Chapter 6 - Rachel insisted she hadn't sent the message.I believed her.
At least for the moment.
The police traced the number.
Burner phone.
No location.
No useful data.
But Rachel had something else.
A story.
She told us that after Sophie was taken, she spent years trying to find her.
Every lead disappeared.
Every file was sealed.
Every person involved claimed not to remember her.
Then, six months before she came to our station, she received an anonymous photograph.
Sophie.
Age five.
Standing in front of our house.
Rachel recognized her immediately.
She had spent years memorizing the shape of her daughter's face.
“Why didn't you come before?” I asked.
“I tried.”
“What stopped you?”
She looked at me.
“Mark.”
“He threatened you?”
“Not directly.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out another envelope.
Inside were photocopies of threatening letters.
No signatures.
Only one symbol.
A black circle with a vertical line through it.
Rachel said she had seen the same symbol in Sophie's old adoption documents.
Officer Harris had the files sent for analysis.
The result came back an hour later.
The symbol was connected to a private child-placement organization that had been shut down nine years earlier.
Three of its former employees had disappeared.
One had been convicted.
Another had died.
The third was still missing.
Mark had worked for the organization.
That was the first real explanation for the photographs of other children.
But it opened a much darker question.
How many children had passed through the same system?
The police searched our house again.
This time they focused on the bathroom.
They removed the mirror.
They lifted floorboards.
They examined the bathtub.
Then one technician noticed something odd about the drain.
The metal cover was newer than the rest.
He removed it.
Inside was a small waterproof memory card.
I felt sick.
The technician inserted it into a computer.
Folders appeared.
Dozens.
Each had a child's first name.
Some were empty.
Some contained photographs.
Some contained audio recordings.
Then we found Sophie's folder.
It had been created eight months earlier.
Inside was a single video.
The technician played it.
Mark sat in the bathroom.
Sophie sat in front of him.
The timer rested on the counter.
The paper cup was beside it.
Mark spoke.
“Tell me what happens on Sunday.”
Sophie said nothing.
“Who comes to the house?”
Silence.
“Who takes Mommy away?”
Sophie started crying.
“I don't want Mommy to go.”
Mark leaned closer.
“She isn't going anywhere.”
“Then why do I have to say it?”
Mark looked directly at the camera.
And smiled.
Because he knew he was being recorded.
Then he said something that made the police freeze.
“Because the person who records this isn't the person who owns it.”
The video ended.
No explanation.
No clue.
Until the technician examined the file metadata.
The camera had not been in the bathroom.
It had been in the mirror.
And whoever had installed it had remotely accessed it from another location.
Officer Harris stared at the screen.
“Someone besides Mark was watching.”
The detective's phone rang.
He answered.
His expression changed.
Then he walked slowly toward me.
“We found the house the messages were coming from.”
“Where?”
He looked at Rachel.
“Across the street.”
I turned toward the station window.
Our neighborhood was fifteen miles away.
Across our street stood an abandoned blue house.
Its windows had been boarded for years.
The police had just searched it.
And inside, they had found something waiting for us.
A wall covered with photographs.
Photographs of Sophie.
Photographs of me.
And one photograph that had been taken only twenty minutes earlier.
May you like
It showed Sophie sleeping on the station couch.
Someone was still watching us.
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