Chapter one hundred and seven

Chapter one hundred and seven
Marlowe

I am beginning to distrust my own shadow.

It moves too fast when I turn my head, lingers too long when I stop. The walls of the precinct feel thinner every night, as though they’re not made of concrete but stretched canvas, trembling with the faint pressure of unseen hands pressing from the other side. I’ve stayed too long in this place, chasing files that don’t exist and leads that refuse to line up.

It started with the erasures. First, one photograph misfiled. Then an entire report gone. Then hours of surveillance tape — blank, static, nothing. I told myself it was clerical error, a junior officer’s mistake. But the pattern is too deliberate. Each missing piece trims away not the noise but the heart of the case. What’s left behind feels curated, arranged, like an exhibit someone wants me to walk through blindfolded.

I don’t tell the others. To speak it aloud would sound unhinged, and God knows I’ve seen what happens to detectives who lose the thread. The whisper spreads fast, faster than blood through gauze: burnout, unstable, unfit. They’re reassigned quietly, pitied, forgotten. I won’t let them bury me that way.

But at night, alone, the doubts surface. I read and reread my own notes, testing them against memory. Sometimes I find discrepancies. Words in my handwriting I don’t remember writing. A turn of phrase too clean, too precise, like someone imitating my voice. Once I found a sketch of the museum’s east wing margins-deep in one of my reports, a pencil drawing so faint I thought it was an accident. But the more I looked, the more detail emerged—columns, shadows, even the faint suggestion of a figure standing at the center. My hand, my notebook, but not my doing.

I tore the page out, burned it in the ashtray.

The next morning it was back in the file, crisp as though it had never been touched by flame.

I don’t sleep properly anymore. When I close my eyes, I hear footsteps pacing just behind me, and sometimes I feel the faint tug of fabric at my sleeve, as though someone is guiding me toward something I refuse to see. I tell myself it’s stress, that the mind manufactures patterns when it can’t accept chaos. But in weaker moments I think—no, I know—that someone is watching me disintegrate and taking pleasure in the pace of my collapse.

I walk the precinct corridors like a stranger now. The younger officers avoid my gaze, as though afraid I might infect them with my unease. Even the captain’s voice feels distant when he speaks to me, his words softened, careful, as though I were brittle glass.

They think I’m slipping.

Maybe I am.

But what frightens me most is not the thought of losing my grip—it’s the faint suspicion that what I’m seeing, what I’m hearing, is not a mistake of the mind at all.

What if the erasures are deliberate?

What if the case itself doesn’t want to be solved?

And what if the walls of this precinct aren’t walls at all, but part of the exhibit—one I’ve already stepped into, without realizing the door closed behind me?