“I Will Live Forever”

“I will never die, I will live forever.”

These words sent chills down the spines of everyone nearby. They didn’t come from a priest, or some trembling believer. They came from a man in shackles, the fluorescent lights of the execution chamber carving hard lines across his gaunt face.

Elias Crane smiled as he said it.

Detective Mara Keane had heard him say many things over the years—pleas, curses, cryptic little monologues—but never anything like that. The words hung in the air, heavy and electric, as if they were more than just sound. As if they were a promise.

She stood behind the thick glass with the other designated witnesses: a warden with a granite jaw, two reporters, a court clerk, and three family members of his victims. The room hummed with an air conditioner that seemed far too loud for such a solemn moment.

On the other side of the glass, prison staff moved with rehearsed efficiency. Straps tightened across Elias’s ankles and wrists. Another strap locked his chest to the gurney. The IV line snaked from his arm to a small box whose contents might as well have been labeled “Oblivion.”

The warden stepped closer to the microphone.

“Elias Jonathan Crane,” he intoned, “you have been convicted of multiple counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Do you have any final words?”

Mara’s pen hovered above her notebook, though she already knew she would remember whatever he said for the rest of her life.

Elias turned his head, and for the briefest moment his eyes met hers. They were pale gray, almost colorless. There was no remorse in them, but there was something else—something that had always bothered her. A strange, unsettling certainty.

 

“I will never die,” he said clearly, his voice echoing slightly through the intercom. “I will live forever.”

The older woman in the front row, a mother who had once clutched a framed photograph in Mara’s interview room, let out a sob.

“You’re not living anywhere after this,” the warden muttered under his breath.

Elias smiled, slow and deliberate, his eyes still fixed on Mara.

“Oh, I’m not talking about my body.”

The warden frowned, about to ask what he meant, but the protocol was the protocol. He nodded to the executioner. The first drug began to drip.

Mara watched the monitor. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Steady at first, then slowly declining. Elias’s eyelids grew heavy. His lips moved, forming words that didn’t make it to the microphone.

She leaned forward, trying to read them.

I will live forever.

His heart rate line flattened.

The warden declared the time of death. In the observation room, the air conditioner kept humming. All at once, the tension disintegrated into something Mara had learned to recognize: a hollow, unsatisfying quiet. No one cheered. No one felt vindicated. It was over, but it wasn’t over.

Because twenty-seven victims didn’t come back just because the state had killed their murderer.

And the strange, unnerving part—Elias had never confessed to all of them. Only twenty-seven.

He’d always insisted there should have been thirty.

1. The Missing Three

Back at the precinct, the world felt smaller, cramped. The homicide unit’s fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead as Mara dropped the thin execution report onto her desk. The bullpen was half-empty, the night shift filling in the gaps. Phones rang, keyboards clattered, someone laughed humorlessly at a joke across the aisle.

Detective Jonah Ortiz slid into the chair across from her desk without asking. He had two coffees in his hands and dark circles under his eyes.

“You look like you attended a funeral,” he said, even though he knew exactly where she’d been.

“In a way,” Mara replied. She accepted the coffee, wrapping her fingers around the warmth. “I watched a man die.”

Jonah shrugged one shoulder. “He earned it. Most people don’t get that kind of certainty at the end.”

She didn’t argue. “He said it again.”

“The line?” Jonah asked. “The ‘live forever’ crap?”

“Yeah.” She took a sip. “Clear as day. Looking straight at me.”

He leaned back, eyeing her. “You know it’s just theatrics, right? He likes to get under your skin. He’s been doing it since the day you cuffed him.”

Mara flipped open a file on her desk. Elias Crane’s face stared up at her in a black-and-white booking photo: longish hair slicked back, eyes like drilled ice. “He always said there should have been thirty victims. We found twenty-seven. We proved twenty-seven. But he insisted on thirty.”

Jonah sighed. “We dug into that for years. Nothing. No evidence. No missing persons that fit his pattern, no bodies turning up later. You know this.”

“You watched him in those interviews,” Mara said quietly. “He never lied about the count. Dates, details, locations—if he said it, we eventually found confirmation. He was proud of it.”

“Yeah, and he was also a narcissist who loved being the smartest guy in the room,” Jonah shot back. “You ever think maybe he invented three extra just to haunt you?”

