The salty and cold wind of the Bostanlı coastline howled through the increasingly deserted streets. The red-haired woman realized that the sound of her high heels was echoing too much in the silence of the night, and she quickened her pace. That eerie chill she had felt on the back of her neck since stepping off the Karşıyaka ferry had grown even heavier as she ventured into the dark alleys.
Merely fifteen steps behind her, Izmir’s darkness was silently gliding beneath Yekta’s neon vest.
Yekta’s mind was ticking like a flawless metronome. He was calculating the woman’s rhythm, the direction of the wind, and the blind spots of the streetlights. His right hand caressed the cold leather sheath of the crescent-tipped pruning knife on his tool belt. He waited for his prey to turn into the narrow street that curved to the right and passed in front of a dark apartment building under construction. The moment she entered there, the harvest would begin.
In those exact seconds, at the other end of the city, the Metropolitan Municipality Nursery and Logistics Depot in İnciraltı was plunged into the darkness of the night with a heavy scent of fertilizer, rust, and rotting leaves.
Detective Aylin slipped silently like a cat through the inadvertently left-open gate of the rusty wire fence. The old night watchman in the security booth had long passed out under the blue light of the television. The beam of the small flashlight in Aylin’s hand wandered like a ghost over the glass of the massive greenhouses and the muddy wheels of the park maintenance vehicles lined up in rows.
Her eyes were searching for the prefabricated building that housed the administrative offices and the workers’ locker rooms. If it were up to Superintendent Selim, this depot was nothing more than a place for “poor laborers with calloused hands.” But Aylin knew; that narcissistic, genius killer was using these depots somehow, mocking the intelligence of the police by stealing materials from here.
The door of the prefabricated building wasn’t even locked. She pushed the broken latch with her hand and stepped inside. It smelled heavily of sweat, tobacco, and dampness inside. The flashlight’s beam swept across the metal worker lockers that covered the entire length of the wall.
The moment the woman stepped into the dark frontage of the apartment under construction, Yekta lunged forward like a panther.
He was going to cover the woman’s mouth with his left hand and finish the job in a single move with the knife in his right. However, in the darkness, the woman’s foot caught on the construction rubble on the ground; she lost her balance and was thrown forward. Yekta, with an instinctive reflex so as not to lose his prey, lunged toward her, and they both crashed violently onto the hard concrete floor.
Right at that moment, that damned thing happened—the thing Yekta hadn’t planned for, which didn’t exist in his flawless equation.
The impact of hitting the concrete and the sudden physical strain caused the fresh, thick black stitches on Yekta’s neck to burst open all at once.
A sickening tearing sound echoed in his ear. A blinding, savage pain pierced his brain, as if boiling water had been poured over it. The warm blood gushing from his torn flesh breached the bandage in seconds and began to pour down his neck toward his neon vest. Yekta, his breath caught in a physical shock, groaned in pain and backed away for a moment.
Seizing this brief window, the woman opened her mouth to scream, but Yekta, fueled by an inconceivable rage toward his own weak, flesh-and-bone body, pounced on her again. With his eyes blinded by pain and his bloody neck where the stitches had burst and the flesh had split apart, he looked more like a wounded monster than a gardener in that moment.
With a primal fury, he pinned the woman to the concrete floor. The crescent-tipped knife rose into the air.
Aylin had entered the chief’s office at the back of the prefabricated building. The desk was a mess; it was cluttered with progress payment files, shift rosters, and tea glasses. She fixed the flashlight’s beam on the thick, worn “Material Custody Ledger” on the desk.
She turned the pages rapidly. Pruning Paste... She was looking for the checkout records of the last two months. Under the feeble light of the flashlight, names were listed one under the other.
Hasan Yılmaz - 3 Tins Cem Taşkın - 1 Tin Yekta Özbek - 2 Tins Rıza Kaptan - 5 Tins
Aylin’s finger slowly traced over the name “Yekta” for just a single second. Then, she turned the page. The possibility that this genius killer’s name could be on these dusty pages, right among ordinary, minimum-wage hoers, couldn’t take root in her arrogant mind for even a second.
These are pawns, Aylin thought in frustration. It must be someone who signs out the chemicals he uses under the names of these poor workers and smuggles them out the back door. The depot supervisor? The logistics manager?
She walked out of the office and returned to the corridor where the workers’ lockers were. Her light swept across the rusted metal lockers. Number 41, number 42, number 43...
Purely by chance, Aylin stopped in front of locker Number 42. This locker belonged to Yekta.
A pungent smell seeping out through the locker’s vents hit Aylin’s nose. It was the heavy, throat-burning scent of an industrial rust remover chemical. The scent of that exact fluid Yekta used to acid-clean his crescent-tipped knife after the murders.
Aylin narrowed her eyes. A killer would clean his weapon with a chemical possessing this exact smell. Her fingertips touched the cold metal door of locker number 42. In the darkness inside lay the secrets of the most dangerous man in Izmir.
However, Aylin’s brilliant and overly analytical profiling kicked in once again. No, she said to herself, giving up on pulling the locker door open. That arrogant, elitist surgeon wouldn’t use this cheap, foul-smelling, industrial-grade municipal rust remover to clean his weapon. This is just the smell of an ordinary laborer trying to clean off sweat and mud.
Aylin bypassed the colossal truth she had literally touched with her hand and began walking toward the depot’s exit in pursuit of an entirely false ghost. Her arrogance had condemned her to pitch-black darkness once more.
In front of the construction site in Bostanlı, Yekta was panting heavily. The blood pouring from his neck wouldn’t stop. The woman’s lifeless body lay on the concrete in her emerald green shawl. That flawless, half-moon-shaped incision on her jugular bore the signature of Yekta’s art.
Yet, there was no aesthetic tableau here. The blood gushing from Yekta’s own neck had dripped onto the woman’s clothes, her hands, and the concrete floor. His ruptured wound throbbed like a sickening slap in the face to his own godhood. He was a sculptor who perfected his victims; whereas right now, he was a feeble mortal made of flesh and bone, losing blood.
With his trembling, bloody hands, he took out that small metal tin from his pocket. Imprisoning the pain in the darkest room of his mind, he scooped the transparent pruning paste onto his finger. As he applied the paste over that bloody curve on the woman’s neck, he took great care to ensure his own blood wouldn’t mix beneath that amber layer.
When the resin froze and sealed the wound for eternity, Yekta tore off the small emerald pendant from the woman’s neck with his trembling hand. The second trophy was now in the hunter’s pocket.
Yekta struggled to his feet. With his left hand, he pressed against his neck, where the stitches had burst and turned into an open lump of flesh. Even though his eyes were watering from the pain, that freezing smile was still on his face. His own body might have betrayed him, but his intellect was more flawless than the Izmir police could ever imagine.
Without even taking off his neon vest, holding his neck, he melted away like a ghost into the dark streets and disappeared. The hunting ground, though tainted with his own blood, was still his kingdom.47Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfsz7gOg9nr
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