Chapter 10 - THE NINE FAMILIES
Nine families.
Nine fathers.
Nine children.
All photographed secretly.
Some outside schools.
Some at parks.
Some through house windows.
Every father had something in common.
Widowed.
Divorced.
Financially stable.
Young child.
Vanessa—or Rebecca—had studied them like job applications.
I was number eight.
Number nine was a man named Jason Cole.
His wife had died eighteen months earlier.
He had a six-year-old daughter named Lily.
And three weeks ago, he started dating a woman named Natalie.
Police showed me Natalie’s photograph.
Different hair.
Different clothes.
But I recognized her instantly.
She had been at my house.
Vanessa introduced her as a coworker named Kim.
My stomach dropped.
“There are more of them.”
Hale nodded.
“This looks organized.”
“How many?”
“We don’t know.”
“Is Michael the leader?”
“We don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
His eyes hardened.
“We know Jason and his daughter are missing.”
The room went silent.
“When?”
“He didn’t show up to work yesterday. His daughter missed school.”
“Find them.”
“We are.”
“No. Find them now.”
Hale looked tired.
“We’re trying.”
I thought about that cage.
Then I imagined another child inside one.
“We have to tell the public.”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“If they know what we know, they scatter.”
“They already scattered!”
“We caught Shaw.”
“And Vanessa’s gone. Michael’s gone. Natalie’s gone. Jason and his daughter are gone.”
Hale rubbed his forehead.
I knew he hated it too.
But police work moved by rules.
Vanessa did not.
That night, Noah came downstairs because he couldn’t sleep.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Can bad people stop being bad?”
The question caught me off guard.
“Sometimes.”
“Can Vanessa?”
I thought carefully.
“I don’t know.”
He climbed onto the couch beside me.
“She was nice sometimes.”
“I know.”
“She made pancakes.”
“I remember.”
“She took care of me when I had the flu.”
“I remember that too.”
He looked confused.
“How can somebody be nice and bad?”
I swallowed.
“People aren’t always one thing.”
“Did she love us?”
I couldn’t answer.
Then Noah remembered something.
“She had a necklace.”
“What necklace?”
“A silver key.”
My pulse jumped.
“A key?”
“She always wore it at the lake.”
Hale had mentioned that the hidden room contained a locked steel cabinet police couldn’t open on site.
I called him.
Within twenty minutes, investigators enlarged old photographs of Vanessa.
There it was.
A small silver key hanging around her neck.
But in the newest security footage from a gas station, Vanessa was no longer wearing it.
“Maybe she lost it,” I said.
Hale looked doubtful.
Then Noah tugged my sleeve.
“She didn’t lose it.”
I looked down.
“How do you know?”
He reached into the pocket of his little blue backpack.
“I took it.”
He opened his hand.
A silver key lay in his palm.
Hale stared.
“When?”
“At the lake.”
“Why?”
Noah’s face changed.
“Because I thought it opened the red door.”
Hale took the key carefully.
Twenty minutes later, an officer drove it to the cabin.
At 1:13 a.m., Hale got the call.
The key opened the steel cabinet.
Inside was a laptop.
Documents.
Cash.
And a handwritten list of names.
At the bottom of that list was Jason Cole.
May you like
Beside his name were two words.
TONIGHT — FIRE.
