Chapter 5 - The Voice on the Line
My grip tightened on the phone so hard my knuckles turned ghostly white. Daniel’s face instantly twisted into a terrifying mask of rage, but I held up a hand to keep him silent.
"Where are you, Richard?" I demanded, my voice icy, dropping all pretense of composure. "The police know everything. They have the video footage of you buying the lye. They know you stole my debit card. There is a felony warrant out for your arrest right now."
A quiet, sinister laugh echoed through the earpiece. "A video of a man in a coat, Clara? A stolen card? Any good lawyer can dismantle circumstantial evidence like that in twenty minutes. You always were too quick to jump to dramatic conclusions."
"You burned your own granddaughter's face!" I yelled, stepping further down the empty hallway so Emma wouldn't hear me. "She’s nine years old! She’s sitting in a hospital bed with bandages covering her cheeks because you put concentrated lye inside a jar of face cream!"
"I put nothing in that jar," Richard replied smoothly, his tone utterly devoid of humanity or remorse. "I bought a sealed gift set from a boutique downtown. If the manufacturer mixed a hazardous batch, that’s a corporate liability issue, not mine. I’m simply a grieving grandfather who realized his daughter-in-law was trying to set him up."
"You sociopathic bastard," Daniel roared, grabbing the phone from my hand and pressing it to his ear. "Listen to me, Dad! If you ever come near my wife or my daughter again, I swear to God I will kill you with my bare hands! Do you hear me?!"
"Daniel," Richard said, his voice lowering into a cold, dangerous register. "You've disappointed me. You let that weak, paranoid woman turn you against your own blood. I built your life. I paid for your college, I gave you the down payment for your house, and this is how you repay me? By letting her drag my name through the mud?"
"You're going to prison, Dad," Daniel spat. "The police are tracking this call right now."
"They won't find me on a burner phone sitting in a diner parking lot sixty miles away," Richard said calmly. "I called to give you one final chance to fix this, Daniel. Tell the police you made a mistake. Tell them Clara mixed the cream herself out of spite to ruin my reputation. Do that, and I’ll come home. We can be a family again."
"Go to hell," Daniel growled.
"Then remember this moment," Richard whispered into the line. "Because every time you look at your daughter's scarred face, you'll know that she did this to her. Not me."
The line went dead with a sharp click.
Daniel lowered the phone, his body shaking violently with rage and disbelief. He slammed his arm against the hallway wall, breathing heavily. "He’s insane. He’s completely lost his mind."
I took the phone back and immediately dialed Detective Lin’s direct line, reporting the call and giving her the timestamp.
"Our digital forensics team is already tracing the cell tower ping," Detective Lin told us five minutes later over the line. "The ping originated near a highway rest stop along Interstate 90, heading north toward the Canadian border. We’ve alerted state troopers and border patrol."
"He’s trying to flee the country," I said. "He has an old hunting cabin up near the boundary waters, doesn't he, Daniel?"
Daniel blinked, a sudden realization washing over his face. "Yes! A cabin in Lake of the Woods! It’s registered under his late brother’s business name—it wouldn't show up on a standard property search under Richard's name!"
"Give me the exact address," Detective Lin said urgently. "We are dispatching a SWAT tactical team to that location immediately."
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Daniel provided the coordinates and detailed instructions to the remote cabin. As he finished speaking, I looked through the small glass window of Room 412. Emma was sitting up in bed, holding her small teddy bear against her chest, watching the snow fall against the hospital window.
Richard thought he was fleeing toward freedom, but he had miscalculated one critical detail: he had left a trail of wounded survivors who were no longer afraid of his shadow.
