Chapter 2 - The Detective and the Safe
Detective Sarah Vance arrived twenty minutes later. She was a hurricane of a woman, shedding a soaked trench coat as she strode into the ER. She took one look at the biometric safe sealed in an evidence bag and then looked at Leo, who was now heavily sedated, his shattered leg immobilized in a temporary splint.
"You're telling me a seven-year-old was fighting to keep this?" Vance asked, her voice low to not wake the boy.
"He was terrified, Sarah," I replied, scrubbing my hands in the sink for the third time, trying to wash away a phantom stain. "Marcus told him no one could look inside. When I cut the bag open, the smell… it was organic matter. Rotting."
Vance signaled her crime scene tech. "Get this back to the lab. I want it cracked open yesterday. And run prints on the blood on that keypad."
We stepped out into the hallway. "Marcus is a ghost," Vance informed me, flipping through a notepad. "We ran his ID. Marcus Thorne. The foster agency he works through, Sunny Meadows, doesn't even have a physical address. It's a shell corporation. We have state troopers locking down the city, but if he knows what's in that safe, he's going to go to ground."
"Or he's going to come back for the boy," I said, a cold knot forming in my stomach.
May you like
Vance nodded grimly. "I'm stationing two armed officers outside his room. No one goes in except you and the primary nurse. We need Leo to wake up and tell us what he knows."
I walked back into Leo’s room. The monitors hummed rhythmically. I looked at the dark purple bruising along his cheekbone. This wasn't just a foster placement gone wrong. This was a systematic cover-up. Someone had trusted a child to transport something so vile, so dangerous, that they were willing to kill for it. I pulled up a chair next to his bed. I wasn't going anywhere.
