It had been just over two days since Liv dropped the bag on Jerry’s bench—a pneumatic piton driver meant to slam steel spikes into rock. The blood on it was the perp’s, she’d said. The same tool that if the rumors were true had been used by Toronto's own vulpine vigilante to fight him off and save two lives. Officially, Jerry was the RCMP and the law. Unofficially, he still carried a soft spot for the myth: the nameless hero who gives up a face to become a symbol. Saturday-morning cowboys and rope-swinging swashbucklers had never really moved out of his head. Vulpes felt like Toronto’s way of keeping that candle lit.

That’s why he’d chosen this lane in the first place. No powers, no black belt, and glasses thick enough to make range officers wince—firearms and field work weren’t his future. But science? Science he could do. Give him DNA, prints, trace and tox, and he’d make sure a case was collared clean on the facts. He wasn’t the rider on the ridge or the masked blade in the rafters, but he could be the reason the cuffs stayed on.

Jerry slid the evidence bag across his bench and read the label again, more ritual than doubt: piton driver, suspected blood. Quiet channel. He’d logged it the minute Liv handed it over—sealed, chain-of-custody tight, her signature under a blocky, tired scrawl. Forty-eight hours was the best he could promise without magic. He didn’t have magic. He had centrifuges, thermal cyclers, and a stubborn affection for masked do-gooders that he never, ever put in writing.

Outer sleeve cut. Fresh gloves. Inner seal popped like a surgeon. The driver was clean except for the rust-brown crust where the spike had snapped out. He photographed everything—overview, close-ups, a scale tucked into each frame—then touched nothing until the shots were squared away in LIMS.

Swab, swab—minimal wetting, just enough to lift. A second set for contingency. He split the sample right then: one aliquot for DNA, a razor-thin scrape for trace and tox. If the day turned unlucky, the backups wouldn’t.

Quant first. He fed the extract into the real-time box and watched amplification curves climb. Plenty of template. No sign of heavy inhibitors. Good. He’d braced for bleach—so many offenders loved bleach—or for some chemical mess from the smoke grenade that coughed through the alley. The numbers held steady. He set up the STR run, sealed the plate, slid it into the thermal cycler, and told himself not to hover while it did its hour-long dance.

Trace got his hands while the machine did the work. Under the scope: soot particulates browned at the edges, the kind you see when oxidizers and dyes burn dirty. He logged them, took microphotos, then ran a micro-FTIR. The spectra weren’t textbook pretty, but he’d seen the family before—color-smoke residues. Not tear gas. Smoke. That fit the witnesses better than TV ever did.

Third slide: two orphan fibers. One black cotton—short staple, common—weave and dye that screamed apron or work shirt, nothing sexy. The other was a dark synthetic, very fine denier, the kind you get in compression base layers; under a jacket it would wick sweat and keep you warm. Bagged and labeled. Fibers rarely solved cases alone, but they made nice little arrows later.

The cycler chimed. He moved the plate to the capillary instrument, killed a few minutes with break-room coffee, then watched alleles march across the screen in tidy fluorescent peaks. When the first full profile assembled, he let himself breathe.

Male, per amelogenin. Clean, single source. No dropout, no ugly stutter that would turn court into a knife fight. He exported the data, sanity-checked peak heights, and built the profile file for the databank. Upload queued. The match/no-match fairy would either bless him overnight or make him wait another day.

He spun to the tox bench long enough to jot the obvious: blood on steel wasn’t going to sing a ballad. Analgesics, if any, would sit below detection on a smear like this; no one microdosed their way into a confession. Still, he sent the sliver through a quick screen for volatiles and flagged the trace finding—smoke residues consistent with color-smoke composition—for the report’s front page.

He glanced at the clock. Just over two days since Liv had dropped the bag and told him, in that quiet voice of hers, that this one didn’t leak. He’d put it on top then, and he wasn’t about to bury it now.

Gloves off. Scrub. Phone up. The report in his head was crisp, no heroics.

