Purgatory

Epigraph

Everyone carries all seven within themselves.

The only question is which one of them comes to light.

Chapter 1

My morning always started with geometry.

Before the call from Miller, the duty officer, broke the silence at five-forty AM, I was already sitting in the kitchen. My shirt was perfectly pressed, button to button, the starched collar cutting harshly into my skin. It was my personal armor against the chaos of the outside world. On the table sat a cup of coffee, its surface black as tar, and two white aspirin tablets lying strictly parallel to the edge of a gray linen napkin. White disks on a muted canvas. In our business, if you don't organize the space around you first, it will eat you up from the inside. I hated chaos. I hated it when things were out of place. When life didn't obey simple, clear rules—it drove me crazy.

When the phone began to howl, my hand jerked, breaking the perfect line. A few drops of coffee splashed onto the napkin, sinking in instantly and leaving a dirty, ugly stain. It spread like a living thing, taking over centimeter after centimeter of the snow-white linen. A gloomy haze erupted ominously through my defenses.

“We have a dead body,” Miller croaked.

I looked at the brown stain and understood: this day could not be washed away.

A local health fanatic, out for his daily morning jog with his Labrador, had stumbled upon the corpse at the edge of an abandoned boat dock on the lake's shore.

In general, people who voluntarily go jogging at dawn have always evoked a deep, almost irrational fear in me. It was as if they weren't human at all, fashioned from ordinary, vulnerable flesh, cartilage, and brittle bones, but some kind of soulless, biomechanical machines. They find the strength to rise in the pitch-dark grayness of any season—defying the icy wind, stubbornly tracing monotonous, unnatural circles on the gravel. The dampness that eats under the skin, the whistle of air in the bronchi, the squelching of sneakers, the splash of swamp mud from under the heels, the cracking joints, the dull, intermittent pain in the knees, and the unbearable stabbing sensation in the spleen when breath runs out... All these traces of violence against one's own body had been deeply ingrained in me since my days in forensic college. We were constantly told that a clear analytical mind was an investigator's main weapon, yet they forced us to pass running tests, driving our hearts to the point of arrhythmia. Those exams were long gone, but I never got used to the feeling. Any forced physical activity still made me cringe internally, making me feel like an old, stiff, withered tree about to crack at the slightest gust of wind.

Today wasn't my shift, but our senior investigator, Carson, had come down with that strange, frightening strain of the new flu—the one that completely shuts off a person's sense of smell and leaves them bedridden for weeks with sudden fevers. No one in the department wanted to get infected; this virus was decimating the staff with astonishing, almost mathematical speed. If even one more employee fell ill, the entire precinct would be locked down, paralyzing all work in the district.

A cool head and a heightened sense of smell—those are things an investigator can't afford to lose, even on the brink of an epidemic. We might not have been subtle "sniffers" in a closed perfume lab, but all our invisible work relied on the utmost concentration of perception. When you lose even one sense due to illness or fatigue, you instantly lose the ability to piece together the disparate fragments of reality into a coherent picture. You go blind. And a blind investigator is simply a bureaucrat sorting through paperwork. A man's shadow, occupied by someone else's shadow.

That's why I decided to go to the scene myself, directly, without waiting for the team to assemble at the station. The remaining operatives were supposed to arrive within half an hour—assuming, of course, they could finally recover from another sleepless night spent filling out the endless reports that littered our desks. The most hated part of the job. Paperwork chaos masquerading as order.

At this time of year, our quiet provincial town was literally suffocating from its own abundance, choking on the rich aromas of wildflowers and the heavy, sweet, almost cloying bloom of magnolias. A provincial American idyll, taken to the point of absurdity, to the point of nausea. Snow-white picket fences concealed perfectly manicured lawns—blade after blade of grass looked as if it had been trimmed with nail scissors. The town slept a well-fed, serene sleep, confident in its own sanctity. But this pastoral was a sham. A plywood façade. A glossy cover behind which the binding was rotting. Behind each of these pristine windows, behind tightly drawn lace Kurdains, a unique catharsis of despair was brewing. Anger, pent up for years beneath the mask of a polite smile. Despair, dulled by antidepressants. Envy of a neighbor's new car, corroding the soul like acid. Our city wasn't alive—it skillfully pretended to be. A wax museum where every exhibit is afraid of melting.

