Chapter 10 - The Man Who Came Back
"Get down!" Daniel shouted.
Owen dropped. The window shattered above him. Daniel hit the floor as glass swept over the counter, and a second crack split the night. He crawled toward the hall. In the locked bathroom, Eli began to wail.
"Stay inside!" Daniel called.
Police sirens rose almost immediately. Malik's team had been monitoring the street from a distance. The shooter fled across a neighboring yard; officers found a discarded rifle but no suspect. Owen was taken into custody, bleeding from a cut on his hand.
At the station, he refused to answer questions until Claire entered the room. "You look like Dad," he told her.
"You look like trouble."
He laughed once, without humor. "Fair."
"Were you the one at our door?"
"Yes. I wanted the box. I thought you had it."
Owen's confession came in rough pieces rather than a clean speech. He had been twenty-three, broke, and eager to prove he was smarter than his father. Mason paid his rent, bought him drinks, and called him indispensable. The first false signature seemed harmless. The next one was easier. By the time anyone died, Owen had made a habit of looking away. "People think one bad choice changes your life," he said. "Mostly it's a dozen small ones, and you keep telling yourself you can stop tomorrow." Claire listened without offering mercy he hadn't earned.
"And the camera in Eli's room? The car bomb?"
"Not me." Owen's hands shook around the paper cup. "You think I don't know what I look like? I did terrible things. I took money from Mason after the collapse. I helped bury the reports. But I didn't put a camera near your kid."
Claire leaned across the table. "Then why mention Eli?"
Owen stared. "I never did."
Nora's warning came back to Daniel with a cold precision: if Owen finds the child before I do. Somebody had convinced Nora that Owen was a danger to Eli. Maybe she was right. Maybe they were all being played.
Owen told them Ben had planned to reveal the falsified inspections at a public hearing. On the night Ben died, he'd arranged to meet a witness at the old family home. Ben never made it. Later, Owen found a voicemail of his father begging him not to trust Mason.
"I kept it," Owen said. "It's on a drive. I hid it in the one place Mason's people wouldn't search."
"Where?" Malik asked.
May you like
Owen looked at Claire. "The house where we grew up. Under the fireplace."
Claire's voice barely rose above a whisper. "That house burned down last winter."
