Chapter 4 - Unlocking the Past
The house on Maple Drive was dark when I pulled up in my rental car. Yellow police tape fluttered weakly across the front porch columns in the midnight breeze. I ducked beneath the tape, unlocked the front door with my own key, and stepped inside. The air still carried that faint, metallic tang of iron.
I didn't turn on the overhead lights. Instead, I pulled a tactical flashlight from my duffel, clicking on the low-intensity blue filter so it wouldn't cast reflections through the front windows.
I walked straight to Violet's bedroom at the end of the hall. Her room was a shrine to a sixteen-year-old girl's quiet life: pastel acoustic foam on the walls, a stack of art sketchbooks on her desk, a stuffed rabbit propped against a pile of pillows, and fairy lights strung along the headboard. It looked innocent, untouched by the horrors that had unfolded fifty feet away.
That was the problem. Monsters don't attack random houses on quiet suburban streets unless they are looking for something specific, or unless they belong in that house's world.
I sat at her wooden desk and opened her laptop. It was locked with a six-digit passcode. I smiled grimly—Violet had used her birthday month and date: 0519. She had always been predictable with numbers, a habit I had tried to train out of her during our weekend camping trips, but she was just a kid.
The screen flickered to life. I bypassed the standard desktop and dove straight into her encrypted messaging apps, cloud backups, and browser history.
For two hours, I waded through the ordinary digital debris of a teenager's life: K-pop music videos, geometry homework assignments, group chats with school friends discussing upcoming exams, and harmless exchanges about weekend plans. Nothing out of the ordinary. No stalkers. No threatening emails.
Just as I was about to check her deleted items folder, my satellite burner phone buzzed against the desktop. It was Marcus.
"I've got something," Marcus said without preamble. "Traffic cameras caught a dark blue SUV idling three blocks from your house at 3:15 p.m. today. The license plates were swapped, but my facial-recognition algorithms cross-referenced the driver against federal contractor databases. You know who was driving, Julian?"
My grip tightened around the phone. "Tell me."
"A guy named Derek Vance—no relation to the detective. He's a mid-level logistics coordinator for Apex Global Security. Your old private military contractor buddies."
My blood turned to liquid nitrogen. Apex Global. A private security firm run by Victor Sterling, a ruthless operator I had served with in Afghanistan. Sterling and I had parted ways five years ago over moral differences concerning civilian casualties in a Black Sea operation. I had turned my evidence over to the Pentagon; Sterling had walked away with a slap on the wrist and a multi-million-dollar defense contract.
May you like
"Why would Apex be interested in my house?" I asked, my voice dangerously low.
"They weren't interested in your house, Julian," Marcus said grimly. "They were interested in what you brought back from your last deployment in Bogotá six months ago. The encrypted flash drive containing the offshore shell accounts of every corrupt official funneling black-ops money through the agency. You told them you destroyed it. They think Violet had the backup."
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(1048x378:1050x380)/Jenna-Bush-Hager-100223-c94955eb572d47ea815a340c18c6e771.jpg)