The weather was muggy and humid, like a greenhouse—warm enough to leave your heavy jacket behind, yet enveloping your lungs in a sticky fog that made it difficult to breathe deeply. The lake had always been a lifesaver for city residents, offering a breath of cool air and a sense of freshness at any time of day. It beckoned and drew you in with its beauty, like a postcard from a tourist brochure. It was just that this place knew how to keep its secrets. Until this morning.

The girl lay on her back, motionless, her face buried in the muddy, slippery surface of the shore. In the predawn twilight, her silhouette seemed blurred, losing its boundaries—as if the lake had already begun to dissolve her. For a maddeningly long second, she reminded me of the tragic heroine from the old fairy tale about the drowned woman—frozen beneath the dark water, caught in eternal expectation of rescue from her brother or a fairytale prince. The only terrifying difference was that this lake "princess" was completely, utterly naked.

Her nakedness had nothing to do with eroticism—it was the nakedness of a sacrificial animal, put on display for all to see. Here and there, fresh, bloodshot bruises gleamed blue across her pale, almost translucent skin, accompanied by deep crimson streaks and jagged, chaotic scratches. It looked as if some mad tattoo artist had been frantically working on her body just a couple of hours ago, and the inflamed marks hadn't yet had time to form a protective crust. The redness around the wounds pulsed. It seemed that if she waited a moment, holding her breath, a magnificent, sacred design, conceived by an infernal artist, would emerge through this crimson mesh of skin. The fiery feathers of a rising phoenix. Or the scaly curves of a reviving dragon.

It took a great deal of effort, blinking hard and squeezing my eyes shut a couple of times, for the induced haze to finally dissipate, returning my mind to the chilling, sober reality of living death. There were no mythical dragons or magical feathers here. Only the crushing, silent triumph of decay—and it sent a distinct chill down my spine, as if the lake itself had breathed onto the back of my neck.

A girl with such piercing red hair, almost glowing in the predawn twilight, shouldn't have been lying like this—defenseless, her face pitifully buried in the lake silt and wet sand. Her flawless skin should have glowed white in a bright, off-the-shoulder silk dress. This unearthly, provocative beauty belonged in ancient legends of elves and unicorns emerging from a misty, ancient forest, not on the dry, rough pages of a police report. Not here, amid the smell of mud and death.

At that hour, the lake seemed like a giant mirror of frozen gray lead. It didn't reflect the sky—it absorbed it, digested it, transformed it into something viscous and hopeless. And in this ringing, deathly silence, I was not alone.

A little further from the cordon, at the very base of an old wooden bridge, a local homeless man squatted. He looked like a dirty, ruffled lake raven, washed ashore by a storm. His name was Tim, though perhaps that wasn't his real name—the clock of madness takes away all that's true, leaving only phantoms, offering new images and legends. Tim clutched his head with his thin, silt-crusted hands and swung back and forth frantically, monotonously, like a pendulum. It was obvious he'd spent many hours by this black water, literally soaking through the night's cold and dampness. A quiet, hissing muttering broke through his filthy beard, but as I took a step closer, his delirium briefly acquired a frightening, ringing clarity:

“...she went into the cool... the sorceress called... the dress on the boards... and the leg is bare, the bare leg...”

These words sent another chill down my spine—not from the lake this time, but from something deep inside, from those layers of memory I preferred not to disturb. The assistants glanced at Tim with disgust, treating him like a common lunatic whose mental lapses were exacerbated by the full moon. But I recorded every detail. I remembered every word. In this city, even the mad sometimes tell the truth.

Taking my eyes off him, I returned to the tarpaulin, next to which our expert was fiddling around.

“When did death occur?” I asked Michael without turning around.

