A direct threat and a clue, all in one letter. This was the work of a true chaotic artisan who was now beyond obsessed with Ace. He looked at the clock on his computer, eight of his allotted twenty hours had already expired if he went by how old the letter was. Time was running out. Ace forced himself to sleep for a few hours and then rushed to police headquarters as fast as possible.

When he arrived, the crime lab technician, who attempted to stop him before, rushed up and tried to explain something about the letters. Before the technician could finish, though, Ace shoved the latest letter at him and barked, “Get this analyzed and make it quick!” Again, the technician urged him to listen to what he had discovered, but Ace would not have it. He wanted results on the handwriting analysis before anything else.

Angrily submitting to the detective’s request the lab tech went to his workstation. In the meantime, Ace went to his desk and pulled out the letters thus far. He knew that the third horseman was to be famine. All that remained was to use a map of the city to see if the location of the dropped letters might lead to the central location of the killer.

Two hours passed and Ace went to check on the lab tech’s progress. As the lab tech finished his analysis of the writing, he had been lucky enough to find a small portion of a fingerprint.

Ace breathed a sigh of relief; the killer had finally slipped up. Results of the fingerprint search came back for a man in his late thirties who was in the system as a missing person, yet the next bit of information was most important. Before he disappeared he was in law enforcement, and he was a detective. It took a few moments for the current detective to gather himself before going further.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Ace grunted. Just as he was about to head back to his desk and get his keys, the lab tech cornered him. “Listen to me, you can’t read any more of these letters. In addition to analyzing the handwriting, I also analyzed the words themselves in the first couple letters.”

As the lab tech continued he described how the same words that were in the letters had also been found in ancient ceremonies for darker purposes, especially the words at the end of the letter. Ace hardly believed what he heard. As far as he was concerned there was no such thing as witchcraft or mystic mumbo jumbo.

Dismissing the technician’s warning, the detective went ahead with his current plan. Too much time had already been wasted on this flimsy theory. He went to his desk, grabbed his keys, cell-phone and went for a drive in the area that he felt the killer would most likely strike in next.

There was maybe an hour and a half left before the killer struck again. Ace needed to solve this case before he ended up the next victim. The ringing of his cell phone interrupted his thoughts. On the other end was a voice he had never heard before, and one he wished to never hear again. The Horseman Killer.

Over the phone, he received driving directions and instructions not to let anyone follow him or a certain daughter of his would find her life ending quite abruptly. It was when he pulled into his ex-wife’s driveway that he was genuinely afraid of what might happen next. Ace checked his gun and stuffed it in the back of his pants. The killer never said anything about not being armed.

Once inside his former home, Ace noticed the smell of incense wafting through the rooms. He tried to hold back his fear, yet it was starting to spiral out of his control as he got closer to the dining room.

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