The fluorescent tubes in the duty room flickered on and off as if they would go out at any moment amidst the sound of the alarm. Irene stared at the snowflake noise on the monitor screen, suddenly realizing that her palms were oozing the same icy sweat as the dead man's, and a sense of foreboding welled up in her heart. Was it just a coincidence that three hours ago, when she'd found the tampering marks on Thomas's license plate in the Engineering Department's file room, the unmistakable scent of spearmint had wafted through the ventilation ducts -- exactly like the mints Leo used to chew?
"Moisture sensors in Anchorway 13 have been triggered." The watchman's hands trembled as he tapped the keyboard, and the monitor screen suddenly jumped to infrared imaging mode. In the confined space glowing with green light, a figure wearing a yellow helmet was bending down in front of a hydraulic pump, and the license code on his reflective undershirt burned a scarlet mark of 0037 in the thermal imaging, as if it was a brand from hell.
Leo's sidearm hit the corner of the table with a crunch, as if breaking some kind of taboo: "That area's been closed for three weeks, and the key is still in the evidence room..." His words were cut off by the sudden bursting of a light bulb. In the brightening darkness, Irene heard the clacking of gears turning from her coat pocket -- it was the red brass pocket watch from Thomas's reliquary, and at the moment the second hand was sweeping counterclockwise through the twelve Roman numerals engraved with bloodstains, as if reversing time.
The steel cables of the Golden Gate Bridge were playing an elegy in the hurricane as the police car plowed through the fog, as if mourning the tragedy. Erin's tactical flashlight swept over the seals of Anchorage Bay 13, and pieces of blood-crusted fingernails clung to the ripped warning tape, as if they were the victim's last struggle. When she pushed open the rusted hatch, the smell of the sea mingled with the pungent odor of chemicals, and the brand-new tank of liquid nitrogen in the corner was still hissing white gas, as if it were the devil's breath.
"SFPD!" Leo's barked command exploded between the metal bulkheads as if it were a cry for justice. Dark figures leapt from the maintenance platform, reflective undershirts flashing like ghostly fire in the red dot of the laser sight, as if they were messengers from hell. Irene stepped in a puddle of viscous liquid on her way to the chase, and the flashlight beam illuminated ears soaked in preservative, each earlobe wearing a different style of pearl stud -- the very same jewelry that had been reported missing by the missing noblewomen in the past six months of unsolved murders, as if it were the killer's trophies.
There was a sudden, muffled sound of something heavy crashing to the floor from the ventilation ducts, as if it were a blow of fate. By the time they find the witness cowering behind a screen, the diesel-smelling maintenance man is holding a wrench to his throat: 'He's back...' Thomas walks through the steel cables every night... Those numbers are bleeding..." His eyes were filled with fear, as if he had seen the devil.
"Parker Wilson?" Erin read the name on the other man's badge and suddenly realized that this was the cousin who had taken over Thomas' job after his suicide. As she tried to check Parker's wrists, the burly man suddenly convulsed epileptically, crushed peppermint leaves floating in the white foam that poured from the corners of his mouth, as if he were possessed by a demon.
Leo's pupils constricted suddenly behind the night vision camera, "The third button of his overalls!" The miniature camera was flashing red on Parker's lapel; someone was obviously maneuvering the confrontation through real-time surveillance. The moment Irene picked up the button with her tweezers, Parker suddenly stormed up and slammed into the liquid nitrogen tank valve, and the entire cabin was instantly engulfed in a white mist of minus 196 degrees, as if he had entered an icy hell.
When the Emergency Response Team broke through the door, Irene was shielding the frozen Leo with her body, showing her bravery and determination. Parker's ice sculpture is frozen in a kneeling position in front of the console, with the index finger of his right hand eerily pointing toward the ventilation ducts, as if guiding something. Deep in the ducts, the officers found evidence glued to the iron walls with frozen blood: the missing page four of Thomas's autopsy report from three years earlier, and the Ace of Spades playing card stained with crushed peppermint candies, as if it were a key clue to solving the mystery.
"Look at this." The technician held up the UV light, and fluorescent writing surfaced in the margins of the autopsy report-"When the gears are reversed twelve times, the fathers crawl out of the steel cables." Erin's temples jutted, the very words were the most frequent ravings of her childhood nightmares, as if the curse of destiny had struck again.
On the way back to the police station, Leo was uncharacteristically silent, as if he was harboring an ulterior motive. Irene investigates Leo's undercover experience with the DEA and discovers that during one of his operations deep inside the drug lords, the lords got hold of his family's whereabouts and threatened his family's lives, demanding him to participate in this bridge-crime scheme. In extreme fear and desperation, Leo gradually loses himself and begins to act on the drug lord's instructions, which explains his involvement in such a complex crime and his preying on Erin's father.
When Irene is comparing work tags in the evidence room, she suddenly realizes that there is a yellowed group photo sewn into the lining of Parker's helmet: a photo of the 1985 Bridge Engineers' Annual Meeting, in which a young Thomas is wrapping his arms around some man in a captain's hat, and the tattoo of a ship's anchor on the man's ring finger matches the photo of the exhibit in her father's disappearance dossier, as if the threads of destiny had entangled them together.
As the clock struck twelve midnight, Erin's computer suddenly auto-played the security footage. In the footage from the bridge tower on the night of Thomas's suicide, a figure in a trenchcoat was carving numbers into the steel cables when it should have been empty -- was it just a coincidence that the man was missing the pinky finger on his left hand, which Leo had just explained last week that he'd severed because of an explosion during a drug bust?
When Erin grabbed her sidearm and rushed to Leo's desk, she found twelve boxes of mints neatly stacked in his locker. On the inside of the torn boxes, someone had drawn equilateral triangles in blood, each corner labeled with the date of the victim's disappearance -- including the rainy night her father vanished off the Bay Area Bridge, as if Leo was behind the tragedy.