She closed the file, more forcefully than necessary. Paper edges snapped against the desk. “He wasn’t improvising tonight. That wasn’t a show.”

Jonah studied her for a moment, then softened. “You want it to mean something. You spent six years chasing that man. It’s hard to let a story like that end on a technicality. I get it.”

Mara hesitated. “What if the story didn’t end?”

He chuckled, then stopped when he realized she wasn’t smiling.

“You think the dead man is going to crawl out of the morgue and finish his set?” he asked, only half joking.

“No.” Mara’s eyes moved to the crime board hanging near the far wall, still populated with old case photos and lines of string. Elias’s victims were clustered in one corner: a constellation of grief. “But I keep hearing that line. ‘I’m not talking about my body.’”

Jonah followed her gaze, then shook his head. “You need sleep.”

Before she could respond, Sergeant Holt’s gruff voice cut across the room.

“Keane. Ortiz. In my office.”

They exchanged a glance. Jonah muttered, “No rest for the wicked,” under his breath as they stood.

2. Echoes

Sergeant Holt’s office was cramped, walls lined with old case boxes and commendations that had long since stopped meaning anything. He had a thick mustache, thinning hair, and the permanent expression of a man who had seen everything twice and liked none of it.

He waited until the door was shut before speaking.

“I know you just came back from the show,” he said to Mara, “but something’s come in.”

“Please don’t call an execution a show,” she replied.

“Then tell the state to stop scheduling them like theater,” he said. “Listen. We just got a call from Easton PD. They’ve got a body. Woman, early thirties, found in an abandoned lot. They’re asking for our help because—” He hesitated, then tapped a folder on his desk. “The scene looks familiar.”

“How familiar?” Jonah asked.

Holt opened the folder and slid a photograph across the desk. It was grainy, printed in a hurry. The victim lay on her back, eyes open, arms positioned straight at her sides, fingers curled inward. No visible blood, no obvious wounds.

Mara felt her pulse quicken. She’d seen that pose before.

“You’re thinking of victim twelve,” Holt said, reading her expression. “I am too.”

“That was Elias’s,” Jonah said slowly. “Same positioning. Same…everything.”

“He was executed three hours ago,” Holt said. “Signed, sealed, delivered. They double-checked. Triple-checked. He’s on a slab.”

“Then we’re looking at a copycat,” Jonah concluded.

Holt nodded. “That’s my assumption. But Easton PD is small, underfunded, and rattled. The press already got wind because some genius rookie left the radio on loud at the scene. Someone’s already using the word ‘Crane’ on the scanners. I want you two down there before this turns into a circus.”

“When was the time of death?” Mara asked.

“ME’s first estimate? Between 8 p.m. and midnight,” Holt said.

Mara glanced at the clock on the wall. It was a little past 1 a.m.

“What time did Elias flatline?” Jonah asked Mara quietly.

“Eleven forty-one,” she said.

Jonah blew out a breath. “So…while he was strapped to a gurney, someone out there re-created his work.”

“Exactly,” Holt said. “Get moving. And for now, this doesn’t leave the room. Copycat is the story. We don’t need any ‘ghost of Elias Crane’ headlines while the state is still patting itself on the back.”

Mara stood. “Yes, sir.”

As they walked out, Holt added, “Keane?”

She paused in the doorway.

“You did good with Crane,” he said, the closest thing to praise he ever offered. “Don’t let a psycho’s last words mess with your head.”

But they already had.

3. The First Copy

Easton was a town that smelled like cold metal and regret. Old factories stood like hollowed-out tombstones, and the January air cut through Mara’s coat as she stepped under the yellow police tape.

The lot was behind a shuttered strip mall, half mud, half ice. A single streetlight painted everything a sickly orange. Officers milled about, their breath blooming in white clouds.

A uniformed officer approached. “Detective Keane?”

“That’s me,” she said, flashing her badge. “This is Detective Ortiz. You the one who called it in?”

“Officer Lyle,” he said. He looked young, eyes too bright. He clearly recognized her name. The Crane case had made her something of a reluctant minor celebrity in law enforcement circles. “We, uh, secured the scene as best we could.”

“Victim?” Jonah asked.

“Over here.” Lyle led them to the body.

