Chapter 4 - The Interrogation Room
An hour later, I was sitting in a small, windowless interview room on the third floor of the downtown precinct, staring across a stainless-steel table at Detective Vance and her partner, Detective Harris.
The walls were painted a dull, institutional gray. A two-way mirror occupied the entire length of the far wall, reflecting the harsh fluorescent glare of the overhead lights.
“Let’s go over it one more time, Marcus,” Detective Harris said, clicking his ballpoint pen. “You’re telling us that the cast was professionally applied—meaning someone with medical knowledge, or at least access to clinical supplies, put it on her.”
“Yes,” I said, leaning forward and resting my elbows on the table. “A standard fiberglass cast requires stockinette, cast padding, and activation water. You don’t just buy that at a hardware store. Someone at a clinic or an urgent care center helped put that on her, or at least supplied the materials.”
“And the man calling himself David?” Vance asked, sliding a mug of black coffee across the table toward me. “We ran his ID. His name is David Miller, no relation to our security guard. He has a record of domestic disturbance, unpaid warrants, and a suspended contractor’s license. But here’s the kicker: according to state records, Lily isn’t his daughter.”
I frowned, taking a sip of the bitter coffee. “Not his daughter? Then whose is she?”
“We pulled the birth certificate using her social security number,” Harris said, dropping a manila folder onto the table and flipping it open. He pointed to a photograph of a young woman with dark hair and a warm, bright smile. “Her name is Elena Vance—no relation to me. She was reported missing four months ago by her landlord.”
The room went cold.
“Missing?” I whispered. “As in... nobody knows where she is?”
“Her apartment was completely abandoned,” Vance said, leaning back in her metal chair and crossing her arms. “All her clothes were there. Her car was parked in the alley. But Elena vanished into thin air right around the time David Miller moved into her building as a live-in superintendent.”
“And Lily?”
“Lily was left behind with David,” Harris said grimly. “He claimed he had temporary guardianship papers signed by the mother, but our investigators checked the signature. It’s a complete forgery. A crude one, at that.”
“Why would he keep her?” I asked, shaking my head. “If he wanted to get rid of her, or if something happened to Elena... why keep an eight-year-old—well, six-year-old—child hidden away in a cast with a piece of metal slicing into her leg?”
Vance leaned forward, her face tightening into a mask of cold fury. “Because he wasn't just hiding her, Marcus. He was hiding something else. That piece of industrial metal you pulled out of her cast? Our crime lab techs ran the serial numbers off the edge an hour ago. It belongs to a specialized hydraulic press stolen from a commercial demolition site in Maple Creek—a site where David worked as a night watchman before the entire building mysteriously burned down to the foundation.”
The pieces of the puzzle began snapping together with a horrifying clarity.
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“The fire,” I said. “He used the demolition site for something illegal. Or someone died in that fire.”
“Or both,” Vance replied, standing up from the table. “And little Lily saw something she shouldn't have seen. David couldn't risk leaving her anywhere she could talk, so he broke her leg, wrapped her up in plaster with a piece of the crime scene evidence locked inside her cast, and planned to move her out of state as soon as the custody paperwork cleared.”
