Chapter 5 - The House That ListenedThe police surrounded the garage before we could reach the exit.
Arthur did not resist when the officers approached the car. He sat with his hands visible, while I struggled to understand how a man could be both the killer of someone and the suspected murderer of a man who had officially been dead for more than a decade.
One officer opened my door.
“Miss Hale, come with us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at the moment.”
“That's comforting.”
He ignored my sarcasm and helped me out.
Arthur was taken in the opposite direction, his hands cuffed behind his back. Before they led him away, he looked at me.
“Don't go back to the estate.”
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“Anywhere but there.”
Then he disappeared into a police vehicle.
I stood beneath the fluorescent lights with my father's photograph in one hand and the silver key in the other.
A woman in a dark coat approached me.
She was in her fifties, with short gray hair and a scar running from her left temple to her cheekbone.
“Norah Hale?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Detective Evelyn Shaw. I need you to come downtown.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“That depends on what you know.”
“I know very little.”
“That's usually what people say when they know exactly enough to be dangerous.”
She opened the passenger door of an unmarked vehicle.
I got in.
For two hours, Detective Shaw asked questions about my father, my employment, Arthur's arrival, and the photograph. I told her everything except one thing: the message on Arthur's phone.
I didn't know whether the message was evidence or bait.
And I had begun to understand that in Arthur Costello's world, the difference could get a person killed.
At six in the morning, Detective Shaw showed me a photograph of Samuel Bellini.
He was older than the man in Arthur's photograph, with silver hair and a distinctive scar across his chin.
I recognized him.
Not from the photograph.
From the estate.
He had visited the house twice during my first six months of employment. Both times, he had arrived through the north gate and left by the south. The guards had treated him with the kind of respect they usually reserved for Arthur.
On the second visit, he had handed me a coin and told me to keep it.
I had forgotten about it until that moment.
I reached into my pocket and found the old coin still there.
Detective Shaw went pale when she saw the symbol engraved on it.
“Where did you get this?”
“From a man who visited the estate.”
“When?”
“Last winter.”
She turned the coin over.
On the back was a number.
317.
“What did he say to you?”
“That I reminded him of someone.”
“Who?”
“He didn't tell me.”
Detective Shaw called someone outside the room. She spoke in a low voice, her words muffled by the closed door.
When she returned, she no longer looked at me as though I were merely a witness.
“Your father was involved in an investigation that was officially closed twenty-two years ago,” she said. “The records were sealed after three officers died. One of them was my father.”
I stared at her.
“You think my father had something to do with their deaths?”
“I think someone wanted the investigation buried badly enough to kill the people conducting it.”
She placed a new photograph on the table.
It showed my father leaving the Blackthorn Hotel.
Beside him stood a younger Detective Shaw's father, wearing a police uniform.
The date was printed beneath the image.
Twenty-two years earlier.
“Your father may have been the only person who knew what happened inside that hotel,” she said.
“And you think the ledger proves it?”
“I think the ledger may prove who ordered the murders.”
“Then why hasn't anyone found it?”
Detective Shaw tapped the number on the coin.
“Because the people looking for it have been searching for a ledger.”
She leaned toward me.
“Your father may have hidden something else.”
Before I could answer, the interview room door opened.
A uniformed officer entered with a tablet.
“Detective, you need to see this.”
He turned the screen toward her.
Security footage showed the Costello estate's basement corridor at 2:58 a.m.
I watched myself open my bedroom door.
I watched Arthur enter.
I watched myself remove the security chain.
Then the footage jumped forward.
My door opened again.
Vincent Rourke walked inside.
For several seconds, the image remained still.
Then the timestamp changed.
The footage showed Vincent leaving my room alone.
He stopped in the corridor and turned toward the camera.
He smiled.
Then he reached up, touched the lens, and the screen went black.
Detective Shaw's face hardened.
“He knows the cameras recorded him.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he wanted us to see him.”
She picked up the coin and slipped it into an evidence bag.
“Miss Hale, I'm placing you under protective custody.”
“Am I allowed to refuse?”
“Yes.”
“Would you recommend it?”
“No.”
Before I could decide, my phone vibrated.
A message appeared from an unknown number.
It contained a single photograph.
My father's hospital room.
His empty bed.
And beside it, a man I had never seen before holding a handwritten sign.
BRING US THE KEY, OR THE NEXT BED WILL BE YOURS.
Underneath the photograph was a final message.
ASK DETECTIVE SHAW WHAT SHE DID TO HER FATHER.
I looked up.
Detective Shaw was no longer watching the screen.
May you like
She was watching me.
And she looked as though she had been waiting twenty-two years for someone to ask that question.
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