Even though she’d seen the photograph, the sight hit Mara with the old, unpleasant mix of professional detachment and human horror.

Female, early thirties, dark hair fanned out around her head. No visible bruising, no visible blood. Arms straight at her sides. Fingers curled in, as if holding something that wasn’t there.

“Any ID?” Mara asked.

“Purse was dumped about twenty feet away,” Lyle said. “We found a driver’s license. Name’s Lauren Bishop. Thirty-two. Address is local.”

Jonah scribbled in his notebook. “Who found her?”

“Teenagers messing around behind the mall. They’re at the station now giving statements.”

Mara scanned the perimeter. “Where was the body first spotted? Here, or was she dragged?”

“Best we can tell, she was placed exactly like this,” Lyle said.

“Of course she was,” Jonah muttered.

Mara knelt carefully by the body, mindful of contamination. Her flashlight skimmed over the woman’s neck, jawline, eyes.

“They’re open,” Jonah noted softly. “Just like…”

“Just like victim twelve. Caroline Haines,” Mara finished. Her throat tightened around the name. “Elias left her eyes open. He told me once—during an interview—‘Closing eyes is mercy. They didn’t deserve that.’”

“That’s the quote the press ran with, right?” Jonah said. “He loved that.”

“Yeah,” Mara said. “Which means our copycat’s not just imitating the crime. They’re imitating the mythology.”

She glanced at the woman’s hands. Something tugged at her memory.

“See the fingers?” she said. “Curled inward? It’s the same pattern. Like they were wrapped around something that’s not there.”

“Syringe?” Jonah suggested. “A symbolic message?”

“Maybe.” Mara stood, forcing her mind into a calmer gear. “Where’s your ME?”

“En route,” Lyle said. “County’s stretched thin tonight.”

“We’ll walk the scene again,” Mara said. “Then I want to see the teen witnesses.”

As she and Jonah moved around the perimeter, examining scuff marks and discarded trash, her mind kept circling the same point.

Three missing victims. One copycat. And the timing—just hours after Elias’s execution.

If this was a coincidence, it was a perfect one.

4. “I Will Never Die”

Back at Easton PD, the conference room was small and smelled like burnt coffee. Two teenagers sat at the table: a girl with streaked purple hair and a boy whose hoodie seemed to be his primary defense against the world.

“Just tell them what you told me,” Officer Lyle said gently. He’d brought them sodas, which sat untouched.

“I didn’t even want to go back there,” the girl said. “It was his idea.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “It was just a shortcut.”

Mara sat across from them, Jonah at her side. The recorder on the table glowed with a small red light.

“What were you doing behind the mall?” Mara asked, her voice calm.

“Cutting across to the bus stop,” the boy said. “We do it all the time. We weren’t… messing with anything. We just saw her.”

“You noticed anything unusual before you saw the body?” Jonah added. “Another person, a car driving off?”

The girl hesitated. “There was a van. I think.”

Mara leaned forward slightly. “You think?”

“It was parked near the loading dock,” she said. “Dark. Could’ve been black, could’ve been navy. The lights flicked on once, then off. By the time we found her and freaked out and called 911, it was gone.”

“Did you hear the engine?” Jonah asked.

“Yeah,” the boy said. “Heard it drive away while she was calling.”

Mara nodded slowly. “Did either of you notice any writing on the van? Logos, letters, numbers?”

The girl shook her head. “It was too dark.”

“What made you go all the way into the lot?” Mara asked. “If you use that shortcut all the time, you must’ve seen that it’s pretty out of the way.”

The boy swallowed. “We heard something.”

“Something?” Jonah asked.

“A voice,” the girl said quietly. “Someone talking.”

Mara exchanged a glance with Jonah. “Male, female?” she asked.

“Male,” the boy said. “Sounded kind of…echo-y? Like it was coming from a speaker.”

“What was he saying?” Mara asked.

The girl’s eyes flicked to the recorder. “I don’t know if we should—”

“It’s okay,” Mara said. “You’re not in trouble. We just need the truth.”

The girl glanced at the boy. He nodded.

“He said,” she began, “I will never die. I will live forever.”

A silence settled over the room.

“Exactly those words?” Mara asked carefully.

“Exactly,” the boy said. “It’s from the news, right? That creep they just killed? My mom watches all that stuff.”

