Chapter 3 - The Corrupt Badge
I desperately forced my face to remain completely blank as I turned away from the observation window.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a frantic drum, but I could not let the detective see my panic.
I slipped my hands into my pockets to hide their violent trembling.
"She is just too traumatized to speak right now," I lied smoothly to the man standing behind me.
The detective nodded slowly, his dark eyes studying my reaction with intense suspicion.
"We will give her some time to calm down before we resume the interview," he replied in a low voice.
He gestured toward the hallway, insisting that I return to the surgical waiting area.
I walked away from the interrogation rooms, feeling the heavy weight of his gaze on my back.
I needed to find a safe place to think and figure out who was actually hunting my family.
I ducked into an empty hospital restroom and quickly locked the heavy wooden door behind me.
I leaned against the cold tile wall and pulled my cell phone from my jacket pocket.
My wife's terrifying note had warned me that the attacker was wearing a police uniform.
I suddenly remembered the wireless security cameras we had installed in the nursery and the hallway.
They were designed to automatically upload motion-triggered video clips to a secure cloud server.
My fingers fumbled frantically as I opened the security application on my phone.
I navigated to the archived footage from earlier this morning and found a video labeled with the exact time of the incident.
I pressed play and held my breath as the dark hallway of my home appeared on the small screen.
The footage showed my wife carrying the heavy plastic cleaning basin out of the laundry room.
She was holding her phone to her ear, chatting casually with her friend Chloe.
Suddenly, a tall man in a dark police uniform stepped out from the shadows of the guest bedroom.
He grabbed her roughly by the hair and shoved a weapon against her spine.
He forced her to walk into the bathroom where our newborn son was resting in his portable bouncer.
I watched in absolute horror as the man orchestrated the cruelest form of torture imaginable.
He made her put the baby in the boiling water, holding the gun to her head the entire time.
As the man turned his face toward the hallway camera, the pixelated image finally became clear.
I dropped my phone onto the restroom floor in complete and utter disbelief.
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The monster in the police uniform was not a stranger at all.
It was my wife's older brother, Officer Thomas Vance.
