Chief Woody crouched beside the broken wall and rubbed one of the strange symbols with his thumb, staring at the dark markings with obvious confusion. After a few seconds, something seemed to occur to him, and he turned toward Axel Vance with a grin. "Aren’t you already investigating some cult? Congratulations, kid. This mess belongs to you too."
Before Axel could answer, Woody turned toward the hallway and raised his voice. "Get the hotel manager, the front-desk staff, and anyone else connected to this floor. I want all of them questioned." Officers immediately began sealing the area while firefighters continued working outside and medical personnel prepared to recover the bodies from Room 1408 and the fifteenth floor.
Axel had no reason to remain for the routine work. Fire investigators could determine what they could about the blaze, the medical examiner could handle the corpses, and Woody’s officers could start interviewing hotel employees. Axel’s immediate concern was the evidence Clarice had stored inside the heavy safe they had dragged out of the burning hotel.
Considering the chaos spreading across Miami, there was only one location Axel currently trusted with sensitive evidence. The Miami Police Department was overloaded with fugitives, random bounty hunters, and people walking in and out at all hours. The hidden federal facility beneath the laundromat suddenly seemed much more secure.
Axel pushed through the crowd outside and found Clarice Starling standing beside the safe while several firefighters moved equipment nearby. "We’re taking this back to your secret basement," he said, then bent down and grabbed the exposed edge before she could respond. With one arm, Axel lifted the hundred-pound steel box and carried it toward their car.
Clarice stared at him the entire way. Axel opened the rear door, lowered the safe onto the back seat, and the car’s suspension immediately sank under the weight. When he straightened again, Clarice was still studying him with an expression halfway between suspicion and disbelief.
"Seriously," she said as they climbed into the car, "are you taking steroids?"
Axel laughed. "After everything you’ve seen, steroids are your first guess? I expected you to accuse me of learning black magic."
Clarice shook her head as she started the engine. "Your strength is ridiculous, but technically I suppose a human body could reach something close to that under extreme circumstances." She glanced toward him once more. "Probably."
They merged into Miami traffic, where Chief Woody’s bounty announcement continued producing new forms of insanity every few blocks. At one intersection, two armed men tried to block the street and force cars to stop while checking drivers against fugitive photographs. Clarice barely slowed before swerving through an opening, scattering the would-be robbers and continuing down the road while Axel watched another argument turn into gunfire behind them.
Clarice kept her eyes forward. "What do you think that waiter was trying to get from my safe? The prison reports, Michael’s file, or the record evidence?"
"Hard to say," Axel replied while watching smoke rise from another street in the distance. "But setting a hotel on fire and sending someone willing to kill himself rather than be questioned is a lot of effort for ordinary paperwork. Whatever they thought was inside that safe mattered to them."
Axel’s thoughts returned to Room 1408 and the system notification he received after purifying Mike Enslin. Michael Myers had given him a considerable increase in Physique, while Mike’s trapped soul had only raised his Psionic Power by 0.1. That suggested the reward might depend on the nature or strength of whatever supernatural force he purified, although Axel did not yet have enough examples to treat that as a confirmed rule.
Michael’s soul had been deeply corrupted and capable of driving a body through catastrophic injuries. Mike Enslin, by comparison, had seemed more like an ordinary human soul imprisoned inside something supernatural. If Axel’s theory was correct, the cult might have discovered its own way to manipulate or strengthen souls for specific purposes.
That possibility made the hidden runes inside Room 1408 much more important.
"I copied several of those symbols before we left," Axel said. "Can your people identify them?"
Clarice shook her head slightly. "I’ll run them through whatever databases we have, but I wouldn’t expect too much. A lot of cults invent their own symbols or modify existing ones until they’re almost impossible to trace."
She turned onto another street and continued, "Sometimes the symbols aren’t even meant to accomplish anything. They’re there because mystery makes followers believe the group knows something powerful." Axel sighed at the answer, because that meant the runes alone might not lead anywhere.
They eventually reached the laundromat and transported the safe into the hidden federal facility. Clarice remained there with the agents to catalog the recovered evidence and compare Axel’s copied symbols against whatever occult, criminal, and extremist files the government possessed. By the time Axel finally left, night had already settled over Miami.
His apartment felt almost painfully small after spending time inside the Dolphin and the federal base. Axel dropped his heavy equipment onto the sofa, checked that the new weapons were secured, then collapsed onto his bed without bothering to do anything else. Even his enhanced Physique could not protect him from mental exhaustion, and he fell asleep almost immediately.
The sleep was anything but peaceful. Axel dreamed of endless fire spreading through black hallways while charred runes crawled across the walls like living insects. Every time he tried to follow them, the shadow from Room 1408 appeared at the edge of his vision and vanished before he could see its face.
The ringing telephone finally dragged Axel awake.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling for several seconds before realizing the old landline was still ringing in the living room. Axel forced himself out of bed, stumbled across the apartment, and picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
"Axel, get down here!" Steve’s excited voice came through the line. "That hotel manager we brought in yesterday finally decided to talk. He says he has something important about Room 1408 and the people behind the Dolphin."
Axel immediately became more awake.