Mara’s heartbeat thudded in her ears.

“Did you hear anything after that?” Jonah asked.

The girl shook her head. “We thought it was like a podcast or something. Someone playing a video. Then we saw her and—” Her voice cracked. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“That’s enough,” Mara said gently. “You did the right thing calling it in.”

As Officer Lyle led them out, Jonah turned to her.

“Well,” he said, “that’s unsettling.”

“He’s using Elias’s voice,” Mara said. “Maybe an audio clip from the trial coverage, maybe something ripped from a TV broadcast. He’s using it like a signature.”

“Copycat, like I said.” Jonah rubbed his eyes. “Someone obsessed. They wait for the execution, then they ‘resurrect’ him with their own killing. Symbolic. Dramatic. Exactly the kind of thing Crane would’ve appreciated.”

Mara stared at the blank wall for a moment. “Or it’s Elias’s prophecy fulfilling itself.”

Jonah groaned. “Don’t start.”

“He said he wasn’t talking about his body,” she insisted. “You heard the kids. ‘I will never die. I will live forever.’ Those weren’t random words. They’re a message.”

“Fine,” Jonah said. “He lives forever—in the mind of a new killer. In the headlines. In every wannabe psycho who wants a piece of his legend. But it’s not mystical, Mara. It’s pathological. And it’s our job to stop it.”

She didn’t argue. Not out loud.

Inside, she wasn’t so sure.

5. The Unfinished Count

Three days later, there was another body.

This time, it was a man in his forties, found seated on a park bench in Whitmore, forty miles from Easton. Pose identical to an old Crane victim—number nineteen, a gym teacher named Patrick Lowe. Eyes open. Arms at his sides. Fingers curled as if gripping invisible handles.

The local PD had recognized the staging immediately.

The media frenzy that followed was worse than Holt had feared. Within hours, the phrase “Crane Copycat” was trending. Within twenty-four, a talking head on a national network said, “Maybe Elias Crane was right. Maybe he will live forever.”

Mara threw a pen at the TV in the break room and stormed out.

The victims had names—Lauren Bishop and Kenneth Mars. They were not props in some perpetual performance.

In the task force room, an enlarged photo of Elias’s smug face stared down at her from the board. Beside it, two fresh photos: Lauren and Kenneth. Red string connected their scenes to old ones, tracing a grim genealogy of violence.

Jonah stood beside the board, arms folded. “Pattern’s clear,” he said. “Each copycat scene matches one of the original known Crane victims, down to the smallest details. Position. Location type. Even the time of day.”

“Was there audio this time?” Mara asked.

“Witness walking his dog heard a male voice say, and I quote, ‘You can’t kill an idea. Watch me prove it.’” He grimaced. “That line’s straight out of Elias’s second interview with you. The one that aired on cable.”

Mara remembered it vividly. She’d been younger then, still believing that if she looked a monster in the eye long enough, she could understand it.

On the recording, Elias had smiled and said, “You can’t kill an idea, Detective. Watch me prove it.”

Now, someone else was using his words as scripture.

“The press is eating it up,” Jonah continued. “We’ve got armchair profilers everywhere. Some say it’s a former worshipper, some say it’s a vigilante sending a message that executions don’t work. Take your pick.”

Mara stared at the board. Three empty spaces beneath Elias’s cluster of victims. Three blank labels that had haunted her for years.

“You ever notice,” she said softly, “that the victims he never admitted to matched a pattern too?”

Jonah blinked. “What do you mean? There were no victims he never—”

“He claimed thirty,” she cut in. “We had twenty-seven bodies. Twenty-seven confirmed. But when you map out those twenty-seven…look.”

She grabbed a marker and drew a circle around the cluster of old crime scene locations. Harlem. Whitmore. Easton. Two small towns in between.

“It’s not random. They roughly form a triangle, with this middle corridor.” She shaded in a shape. “We said the missing three were either outside the jurisdiction or figments of his ego. But what if they were here? Hidden, or never discovered? What if he did kill thirty people, and the copycat is—consciously or not—trying to complete something Elias couldn’t?”

Jonah frowned, following her lines. “You think our copycat knows about the missing three?”

