The city gets foggy every fall.
The fog climbed up from the river, covering the embankments, roads, and scaffoldings, turning the entire city's outline into an out-of-focus photo. Some people go missing in this weather, and some are found after the fog lifts - in a way that shouldn't exist.
We have a habit of blaming crazy people for the unexplainable. One madman, two madmen, a bunch of madmen. But when a madman begins to follow a set of rules that are so sophisticated that we have to admit: it is not madness, it is some kind of order disguised as madness.
Seven years. Seven bodies. Seven carefully selected "speech targets".
The police called it the "fog speaker" case because a page of speech was stuffed into the palm of each corpse - written in the victim's blood, but the content was a summary of the victim's life. The words were calm, restrained, even with a kind of morbid respect, as if the murderer was completing the last public speech for the deceased.
But after the sixth body appeared, the case was closed.
Clues disappear, suspects die, and the task force disbands. By all accounts the case is closed. No one said it was broken.
Until this fall, the fog rose again.
