At the remote dock in the southwest of town, several police cars were parked in the rain.
The sky was still drizzling steadily.
As the police cordon was set up, forensic staff and officers moved through the scene, examining evidence and preserving the site.
Finlay stood inside the wooden cabin, staring at several marked outlines and evidence indicators on the floor.
In the end, his gaze settled on the large hole smashed through the floorboards.
"Finlay."
Roscoe walked over with a towering man beside her, a broad-shouldered, crew-cut giant standing nearly 195 centimeters tall. He wore simple jeans and a jacket, his features sharp and solid.
"Roscoe. Reacher."
Finlay shifted his gaze, adjusted his glasses, and gave a small nod.
The man called Reacher remained calm and composed, his eyes sweeping quickly across the entire cabin.
His gaze moved over every marked trace of the scene—the corpses, the holes blasted through the wooden walls, and finally the broken opening in the floor at Finlay's feet.
His brows slowly furrowed.
"A strange death scene."
There was clear confusion in his voice.
He had handled far too many death investigations.
Both natural talent and years of experience had given him observational skills far beyond ordinary people. His attention to detail was almost frightening.
Throughout his career, he had seen countless bizarre-looking crime scenes.
But this one…
this one felt different.
Or rather, it was too abnormal.
Too far beyond conventional understanding.
Reacher walked over to one of the bodies lying in the cabin and crouched down.
He asked the medical examiner for a pair of plastic gloves.
The examiner gave him a surprised look, then glanced toward Finlay.
Finlay nodded.
Only then did the examiner hand them over.
After putting on the gloves, Reacher reached out and lightly examined the twisted neck of the corpse.
His eyes sharpened instantly.
"The cervical vertebrae are completely shattered."
After checking that body, he repeated the process with several others.
Then he stepped outside to inspect the corpses lying beyond the cabin.
By the time he finished, he had reached a conclusion that even he found difficult to believe.
He returned to the cabin and looked up, meeting the deep gaze behind Finlay's glasses.
The two men exchanged a silent look.
Then, carrying umbrellas, they walked outside together.
Roscoe looked around, clearly unable to tell what was going on, and followed after them with visible confusion.
They stopped on the dock outside the cabin.
Rain pattered softly onto the surface of the lake, ripples spreading outward in endless circles.
"So," Finlay said, turning toward the large man beside him, "what conclusion did you reach after looking at it, Reacher?"
This giant of a man had arrived in town only a few days ago.
He was strange—very strange.
He had come carrying nothing but a toothbrush and seemed to be investigating something in town.
Reacher's physique and presence were so striking that from the moment Finlay first saw him, he had been certain this man's background was anything but ordinary.
That was why he had remained wary of him.
But after spending some time together, he discovered that Reacher possessed astonishing powers of observation and deductive reasoning that stood in complete contrast to his brute appearance.
"There are thirteen bodies," Reacher said calmly. "All from the same side. Their transportation was the vehicles outside, though there should be one car missing."
"All of them were armed. Judging by the bullet holes at the scene, there was an intense gunfight inside the cabin. But these people were all killed using unconventional force."
"The fatal injuries were to the neck and chest. Extremely precise. Extremely efficient. A very frightening method of killing."
"There's very little blood at the scene. The limited blood traces mainly came from the few victims who suffered massive chest trauma and coughed blood before dying."
He paused, his eyes narrowing slightly.
"The unreasonable part is the force involved."
"The bodies were blasted through the walls of the cabin and thrown more than ten meters away. The farthest body landed eighteen meters out."
He looked back toward the ruined cabin.
"It's hard to imagine how much force would be needed to do something like that."
"You're suspecting me," Reacher said with calm certainty, laying out his conclusion as if it were already settled fact.
Behind them, Roscoe listened in silence, but her eyes flickered as a storm of thoughts churned inside her.
If Reacher's analysis was correct… could something like this truly be done by a human being?
Reacher's height and build alone made it obvious he was far stronger than the average person, yet even he believed this level of destruction was impossible to replicate physically.
"There aren't more than ten people in this entire town who are bigger than you," Finlay said, not denying his own suspicion. "But none of them could kill over a dozen armed men so cleanly while facing gunfire."
"You think the scene was staged," Reacher said, smiling slightly as he completed Finlay's other line of reasoning.
"But you quickly ruled that out as well."
"Right," Finlay admitted with a sigh, rubbing his temples. "Based on the bodies, the structural damage, and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, it looks like the killer was surrounded by armed men. And yet, somehow, under live gunfire, he killed every single one of them in a way I can't even begin to explain."
"And you can't do that," Reacher added flatly.
Finlay exhaled heavily, frustration clear in his voice.
A scene like this made no sense—no logic, no direction for investigation. How were they supposed to even begin finding a culprit?
And beyond this case, Finlay was also worried about something else.
Matthew had been found. The boy had returned home on his own. After a brief conversation, Finlay had already sensed that Matthew was hiding something.
He didn't know if this was connected to the scene here, and logically speaking, it shouldn't be. Matthew had always appeared completely ordinary in this small town.
And yet… Finlay couldn't shake the feeling that there was a connection.
Maybe even that Matthew himself was involved.
"Sir."
At that moment, a police officer hurried over from behind them.
The three of them turned around.
The officer trembled slightly as he delivered the report.
"There's been an emergency call from Kleiner Manor. A maid reported a large-scale shootout. Officers who arrived at the scene confirmed more than forty bodies."
He paused, swallowing hard before continuing in a shaking voice.
"Among the dead… is Kleiner himself."
"What?"
Finlay, Reacher, and Roscoe all changed expression at the same time.
Everything was spiraling out of control.
At Kleiner Manor—another scene even more bizarre than the dockside cabin—Finlay, Reacher, and every officer present immediately realized something was very wrong.
Dozens of heavily armed gunmen had been wiped out.
The guards at the gate had been killed by some terrifying blunt force impact, their bodies smashed so violently that even the iron gate had been torn apart.
Rather than believing a human had done this, they would have preferred to believe a massive truck—tens or even hundreds of tons—had plowed through the estate at high speed.
But there were no tire tracks.
Only a long, strange gouge across the ground—its origin completely unknown.
And in the mansion's living room, dozens of gunmen had been killed with precision shots to the forehead, each leaving behind a tiny, burned hole.
No visible bloodshed.
No chaos.
Just silent, surgical death.
Inside the entire estate, the only survivors were a few dogs—and a maid who had hidden trembling in the kitchen since the fighting began.
The billionaire Kleiner had been left crippled, his limbs twisted grotesquely, his face frozen in agony that clearly showed he had suffered before death.
And inside the mansion's massive safe, everything was gone.
Whatever had been inside… had been taken.
"This is a massacre," Finlay said grimly.