“Maybe not specifically,” she said. “But he knows Elias’s work intimately. He knows the poses, the quotes, the timelines. He might’ve found something in Elias’s journals too.”

“Journals?” Jonah repeated.

“He wrote obsessively in prison,” Mara said. “Poems, manifestos, letters that never got sent. The state seized everything. Official line was that most of it was ‘rambling junk.’ But what if it wasn’t?”

Jonah rubbed his temples. “You’re suggesting the state sat on potentially relevant material in a high-profile serial case?”

“I’m suggesting they didn’t think it was relevant to known crimes,” she said. “Because it might not have been. It might be about the unknown ones.”

Jonah hesitated, then sighed. “All right. I’ll be the procedural adult. We ask Holt to request the journals. We go through them line by line. Maybe we find references to thirty, or to some grand design only he understood.”

“And in the meantime,” Mara said, “we assume our copycat won’t stop. He’s recreating the old murders as a way of resurrecting Elias. The question is: what happens when he reaches the twenty-seventh?”

“Or the thirtieth,” Jonah said quietly.

Silence stretched between them.

“That’s what this is,” Mara said at last. “His way of making ‘I will live forever’ true. Through someone else’s hands.”

6. Legacy

The journals arrived two days later in a battered cardboard box stamped with the state’s seal. Holt signed for them reluctantly.

“These better be worth the paperwork,” he grumbled.

Mara and Jonah hauled the box into the task force room. Inside were six thick notebooks and dozens of loose pages, all filled with Elias Crane’s cramped handwriting.

They divided the pile.

For hours, the room was filled only with the rustle of paper and the scratch of highlighters.

Mara waded through metaphors and half-formed philosophies. Elias compared himself to storms, to plagues, to music that never stopped playing. He wrote about control, about fear, about how “death is a door for most people but a mirror for me.”

Somewhere around the middle of the third notebook, she found it.

He had drawn three small circles at the bottom of a page, unconnected to any sentence. Underneath, in tiny letters, he’d written:

“Thirty lights out. Only twenty-seven acknowledged. The rest are for later. For after.”

Her skin prickled.

“Jonah,” she said, her voice tight.

He looked up from his own stack. “You got something?”

She slid the notebook across. He read the line, his jaw tightening.

“For after,” he repeated. “What the hell does that mean? After what? After death? After fame? After trial?”

“After he couldn’t do it himself anymore,” Mara said. “He was planning for a legacy. A continuation.”

“Through who?” Jonah asked. “He had no visitors besides you, his lawyer, and a priest. He was in isolation the last two years.”

“In isolation physically,” Mara said. “But he knew the press watched him. He knew the public was fascinated. He knew some people out there worshipped him. He said it himself during the third interview: ‘There are so many out there who understand me better than you ever will, Detective.’”

Jonah swore softly. “You think he’s been communicating with someone indirectly. Through interviews, through court transcripts, through lines like—”

“‘I will never die,’” she finished. “He was planting seeds. Little messages. The kind that only someone attuned to his language would notice.”

“Someone like our copycat,” Jonah said.

They stared at the notebook, at those three small circles.

“Three missing victims,” Mara said quietly. “Three planned ‘after’ murders. Thirty total. He wasn’t lying about the number. He just outsourced the last three.”

“The state killed a man,” Jonah said slowly, “but they didn’t kill his design.”

Mara closed the notebook, a cold determination settling in her bones.

“Then we will,” she said.

7. Never Die

The third copycat murder happened faster than they’d hoped.

A young man in his twenties, found in a motel room on the outskirts of town. Same pose, same open eyes, same curled fingers. No visible wounds.

By then, the entire region was on edge. Reporters camped outside the precinct, demanding answers. Talk shows ran segments titled “The Crane Curse” and “Did We Execute the Wrong Man?”

Mara wanted to tear each headline down with her bare hands.

In the motel room, she stood over the third victim, feeling the walls closing in.

“That’s three,” Jonah said quietly behind her. “Three known victims copied. Three missing in Crane’s own count. The math adds up, and I hate it.”

Mara swallowed. “The ME still says cause of death is unclear?”

“Prelim says some kind of induced cardiac arrest,” Jonah replied. “No injection marks, no ligature marks. No signs of struggle. Same as Lauren and Kenneth. It’s like someone flipped a switch in their hearts.”

