After 3 years of silence, I came home to find my father’s house repainted and a stranger’s car in the driveway. My stepmother told me he was dead and buried. But at the cemetery, there was no name on the stone. An old man approached me with a rusted key and said, ‘Your father isn’t here.’ The letter inside the envelope was dated yesterday… and it contained a set of coordinates that led to the basement of the house I was just kicked out of…

I spun around, but I wasn’t fast enough. A heavy object slammed into the side of my head. The room exploded in a burst of white light, and then the world went black.

***

### Chapter 3: The Ghost in the Machine

I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth and the cold sensation of steel against my wrists. I was zip-tied to a chair in the center of the room.

The lamp was now pointed directly at my face.

“I told you, Leo. There was nothing for you here.”

Linda stood in the shadows, silhouetted by the dim light of the hallway. Beside her stood a man I recognized instantly—**Detective Marcus Vance**, the lead investigator on my case three years ago. The man who had “found” the incriminating files on my laptop.

“You’re a hard man to keep down, Leo,” Vance said, tossing a blackjack onto the desk. He picked up the blue ledger. “But your father was always the smarter one. He knew how to hide. Too bad he didn’t know how to stay hidden.”

“Where is he?” I hissed, my head throbbing with a rhythmic, pulsing agony.

Linda stepped into the light. She looked disappointed, like a teacher dealing with a slow student. “Thomas is… in a state of transition. He thought he could outplay me by faking a heart attack. He thought Harold would be his little secret messenger. But everyone has a price, Leo. Even old groundskeepers.”

My heart sank. Harold. He hadn’t been a messenger; he had been a lure.

“You killed him?” I whispered.