Bartholomew Peter Sanchez
Aiden's POV
The precinct is just a low hum of white noise this morning—telephones jangling, keyboards clacking, a faint, muted rhythm from a police scanner. I try to take in the noise, to let it root me in—but my equilibrium is broken. I'm sleep-deprived. My place, though it’s just boxes and bad feng shui hanging on the walls, feels a million times safer than any space in the city right now. My attention is a laser, entirely focused on the man who goes by the name of Eliot Raines.
I spent the rest of the night digging, working outside the official precinct system using my own contacts, favors owed and private databases. I was running Eliot RainesRaines backward, searching for a root to the tree of charming deceit he’d planted in our lives.
He has no past.
His social security number is new. His degrees from Cornell Vet School? legitimate, but the academic transcripts prior to that are a blank slate. His birth certificate? Fabricated. He's a phantom built on good credit and expensive suits.
By 8 a.m. I had a name. A real one.
Bartholomew Peter Sanchez. A flagged name buried deep within a closed file from the New York City Family Court system, cross-matched with fingerprint data from a minor arrest two decades prior for vandalism. A fifteen-year-old kid.
I unearthed a sealed juvenile record. The file is thin, but the information is gut-wrenching. The mother was a domestic abuse victim, scarcely present.
The father? A prominent family attorney in the city. The kid was charged with vandalism after he tagged his father’s office.
But the key: Bartholomew Peter Sanchez was the victim of horrific child abuse. The lawyer, his father, was never charged because of his power, but the court record included affidavits describing ongoing physical and emotional abuse. The name of the attorney is redacted, but the identity is unmistakable: a family law attorney known for his ruthless tactics and ability to game the system.
Lawyers. The connection snaps into place, brutal and inescapable. Every victim: a lawyer. Paige, Tessa, Amira, Veronica, Chacha. They’re the profession of the man who tormented Him. What he is now doing to those who share his profession is the cold, calculated cruelty of his father.
I make my way to Dana’s desk, the pile of papers in my hand feeling like a lump of lead. She’s already at her desk with a jumbol coffee. She glances at my face — the three day stubble, the bloodshot eyes, the complete dead calm — and she sets Saucer down.
“Aiden, what is it? Did you find something on the Lang case? You look like you just came back from the morgue.”
I walk to the whiteboard, ignoring the morning shift chatter. I take a dry-erase pen and write one name: ELIOT RAINES. I put a neat, crisp line through it. Under it, I put: BARTHOLOMEW P. SANCHEZ.
Dana’s mouth is slightly open as she stares at the board, bewilderment mixed with worry. “Aiden, slow down. You’re telling me a veterinarian who married your friend is our killer? That’s… that’s a hell of a jump, even for you .”
“It’s not a jump, Dana. “But it’s the truth,” I say in a low, calm voice that hides my sense of impending doom. I bang the stack of printouts, the tattered stack, on her desk. “Look Look Just look.”
To the top sheet, please. It’s the grainy, zoomed-in, still from the Mercer Hotel lobby video. The one where the man stopps, briefly revealing his profile, before going into the bar where he met Chacha Remirez hours before she died.
“This is Chacha Remirez’s hotel, the night she was last seen alive. Look at the profile. Look at the hairline. Look at the set of the jaw.” I press my finger shaking on the photograph. “Now“Now look up at this baby. ”
Across the desk slides a candid wedding photo of Eliot and Ruthie from not that long ago. The resemblance is is spookily accurate. It’s the same guy, just in a different outfit.
Dana collects both photographs, her breath caught as she looks. “Okay. “Okay, that cande. Okay, the resemblance is... striking. But Aiden, lots of people look alike.”
“You can’t just take an ill-conceived profile to the Captain.”
“It’s more than a profile. It’s a pattern,” I say again, sliding over the next piece of proof. It’s the selfie Ruthie sent me – the one where Eliot is holding up a champagne glass in the car. I zoomed in on his lapel.
“This was last night. He was celebrating support for his new clinic. See his lapel pin. That tiny, silver thing. It’s the caduceus, the symbol of his trade. And now, here’s the shot from the coffee shop cam, taken from outside Veronica Cheng’s office building.”
I roll out a big, printed photograph of the pixelated man at the outdoor table looking into Veronica Cheng’s office. Even through the blur, the tiny flashes of silver on his coat can be seen.
“He was following her, Dana, he was following her! For an hour. And he was wearing his pin. The pin he wears for his work as a vet. The badge he’s so proud to wear in his winning picture. The badge the man outside Veronica Cheng’s office was wearing.”
Dana’s eyes are wide now as her disbelief begins to unravel beneath the weight of visual truth. She leans back, with one hand running through her short hair. “Okay. Okay, that’s... a solid link to two scenes. But how does that show he’s Bartholomew Sanchez, an alleged juvenile abuser?”
I slide the final document across: the printout of the sealed Family Court juvenile file summary.
Because Eliot Raines’ is a ghost. I exhausted every resource I had and uncovered his real name: Bartholomew Peter Sanchez. He manufactured the ‘Eliot’ persona three years ago. The genuine Bartholomew Sanchez was fifteen when he was detained for vandalizing his father’s office—a high-stakes family attorney who savagely abused him. The record is clear: repeated trauma, physical and emotional, at the hands of a lawyer who was adept at using the courts to protect himself.”
I stand up, and go back to the whiteboard, tapping the initialed names we’d jotted down .
“Each victim is a lawyer, Dana. He’s not killing them for money or just killing them, but for some kind of vengeance or something like that. He’s killing his father. Over and over. He’s a frickin’ psycho with a trauma-based vendetta against the entire profession.”
The precinct noise recedes in the background. Dana doesn’t say a word, but her eyes are flicking from the pictures, the court synopsis, and the names on the list. The answers stand with terrible completeness - the precision of the carvings, the absence of resistance, the meticulous extraction of the earring,
the organization, the clean exits.
“Dear God, Aiden,” she finally breathes out. “The initials. He’s branding them as a kind of symbolic revenge. He doesn’t care what those initials mean he’s just recognizing a pattern of abuse,”
“He is. And we have to get moving. Now.” I snatch up my jacket. “Ruthie just moved in with him at the house he inherited on East 89th Street. A former townhouse. Dana. He’s transporting his new life—Ruthie, the personification of his “normalcy”—back to the place of his trauma.”
The insinuation lingers, bitter and fatal, in the atmosphere. My Ruthie, my best friend, is now with a slow moving hunter of attorney’s killers, in the home he himself sees as his point of origin. He is exposed. He knows we’re looking. He’s escalating.
“We need to bring the Captain in on this. We have to secure the building and get a warrant,” Dana says as she swiftly climbs the stairs to answer the phone."
“Time, Dana. If we do all the official stuff we’re going to waste an hour. He’s a careful killer; he’ll be out in five minutes. We call it a welfare check on Ruthie. I am reaching out directly to the commanding officer of Midtown North and demanding a silent mobilization now on East 89th Street. We go in fast and we go in hard.”
I read the name Bartholomew Peter Sanchez on the whiteboard and I hear Eliot’s smooth, annoying voice a
t the back of my mind.
I draw my sidearm and check the clip. “Let’s go.”