THE DRAGON KILLER’S File

A dead man’s hand is holding a child’s toy — and Chief Detective Laura Soto knows exactly what it means.

Five years ago, Frank Castor confessed to being Chicago’s most notorious serial killer. Six victims. Six plastic dragons left in six cold hands. Case closed — until his conviction collapsed under a contamination review, and the mayor’s own son turns up dead beneath the elevated tracks with a dragon in his palm.

Chief Detective Laura Soto knows the original killer never spoke publicly about the toys. So how is the pattern back?

As the body count climbs and a countdown ticks toward a number only the killer can see, Laura is pulled into a conspiracy that reaches back further than the Dragon Killer case ever did — one that touches her own father’s unsolved death, a commissioner she once trusted completely, and a son willing to disappear into his own manufactured guilt to draw a real monster into the light.

She catches him. The evidence is airtight. The city believes it’s over.

It isn’t.