Selena took a cigarette from Stan with a nervous smile. It was likely too late to ingratiate herself. He knew why she was on the run and he was going to use the situation to his advantage.

Selena had never liked Stan. And she had been the one to get him fired.

Part Three

Selena leaned against her wounded soldier of a car as Stan Brandanowitz stepped from his Cadillac and walked over to her. He was the reason she’d left and the last person on Earth she wanted to see.

Stan stopped just as he was about to light his cigarette. Mentioning Richard had probably been a mistake.

Part Two

Her car broke down on the longest stretch of highway in the middle of nowhere. Selena popped the hood and even her rudimentary knowledge was enough to diagnose an overheated engine. It had been hours since she’d seen another vehicle.

As the black Cadillac pulled up beside her, she wondered if she could trade the water and money for just a pinch of good fortune.

Part One

In my visit to the pharmaceuticals factory, I discovered that there was no black dot serial killer. The black dots themselves were the murderer. It was a virus that was being manufactured as a biological weapon and it had somehow leaked out of one of the containment units.

In the end, I died alone.

By the time I got to Pine Hill, someone had warned Mr. Dowling of my impending arrival. An army of his goons were waiting for me outside. There was no way I was getting an audience.

I now had my own Black Dot on my forehead. It meant I had only a few hours to find a solution or I’d be the next victim.

No one could remember what the pharmaceuticals factory was built for, other than to pollute the entire city with noxious fumes and wastewater. It was owned by Rufus T. Dowling, the reclusive textiles baron who at one time controlled more than a third of the city’s real estate.

Once I had learned the truth about the black dot killings, the first question I wanted answered was whether Dowling knew about the plot. That’s why I drove to his mansion on Pine Hill.

The pharmaceuticals factory was something of a dinosaur, antiquated and larger-than-life at the same time. It loomed so ominously over the lake district that only the most desperate dared to visit. If there was a serial killer operating in its shadow, some of the more authoritarian city elders might have deemed it good for social welfare.

Turns out I was right about the pharmaceuticals factory but wrong about the killer. The reality was even worse than I’d imagined.

Every victim of the past month had been found with the same black dot tattooed to his or her forehead. We reported it to all the usual departments, thinking we must have a serial killer or cult on our hands. But each of the deaths appeared random, with a variety of causes and nothing linking them together.

The captain was mad at me so I was assigned the desk, going through all the case files. I was the one who discovered the connection, that all the victims had visited a certain pharmaceuticals factory on the east side before their deaths.