Chapter 1: The Empty Crime Scene
The smell of mildew and soaked pine clung to the back of Inspector Miller’s throat the exact moment he crossed the threshold of the front door. It was a detached house tucked away on the edge of a dense pine forest, where the sunlight seemed to die before touching the ground.
There was no yellow police tape stretching across spilled blood. There was no broken glass on the floor, nor kicked-in doors. The front door lock was intact, bolted from the inside. The only reason the police had been called out there was an alert raised by the local primary school, which found the children's prolonged absence and the radio silence of the parents strange.
Miller walked through the living room in silence, his notebook firmly closed in his coat pocket. It was far too clean of a case. And for an investigator with fifteen years of homicide experience, surgical cleanliness was always the prelude to something infinitely worse.
"Did you find anything in the kitchen?" asked the deputy agent, emerging down the hallway with a portable lantern.
"The coffee maker still has half-warm coffee," Miller murmured, approaching the counter. "The coats are on the hooks. The keys are on the table. But the entire family vanished. No suitcases, no documents taken, no tire tracks in the gravel driveway. As if they had evaporated while eating dinner."
They went upstairs, where the house's silence seemed to acquire a physical weight, almost a barometric pressure that made their ears ring. They stopped in the hallway in front of the master bedroom.
That was when Miller heard it. A subtle, muffled sound, as if someone were scratching the wood from the inside of a closed wardrobe.
Scritch... scritch... tick.
"Did you hear that?" Miller raised a hand, stopping his colleague.
"The wind in the tiles, boss. The house is old, the wood creaks with the humidity."
"Don't come to me with weather excuses," Miller retorted, slowly approaching the partition wall between the bedroom and the bathroom. He placed the palm of his hand against the plasterboard panel. The surface was abnormally cold, as if the interior of the wall were filled with blocks of ice.
Determined to find the source of the sound, Miller sent the deputy to fetch the toolbox from the vehicle. Minutes later, the screeching noise of a screwdriver tearing through wallpaper and piercing the plaster echoed down the empty hallway.
Miller pulled a piece of the panel outward. The lantern's light penetrated the dark cavity between the wooden beams of the house's structure.
There were no electrical wires in there, nor plumbing pipes. There was only a dense tangle of long, dark hair mixed with damp earth and rags of children's fabric, glued to the wood like an abandoned nest. And at the bottom of that narrow darkness, two pale, lidless eyes stared back at them through the opening in the wall, their lips parting in a wide, impossible smile.