Michael was a former trainee pathologist from the capital who had fled to our backwater three months ago. Unlike the older, cynical cops in our department, he hadn't yet managed to lose that pure, almost scientific interest in new cases. He hadn't acquired that protective indifference that his older colleagues usually hid at the bottom of glasses of cheap alcohol or behind a thick, suffocating veil of cigarette smoke. Michael still saw dead people, not just lumps of cooling carbon for reports. And this simultaneously fascinated and terrified me—how long would he last in this city before his eyes, too, were clouded by a gray film?

“Her name is Mia Rockett,” he replied quietly, almost reverently, carefully lifting the edge of the tarpaulin. “Without an exact autopsy and measurements, I can only give an approximate time, Ed. She was in the water and on this mud for about five or six hours. No more.”

I froze. My throat was dry, as if I'd swallowed lake water myself. The first rays of the morning sun broke through the fog and glinted brightly, ominously on her disheveled copper hair, tangled in the lake mud. The metal noose inside my mind tightened to its final, tightest knot.

“I know her,” I said, and my voice sounded as if it belonged not to me, but to someone else—someone who had been sitting inside all this time, waiting for his moment.

* * *

Michael stepped back delicately, removing his heavy rubber boots from the edge of the dock so as not to trample any traces. His silent withdrawal gave me the physical space I needed, but I remained motionless, afraid to take another breath. The damp lake air, which had seemed so healing and fresh just a moment ago, suddenly became sticky, stifling, and unbearably heavy. The sweet, cloying scent of the blossoming trees along the shore mingled with a subtle, yet now incomparable aroma: the bitter, metallic odor of stagnant lake dampness and the tang of impending death.

Mia Rockett. Our school's shining star, whose wild red hair once seemed to me the only living, pulsating spot in the gray, faceless haze of the endless school corridors. Back then, we were both considered outsiders, social outcasts. But while I hid from the cruelty of teenagers in the shadow of my own grayness and invisibility, Mia, on the contrary, aggressively defended herself from the world with her dazzling, provocative, almost offensively provincial beauty. And now all this proud beauty was shattered, torn to pieces, rolled in the mud, and thrown to the lake crayfish.

I forced myself to kneel in the cold, squelching mud of the shore, completely forgetting my long-standing aversion to sudden movements. My mind, spurred on by the shock of recognition, went into overdrive, transforming in seconds into the dispassionate lens of a camera. Emotions shut off, giving way to a cold scanning of the evidence. I looked at Mia as if I were seeing her for the first time—and the last.

“Help me turn her over, Michael. Just be careful, for God's sake. Keep her head in place.”

Using four hands, we carefully turned the stiff body over. I looked at Mia. Her face, cleared of the caked silt by Michael, seemed like a frozen marble mask. Even dead, sprawled on a layer of slimy silt, she managed to look offensively beautiful. Slender collarbones, porcelain skin that glowed with a ghostly radiance in the dim light. A true lake nymph, someone mercilessly stripped of her green plumage. The crimson bruises on her wrists and neck looked like ugly decorations, emphasizing her fragility. Like a still life created by a maniac aesthete... or someone who really wanted us to think so.

My gaze was immediately caught.

“Look here,” I said quietly, almost in a whisper, pointing a rubber-gloved finger at her neck. “Do you see these bruises?”

On the front of her pale neck, two even, dark, crimson-blue stripes were clearly visible, extending back and almost meeting at the nape of her neck. The skin around them was frantically scratched, as if Mia, in her final seconds of life, had desperately tried to pry open the fingers that were strangling her or tear off the noose. I looked closer, my face almost touching her collarbones: on her chest lay a massive, dull-gleaming pendant in the shape of a silver wing on a thick leather cord. The cord was tightly, unnaturally pulled around her throat, and the wing itself was deformed and bent, as if it had been subjected to a colossal clamp. The nature of this deformation was at odds with the softness of human hands—the metal was bent against something flat and hard.

“Classic rear naked choke,” Michael nodded authoritatively, making a note on his clipboard. “The attacker used her own jewelry as a noose. The noose choked. She fought hard, Ed. Look at her hands.”

