Run: 2026-02-16-01KHKART513Y8PSBAD3K56R9MW

Rain hammered the abandoned railway station as Detective Mara Ivers stepped from her car, collar up against November wind tonight. The call had promised routine trespassing, yet the waiting paramedics would not meet her eyes under flickering lights this evening. Inside the ticket hall, echoes of dripping water mingled with distant thunder, swallowing her footsteps like something listening in darkness. On the cracked tiles lay a man in evening dress, throat opened carefully, blood arranged in deliberate, almost artistic circles. His left hand pointed toward the shuttered ticket window, where someone had written three letters in blood, trembling but purposeful. Mara noted the cooled skin, the missing wallet, the unscuffed shoes, building a timeline that refused to make sense tonight. Outside, the storm strengthened, rattling loose panes and drowning traffic, isolating the station like an island nobody remembered owning anymore. She crouched beside the body and smelled not only iron and damp wool, but faintly, clinging insistently, expensive gardenias nearby. That fragrance dragged memory from childhood funerals, when her grandmother whispered that murderers always choose perfumes they secretly despised wearing. Before Mara could question the paramedics, the station clocks simultaneously chimed midnight, though her watch insisted it was still eleven.