Chapter 9 - SOMEONE INSIDE
The hospital went into security lockdown.
Detective Hale called cybercrime.
Hospital staff checked the room's television system.
Someone had accessed the internal network remotely.
“Can you trace it?” Ethan asked.
A technician shook his head.
“Not quickly.”
Hale looked at the door.
“We're moving Emmie.”
“To where?”
“Another floor. No public registration.”
Ethan picked up her bag.
“I'm going with her.”
“Of course.”
Then his phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
A photo appeared.
His house.
Taken from across the street.
Timestamp: two minutes ago.
Below it:
Laura kept better secrets than you do.
Ethan showed Hale.
“Someone's at my house.”
Hale immediately sent officers.
Then another message arrived.
A second photograph.
Laura.
Alive.
Standing beside a storage facility.
Date stamped seventeen months earlier.
Ethan stared.
“I've never seen this picture.”
The next text came fast.
ASK WHAT SHE HID IN UNIT 214.
Hale saw it.
“Could be bait.”
“It probably is.”
“Which means you are not going alone.”
Ethan looked at Emmie.
She was listening.
“Mom had a storage place?”
“I don't know.”
Emmie suddenly said, “The key.”
Ethan turned.
“What key?”
“Mom's little silver key.”
His pulse jumped.
“Where did you see it?”
“She put it in the green box.”
Ethan knew the box immediately.
Laura's old recipe tin.
He had not opened it since her death.
It sat in the top kitchen cabinet.
Officers searched Ethan's home and found nobody.
At 10:30 p.m., Hale drove Ethan there while another detective stayed with Emmie.
The recipe tin was exactly where Ethan remembered.
He pulled it down.
Inside were handwritten recipes.
A photograph from their wedding.
Emmie's kindergarten picture.
And taped beneath the bottom insert—
a silver key.
Attached to it was a tag.
214.
Ethan sat down hard.
“She knew.”
Hale looked around.
“She knew something.”
“Why didn't she tell me?”
“Maybe she planned to.”
Ethan found another folded paper.
Laura's handwriting.
Only one sentence.
If anything happens to me, do not trust the first explanation.
Ethan closed his eyes.
For fourteen months, the first explanation had been the only explanation he allowed himself to believe.
Accident.
Bad brakes.
Terrible luck.
Now he realized Laura had been afraid before she died.
Hale said, “We need to locate the storage facility.”
Ethan's phone buzzed again.
New message.
MIDNIGHT. UNIT 214. COME ALONE OR THE SCHOOL GETS ANOTHER VISITOR TOMORROW.
Hale read it.
“You are absolutely not going alone.”
Ethan looked at the clock.
10:42.
Then a new image appeared.
It showed Mrs. Bell, Emmie's teacher.
Her hands were tied.
Her mouth covered.
And beside her face was a handwritten sign.
May you like
11:30. NOT MIDNIGHT. I CHANGED MY MIND.
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