The Night Blinder

A man stares into the ocean, sightless and dead. Another soon realizes the past is never past...

He takes their eyes but leaves behind something far more disturbing—a crime scene so pristine it's like a work of art. In the exclusive hills of Malibu, a killer is hunting the wealthy and powerful, surgically removing their sight and arranging their bodies with chilling precision.

Detective Harriet "Harri" Harper thought joining LAPD's elite Robbery-Homicide Division would be her biggest challenge, but she's walked into a nightmare. The killer's methodology is flawless, his victims seemingly random—until a pattern emerges that's more terrifying than chaos. When a high-profile talent agent becomes the second victim, the media frenzy explodes and the killer vanishes like smoke.

But this predator isn't finished. He's been perfecting his craft, and each murder is more elaborate than the last. The missing eyes aren't trophies—they're a message. Someone is watching, learning, waiting for the perfect moment to complete his masterpiece.

As Harri and her partner Detective Tom Bards close in, they realize they're not just hunting a serial killer—they're tracking an artist who sees death as his canvas. And in his twisted vision, the detectives pursuing him might just be his next subjects.

When a killer collects what you see, blindness becomes a mercy.

This time of day normally calmed Miles Davidson. It was sunset over the Pacific Ocean, and Malibu was one of the most beautiful places he'd ever lived in. He was awash in hazy pink and orange because his interior decorator had followed his directions to create a stunning room to match the stunning view. She'd chosen pristine modern white for his living room furniture with sleek mirrored surfaces and only a few dashes of bright reds and blues. The decor made the light of the setting sun even more intense.


Miles knew he'd created something fabulous when he brought the first woman back to the house and watched her as she breathlessly took in his home with stars in her eyes. 


This Malibu Cove mansion helped him secure the first clients at his new wealth management firm. The Hollywood elite loved to see this kind of lifestyle. They needed to see it. Money only loved money. It made them feel safe and understood. He'd known going in that he had to look right, speak right, smell right. He'd need all the trappings of wealth to attract the wealthy. Miles didn't always do things right, but he'd been right about that. 



Now, when he looked around his living room, all he could think of was how screwed he was.



Miles checked the time on his Patek Philippe Nautilus watch and saw that it was only two minutes since the last time he'd checked. He was waiting for his savior to come and bail him out, just this one last time. Miles knew he could trust this guy. He'd made so much of his own money he would know what to do. Miles wasn't sure how it would go. He'd have to play it by ear, which fortunately for him, was his specialty. Miles practiced his scripts in his mind.


Would his savior demand a partnership? 

Maybe.

Probably. 


Why wouldn't he? 


Miles hoped against hope it would be a low-interest loan. Just until he was back on his feet. 



He paced back and forth through the living room, basking in the fading glow of the sun dropping into the ocean. He stopped at the open laptop on his desk and checked his emails. The rest of the funds had been transferred. The message from Sparky was: You live to see another day. 


Bastard, he thought. 


All of his clients’ money was gone. 


What was he going to tell them? 


What was he going to tell his father? 



He took one last swig of a thirty-year-old single malt Balvenie and set the empty tumbler down on the glass-topped coffee table. His hands were shaking something terrible, and he didn’t know how he would make it through the night. 


His world was crashing down on his head. The entire town would know by tomorrow, he thought.



All of those elite money types gossiped like thirteen-year-old girls and once one client found out Miles had lost all of their money, then all the other clients would know within minutes. And then his career, his reputation, Christ, his life would be over. 


His mind raced back and forth between justifying what he'd done and desperately trying to find a way out of it. Would they be able to arrest him immediately for something like this? 


No. 


Could they, though? All he'd done was lose all of his clients’ money. Sure, it was horrible, a devastating gut punch for anyone, but not criminal? 


Only stupid, right? Just a terrible series of bad decisions. 


He would be sued is all. They'd come after him for failure of his fiduciary duty or something, some kind of civil thing and he could bankrupt out of that. They might take the sports cars and leave him the BMW. They'd probably take the condos in Mexico and Hawaii, but they'd leave him this house, surely? 


He'd worked so hard for this career and he was losing it because of a terrible series of bad decisions. 


Actually, he'd used his clients’ money to pay off a debt. 
It wasn't like he was running a Ponzi scheme. He did essentially steal their money. That was embezzlement, he guessed, but he wasn't a Bernie Madoff or anything. Before he'd had to use their money, he'd made them a ton of it.

Embezzlement. 


He would definitely get time in prison for that. He could have killed someone while drunk driving and not be in as much trouble as he was in right at this moment. People with money didn't like it when other people messed with the one thing that made them better than everyone else. He had to find a way to replace that money.