Chapter 12 - THE TWENTY-FOURTH RECORDING
The screen flickered, casting a sickly blue glare across Daniel’s face.
The footage didn't open with sound. It opened with static, followed by the faint, muffled hum of central heating. The camera angle was high, looking downward from the corner of Daniel’s master bedroom ceiling—a vantage point right above the wardrobe.
Daniel watched himself sleeping.
On the screen, his chest rose and fell beneath the charcoal-gray comforter. He was alone in the king-sized bed. The digital clock on his nightstand read 3:42 AM. For twelve agonizing seconds, nothing moved except the faint flutter of the window curtain caught in the HVAC draft.
Then, the bedroom door on the screen pushed open by an inch.
A gloved hand reached inside. It wasn't holding a weapon. It was holding a small handheld audio recorder, aiming it into the room. Daniel leaned closer to his laptop, his pulse hammering in his ears like a trip hammer. The camera slowly zoomed in on his sleeping face. The resolution was terrifyingly sharp—4K, professional-grade lens work.
Suddenly, a voice whispered from the laptop speakers. It wasn't Evelyn’s voice.
It was a man’s voice. Low, gravelly, and bone-chillingly calm.
*"He sleeps like an innocent man, Clarissa. But debts aren't erased just because you put someone in a cage."*
The gloved hand withdrew. The door clicked shut. The video cut to black.
Daniel slammed the laptop lid closed, his chest heaving as if he had just run five miles through deep snow. Clarissa. That was Evelyn’s middle name—the name she went by before she moved to this town, before she married Daniel under the pretense of being an orphaned preschool teacher with no living relatives.
During the police interrogation, Evelyn had refused to speak. Her court-appointed public defender had seemed bewildered by her silence. She had simply stared at the mirrored glass of the interrogation room with an empty, smug smile, as if she were waiting for an inevitable rescue.
Daniel grabbed his cell phone and dialed Detective Mark Miller’s personal number. It rang four times before a groggy, irritated voice answered.
"Daniel? It’s two in the morning. Is Ethan okay?"
"Miller, she isn't alone," Daniel choked out, pacing between the refrigerator and the counter, his eyes darting toward the dark window panes. "Someone was inside my house three nights ago. They left a thumb drive on my porch ten minutes ago."
Silence stretched across the line, heavy and abrupt.
"Daniel, listen to me very carefully," Detective Miller said, the sleep vanished entirely from his voice. "Get your kids into one room right now. Lock the bedroom door. Keep your weapon ready. I’m sending two cruisers to your address immediately."
"Who is he, Mark? Who was she talking to?"
May you like
"We just received a notice from the state penitentiary forty minutes ago," Miller whispered, his voice laced with dread. "The transfer van carrying Evelyn from the county jail to the high-security psychiatric wing never arrived at its destination. They found the transport van overturned on Route 9. Both guards are dead. Daniel... Evelyn is gone."
***
