Chapter 5 - Interrogation in the Dark
Officer Ryan Hayes froze, his fingers hovering half an inch above the polymer grip of his Glock. His eyes darted from my tactical chest rig to the suppressed barrel of my carbine, and finally up to my face.
The color drained entirely from his cheeks. The arrogant suburban patrolman vanished, replaced by the naked, shivering realization that he was looking at a ghost he had no business waking up.
"Mason..." Hayes stammered, his voice pitching an octave higher. "Man, you've got this all wrong. It was an accident. Brad didn't mean to—"
"Shut your mouth," I said, stepping across the Persian rug until the muzzle of my rifle was three inches from the bridge of his nose. "Every word you speak from this point forward is just wasting air you aren't going to need tomorrow."
Councilman Richard Vance backed away against the mahogany bookshelves, his hands raised, trembling violently. "Mr. Miller—Mason, please. Let's be rational. We can settle this. Money, property, whatever you want—name your price. My campaign fund can cover—"
"Your campaign fund isn't going to buy you a tombstone, Richard," I interrupted, never taking my eyes off Hayes. "Move. Into the study. Now."
We filed into the oak-paneled study. The French doors were closed, sealing us off from the rest of the house. I kicked a leather armchair toward the center of the room.
"Sit," I ordered Hayes.
He dropped into the chair, sweating profusely, his chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow gasps. "What do you want from us, Mason? The police department—they'll know you were here. My cruiser has GPS tracking—"
"Your cruiser's GPS is currently looping a static signal from three blocks away, thanks to a military-grade satellite jammer sitting on my belt," I said smoothly. "As far as your dispatchers know, you're currently parked outside a 24-hour donut shop on 4th Street."
Hayes swallowed hard, his throat clicking in the quiet room. "You're insane. You're throwing your whole life away for a kid who's probably brain-dead by now anyway—"
Before he could finish the sentence, I crossed the floor in a blur, grabbed him by the tactical collar of his uniform shirt, and slammed his head down onto the mahogany desk with enough force to shatter the glass inkwell.
A sharp crack echoed through the room. Hayes let out a choked, gurgling scream, blood pooling from a split lip across the polished wood.
"Say her name again," I whispered directly into his ear, pressing the cold steel barrel of my pistol against the back of his neck. "Say Violet's name again with that trash in your mouth, and I'll skip the trial entirely."
"Okay! Okay!" Hayes sobbed, his hands clawing uselessly at the edge of the desk. "I'll talk! I'll tell you everything!"
Councilman Vance collapsed into a corner sofa, covering his face with trembling hands. "It was the municipal zoning grants," Vance muttered, his voice broken. "The drainage contract for the new industrial park. We embezzled two million dollars through shell companies. Violet found the ledger on the home network share drive while she was doing a school project. She didn't even know what it meant—she just thought it looked weird and tried to upload it to her cloud drive as a backup."
"And you decided her life was worth two million dollars," I said, my voice dropping so low it barely registered above the rain pattering against the windowpane.
"Brad panicked!" Vance cried out, tears leaking through his fingers. "He went to retrieve the drive because he knew her father was an ex-soldier and would find out. He didn't mean to hurt her—he swear to God he didn't! Ryan just helped him cover it up!"
I looked down at Hayes, who was whimpering against the desk, blood dripping onto the carpet.
"Cover it up," I repeated softly. "You didn't just cover it up. You walked into my house, you beat a sixteen-year-old girl into a coma, and you left her to drown in her own blood while you went out for coffee."
I pulled a pair of heavy tactical zip-ties from my belt, yanked Hayes's arms behind the back of the chair, and locked them down so tight the plastic bit deep into his wrists. Then I did the same to Vance, binding him securely to the sofa frame.
"What are you going to do to us?" Vance whispered, staring up at me with eyes wide with terror. "You can't just execute us. People will look. The FBI—"
"The FBI isn't coming tonight, Richard," I said, walking over to the study's built-in computer terminal. I plugged a secure flash drive into the USB port and downloaded every file, every bank routing number, every offshore shell company record, and the complete confession audio I had just recorded on my encrypted burner phone.
"What are you downloading?" Hayes choked out.
"Your retirement papers," I said.
I pulled the flash drive out, slipped it into my pocket, and walked toward the door.
"Where are you going?" Vance shouted in panic. "You can't leave us tied up here!"
"Relax," I said, pausing at the threshold with my carbine raised. "I'm not going to kill you here. That would ruin your expensive rug."
I stepped out into the hallway, pulled the heavy oak study door shut, and locked it from the outside with a hardened steel padlock I'd brought specifically for the job.
As I descended the grand staircase and slipped back out into the rainy night, my phone buzzed in my pocket with an incoming call from the hospital.
May you like
My heart stopped. I answered instantly.
"Mason?" It was Harper. She wasn't crying anymore. Her voice was trembling, but there was a strange, impossible note of light in it. "Mason, get back here. Right now."
