Blake had been in the Philadelphia motel for eight days.
The room smelled like mildew and failure. The walls were thin enough that he could hear every sound from adjacent rooms—couples arguing, babies crying, the constant hum of desperation that accumulated in places like this. Blake had stopped trying to sleep. Instead, he sat on the edge of the bed and watched news coverage of the manhunt on the television.
His face was everywhere. Federal warrant. Armed and dangerous. If you see him, call immediately.
Blake was almost unrecognizable to himself. The photographs used were from his university identification—a younger version of him, more hopeful, more intact. The Blake sitting in this motel room was different. Thinner. Harder. Consumed by something that had moved beyond mere obsession into something more like a compulsion.
He'd failed in Provo. That was the reality he had to accept. He'd had James in his sights and somehow the moment had become complicated. A cop had gotten in the way. James had escaped. And now Blake was hiding in Philadelphia while FBI resources multiplied across three states.
But Blake had learned something important from the failure: direct attack was becoming impossible. James was protected now. FBI protection meant cameras, agents, controlled environments. It meant Blake couldn't just walk into a room and shoot.
So Blake had to evolve.
He started with research.
Using a burner phone and an untraceable internet connection at a library, Blake compiled information about everyone connected to James Patterson.
Sarah Martinez—the woman who'd been with him in Provo. She was staying in a hotel under FBI protection but she wasn't under lock and key. She went to work at a bookstore. She left the hotel. She was vulnerable.
Emily Washburn—James's ex-wife in Idaho. Blake knew her location. A potato farm cooperative near Boise. She was isolated, rural, far from FBI resources.
Marcus Chen—the young man who'd been traveling with James and Sarah but who'd then fled to California. Blake tracked him through social media. He was alive and documented his life in real time: coffee shops he visited, hiking trails he explored, the general pattern of someone who'd escaped and was learning to live freely.
There was also the FBI Special Agent Lisa Martinez. Blake found her official photograph online. He found her office location. He started to map out the possibility of reaching her.
Each of these people was a potential leverage point. Each represented a way to force James out of protection.
But Blake needed to think carefully. The FBI wouldn't negotiate with terrorists. But they might make mistakes if they were desperate enough. They might fail to protect everyone simultaneously. They might be forced to choose which life to save.
Blake had been a researcher once. That skill hadn't disappeared just because he'd spent years in prison. He could still analyze data. He could still see patterns. He could still understand how systems worked and where their vulnerabilities existed.
The FBI system had one fundamental weakness: they believed they could protect James by surrounding him with resources. But what if James wasn't the target? What if Blake made it clear that James wasn't important—only the people James loved?
That would change the calculation. That would make the FBI's protection irrelevant.
On day nine in the motel, Blake made a decision.
He would target Sarah first.
Sarah was the most accessible. She was in Provo, moving between locations, establishing patterns. She was also the person James had grown closest to. If something happened to Sarah, it would break James in a way that direct attack could never achieve.
Blake purchased a bus ticket to Salt Lake City. He paid cash. He used a false name. He was one of dozens of travelers moving through the Greyhound station—invisible in the way that Blake had learned to be invisible.
It took him three hours to reach Salt Lake City. Another hour to reach Provo by local bus. By evening, he was watching Sarah's hotel from across the street.
She left at 7 PM to go to work at the bookstore. Blake followed at a distance. He watched her move through the town like someone who'd learned to be cautious but hadn't yet learned to be paranoid.
He learned her schedule. Tuesday evenings she went to a grocery store near her hotel. Wednesday mornings she went to a coffee shop. Friday nights she walked through a park near downtown.
Blake documented all of it. He began to understand the rhythms of Sarah's vulnerability.
But he didn't make a move. Not yet. This was reconnaissance. This was preparation. Blake had learned in prison that the best attacks were the ones planned with precision, not executed with rage.
On the tenth day, Blake received a visitor in his mind.
It was Officer Smith White, the cop who'd died in Provo. Blake hadn't thought about White in a structured way before. White was just collateral damage—the cost of access to James. But now, sitting in the motel room, Blake found himself imagining White's face, White's final moments.
Blake wondered if White had a family. He wondered if White's children knew what their father had done. He wondered if they blamed White for being a hero or praised him for the sacrifice.
Blake pushed the thought away. It was irrelevant. White was dead and White had chosen that. Blake hadn't wanted to kill White. White had made a choice that had cost him his life.
But the thought kept returning. Blake kept imagining White's family. He kept thinking about how Blake had caused that suffering—not through direct intention, but through his obsession with James.
Blake stood up and walked to the mirror. He looked at himself for the first time in days. The face staring back was barely recognizable. The eyes had a quality of dissolution—like someone who'd been fundamentally altered by the distance between intention and action.
Blake looked at this face and wondered: Who am I?
He didn't recognize the answer.
By day twelve, Blake had begun to understand something troubling.
He'd come to Philadelphia to hide and to plan. But what was the plan actually for? Kill James. Yes. But then what? Kill Sarah? Kill Emily? Kill anyone connected to James until James understood the depth of Blake's rage?
At some point, Blake would be caught. The FBI would catch him. They would arrest him and he would go back to prison, probably for life. That was the mathematical certainty of his situation.
So the real question was: What did Blake want to accomplish before that happened?
Was it enough to kill James? Was it enough to terrorize people? Was it enough to make people suffer?
Blake sat on the motel bed and realized he didn't know the answer.
He also realized that not knowing the answer was itself a form of dissolution. He'd spent ten years focused on revenge. Now that he'd actually attempted it, now that he'd failed, he was discovering that he had no other purpose.
He was a man defined entirely by obsession. And once the obsession was revealed as hollow—once Blake understood that killing James wouldn't actually fix anything, wouldn't actually restore what Blake had lost—he was left with nothing but the obsession itself.
Blake pulled out his phone and called Vincent again.
Vincent answered but didn't speak.
"I don't want to continue," Blake said.
"Then stop," Vincent replied.
"I can't," Blake said. "I don't know how to stop."
Vincent hung up.
Blake set the phone down and understood that he was now truly alone. Not because Vincent had abandoned him, but because Blake had abandoned himself somewhere in the process of becoming a fugitive and a killer.
Blake had become the person Blake had always feared becoming: someone who was nothing but rage, nothing but hate, nothing but the empty shell of a man who'd once been something more.
And the worst part was that Blake could see this clearly. Blake could understand it. Blake could analyze it with the same clinical precision he'd once applied to research data.
Blake just didn't know how to change it.
So instead, he continued his surveillance of Sarah. He continued mapping her vulnerabilities. He continued preparing for actions that he was beginning to understand wouldn't actually bring him peace.
But preparation was all Blake had left. Preparation and obsession and the fading hope that somehow, if he just pushed hard enough, if he just destroyed enough, something inside him would finally feel fixed.
It wouldn't. He knew it wouldn't. But Blake had already burned every bridge. He had no other direction left to travel.