Chapter 6 - The Setup
By Tuesday, David was supposed to be the grieving widower. Instead, he had to return to his office, pretend everything was normal, and deal with the fact that his wife and daughter had vanished into thin air.
He filed a missing persons report. The police came to the house. I watched it all unfold on the local news from Elias’s cabin. David looked directly into the cameras, fake tears streaming down his face.
"Sarah, if you're out there, please come home. I just want my family back," he choked out.
It made me physically sick. But it also gave me my opening.
I recorded a video on the encrypted laptop. Just me, sitting against a plain white wall.
"I'm alive, David," I said into the camera. "And I know everything. I know about the five million. I know about the man in the fleece jacket. If you don't wire two million dollars to the offshore account I just created by midnight, I’m sending the police the audio recording of you hiring the hitman."
It was a bluff. I didn't have an audio recording. But David didn't know that. Sophie had overheard him; he would assume I had bugs in the house.
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I sent the video directly to his personal cell phone.
Ten minutes later, the burner phone Elias had bought me rang. It was David.