“Benoit? Jerry. I’ve got a clean male STR profile from your piton—single source, ready to run. Databank search is queued; earliest feedback tonight, more likely tomorrow. Trace shows smoke particulates consistent with color smoke—think crowd-control canisters, not kitchen fire—and two microfibers: black cotton and a fine synthetic consistent with a base layer. No bleach, no obvious inhibitors. I’ll push you the prelims on the quiet channel in five.”

He paused the way he always did when the science part was done and the human part threatened to start.

“And, Liv? If this is the guy the city’s whispering about, tell your people to keep their gloves tight and their paperwork tighter. I’ll give you everything the molecules will say.”

Jerry fired the prelims up the quiet channel, then let his so-called ergonomic chair creak while he steepled his fingers. The first wave of answers was the boring kind detectives secretly pray for: clean male autosomal STR, amelogenin XY, single source; no hit in the National DNA Data Bank’s convicted offenders or crime-scene indexes; nothing in the cross-provincial auxiliaries he could legally ping. Tox on a smear was predictably stingy—no solvents, no obvious analgesics—and the extraction curves hadn’t shown the weird inhibition you get when someone bathes a scene in bleach or household chemistry.

He jotted the summary in his lab book: no NDDB match, no exogenous inhibitors, no “Special” flags. In other words, not a metahuman profile, no divergent markers, no bio-oddities to light up the CSIS watchers who hover when a case smells paranormal. This stayed squarely in RCMP Homicide/Behavioral, which was exactly where Liv wanted it.

No hit didn’t mean no hope. It meant homework. He queued the profile for routine rechecks, noted a Y-STR fallback if mixture ever cropped up, and flagged the microfibers for later comparison—black cotton as apron/common workwear, fine denier synthetic as compression base layer—useful arrows, if not the target. Then he leaned back, rubbed the bridge of his nose behind the thick lenses, and told himself what he told every detective at this stage: the science had said everything it could today. Now the city had to talk.

****

Elsewhere, Liv was at the corner store doing the kind of errand list her mother would approve of: bread, milk, a flat of “pure Canadian spring water” (which probably came from a tap three blocks away), coffee filters, bananas that would be mush by Friday. Regular-people things, checked off between cases.

Her phone buzzed. Jerry: clean male STR, single source, no NDDB hit yet; trace consistent with color-smoke; two microfibers (black cotton, fine synthetic); full prelim in her inbox. Under forty-eight hours. She let herself feel the tiny lift that came with competence. That was one bone tossed to her from the universe.

The lift evaporated a second later when the hair on the back of her neck prickled. Instinct, not drama. She paused in the cereal aisle, rows of cartoon mascots grinning back—bran that promised virtue, sugar that promised tooth rotting flavor. Nothing obvious. No one at her shoulder.

She turned the cart and caught movement at the endcap. Tall. Pale. Fair hair. Eyes the color of lake ice. Familiar in a way she couldn’t place until the file cabinet in her head coughed up the answer: the butcher from the new shop. Callum… Campbell? He’d glanced her way in that “I know you from somewhere” way people do when the uniform isn’t on.

He wasn’t in a coat or apron now—just a dark jacket and a carry basket with ordinary things: paper towels, a tin of coffee, dish soap, a sleeve of batteries. The jacket hung clean; if there was stiffness in one shoulder, it was subtle enough that even her trained eye filed it under posture, not pain. He returned her look with a polite, frictionless half-smile and went back to comparing labels like a man deciding between two identical brands of canned tomatoes.

Liv gave him a nod—the kind you give a shopkeeper you’ve seen once—and rolled on. Coincidence. People live near their jobs. People buy groceries. She parked the thought where it belonged and let the cart squeak her past the neon cereal and into grown-up food.

Another buzz from Jerry: “Uploading now. Call if you want the walk-through before I write it pretty.” She thumbed back a quick “Received” and pictured the lab’s fluorescence peaks lining up like tidy city lights. Not a match yet, but a profile ready to bind to a name. It would do.

