That evening, Saint sat at her desk with the Macauley file, grap­pling with the after­math of Richie Mon­trose and Nix, which promised to cre­ate more work than she had encoun­tered since tak­ing over her cur­rent role. Despite her urg­ing Deputy Michaels to leave for the night, he remained, sens­ing he would be need­ed as they faced a com­plex sit­u­a­tion.

Saint men­tal­ly cat­a­loged what she knew: Nix had tak­en a gun and dri­ven to Dar­by Falls, where he fatal­ly shot Richie Mon­trose. While she con­sid­ered the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Tooms was being hon­est about the dog, she rec­og­nized that it didn’t alter the core facts. The fright­en­ing real­i­ty was that Cal­lie Montrose’s blood was dis­cov­ered at Mar­ty Tooms’s farm­house, rais­ing trou­bling ques­tions.

As she pre­pared to leave, the phone inter­rupt­ed her thoughts. Expect­ing Himes, she was sur­prised to hear Lucy Alston from the lab on the line. Lucy informed her of new­ly obtained fin­ger­prints, prompt­ing Sain­t’s thoughts to race back to the enve­lope found beside Richie Mon­trose, inscribed with the omi­nous mes­sage: *I’ll see you in hell*.

Lucy revealed that they had a match to Nix, caus­ing a tight­ness in Saint’s chest. Seek­ing more clar­i­ty, she hoped for addi­tion­al leads, but Lucy dis­closed that there were indeed more match­es: fin­ger­prints had also matched to Mar­tin Tooms and Joseph Macauley. This devel­op­ment added anoth­er lay­er of com­plex­i­ty to the inves­ti­ga­tion, height­en­ing the stakes as Saint rec­og­nized the impli­ca­tions of such con­nec­tions.

In this charged atmos­phere, with mount­ing pres­sure from mul­ti­ple direc­tions, Saint faced the encroach­ing headache of frus­tra­tion and urgency. The pieces of the puz­zle were slow­ly begin­ning to fit, yet each rev­e­la­tion com­pli­cat­ed her under­stand­ing of the case, leav­ing her with more ques­tions than answers.