Chapter 3 - The Empty Room
The stench hit us the moment the heavy steel door was pried open—a mix of damp earth, bleach, and something metallic that made my throat close up.
David grabbed my hand, squeezing it tightly as we followed Detective Vance and her flashlight down a narrow concrete stairwell. The descent felt like walking into a grave.
At the bottom of the stairs was a long, narrow corridor lined with reinforced doors. It didn't look like a basement; it looked like a subterranean holding cell.
Vance kicked open the first door. Her flashlight beam swept the interior, revealing a small, windowless room. In the center was a child-sized cot with straps attached to the metal frame. A single, bare bulb hung from the ceiling.
My breath caught in my lungs. “Oh my god.”
“Don't touch anything,” Vance warned her deputies.
I moved toward the corner of the room, my eyes adjusting to the gloom. The concrete walls were covered in faded, frantic scribbles. Stick figures. Tally marks. And names.
I traced my fingers over a deeply etched carving near the baseboard. T-O-B-Y.
Right beneath it, etched in fresh, white chalk, was a single word: L-E-O.
“They were preparing it,” David realized, his voice trembling with a mixture of horror and pure rage. “The sedative. The party distraction. They were going to bring Leo down here.”
“Why?” I cried out, the walls closing in on me. “Why would my own parents do this?”
Vance shone her light on a metal filing cabinet in the corner of the room. She pulled the top drawer open. It was completely empty, wiped clean. But stuck in the tracks of the drawer was a single, crumpled piece of paper.
May you like
Vance carefully extracted it with a gloved hand and flattened it out.
It was a wire transfer receipt. Ten million dollars, routed to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. The memo line read a single phrase: Harvest.
