The Fourth Case

The Fourth Case

Detective McMillan no longer trusted the silence of the Bronx.

He had learned early that silence there was never an absence of noise — it was accumulation. Of fear, of guilt, of unfinished business. That morning, sitting at the narrow desk of the 46th Precinct, he stared at the open case board like someone looking at a body that would not stop bleeding.

Robberies in Kingsbridge had become routine. Houses broken into with no apparent violence, small objects taken, nothing that justified the risk. The kind of crime that never made headlines but ate the neighborhood from the inside. Worse still were the repeated calls from that old lady in Morris Heights, in an ageing building that creaked as if it were breathing. Always the same story: anonymous letters, careful handwriting, phrases far too polite to hide the filth they carried. Invitations, promises, insinuations. Nothing directly criminal. Nothing that would justify a warrant. Even so, something about those letters bothered McMillan more than it should.

And then there were the teenagers.

Two dead near the parish months ago. A third one wounded. No witness willing to talk. No camera working at the right time. The priest swore he hadn’t heard anything. The neighborhood prayed. The city swallowed one more secret.

But what kept McMillan up at night now was something else.

The fourth body.

Male. Early sixties. Gay. Lived alone in an apartment that was too clean, too organized, as if he wasn’t expecting visitors — and yet was always ready for them. A single shot. Precise. Execution. Nothing broken. No sign of forced entry at the door. No struggle.

The pattern was starting to form, and that was what bothered him most.

All the dead were older men. All lived alone. All had let someone into their homes that night. And all had been found the same way: sitting or lying down, hands covering their faces, as if they were ashamed to be seen dead.

And on top of the body… a rag doll.

Small. Cheap. The kind they sell in corner stores. Hand-stitched, with crooked eyes and a simple dress. Always the same one.

McMillan held a photo of the scene while his coffee grew cold beside him. They had already checked everything: prints, DNA, cameras, neighbors. Nothing. The killer left no trace. Not physical, not emotional.

“Either he’s very careful,” he muttered, “or he wants us to think he is.”

The younger partner had suggested a hate crime. It was the obvious hypothesis. But something didn’t fit. Hate crimes usually scream. This one whispered.

There was method. There was time. There was intimacy.

The killer didn’t force his way in. He was invited.

McMillan went back to thinking about the old lady in Morris Heights. The letters. The polite way someone could suggest indecent things without using a single dirty word. He also thought of the boys from the parish, the silence of the adults, the way certain stories repeat themselves when nobody wants to listen.

Deep down, he knew: those men hadn’t been killed for being gay.

They had been killed for having trusted.

That night, already at home, McMillan opened the drawer where he kept old clippings. He took out a yellowed photo — a child sitting on a staircase, holding a rag doll identical to the one from the crime scenes.

On the back, written by hand:

“When no one protects, shame learns to shoot.”

He closed the drawer slowly.

And for the first time in years, he was afraid to know the truth.

It was only when the coroner pulled the sheet up to the face that McMillan felt his stomach tighten.

It wasn’t the wound. He had seen worse.

It was the shape of the face.

The hard line of the jaw.

The broad nose.

The way the hair was starting to thin at the sides.

It didn’t make sense. But it did.

He took two steps back, as if the body had moved. The smell of the room — cheap detergent mixed with gunpowder — brought back something too old to be a recent memory.

His father.

The same heavy brow. The same way of taking up space without asking permission. The same kind of man who spoke too loudly even when he wasn’t angry. Especially when he wasn’t.

McMillan closed his eyes for a second, but the sentence came back whole, intact, as if it had never gone away.

“A man who isn’t a man deserves to die.”

His father said that as if he were teaching a basic rule of life. He said it to him. He said it to the younger brother. Sometimes he laughed afterward, as if it were a joke. Sometimes he hit the table. Sometimes he hit them.

It wasn’t anger. It was doctrine.

The detective opened his eyes again and stared at the dead man. The man seemed smaller now, shrunk in his own living room, hands covering his face like someone trying to hide from the final judgment.

The doll was there, thrown across his chest, the dress twisted, the face stitched with a smile that didn’t match anything.

McMillan swallowed hard.

That was not a message to the police.

It was a message to someone who had heard that sentence before.

He stepped away from the scene and wrote in his notebook, his hand a little unsteady:

“Victim physically resembles the father.”

Then he crossed it out.

Rewrote:

“The killer sees his father in the victims.”

The pattern was beginning to take shape. It was not random hatred. It was not social cleansing. It was not religious morality.

