Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GWDJMAEQK2ZXV4XZAYXSMP

The rain had not stopped for three long days when Detective Mara Voss finally arrived at the old lighthouse gate. She stepped carefully past the yellow tape, nodding once to the young uniformed officer who stood shivering beside the door. Inside, the old keeper's body lay sprawled across the spiral stairs, his eyes fixed on something she could not see. A single dark wound marked his temple, clean and precise, the kind that spoke of intention rather than blind rage. Doctor Chen knelt beside the body and whispered that death had come sometime near midnight, give or take an hour. But it was the lantern room above that pulled her upward, one cold iron step after another, toward the light. The great lamp had been lit somehow, its beam sweeping uselessly across the gray water, though the man was dead. On the cold glass, someone had written a single word in the dead man's blood, still wet, still gleaming: "Why?" Mara Voss pulled her coat tighter and understood, with a terrible certainty, that this case would follow her home forever.