I glanced at Mia's wrists. Around the delicate joints, deep, ring-shaped, almost perfectly circular bruises gleamed blue. It was a disconcerting sight, as if her hands had been bound with a tight tourniquet or held in a brutal vice before her death, methodically breaking any resistance.

“And that's not all,” Michael carefully lifted her right hand. “Look under her nails. There's dirt, splinters, and particles of someone else's skin there. She scratched the killer's face or neck. Our genetic analysis will give the prosecutor a profile. He'll never be able to clean himself up.”

I remained silent, absorbing the information. My gaze slid further: on her left temple, just above her copper hairline, there was a deep, jagged wound, its edges coated in dried blood—the mark of a powerful, pinpoint blow from a heavy, blunt object. A blow of that force should have cracked her skull, or at least delivered a colossal impact.

A horrific, linear picture would now emerge before the eyes of any inexperienced investigator: someone familiar had ambushed Mia on the bridge, knocked her unconscious with a blow to the head, ripped off her dress, pinned her hands, and cold-bloodedly strangled her with the cord from her own pendant, after which he dumped her body in the water. An obvious scenario, one that reeked of a maniac or a jealous nut.

“The dress, Ed,” Michael nodded toward the old decking, where the dark fabric lay in a neat lump. “It wasn't just torn off in a fight. The buttons on the chest are undone, every single one. The fabric is only torn on the back. Why would a killer strip the victim naked, carefully unbutton the dress, and then dump it here?”

“Are there any signs of sexual assault?” My voice sounded drier than I would have liked.

Michael carefully shone the flashlight across Mia's inner thighs. The clean skin showed no tears or telltale marks.

“Visually, it's clean,” Michael frowned. “But that doesn't mean anything yet. The markers wash away quickly in water. I need to collect swabs. If it was a psychopath, we'll find traces. But my intuition tells me, Ed... Everything here is too sterile. As if she was undressed not for desecration, but for purification.”

“Purification?” I looked closely at the intern. “You read too many occult thrillers, Michael. Removing clothing is a classic way to remove evidence from textiles. Fewer fibers means fewer clues. The killer is smart. He knew that water would cleanse the body of its microparticles.”

“Or maybe he wanted her to go there the same way she came into this world,” Michael muttered quietly, pulling the tarp back over Mia's face. “The lab will tell, Ed. Chemistry doesn't lie.”

But inside me, in the deepest layers of my instinct, something resisted both hypotheses. Mia's sterile nakedness seemed not a criminal trace, but a manifesto. As if someone hadn't killed her—someone had put her on display, demonstrated her, peeled away the final layers so the whole world could see what lay beneath.

I slowly turned my head and looked at the old wooden bridge hanging over the water a few meters away. In the pre-dawn gloom, it looked like an ancient altar. The lake around its rotting supports was thickly overgrown with water lilies. Rusty construction brackets from old pilings protruded ominously from the dark depths—like the broken fangs of a prehistoric monster frozen in eternal agony. The iron had been eaten away by corrosion, revealing razor-sharp edges.

I glanced at the warped boards of the scaffolding. Fresh, white splinters were visible in the narrow gaps between them. The wood had split only recently, as if these centuries-old logs had suddenly experienced a colossal strain. As if someone or something was violently tearing these boards from their grooves, trying to break free—or preventing someone from escaping.

Then my gaze returned to the bent silver wing on Mia's chest. The silver had been pressed inward. The metal seemed to retain the imprint not of human fingers, but of a blind, hard edge. My mind feverishly recorded these details, filing them into a mental folder that so far defied logic. The clues didn't fit together. There was something wrong with this pattern, something that violated every law I'd been taught.

“Ed? Are you okay?” Michael looked into my face. “You're as pale as death. Your face is gone.”

I didn't answer. Slowly, feeling a dry crack in my knees, I rose to my feet. My palms were covered in mud; I pulled an old handkerchief from my coat pocket and began methodically scrubbing my skin until it was red. A cold determination was growing inside me, burning away the remnants of school memories. Poetry was dead. Only the anatomy of lies remained. The earthly trap slammed shut around Mia Rockett, and I heard the click of its lock.

