While the Bozyaka Police Department was drunk on the celebrations of 'Perpetrator Found', Aylin was alone in her office. This fabricated victory of the department made her sick to her stomach.
Aylin stared blankly at the whiteboard across from her desk. Her self-invented, nonsensical diagrams like "Elite Landscape Architect" and "Rich Surgeon" were still on the board.
She stood up. Grabbing the whiteboard eraser, she furiously wiped away the entirety of the "Elite" profile she had spent weeks building, erasing all the remnants of her own hubris. She left a clean, spotless white board.
She began to mutter to herself. Stripping her logic entirely from that elitist blindness, she focused on the crudest, most naked facts.
"The pruning paste from the logistics depot... The massive municipal valve in the sewer... The rusted T-wrench used to choke me..."
Aylin's eyes widened. "The killer isn't a rich man infiltrating from the outside," she whispered in the empty office. "The killer is right inside that depot, that sewer, that nursery. He belongs there. He lives there!"
Her mind drifted to the interrogation room at the nursery, to the pathetic, exhausted worker sitting on top of the green metal chest. That man whose neck was wrapped in crude stitches because he had injured himself with a chainsaw. Yekta.
Aylin vaulted to her desk and aggressively typed Yekta's personnel file into the system. Yekta's expressionless, cold mugshot flashed on the screen.
Date of hire... Residential address: Eşrefpaşa...
And then, Aylin saw the final line that froze the blood in her veins: Processing Status: Lateral Transfer to Muğla / Bodrum Municipality - APPROVED.
Lightning struck in Aylin's brain. That "chainsaw accident" was no coincidence. The first victim had resisted the killer, and they had struggled. There could have been DNA under the victim's fingernails. And Yekta had deliberately butchered his own neck with a chainsaw to obliterate those scratch marks!
Aylin had looked into the eyes of Izmir's most flawless serial killer, pitied his crude stitches, and let him go due to her own arrogance. The man was heading to the bus terminal right now.
Aylin strapped her gun to her waist. She reached for her badge on the desk but her hand hovered in mid-air. If she went to Selim, the man would treat her like a lunatic and would never issue a search warrant to arrest Yekta. The process was already closed. If she went through official channels, this monster would descend on Bodrum and paint those white streets in blood.
Aylin left the badge on the desk. She was no longer a police detective; she was a wounded hunter who had let her prey slip through her fingers, defeated by her pride, and out for revenge.
It was getting dark when she plunged into the narrow, steep streets of Eşrefpaşa in her civilian car. She parked in front of Yekta's rundown, single-story house. The lights were off. She got out of the car and drew her weapon. Shattering the door lock with a single kick, she barged inside.
The house smelled of dampness, cheap tobacco, and loneliness. Aylin swept the house with the flashlight attached to her gun. An old sofa bed, a tube television... Everything was part of that "ordinary, pathetic worker" mask.
But Aylin was no longer fooled by those masks. When she entered the bedroom, she noticed small scratches on the floor next to an old wooden wardrobe. The wardrobe had been repeatedly pushed back and forth.
Aylin lowered her gun and pulled the edge of the wardrobe with all her might. The cabinet slid sideways on a hidden wheeled track. Behind it, a makeshift secret compartment carved into the wall was revealed.
When Aylin shone her flashlight inside, her breath hitched. The sickly feeling in her stomach morphed into pure terror.
Inside, in stark contrast to the damp slum outside, was a sterile museum illuminated by bright white fluorescent lights. On black velvet pillows mounted to the wall, the trophies Yekta had taken from his victims were displayed.
On the first pillow, the elegant pearl-embroidered brooch ripped from the collar of the brunette woman murdered in Kordon. On the second pillow, the emerald necklace of the red-haired woman he stalked on the Karşıyaka ferry. On the third pillow, Hale's police star, murdered in the department's parking lot.
Aylin couldn't hold back her tears as she stared at the police star with Hale's blood still on it. The killer was a genius. And Aylin had been entirely blind to this genius for weeks solely because of her own arrogance.
Just then, right behind Aylin, echoed that solid "CLICK" sound announcing the front door of the house softly closing.
Aylin froze. Slowly turning around; she saw Yekta leaning against the bedroom doorframe, tool bag slung over his back, wearing his windproof jacket. He hadn't gone to the bus terminal. He was an obsessive perfectionist who wouldn't leave without completely scrubbing his house clean.
On Yekta's face, there wasn't a trace of that pathetic worker mask. His eyes belonged to a pure, dangerous predator glowing in the dark. The cold, crescent-shaped pruning knife in his hand twirled slowly between his fingers.
"I never thought an orchid would take root in my soil this quickly, detective," said Yekta. His voice echoed through the house like a whisper. "I suppose I'll have to postpone my Bodrum bus to the next schedule."
In Izmir, hunter and prey; badgeless, ruleless, and utterly alone, were locked inside the dark house for their fatal confrontation.
ns216.73.216.152da2
and then Add to home screen.