After speaking to Pamela Dawes by phone, Alex heads to Payne Whitney Gym, reflecting on Darlington’s perfectionism, her roommates’ first impressions of him, and her uneasy history with both Darlington and Lethe. She recalls Darlington testing her on their first day by unleashing jackal-like creatures and her resolve to read the person in charge, marking the start of their complicated mentorship.

Crossing campus past society tombs and Grove Street Cemetery, Alex notes the attraction Grays have to life-adjacent places and remembers the unsettling behavior of Grays during the earlier Skull and Bones prognostication on Michael Reyes. She arrives at a police-lit crime scene centered on a traffic island near the gym, with a coroner’s van and investigators at work.

Alex identifies Centurion Detective Abel Turner and texts him to announce her presence as Dante. After he pointedly ignores her for a time, she presses him, hinting she will contact Dean Sandow. Turner approaches and stonewalls her, insisting there is no reason to suspect society involvement and emphasizing they will keep the case away from Yale and Lethe. When Alex invokes Thursday’s sanctioned ritual night, Turner rebuffs her and, with fatigue and irritation showing, tells her to back off because the victim is “town.”

Torn between the relief of walking away and her sense of duty, Alex decides to investigate. She approaches the coroner’s van with purpose, offers a gold compulsion coin, and orders the coroner to show her the body. Alex sees a young woman in a torn white camisole, stabbed repeatedly in the chest with enough force to fracture the sternum. The coroner, under compulsion, relays that Detective Turner believes it is the boyfriend, already picked up for questioning, and that both the boyfriend and the victim have drug-related priors.

Alex learns the victim’s name—Tara Hutchins—and the estimated time of death: around 11 p.m., hard to fix due to the cold. Alex notes the coincidence with the strange surge during the earlier ritual when Grays strained against the wards and something battered at the chalk circle, wondering if that force could have reached Tara. She also considers the simpler possibility of domestic violence. She instructs the coroner to forget her presence and leaves the van unseen.

As Alex slips away, she glances at Grays clustered by the gym doors and briefly thinks they look frightened, which unsettles her. She reflects on Darlington’s habitual question about when she first saw Grays and reframes it as when she first knew to be afraid, underscoring her ongoing tension between seeking normalcy and confronting the uncanny dangers around Yale.