2. The Gallery of Disappeared Souls

The second canvas was discovered four days later in a disused textile mill on the eastern bank of the Lorn River, where the city’s industrial skeleton lay half-submerged in rust and river mist.

Inspector Arvo Kask received the call at six in the morning. The body of a man had been found suspended from the ceiling beams of the old Bleicher-Weiss factory, a sprawling brick ruin that had once produced the finest linen in Valdoria and now produced nothing but echoes. The caller was a municipal engineer conducting a structural survey ahead of a planned demolition. His voice on the recording, which Kask listened to twice in the patrol car, trembled in a way that suggested he would not be returning to work that week.

The factory floor was a cathedral of iron and shadow. Overhead, the remnants of conveyor belts and pulley systems hung like the bones of extinct animals. Daylight entered through shattered windows in long, dusty shafts that illuminated floating particles of cotton fiber still drifting decades after the looms had stopped. The air tasted of oxidized metal and something else—a sweet, cloying odor that Kask now associated with the substance the coroner had tentatively identified as a mixture of beeswax, linseed oil, and an unknown stabilizing agent.

The victim hung from a crossbeam approximately twenty feet above the ground. He was suspended not by rope but by a complex system of leather straps and brass buckles that had been carefully arranged to distribute his weight across multiple points. His arms were extended outward, his legs positioned as though he were running, and his entire body had been tilted forward at an angle that defied gravity. The overall effect was of a figure caught in mid-motion, frozen between one step and the next, as though time had been halted by the artist’s command.

Sergeant Rask stood beneath the body, her flashlight tracing the contours of the suspension system. “It’s a flying buttress,” she said quietly. “The support structure. It’s modeled on Gothic architecture. The weight distribution, the tension points—this isn’t just staging. It’s engineering.”

Kask had stopped being surprised by Rask’s observations years ago. She had studied structural engineering before joining the force, a background that had proven useful in cases involving building collapses and, apparently, elaborately staged corpses. He asked her whether the victim could have been alive when suspended.

“No,” she said, after a long examination. “The straps would have cut off circulation within minutes. Whoever did this arranged the body postmortem. The preservation compound was applied before suspension, not after. He was prepared first, then positioned.”

The forensic team arrived and began the slow work of documenting the scene. Kask walked the perimeter, noting the absence of footprints, the careful arrangement of debris to create a clear path from the entrance to the central display. The killer had not broken in. He had been invited, or he had simply waited until the building’s decay provided an opening. Either way, the crime scene was immaculate—not because it had been cleaned, but because it had been composed.

The victim was identified by mid-afternoon. His name was Oskar Rebane, age forty-seven, a former dockworker who had applied for permanent disability benefits three years earlier following a spinal injury sustained during a cargo-loading accident. His claim had been processed by the Valdorian Social Security Tribunal and denied by a judge named Margit Sokk, who had cited surveillance footage showing Rebane lifting grocery bags as evidence that his physical limitations were “inconsistent with total disability.” Rebane had appealed the decision twice. Both appeals were rejected. He had stopped seeking medical treatment eighteen months before his death, reportedly telling his sister that he could no longer afford the consultations without the benefits to which he believed he was entitled.

Kask read the file in silence while the coroner’s team lowered the body. When he finished, he placed the folder on the hood of his car and stared at the river for a long time.

“There’s a connection,” he said to Rask. “The first victim, the woman in the cathedral. She was also denied benefits. Different judges, different years, same outcome.”

Rask nodded. “You think the killer is targeting Tribunal claimants?”

“I think the killer is targeting Tribunal decisions. The victims aren’t just people who were denied benefits. They’re people whose denials were particularly… thorough. The kind of rulings where the judge went out of their way to disprove the claimant’s suffering.”

“And that means what, exactly?”

Kask did not answer immediately. In his pocket, his phone buzzed with a message from the prosecutor’s office, requesting an update on the investigation. He ignored it. The prosecutor could wait. The dead could not.

Julian Holt heard about the second victim through a different channel.

Since the night of the phone call, he had been monitoring the police-band radio with the obsessive attention of a monk transcribing scripture. He had also begun collecting copies of the city’s three major newspapers, scanning the obituary sections for messages that the killer might have embedded. The Collector had promised more installations, and Holt believed that the promise was not merely a threat but an invitation—a guided tour through a gallery that only he, among the living, had been invited to enter.

The obituary for Oskar Rebane appeared two days after the body was found. It was a standard notice, brief and unsentimental, listing the deceased’s surviving relatives and the date of a memorial service to be held at a small Lutheran church in the eastern district. But there, at the bottom of the notice, in the line reserved for “memorial donations,” was a phrase that did not belong:

“In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Gallery of Disappeared Souls.”

The words were so ordinary that they might have passed unnoticed by anyone not looking for them. But Holt was looking. He had been looking since the moment he saw the grooves carved into the first victim’s collarbone, and he understood, with a certainty that felt almost physical, that the obituary was not a request for charity. It was a map.

He spent the following morning in the archives of the Lornheim Central Library, a cavernous neoclassical building that had survived two wars and one flood and still smelled of paper and time. The archive contained bound volumes of every newspaper published in Valdoria since the country’s founding, and Holt worked through them methodically, searching for any previous mention of the phrase “Gallery of Disappeared Souls.”

He found it in a 1923 edition of the Lornheim Courier, in an article about an exhibition of mourning art that had been staged by a collective of expressionist painters in the aftermath of the First World War. The exhibition had been controversial, featuring life-sized wax figures of soldiers posed in scenes of domestic tranquility that were gradually revealed to be tombs. The collective had called themselves The Curators, and their manifesto, reprinted in the article, declared that “the greatest art is that which makes the invisible dead visible again.”