She finished fast—pasta, a jar of sauce she wouldn’t admit to her mother, mustard because she was out, despite three half-empty jars at home. At the register she paid cash on reflex, bagged with the practiced speed of someone who’d done this at 2 a.m. too many times, and stepped into the evening air.

Behind her, the store’s bell chimed again, harmless as ever. Liv set the bags in her trunk and told herself what she told every rookie who felt watched for the first time: your instincts are a tool; don’t turn them into a story. Then she slid behind the wheel and pointed the car at home, dinner, and Jerry’s prelims waiting on the laptop.

****

“Predictable”, that was his first read as he ghosted her steps. Detective Benoit lived in grooves: station, corner store, home—coffee, carbs, the kind of sensible protein a woman buys when she is trying to fight off a diet driven by anxiety. He watched from a healthy distance and let the mundane do its work. Patterns were a kindness; they made art possible.

He’d started his watch outside the station and let her carry him through the evening—side streets, crosswalks, the grocery’s automatic doors breathing warm air across her shoulders. Now, in the cereal aisle, he catalogued her like a specimen: left hand on the cart, right free; head on a slow swivel that never quite telegraphed “cop,” just “awake”; phone pocketed, not clutched; the way she chose labels—scan, decide, move—no dithering. He was building a profile of the profiler. They called her a hound. He preferred himself a wolf. Lone was fine. He’d never needed a pack.

An impatient man would have acted already. He wasn’t impatient. He was method. Early pieces had been impulsive because youth demanded rehearsal, but even then there had been rules—brushes chosen, armor designed, evidence minimized, exits mapped. Discipline separated artists from hobbyists.

He drifted a step, plucked a carton of milk because it made him invisible, and let his mind pace through the so-called masters he’d studied and discarded. The Ripper? Fog and luck with a press corps hungry for ghosts—opportunist more than artisan. Zodiac wrote ciphers because the work alone didn’t hold; he needed to be read to be real. Bundy leaned on charm as a crutch and spiraled sloppy at the end. BTK, clerk of his own fetish, couldn’t help but leave breadcrumbs to admire later. Dahmer was neediness with a knife, a mausoleum keeper, not a curator. Chikatilo was appetite without curation. Kemper couldn’t stop talking long enough to let the work breathe. Cartel spectacle? Gaudy installation art for cowards with guns. Noise instead of control.

They’d call him arrogant for the comparison. They should. A few more gallery pieces—clean, intimate, staged to be understood without him ever speaking—and he would climb past the first bar that mattered to the tabloids. If he wanted, he could even seed a hint or two for astute readers: echoes from the crude rural years that never made print. The “missing,” the “suicides,” the “accidents.” Dross, yes—student work stained by a young man’s temper—but useful if he ever needed leverage… or a chapter in a memoir that history would pretend to be horrified by while devouring every line.

He glanced at the milk carton’s back and almost smiled. That was an American habit, really—faces lost to suburbia stamped over breakfast. He didn’t need cartons. He’d learned better tricks: how procedure blinds, how expectation can be bait, how to salt a scene with exactly the fibers you want someone to find later and starve it of everything else.

A few more pieces and the name the city had given him would fit the skin perfectly. Bloodletter. The media’s, yes, but earned. Clean, declarative. He liked it.

He let the aisle breathe around him and tracked her choices—A loaf of Rye bread of course; mustard, the right kind; nothing fussy. Sensible food, a body that runs on work. Good. A hound with fuel. It would make the story tidier when the city tried to tell it back to itself.

At the end of the aisle she turned, and their eyes met. A beat of exposure—bright, sharp—then he softened the mouth, lifted his brows a millimeter, and let the butcher’s recognition bloom on his face. Not predator, not even stranger. Just two customers who had once traded a few words across a glass case. Two ships passing by pure coincidence..

He gave her the small, frictionless nod of a man deciding between brands, and looked down first. Coincidence performed. Patience preserved. The wolf could wait. The gallery would be better for it.