“He has money,” she said. “He runs a construction business. He hires people. He always said nobody could ever really get away from him if he didn’t want them to.”
I looked from the card to the photographs to the date of the last journal entry.
The sequence arranged itself so cleanly it felt obscene.
A man obsessed with finding his stepdaughter.
A hired investigator.
Weeks of surveillance.
George deciding to go to the police.
George dead the next day on a clear road.
“Do you think Brendan killed him?” I asked.
Helena answered without hesitation.
“Yes.”
The certainty in her voice frightened me more than the possibility itself.
We were still standing in that room, the journal open on the desk between us, when the brick came through the front window.
Glass exploded somewhere down the hall with a crash so violent Clare screamed. We all flinched at once. For one mad second I thought Brendan had come back with a gun.
Instead we found a brick on the living room carpet, wrapped with white paper and a rubber band.
I unwrapped the note with fingers that had started shaking all over again.
STOP HIDING WHAT DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU.
That was the moment something inside me hardened.