Chapter 1

The letter arrived the same day the third body was found.

Irene Voss did not open the envelope immediately. She was too busy studying the photographs of the corpse on her screen: a thirty-two-year-old woman, dark-haired, ligatures on her wrists that were not defensive but decorative. The scene had been set. The killer had taken hours. And at some point, as she lay motionless, he had read poetry to her.

That was not in the official report. Irene knew that because the victim had been her patient.

The envelope was made of thick paper, cotton texture, without a return address. She opened it with a scalpel, methodical, as she did with everything. Inside, a single sheet, slanted letter, black ink:

"When you masturbate thinking about danger, do you imagine that I am the one watching you from the dark? Or would you rather pretend you don't know I'm there?"

Irene left the letter on the table. Then he turned it over. On the other hand, a date: three days in the future. And a direction he recognized.

It was his apartment. Irene did not call the police. Not yet.

First, he checked every lock, every window, every corner where a person could hide in a sixty-square-meter apartment. Then he checked again. The date in the letter gave him three days' margin, but the margin was an illusion. If he knew her address, if he knew her sessions with Miranda – the third victim, the one who was now lying in the morgue with Neruda's verses on her lips – then it was already in her life, only she hadn't noticed when she crossed the threshold.

He sat on the edge of the bed. The letter trembled slightly between his fingers. Not scary. Of something more complex that did not yet have a name.

Irene specialized in profiles of sexual murderers. He knew how the fantasies that escalated worked, how power was eroticized, how observation preceded action. What she didn't know was why an anonymous letter turned her on.

Because he did. He recognized it with the same clinical coldness with which he recognized symptoms in a stranger. The pulse accelerated. Sensitive skin. The sudden awareness of your own breathing.

It was the danger, he told himself. Adrenaline. Nothing more.

But when he closed his eyes that night, he didn't see Miranda's face at the crime scene. He saw the slanted handwriting, the impertinent question, and found himself inventing answers.

The second letter arrived the next day, in his office.

Irene worked in a private criminal profiling consultancy, an unnamed building in a neighborhood where no one asked questions. The envelope was on his desk when he came in, at seven in the morning, before the cleaning arrived.

This time there was no date. Just a description:

"Today you are wearing fishnet stockings under the black dress. Not because you're going to see anyone important. You do it because you like to feel the texture against your skin as you walk down hallways where no one suspects. That's your secret, Irene: it turns you on to go unnoticed while feeling exposed."

He read the letter three times. Firstto process the content. The second to look for errors, clues, any clue that would reveal how he had observed her without her noticing. The third to feel it again: that disturbing mixture of rape and recognition.

Because it was true. The thing about the socks. That feeling exposed in public, invisible and completely visible at the same time.

No one knew. Not her ex-partners, not her colleagues, not the therapist she herself consulted once a month to "process the emotional burden of work". It was his private fantasy, the one he had never written or spoken aloud.

And now it was on paper, in slanted handwriting, in the hands of someone who was watching it.

Irene folded the letter carefully, put it in the drawer along with the first one. Then he called a number that he had memorized for years but had never used.

"I'm Dr. Voss. I need to talk to Detective Castel. Tell him that I know who killed Miranda Cruz.

A lie. I didn't know who. But she knew that the killer had chosen her as the next spectator, and that gave her a kind of power she wasn't willing to waste.