It was a settling of scores.

And what disturbed him most was not the coldness of the crime — it was the care. The way the killer seemed to conduct each death as a silent, almost intimate ritual.

As if saying:

“Now you don’t shout anymore. Now you don’t give orders anymore. Now you don’t scare anyone.”

When he left the apartment, McMillan noticed something that wasn’t in the report.

All the victims had been killed the same way.

But none of them seemed to have tried to run.

As if, deep down, they had recognized who was standing in front of them.

And accepted it.

The only witness showed up two days later.

A thin, nervous man who worked at the corner grocery store and smoked too much for someone who claimed not to have seen anything important. He spoke looking at the floor, like someone trying to remember without wanting to remember.

“I only saw him from a distance…” he kept repeating. “Nothing special. Just a regular guy.”

McMillan asked him to describe the man.

The man scratched his forehead, thought for a while.

“Tall. Thin. White. Light eyes… blue, I think. Light hair too. Blond, maybe. He had a mustache. And a cap. One of those regular ones, you know? Nothing flashy.”

Nothing flashy.

It was always like that.

The kind of person who walks past you in the street without leaving a trace. The kind no one really remembers. The kind that doesn’t raise suspicion, who doesn’t carry threat in his body.

“Did he go into the building?” McMillan asked.

“He did. Like he lived there. He greeted the doorman. Went up.”

“And did he leave?”

The man hesitated.

“He left later. Calm. Walking slowly. Like someone who’s in no hurry at all.”

McMillan wrote everything down, but he already knew: that description led nowhere. It was far too generic. It could be anyone. Or worse — it could be exactly the kind of man no one would ever notice.

Later, alone in the room, he reread the statement.

Tall. Thin. Blond. Blue eyes. Mustache.

And he felt a chill run up his spine.

Not because of the sketch itself.

But because that description fit something he knew all too well.

His father had worn a mustache for years. Said a man without a mustache looked weak. Always wore a cap, even inside the house. Had light eyes that hardened when he got irritated — and he got irritated easily.

McMillan pushed his chair back, stood up and stared at the dark reflection in the window. The city outside went on indifferent. Sirens in the distance. A train passing. Life as usual.

He thought of the dead men. Thought of the doll. Thought of the sentence.

“A man who isn’t a man deserves to die.”

And for the first time an idea hit him with enough force to make him break out in a cold sweat:

What if the killer wasn’t killing out of hatred…

but out of obedience?

Not to someone still alive.

But to a voice too old to die.

A voice that kept giving orders even after the silence.

He closed the notebook slowly.

He knew that from that moment on, the case was no longer just professional.

It was personal.

The apartment was silent.

Not the silence of the early hours of the morning, but that thicker kind, that seems to wait for something to happen.

McMillan walked into the bedroom without turning on the light. He knew the space by heart. The wardrobe on the left, the bed against the wall, the old mirror in front of it, with a small crack at the top corner — a reminder of another life, of another outburst of anger.

He walked over to the dresser.

Opened the bottom drawer.

Inside, the box.

Always in the same place. Always closed. Always untouched during the day.

He picked it up carefully, like he was holding something too fragile to drop. Took it to the edge of the bed and sat down in front of the mirror.

He opened it.

First, the blonde wig, neatly combed, too artificial to look real — but good enough in the dark.

Then, the blue lenses.

He put them in slowly, blinking until the burning faded. The reflection returned a gaze that wasn’t his.

Next, the fake mustache. He adjusted it with his fingers, pressing it firmly above his lip until it held.

Lastly, the cap.

When he raised his head, the man in the mirror was no longer McMillan.

He was someone else.

Harder. Older. Heavier.

He opened the box one more time and took out the rag doll. Small. Poorly stitched. The same one he had left on the bodies.

He held it for a few seconds, in silence.

Then, staring straight at his own reflection, he spoke.

The voice did not come out as his.

It came out low. Hard. Without affection.

Exactly like before.

“A man who isn’t a man deserves to die.”

The words echoed in the empty bedroom.

For a moment, he could almost smell stale alcohol, hear the floorboards creaking in the old house of his childhood, feel the weight of his father’s gaze on him and on his younger brother.

There was no anger in his face.

There was conviction.

He put the doll back in the box, closed it carefully and stored everything once again in the drawer.

Before leaving the bedroom, he stopped in front of the mirror one last time.

The man staring back at him now was not a killer.

He was an obedient son.

And deep down, that was what filled him with the greatest pride.