Chapter 3 - A Camera in the Dark
Daniel watched the video once, then again, because his mind refused to accept what his eyes reported. Their nursery. Their sleeping child. A tiny green light on the baby monitor. The camera angle came from the closet.
Claire pressed a hand over her mouth. "Someone was in our house."
"Or someone's inside now," Reyes said.
The officers swept every room, closet, and crawl space. They found no intruder. In the nursery, though, Reyes discovered a lens no bigger than a pea embedded inside a plastic owl on the bookshelf. Daniel had bought the owl at a yard sale three days earlier. A woman in a yellow raincoat had insisted it was free.
He could remember her smile now. He wished he couldn't.
Reyes bagged the owl. "We'll need your security footage. Don't touch the router."
"We don't have security cameras," Daniel said.
"You do now," Claire replied.
They spent the afternoon at a police station where the chairs had metal arms and the vending machine ate Daniel's last five-dollar bill. Eli fell asleep against Claire's shoulder while two detectives asked the same questions from different angles. What did Owen want? Where had Claire lived as a child? Did anyone besides family know her father's estate was never settled?
Claire answered until her voice turned papery. She had always described her dad as difficult, private, stubborn. Under fluorescent lights she admitted something else: he had been terrified near the end of his life. Once, he phoned her at midnight and said, "If Owen asks, the documents burned." She had assumed it was a fight over money.
"Documents for what?" Detective Malik asked.
"I never found out."
Daniel remembered a photograph in their bedroom: Claire at eighteen, laughing beside her father in front of a peeling white house. She had cut Owen out of the print. What else had she edited out to keep living?
When they were cleared to leave, Malik advised a hotel and changed locks. Daniel agreed without hesitation.
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In the station parking lot, Eli woke, touched Claire's cheek, and said, "Mommy, car goes boom."
A second later the family minivan across the row exploded into an orange ball of fire.
