Prologue - HUNTED - An Aria Hunt FBI Crime Thriller

“The sixth will see the spiral. The seventh will ascend.” —Anonymous message, never decoded

Springfield, Virginia – January 15th | 8:37 AM

The red backpack lay open in the snow.

Sequins glinted. Zipper half-pulled. Empty.

Tara Michaels was gone.

Eight years old. Mathematically gifted. Selected for a national STEM camp. A girl who solved logic puzzles for fun. Now vanished between the curb and the school gate in under ten seconds.

No scream. No struggle. No trace.

Ethan Parker crouched beside the crushed diorama, its foam board soaked through. A few broken paper fractals scattered in the slush. He stared at them, throat tight. Nearby, one of the techs muttered about magnetic interference on the cameras.

The fifth child in eight days.

Behind him, Tara’s mother wailed. Her father dropped to his knees, hands curled into fists. EMTs hovered but didn’t touch him. There was nothing they could offer.

Parker didn’t move. Couldn’t.

This was too clean. Too surgical.

The crime scene was a loop—no entry, no exit. Just a void.

The others had been the same.

A whisper of tires on asphalt broke the moment. A black SUV pulled up, slow and quiet. Assistant Director Katherine Vance stepped out, all severity and precision. Her charcoal coat snapped in the wind like a banner. Her eyes found Parker’s and said what her mouth didn’t:

We’re out of time.

He met her halfway. “Tara Michaels. Age eight. Snatched between the car and the gate. Ten steps. Gone.”

Vance’s eyes tracked the backpack. “Anything new?”

“No witnesses. No prints. No DNA. Cameras glitched—again.” He hesitated. “This time, they left something else.”

He held up a small laminated tag: a Fibonacci sequence, scrawled in red on the back. Just numbers. Nothing else.

Vance’s face remained unreadable, but her jaw flexed. “Five in eight days. All gifted. No ransom. No message.”

“Until now,” Parker said, eyes on the tag.

She looked at him sharply. “And?”

“I’ve got every unit cross-checking data. No behavioral or forensic links. He’s too careful.”

Vance didn’t blink. “Then we bring in someone who sees what we don’t.”

Parker frowned. “You mean Quant or Cyber?”

“No,” she said. “I mean Hunt.”

He laughed once, bitter. “Records Management? Aria Hunt hasn’t left the basement in two years. She’s not cleared for field.”

“She’s not being sent to the field,” Vance said. “The field is coming to her. She sees the patterns before the rest of us even know they’re there.”

“She’s unstable. After Denver—”

“I don’t care,” Vance snapped, low. “I care that there are five children missing. Possibly six. And we’re staring at another goddamn backpack.”

Wind swept across the scene, sending fractured bits of Tara’s diorama skittering across the sidewalk. One stopped at Parker’s foot—a jagged shard with the golden spiral painted on it.

He stared at it for a long time.

Somewhere, someone had already marked the next point in the sequence.

And the clock had just started.

Prologue (Comic Strip) - HUNTED - An Aria Hunt FBI Crime Thriller