Chapter 41: Epilogue

“That’s what happened. I swear on the book.”

The interrogator nods her head with false understanding. “How did you escape after Aries Black and his motley crew kidnapped you?”

“Aries thought I fell by accident the first time he came in.” Russo braces forward, his wrists fettered to the metal, heavy-duty table. “But I was trying to reach a nail that was on the floor. Thankfully, he didn’t see it.

“My phone was in my back pocket and I knew my prolonged absence would go noticed by the district or my family. But I couldn’t wait that long.

“I collapsed again, and I reached for that nail and used it to scrape through the duct tape. Even though the chair had leather straps, I was duct taped to the chair and all the doors were left unlocked.”

She flares a curious brow. “Are you trying to insinuate something, Detective?”

He nods eagerly. “They wanted me to escape. Aries is a lot of things, but he’s not sloppy. For a kid who grew up in the Badlands, he’s awfully meticulous. He wanted to hurt me.”

The dark bruise that billowed across his jaw proved him right about that.

“But he didn’t want to kill me. As soon as I escaped, after what I saw—what I know—I didn’t even report it. I went straight home to see if my family was safe.”

The interrogator’s face falls solemn, a dark gloom over her eyes. “And what did you do when you got home, Detective?”

He’s about to answer, then his mind draws a blank. He remembers how he got out, how he hitchhiked back to Braidwood, and how he got home. But anything past that is an empty gap of black.

The interrogator claims a small victory from his visible befuddlement because she has him right where she wants him.

“You don’t remember what you did?”

“Me?” he says dazedly.

“This is surveillance from your own home security.” She picks up an iPad and swivels it around to show the screen, sectioned to display different parts of the house.

“A tribute to your paranoid nature because without this videographic proof, I wouldn’t have believed that a decorated detective with an enviable record of arrests and solved cases…murdered his family in cold blood.

“Now I wonder, did robbers truly kill your late son, or was it just you?”

She plays the video. It shows him entering the house with glazed eyes. His unblinking stare fixed on his wife as she ran up to him, holding onto his face.

Russo watches himself hold on to her, his one hand under her chin and the other on top of her head before he snaps her neck like a twig. She drops.

A terror thunders through Russo that unmans him. His eyes fly up to the interrogator and she motions back to the screen, meaning for him to continue watching. And he does.

His daughter is frozen, and he watches himself stalk after her. She regains her senses and runs for her life. A glaze-eyed Russo catches her and repeats the same brutality, and his daughter falls at his feet.

Russo shoots back, his arms fully outstretched, his mobility restrained by his chains.

“How do you not remember that?”

He cries shamelessly into his arm, not knowing what to make of it, but he knows without a doubt that it may have been him.

But it wasn’t. He would never do that and wasn’t capable of doing that. Which is something he mumbles, his words coming out as a muffled slur.

“What was that?”

“It wasn’t me!” Spittle flies from his mouth, eyes crazed with agony and anger. “I didn’t do this!”

“Let me guess, was it the shadows you saw attack Mia and Opal?”

Russo rattles the chain. She flinches back. He tugs at it belligerently, seething like a rabid dog.

“I know what I saw. And I have proof.” He slants back forward, dropping his volume low to a conspiratorial whisper.

“It started with what happened to Erin, I’m telling you. It’s all her—it’s all them—they were never the victims. At least not Erin.

“I think Keila left on her own because she couldn’t live with the guilt of what happened to her.”

“All I hear is speculation without even circumstantial evidence, just your farfetched theories. Aries and the others were cleared seven years ago, and you have no substantial proof to refute that.

“But we’re not talking about the Erin Lockwood case. We are here about the slaughter of your family, for which we clearly have an abundance of proof.”

She closes the cover of the iPad and rises to her feet.

“Wait—no.” He scrambles for his thoughts. “You don’t think it’s strange that just after I was abducted and I crawl my way back to my family…I just kill them without motive or cause?

“No argument, no motive—I just decided to snap their necks? You don’t find any of that at least a bit insane?”

Doubt flickers in her eyes. “You never know what goes on inside someone’s head. Someone in your line of work should know all about that.”

She tucks the iPad to her side and makes a start for the door.

“Whatever made me kill my wife and child will do it again. No one is safe! No one!”

She knocks on the door. It unlocks remotely. She exits and glances at men flanking the door.

“He’s all yours.”

She strides away and federal agents enter the padded room. The backs of their necks are tattooed with the mark of the sword pointing south with a snake wrapped around its blade.

^End of Book 1^