Chapter 7 - The Hidden Witness
I dropped to my knees beside the dying judge, the heat of the burning cabin baking my back.
His eyes fluttered open, rolling wildly in his head as he struggled to focus on my face.
I grabbed his shoulders and screamed, begging him to tell me where Lily was.
Judge Hanley coughed violently, a thick spray of dark blood staining his cracked lips.
He gasped that Daniel had blackmailed him with photographs of his gambling debts to sign the emergency custody order.
He whispered that he had come to the cabin to demand more money, only to realize Daniel’s syndicate was executing loose ends.
Carter gently pried the blood-stained piece of paper from the judge's tightly clenched fist.
The judge took one final, rattling breath and went completely still in the dirt.
Carter unfolded the paper and held it up to the orange light of the flames.
It was not a legal document or a ransom note.
It was a drawing made with bright pink and blue crayons, unmistakably drawn by my daughter Lily.
She had drawn a picture of a massive, grey stone building with tall iron gates.
In the corner of the paper, she had scrawled a single word in her messy, seven-year-old handwriting.
The word was "Monster."
I stared at the drawing, my mind racing to identify the terrifying structure she had drawn.
I suddenly remembered a road trip we took last summer through the next county over.
Lily had pointed out a terrifying, abandoned psychiatric hospital on the hill and asked if monsters lived there.
Daniel had laughed strangely that day and told her she was absolutely right.
I looked at Carter and told him I knew exactly where they had taken my child.
It was the old Blackwood Asylum, a facility shut down decades ago for horrific patient abuse.
Carter checked the ammunition in his weapon, his jaw set in a line of pure, lethal determination.
We left the judge’s body in the dirt and sped away from the burning cabin.
The sun was just beginning to rise, casting long, eerie shadows across the mountain roads.
We arrived at the massive iron gates of Blackwood Asylum, the rusted metal covered in thick, thorny vines.
Carter used the SUV to smash the ancient gates open, the heavy iron crashing to the ground.
We stepped out of the vehicle and walked toward the towering, gothic structure looming in the morning fog.
Suddenly, a terrifying, high-pitched scream echoed from one of the shattered windows on the third floor.
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It was not the scream of a child.
It was the scream of Patricia, sounding completely out of her mind with fear.
