The Writer Whose Fiction Predicted Real Crimes

2:17 a.m. The cursor on Sylan Corbett's laptop screen was still blinking at the last sentence of Chapter 15. Before his fingers could press the next key, a brutal pounding slammed against his apartment door. "Police! Open the door now!" Sylan frowned. He had just slid off the safety chain when the door was shoved open from outside. Four uniformed officers barged in, led by a man in a drab brown suit who stared sharply at him. "Sylan Corbett? I'm Inspector Calder Whitlock," the man said coldly. He did not waste time searching the room. His eyes locked straight onto the glowing laptop screen on the desk. "Step away from that keyboard." "Two in the morning, and no written warrant?" Sylan shot back, keeping his voice level even as his heart raced. "What is this about, Inspector?" Instead of answering, Whitlock tossed a plastic folder onto the desk, right beside Sylan's laptop. Three photos spilled out. Sylan looked down. The photo showed a middle-aged woman lying dead on a kitchen floor, one arm folded strangely beneath her body. But it was not the corpse that suddenly turned his blood cold. "Marlene Doyce. Killed this afternoon," Whitlock said. He pointed at the cream blouse on the victim in the photo. "Look at the third button on her chest. It's missing." Sylan's breath caught. He slowly turned toward his laptop screen and scrolled up to the draft of Chapter 14, which he had finished last night. The victim was a woman. In a kitchen. One arm folded. The third button of her blouse missing. The accuracy was one hundred percent. "That manuscript hasn't been published," Sylan's voice thinned. "I've never sent it to anyone. It's a raw draft." "Exactly. But an hour ago, we received an anonymous report that quoted a passage exactly like the one on your screen, along with the address of this apartment," Whitlock hissed. "So explain to me, Mr. Corbett. How can a crime scene be identical to a novel that has never left your laptop?" Sylan fell silent. His mind raced, piecing together this impossible puzzle. Two hours later, Sylan was sitting in an interrogation room at the Marlowe District Police Station. The air in the room was as cold as the stare of Whitlock, who sat across from him. Behind the one-way glass on the side of the room, Sylan knew another pair of eyes was watching him. "If I wanted to kill someone," Sylan said, breaking the silence, "I wouldn't write it in that much detail, save it on my own laptop, and then wait for the police to break down my door." "Maybe this is how you built a psychological alibi. Playing the framed man," Whitlock replied, tapping the victim's photo on the steel table. Sylan did not look down. He stared back at the Inspector, then slowly pulled the victim's photo closer to himself. He looked at it not with the fear of a suspect, but with the sharp intensity of a creator whose work was being tampered with. "Inspector," Sylan said, his voice now intimidating. "In my Chapter 14, the third button is indeed missing. But your eyes missed something very important." Whitlock frowned. Behind the one-way glass, a female detective named Evangeline Frost leaned forward too, suddenly interested. Sylan tapped the victim's left shoulder in the photo with his index finger. "There's a small red scribble on the victim's shoulder. It looks like a letter struck through with one horizontal line, with a curved tail at the end. Do you know what that mark is?" Whitlock went quiet, staring intently at the spot Sylan pointed to. "It's a standard proofreading mark," Sylan said coldly. "A symbol editors use by hand to delete a word from a manuscript." Sylan leaned forward. "I never use that manual mark in my digital drafts. Whoever the bastard is who killed this woman, he didn't just copy my writing. He's trying to edit it in the real world. And he did it on purpose to show me." Whitlock was lost for words. The interrogation room was suddenly dominated by the man who was supposed to be cornered. Toward morning, the police had no choice but to release Sylan due to a lack of physical evidence, though his laptop was confiscated. Lorne Street was still dark and foggy when Sylan arrived at his apartment door. His steps stopped at once. On the doormat lay a small cardboard box with no sender's name. Sylan carried it inside and locked the door tight. When he opened the box, he found his research notebook, the black-covered one he had lost at the station weeks ago. He flipped to the last page. Sure enough. The last sentence in the book had been struck out with a very neat red line. Originally, the sentence Sylan wrote read: "He finally came home." Now, handwriting in red ink had replaced it with: "He was finally caught." Just as Sylan read that word, the phone in his pocket vibrated hard. A call from an unknown number. Sylan answered with his jaw clenched. "Your last sentence was a little boring, Sylan," a voice greeted him from the other end. The tone was soft, smooth, and far too friendly. "But I've edited it for you. Now all that's left is for you to finish the chapter."