Chapter 4 - The House of Shadows
By 5:30 p.m., the quiet residential street in West Portland was cordoned off with bright yellow crime scene tape. Four patrol cars, a mobile command center, and two ambulances lined the curb, their flashing red and blue lights reflecting off the darkened windows of the surrounding homes.
Crime Scene Investigators in white Tyvek suits moved in and out of the front door, carrying heavy equipment cases and camera tripods.
I stood near the rear bumper of my patrol car, watching a paramedic gently examine Toby’s wrists and feet inside the back of an ambulance. Toby refused to let the paramedic touch him unless I was standing within his line of sight.
"Dunham," a voice called out.
I turned to see Detective Sarah Chen walking across the lawn. Chen was a veteran with the Multnomah County Special Victims Unit—sharp, pragmatic, and impossible to fool. She held a thick black notebook under her arm.
"What do we have, Sarah?" I asked, rubbing the back of my neck where a tension headache was beginning to form.
"It’s dark, Jim," Chen said, her jaw tight. "We brought an angle grinder to the steel door in the closet. The girl—Maya—is emaciated. She’s thirteen, but she weighs barely sixty pounds. She has pressure sores on her ankles from that steel cable."
I swallowed hard, feeling a knot of pure anger tighten in my stomach. "Did she say anything?"
"Not much," Chen said. "She just kept asking if her father was dead. When we told her he was in custody, she didn't cheer or cry. She just looked at the wall and said, 'He’s going to turn the lights off now.'"
"What about the house?"
Chen took a deep breath, opening her notebook. "The place is a maze of hidden electronics. Arthur Vance wasn't just locking them up. He had three high-capacity servers running in the attic, hooked into encrypted satellite arrays. We found hundreds of forged state identity files, stolen social security numbers, and fraudulent birth certificates."
"He was running an identity theft ring?"
"It’s worse than that," Chen said, looking back at the house. "We ran Arthur Vance’s fingerprints through the federal database twenty minutes ago. His real name isn't Arthur Vance. It’s Dr. Arthur Vance, former research biophysicist, whose medical license was permanently revoked in California eleven years ago after he was investigated for illegal human testing and child endangerment."
A cold shudder ran down my spine. "And the kids? Are they his?"
May you like
Chen looked up from her notebook, her dark eyes filled with a grim, heavy sadness.
"We just ran rapid DNA swabs on Toby and Maya through the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System," Chen said softly. "Jim... neither of those children belongs to Arthur Vance."