“Yes, Michael. I'm fine,” I replied dully, looking through the thinning fog at the road. The flashing blue lights of police cars were already visible there. “Follow protocol. Seal off the pier, the bridge, and the shoreline for a hundred meters in both directions. And prepare a list of everyone she's been in contact with in the last week.”

I tossed the soiled handkerchief into the evidence bag and tucked my hands into my pockets. My skin still itched from the dried mud, demanding cleanliness. But I knew this lake sludge would be much easier to wash away than the filth I was about to sink into. To peer into the traps of others, I had to first return to the source of my own. To the armor I had forged over the years—to ensure no one could leave a mark on me.

Box house

For as long as I can remember, I've always been a black sheep. Not just a weird kid from a tough neighborhood, but a systemic glitch, an outsider thrown into an alien ecosystem. At school, I was openly, viscerally shunned. The local kids, whose primitive radars unerringly detected hidden threats, thought it best not to mess with me. My heavy, overly broad chin, my perpetually sullen face, as if carved from gray stone, and that frightening, frozen, "know-it-all" attitude—all of this instantly alienated my peers.

I was deeply, nauseatingly uninterested in their noisy games, their get-togethers behind garages, and their herd-like gatherings after school. When the crowd, spurred on by the first hormones, would fight over a sideways glance at someone else's disco, I would simply turn and leave. In their narrow-minded eyes, I was an arrogant idiot who stubbornly refused to join any camp, choosing absolute, ringing solitude.

During my entire school years, only twice did anyone seriously try to beat me. And even then, they quickly stopped, realizing with their herd instincts that there was little pleasure to be gained from beating Ed. In moments of aggression, I didn't scream, didn't beg for mercy, and didn't try to swing my fists. I knew how to lock myself tightly, like a dead bolt, inside my own mind—becoming like an old, abandoned reinforced concrete box, the contents of which couldn't be reached by kicks or heavy army boots. My gaze at such moments became empty and dispassionate, like the lens of a switched-off camera.

Gradually, I transformed from a target for bullying into an inanimate piece of furniture. I became an invisible figure to those around me, a gray ghost from whom nothing could be elicited: not a cry of pain, not a retaliatory curse, not even an emotional impulse. And yet it was precisely this impulse, this alien weakness, that they sought to feed on—to gain energy for another primitive spurt, a kitchen brawl, or a nighttime foray into abandoned fields with cheap beer. I methodically starved them, denying them this fodder for gossip.

Perhaps only Miss Harley, our Advanced Placement teacher, would occasionally glance at me through her old glasses with silent, profound understanding. She never praised me in front of the class, but she would periodically toss problems three times harder than the rest of the class onto my desk, because she knew I could handle them. We never had long conversations, but one calm glance from her made me understand: with such a mind, you could ignore the petty jabs of your classmates and ignore the salacious jokes they spewed even at your teacher.

“Time will put everything in its place,” her calm and wise eyes conveyed.

She was absolutely right on target. Already in college, and then at the academy, where I became obsessed to the point of insomnia with the psychology of serial criminals and profiling, other people's patterns began to form for me like the elements of a mathematical puzzle. Puzzle after puzzle, number after number. I simply sat in the corner of the classroom and observed people—and nothing could escape my scanning gaze, no matter how carefully they tried to hide it.

I've seen a young lab assistant in the department jerk his head away during casual conversation, vainly trying to hide the smell of morning fumes and his unrequited love for a married graduate student behind a mouthful of mint gum. I've seen an elderly law professor have a raging row with his wife—for this pedant, for the first time in twenty years, had abandoned his habit of impeccably choosing a tie. The color of his stripes clashed with the shade of his jacket. And then this great legal scholar carelessly cut himself under his jaw while shaving. Usually, this ritual was controlled by his wife's gentle attention, but now the system malfunctioned, and chaos erupted through a drop of blood on his collar.

People seemed like transparent clockwork to me. Gears creaked, broke, and I simply recorded these sounds. I was sure it was a gift. Only much later did I realize it was also a curse: to see someone else's pain so clearly, but to be unable to offer comfort, unable to simply embrace without first analyzing the anatomy of that embrace.