Detective Cruz Reyes ran a weary hand over his face, the gesture doing nothing to wipe away the exhaustion that lived in the lines around his eyes. He stood in the humid morning air, looking at the chalk outline on the pavement. The official report would call the death of Rico Suarez a freak accident. A chunk of loose concrete, dislodged by unknown means, had struck the deceased, causing fatal head trauma. Case closed.
But Cruz hated cases that closed themselves so neatly. He'd been a cop in Manila for twenty years. He'd seen a thousand tragedies, most of them brutally simple: a knife over a gambling debt, a bullet from a rival gang, a wife's patience finally snapping. They were ugly, but they made sense. They followed a pattern.
This didn't. He crouched, looking at the dark bloodstain, now crawling with flies. He'd talked to the girlfriend, Angela, a beauty whose grief was so profound it seemed to suck the air out of the room. She said they were just talking. No one was around them. No construction overhead. The rock just… hit him. Like a bolt from God. Cruz didn't believe in bolts from God. He believed in patterns. This was a deviation. An anomaly he couldn't ignore, even if his captain wanted it off his desk by lunch.
The call came an hour later, as he was drowning the anomaly in a cup of bitter station coffee. A home invasion in Tondo. Multiple homicides. It was the kind of call that was depressingly routine, but the patrolman on the line sounded spooked. "Sir, you need to see this. It's… I don't know what this is."
He knew what the patrolman meant the moment he stepped inside the Santos house. The smell hit him first—blood and ozone and the lingering scent of fried fish. Then came the tableau of horror. It wasn't just a murder scene; it was a work of madness.
His partner, a young, eager cop named Diaz, was already trying to rationalize it. "Four or five perpetrators, maybe? High on shabu? Looks like they tortured them."
Cruz shook his head, his eyes scanning, absorbing. He saw the patterns. Or rather, the lack of them.
He pointed to the father, still lying by the shattered TV. "Look at the knife. It's a kitchen knife, from that block." He pointed to the empty slot. "Entry wound is clean, straight-on. No signs of a struggle before the strike. The M.E. is going to tell us it hit him from at least ten feet away. Who throws a knife that accurately in a panic?"
He walked over to the mother, pinned to the wall. He didn't touch the sharpened table leg impaling her, but he saw how it was perfectly centered in her sternum. "She has defensive wounds. Snapped ulna. Fork tines in her back and shoulder. But look at the angle of this spear. It's angled up, as if fired from the floor. And the force required…"
He saw the broken plaster on the ceiling, the terrified children being interviewed by a social worker outside, their eyes empty and hollow. He heard their fragmented story. Things moving on their own. A vase stopping in mid-air. Their brother being stuck to the ceiling.
Diaz scoffed quietly. "They're in shock, sir. They don't know what they saw."
"They know," Cruz murmured, his gaze drifting around the room. It was chaos, but it was controlled chaos. The photos shattered. The drawings shredded. It was personal. It was an annihilation of a life, not just a taking of it. He felt a cold dread creep up his spine, a feeling he hadn't had since he was a rookie. This wasn't a crime of passion or greed. It felt like a ritual. It felt like a message.
He thought of the rock that had fallen from a clear blue sky. He thought of this impossible slaughterhouse. Two anomalies in two days. It wasn't a pattern yet, but it was the start of one. Someone, or something, was out there, breaking the rules of the world. And Cruz Reyes, a tired man who believed only in cause and effect, was the only one who seemed to notice.