Chapter 6 - Blood for Blood
The air vanished from my lungs.
Caleb hadn't just stood by while criminals took her. He had authorized it. He had walked out of that shed knowing what Vance Kane was going to do to our ten-year-old daughter to protect his own miserable, gambling-addicted life.
"Audrey, please," Julian begged, dropping to his knees, his hands held high in surrender. "I tried to stop them! I swear to God I tried! But Kane pulled a gun on me! I had to run! If I go to the police, Kane will butcher my kids too!"
"You had a choice, Julian," I said, my finger tightening on the heavy iron trigger. "Rosie didn't."
"Audrey, don't! If you kill me, you'll never find the offshore accounts! You'll never prove Caleb did it! Detective Miller is Kane’s cousin! The whole police report is being doctored right now to pin the whole thing on a random drifter!"
I paused, the flare gun still leveled at his throat. "What did you say?"
Julian nodded frantically, smelling a shred of hope. "Miller! Detective Miller—the lead investigator on Rosie's case! He’s Vance Kane’s first cousin! Why do you think the perimeter searches were delayed by twelve hours? Why do you think the forensic team didn't check the trunk of Caleb's car? Miller wiped the dashcam footage from the intersection outside her school!"
The entire puzzle snapped into place with terrifying clarity.
The sympathetic detective who had patted my shoulder at the police station, telling me to go home and rest. The man who assured me they were pursuing 'strong leads out of state.' He wasn't incompetent. He was the cleanup crew.
"Give me your phone," I ordered.
Julian hastily pulled his personal phone from his pocket and slid it across the wet floorboards toward my boots. "The password is her birthday. Rosie's birthday. 0-9-1-4. Everything is in the encrypted folder under *Project Echo*. The bank routing numbers, Miller’s wire receipts, the photos of the shed... all of it. I kept copies so Caleb couldn't cut me out."
I bent down, retrieved the phone without taking my eyes off him, and slipped it into my pocket.
"Thank you, Julian," I whispered.
"You... you're letting me go?" he asked, relief washing over his sweaty face as he began to rise to his feet.
"No," I said.
I fired the flare gun directly past his ear into the ceiling rafters.
The high-intensity magnesium flare ignited with a deafening roar and a blinding burst of crimson fire. It slammed into the dry cedar roof beams, showering the room in a cascade of white-hot sparks. Within three seconds, the aged, resin-soaked timber caught fire, bursting into an uncontrollable wall of roaring orange flames.
Julian screamed, diving sideways as burning beams began to crack and collapse.
I stepped backward out the side door, slammed the heavy iron latch from the outside, and jammed a thick steel pry bar through the hasp.
Inside, Julian pounded frantically against the reinforced wood. "Audrey! Let me out! AUDREY! IT’S BURNING!"
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"The water is right beneath you, Julian," I shouted through the crack. "Jump through the trapdoor into the lake. If you can swim across with the current, maybe you live. That's a thousand times more mercy than you gave Rosie."
I turned and walked away into the fog, the heat of the roaring inferno warming my back.