The collective had disbanded after the exhibition, and its members had scattered across Europe. But Holt noted the names: a sculptor named Elias Voss, a painter named Klara Rentel, a chemist named Artur Sild. The surnames meant nothing to him, but the first name—Elias—echoed something. He could not remember what.

He returned to the present with the obituary still folded in his coat pocket. The memorial service for Oskar Rebane was scheduled for the following afternoon. Holt decided to attend.

The Lutheran church was small and cold, its pews occupied by perhaps a dozen mourners. Holt sat in the back, observing. He recognized no one—not Rebane’s sister, who wept quietly in the front row, not the pastor who delivered generic words of comfort, not the elderly man who stood near the door as though guarding against intruders.

But as the service ended and the mourners filed out, Holt noticed a figure lingering near the altar. A woman, perhaps fifty, wearing a dark coat and holding a small notebook. She was not crying. She was watching, her eyes moving across the church as though cataloguing its details for later retrieval.

Holt approached her outside, in the thin November sunlight.

“You’re not family,” he said.

“Neither are you.” Her voice was calm, unoffended. “You’re the former judge. The one who resigned after the Vass case.”

“I was asked to resign.”

“Yes. So I’ve read.” She extended her hand. “Inspector Maren Falk. I’ve been assigned to the Bureau of Visible Suffering.”

Holt stared at her. “The what?”

“That’s what we’re calling it internally. The case file. The name came from a phrase the first victim had written in her journal, months before she died. ‘No one sees suffering that does not bleed.’ The killer seems to have taken that as a challenge.”

Falk’s handshake was brief but firm. She had the watchful stillness of someone who had spent years in interview rooms, reading the micro-expressions of liars. Holt recognized the quality. He had possessed it himself, once.

“I’m not a suspect,” he said.

“I didn’t say you were. But you are a person of interest. You were at the first crime scene within hours of its discovery. You’ve been visiting newspaper archives. You attended this funeral despite having no connection to the deceased. If you were a suspect, you’d be under arrest. You’re not. You’re something more complicated.”

“What’s that?”

“A resource.” Falk tucked her notebook into her coat. “You understand the Tribunal. You understand the kind of reasoning that produces these denials. You understand how invisible suffering becomes visible neglect. And you clearly understand something about this case that has drawn you in beyond professional curiosity.”

Holt considered lying. He had been a judge long enough to know the architecture of deception—how to build a statement that was technically true while omitting everything that mattered. But something in Falk’s steady gaze suggested she would recognize the omission before he finished speaking.

“The killer contacted me,” he said. “After the first victim. A phone call. He called himself a collector.”

Falk’s expression did not change. “Did you report this?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he told me there would be more. And I wanted to see if I could find him before you did.”

Falk studied him for a long moment. The wind stirred the dead leaves around their feet. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell rang the hour.

“You’re not a detective,” she said finally. “You’re not even a judge anymore. You have no training, no resources, and no authority. And you’re keeping information from a murder investigation. Any one of those facts would be grounds to hold you. Taken together, they suggest either profound arrogance or something more concerning.”

“Which do you think it is?”

“I think you’re still trying to save Elena Vass. And I think you believe that catching this killer will somehow undo what happened to her. It won’t. The dead stay dead, no matter how many murderers you bring to justice.”

She turned to leave, then paused. “But you understand the killer’s language in a way that my team doesn’t. So I’m going to make you an offer. Share what you know. Stop withholding evidence. Work with me, not against me. And perhaps, by the time this is over, you’ll have found whatever it is you’re looking for.”

Holt watched her walk toward an unmarked car parked at the curb. Before she opened the door, she looked back.

“The obituary,” she said. “You’re not the only one who reads them. The phrase ‘Gallery of Disappeared Souls’—we traced it. The archives. The Curators. Elias Voss. We know what you know. The question is what you know that we don’t.”

She did not wait for an answer. The car pulled away, leaving Holt alone on the church steps with the scent of incense still clinging to his coat.

That night, he returned to his apartment and spread the photographs across his table once more. The first victim, the woman in the cathedral. The second victim, the man suspended in mid-motion. Two figures, two stages of a process he could not yet name. The killer was not simply killing people. He was transforming them, moving them from one state of being to another, as a sculptor moves marble from formlessness to form.

And somewhere in the city, in a studio that smelled of wax and oil, a third figure was waiting to be transformed.

Holt’s phone buzzed. The blocked number.

“You attended the funeral,” the voice said. “You met Inspector Falk. You’re considering her offer.”

“Are you watching me?”

“I’m watching everyone. The city is my gallery. The Tribunal is my subject. The Bureau of Visible Suffering—that is what she calls it, yes? I prefer a different name. I prefer ‘The Exhibition of Final Truths.’”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to understand. You, specifically. You were a judge. You held lives in your hands and you weighed them against regulations, against budgets, against the convenience of bureaucratic indifference. You know what it means to decide who suffers invisibly and who is permitted to be seen. When the exhibition is complete, I want you to be its first witness. Its critic. Its conscience.”

The line went dead.

Holt sat motionless for a long time. Then he reached for a pen and a sheet of paper and began to write down everything he knew about the case: the names, the dates, the connections, the theories. Not for the police. For himself. A record of descent.

When he finished, he folded the paper and placed it in an envelope, which he addressed to Inspector Maren Falk. He did not seal it. He placed it on the table beside the photographs, a confession that he was not yet ready to deliver.

And in the morning, when he woke from a dream of marble figures walking slowly into the river, he discovered that a third obituary had been published in the Lornheim Courier. The name of the deceased was unfamiliar. The funeral arrangements were standard.

But the memorial donation line read: “Contributions may be made to the Penitent Judge.”