“Fear?” Mara suggested. “Some kind of drug that metabolizes quickly?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But if it is, it’s sophisticated. Our guy isn’t just some obsessed fan. He’s smart. Careful. And he likes symbolism as much as Elias did.”

Mara walked to the motel desk. On the cheap, splintered surface lay a small, black digital recorder.

Gloved, she picked it up and pressed play.

Static, then a voice she knew too well:

“You can kill a body,” Elias Crane’s recorded voice said. “But you cannot kill the idea of me. I will never die. I will live forever.”

More static. Then another voice, distorted by a filter, low and calm:

“I will finish what you started.”

The recording clicked off.

Mara stared at the device, her pulse hammering.

“He’s talking to him,” Jonah said. “Or pretending to. Like a disciple.”

“Not just a disciple,” Mara said. “A collaborator. Elias laid out the plan. This guy is executing the ‘after’ phase.”

“So what now?” Jonah asked.

“Now,” Mara said, “we stop giving Elias Crane the last word. We profile the copycat for who he is, not who he worships.”

She turned to the motel’s peeling door, to the world outside where cameras and fear waited.

“Elias was right about one thing,” she said. “You can’t kill an idea. But you can hunt the person who thinks they’re its chosen messenger.”

8. Epilogue: The Spine’s Chill

Weeks later, the press still talked about the “Crane Copycat,” but more of the coverage had shifted to the victims: Lauren Bishop, a graphic designer who volunteered at animal shelters. Kenneth Mars, a night-shift nurse who sent money back to his parents overseas. Daniel Chu, a grad student who tutored kids in his neighborhood for free.

Their stories mattered. Mara made sure of it. Every time a reporter pushed for details about Elias, she redirected them to the lives cut short by someone trying to make a dead man’s words come true.

The copycat remained at large, but they had clues—van sightings, voice analysis on the distorted recording, procurement paths for rare cardiac-affecting substances. It would take time, but Mara believed they would find him.

Belief in justice was perhaps naïve. But it was the only thing that kept her from sinking into the same abyss Elias had gazed into and decided he liked.

One night, she sat in her apartment, the city’s glow painting dim shapes on her walls. The TV was off. The box of Elias’s journals sat in the corner, lid closed, as if the words inside were sleeping.

She poured a glass of water and sat at her small kitchen table. The silence felt heavier than usual.

On an impulse she didn’t fully understand, she opened her laptop and pulled up the old recording of Elias’s final interview. The one before he was moved to death row. The one where he’d looked into the camera with that cold, unblinking stare.

She pressed play.

“You think this ends with me,” he said to her younger self onscreen. “You think you’re cutting off the head of the snake. What you don’t understand, Detective, is that heads are memorable. People remember heads. They imitate them. They become them.”

Her younger self leaned forward, jaw tight. “People will remember your victims,” she said. “Not you.”

Elias had smiled. “We’ll see which names last longer.”

Mara stopped the video.

She sat there for a long time, listening to the hum of her refrigerator, the distant sound of sirens far below.

Then she opened a blank document.

At the top, she typed:

THE CRANE CASE: NAMES THAT MUST BE REMEMBERED

She wrote Lauren’s name first, then Kenneth’s, then Daniel’s. Then all twenty-seven from before. Brief descriptions of who they were, not how they died.

If Elias Crane would live on as an idea, she decided, then so would they. Not as footnotes in his legend, but as the true center of it.

Somewhere in the cold archives of the prison, his body lay in a drawer. His voice still echoed in recordings, in transcripts, in the mind of a killer who believed himself chosen.

And yet, despite the memory of those last words, despite the repeating line that sent chills through witnesses and viewers and late-night audiences—

“I will never die. I will live forever.”

—Mara found a different sentence settling into her own bones, deeper and quieter.

No matter how many times your words echo, she thought, they’re not the last ones.

She began to type, line after line, building a counterweight to a dead man’s promise.

Outside, the city moved on. Somewhere in its maze, a copycat walked, planning what he thought would be the final act in a dark inheritance.

But he had made one mistake.

He’d underestimated how stubborn the living could be.

And somewhere, invisible but very real, a new idea was forming—one that Elias Crane had never accounted for:

You can’t kill an idea.
But you can outlive it.