plane.

Tyler, who finished it before they even made it over the Midwest and was now rereading it, just shrugged and sank further into his seat across from his boyfriend, holding his hand from across the table. "You want a joke answer or exact number?"

"Surprise me."

"236. Try to guess which one it is."

By the smug look on his face, Josh could only guess that it was true. Instead of saying so, he had propped his legs on either side of Tyler, plucked the book right off of his hands, and grabbed his chin.

"I love you. You know that right?"

"Of course I do. You only tell me that one average, every thirty-two minutes," Tyler grinned, letting Josh shut him up with a kiss. When he had pulled back, Tyler's pupils were wide. "I love you back."

The memory made Josh's chest tighten, and he flipped the book over to see that the spine was broken in fairly well, the title and name of the author wrinkled and torn beyond recognition.

There was a picture of Josh, Tyler, and Jenna at the state fair earlier that year paper-clipped to the back cover. Scrawled on the bottom right of the photograph in white ink were the words JJT at State Fair, 2018. The paper had been folded in half several times and red pen from the back had begun to bleed through.

Tyler liked to carry photos of his second family as he called their team in his wallet, right beside his little sister and his mother, who died two years ago from suicide. Josh pulled the photo out to examine it better, his heart aching. He didn't know what he would do if they found Tyler too late, or never found him at all.

Out of compulsion and muscle memory, he flipped it over to see if Tyler had written any retelling of the events on the back as he usually did with his photographs. Instead, there were only two words written in bright red ink. The first one was scratched out several times over with a big question mark untouched beside the intelligible word. A smaller word with three exclamation points was underneath it, this time underlined.

Warehouse?

Josh frowned. Tyler has first suggested Brendon was holding his victims in a warehouse. The second word made him sick to his stomach in realization.

Underground Bunker!!!

Tyler solved the case without even realizing it.

"Jenna..."

Immediately, she was at his side, looking over his shoulder at the photo. "Underground. Tyler thought there was a warehouse or bunker of some kind, which is how we ended up at the dock."

"Black?"

"But we were wrong." Jenna chewed on the inside of her cheeks, the beginning of tears clinging to her lashes. "That was a diversion to get to Tyler. There had been a hidden bunker underneath where we thought Brendon was keeping his victims."

By then, the others had gathered, and a bubble of tension arose, threatening to pop any second. Mark audibly gulped, and Sarah sucked in a sharp breath, calling out Jenna's name again.

"We've been looking in the wrong place."

"Uh, Black? Dun? Guys?" They all turned to Sarah and Dallon crunched behind Dallon's computer. Their faces had gone so pale they almost blended into the white papery walls of the cubicles. "We just found out how Brendon knew we were coming."