Steve continued before he could respond. "This is incredible. I’ve never worked a case like this before. It’s like something out of a horror movie."
"You have no idea," Axel muttered. "I’m coming."
Less than an hour later, Axel entered the Miami Police Department and followed Steve toward an interrogation room. Gerald Olin, the Dolphin Hotel manager, sat upright behind the table with his wrists cuffed in front of him. Despite spending the night in custody, Olin still carried himself with the calm dignity of a man accustomed to dealing with wealthy guests and difficult situations.
He gave Axel a slight nod as the officer entered. Axel sat across from him and placed both hands on the table. "Steve said you wanted to tell me something."
Olin studied him for a moment. "Officer Vance, have you ever heard of Frankenstein’s monster?"
Axel paused before answering. "Of course. Victor Frankenstein created life through an experiment using dead human material, at least in the way most people understand the story."
Olin smiled faintly. "Exactly. Except there is one detail you should reconsider."
Axel narrowed his eyes.
Olin leaned forward slightly. "Perhaps it was never merely fiction."
Axel’s expression became serious. "Explain."
"I never fully understood what was happening inside Room 1408," Olin said. "I knew people died there, and I knew the room behaved in ways I could never explain, but I spent years convincing myself that not knowing was safer than asking the wrong questions." He looked down at his cuffed hands before continuing.
"The shareholders who controlled the Dolphin were strange people. Most hotel owners worry constantly about occupancy, expenses, and profits, but these people never seemed particularly concerned with revenue." Olin’s voice became quieter. "Instead, they encouraged the stories about 1408."
Axel frowned. "You’re saying the hotel deliberately advertised a room where people kept dying?"
"Not openly," Olin replied. "They allowed rumors to spread, encouraged employees not to deny them too strongly, and let stories reach the sort of thrill seekers who wanted to prove haunted places were fake. Men like Mike Enslin eventually came to us willingly."
That immediately changed Axel’s understanding of the situation.
Olin continued, "Every time someone died in Room 1408, one of the shareholders or one of their representatives would arrive afterward. They rarely spoke to me and never seemed particularly upset about another death." He looked directly into Axel’s eyes. "They were interested in the result."
"What result?"
Olin hesitated.
Then he said, "A perfect human."
Axel leaned forward. "What does that mean?"
"I don’t know everything," Olin admitted. "Years ago, I accidentally overheard two of them speaking when they believed they were alone. One mentioned that the room was producing failures, while the other said they needed more subjects before they could achieve what Frankenstein had only attempted."
Axel remained silent.
Room 1408.
The hidden runes.
The cult.
The waiter willing to kill himself.
A supposedly haunted room filled with carefully attracted victims suddenly looked less like a random supernatural phenomenon and more like part of an experiment.
Axel stared at Olin. "Are you absolutely certain you heard them correctly?"
Olin’s expression did not change. "Officer Vance, running a hotel means noticing details other people overlook. I remembered every word because it was the strangest conversation I had ever heard."
Axel slowly nodded.
For the first time since entering the room, he felt they had received a genuine lead rather than another theory. He stood and extended one hand toward Olin. "Thank you. If what you told me is true, this could help us identify the people responsible for all those deaths."
Olin looked at Axel’s offered hand.
Then he smiled.
"Make sure you include me."
Axel frowned. "Include you in what?"
"When you avenge the victims."
Something in Olin’s tone made Axel’s body tense.
The manager continued calmly, "Avenge me too, Officer Vance."
"What are you talking about?"
Olin’s body suddenly jerked.
Axel immediately reached across the table.
Blood appeared at the corner of Olin’s mouth.
His eyes widened once, then his entire body began trembling violently.
"Medic!" Axel shouted toward the door. "Get a doctor in here!"
Steve rushed inside while Axel caught Olin before he collapsed from the chair. Within seconds, medical personnel from the department entered and began checking him. Nothing they did changed the result.
Gerald Olin was dead.
The doctor who performed the first examination looked more disturbed with every second. He pressed his stethoscope against Olin’s chest, checked the body again, then slowly looked toward Axel. "This doesn’t make any sense."
Axel’s jaw tightened. "What happened?"
"I can’t give you an official cause without an autopsy." The doctor stared at Olin’s chest. "But his heart feels catastrophically damaged. There’s no gunshot, no stab wound, no blunt-force injury, nothing on the outside that explains it."
Axel’s expression darkened.
A witness had just been murdered inside a secured interrogation room.
No attacker had entered.
No weapon had been used.
Whatever killed Gerald Olin had reached directly inside the Miami Police Department and destroyed his heart without leaving an obvious external wound.
"Damn it."
Axel slammed one palm against the table.
They finally had someone willing to talk, and the cult had silenced him in front of police officers.
Steve appeared in the doorway again only a few moments later. "Axel, phone call for you. It’s Clarice."
Axel immediately left the interrogation room and grabbed the receiver at the nearby desk. "Clarice?"
Her excited voice came through the line.
"Axel, get over here as fast as you can."
He straightened.
Clarice continued, "We found something in the evidence from the hotel."
Axel’s expression sharpened as he looked back toward Gerald Olin’s body.
"What did you find?"
"A clue."
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