Chapter 4: Shadows and Lies
The morning sun cast long shadows across the broken glass in my father's office. Someone had done a thorough job—filing cabinets overturned, desk drawers dumped, even the coffee pot smashed against the wall. But they'd missed something important.
"Professionals," Sarah said, photographing the scene with her phone. "They knew exactly what they were looking for."
Chief Mason arrived twenty minutes later, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. His uniform was wrinkled, and he smelled faintly of bourbon.
"Hell of a thing," he said, surveying the damage. "Any idea what they were after?"
"Legal files," I replied. "Client confidentiality prevents me from being more specific."
Mason's eyes narrowed. "This wouldn't have anything to do with your recent cases, would it?"
"Why would you think that?"
"Because trouble seems to follow you Kane boys like flies on shit."
Sarah stepped forward, her badge visible. "Chief, have you processed the scene for fingerprints?"
"We'll get to it."
"When?"
Mason's face reddened. "When I damn well feel like it, Agent Mitchell. This is still my jurisdiction."
After Mason left, muttering about federal interference, Sarah and I surveyed the real damage. The hidden safe behind dad's law degree had been cracked open, but whoever did it hadn't found what they were really looking for.
"They got the decoy files," I said, running my fingers along the empty shelves.
"Decoy files?"
I smiled grimly. "Dad was paranoid. He kept dummy files in the safe—old divorce cases, nothing important. The real evidence is somewhere else."
"Where?"
"I'm hoping I can figure that out."
We spent the morning cleaning up, but my mind kept wandering to the night before. Making love to Sarah had felt inevitable, like we were two people who'd been searching for each other without knowing it. But in the harsh daylight, with our professional lives colliding, I wondered if we'd made a mistake.
"Regrets?" Sarah asked, as if reading my thoughts.
"About which part?"
"Any of it."
I stopped sweeping broken glass and looked at her. She was beautiful in a way that made my chest tight—not just physically, but the fierce intelligence in her eyes, the way she moved through the world like she owned it.
"None," I said. "You?"
"Ask me again when this is over and we're both still alive."
Mrs. Rodriguez arrived at noon with coffee and sandwiches, taking the destruction in stride like she'd seen worse.
"Your father always said this day would come," she said, setting food on my desk.
"What day?"
"The day someone got desperate enough to show their hand."
She pulled a small brass key from her purse. "He gave me this before he died. Said if anything happened to his office, I should give it to you."
The key was warm from her hand. "What's it for?"
"Storage unit. Number forty-seven at Miller's Self Storage on Highway Nine."
My heart hammered. "How long have you known about this?"
"Three days. Since the funeral."
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
Mrs. Rodriguez fixed me with a stern look. "Because you weren't ready to hear it then. Now you are."
Sarah and I drove to the storage facility in her rental car, a nondescript sedan that screamed federal government. The afternoon heat shimmered off the asphalt as we navigated the maze of storage units.
Unit forty-seven was larger than I'd expected. When I opened the metal door, my breath caught.
"Jesus Christ."
The space was filled with filing cabinets, boxes, and a wall covered with photographs, newspaper clippings, and red string connecting various pieces of evidence. It looked like the workspace of either a dedicated investigator or a complete lunatic.
"Your father was thorough," Sarah said, walking to the evidence wall.
The center of the display showed photographs of the three missing women from the nineties, but surrounding them were dozens of other faces—young women, teenagers, some I recognized from old Millbrook High School yearbooks.
"How many?" I whispered.
Sarah counted silently. "Twenty-three. Going back to 1987."
"Twenty-three women disappeared from Millbrook?"
"Not just disappeared. Look at this."
She pointed to a timeline Dad had constructed along the bottom of the wall. The disappearances weren't random—they occurred in clusters, with quiet periods in between. Every cluster coincided with specific dates.
"What happened on these dates?" Sarah asked.
I studied the timeline, feeling sick. The pattern was there, clear as daylight once you knew to look for it. "Town elections."
"What?"
"Every cluster of disappearances happened during election years. Someone was cleaning house."
Sarah photographed everything while I went through the filing cabinets. Dad had been more than thorough—he'd been obsessed. Bank records, phone logs, property deeds, police reports. Twenty years of investigation hidden in a storage unit.
In the bottom drawer of the last cabinet, I found a file marked "Vincent—Insurance Policy." Inside was a single photograph and a handwritten note.
The photograph showed Vincent at what looked like a party, his arm around a young woman I didn't recognize. But her face was circled in red ink, and written underneath was a single word: "Missing."
Dad's note was brief: "Vincent knows I have this. It's the only reason I'm still alive."
My hands shook as I showed Sarah the photograph.
"When was this taken?" she asked.
I flipped it over. In Dad's handwriting: "V's 50th birthday party, 2009. Girl missing three days later—Maria Gonzalez."
"Marcus," Sarah said quietly. "If your father had evidence that Vincent was involved in these disappearances..."
"Then Vincent had him killed."
The words hung in the air between us like poison. My uncle—the man who'd helped raise me, who'd taught me to fish and throw a baseball—was a murderer.
"We need to get this to the FBI," Sarah said.
"We need to be careful who we trust. Dad spent twenty years collecting this evidence and never went public with it. There had to be a reason."
"Maybe he was scared."
"Dad wasn't scared of anything. He was protecting someone."
"Who?"
I looked around the storage unit, at the wall of missing faces, at evidence of decades of murder and cover-up. "Me."
"You? Why would you need protecting?"
Before I could answer, Sarah found another file buried beneath the others. This one was labeled "Marcus—Birth Records."
My heart stopped as she opened it. Inside was a collection of documents that rewrote everything I thought I knew about my life.
The first was an adoption certificate dated three months after my birth. The adoptive parents were listed as David and Margaret Kane.
The second was a hospital record showing Lisa Martinez had given birth to a baby boy on my birthday. The father's name was listed as "Vincent Kane."
"My God," Sarah whispered.
I stared at the documents, my hands shaking. "Vincent Kane isn't my uncle. He's my biological father."
"And Lisa Martinez..."
"Was my mother. The first woman to disappear from the mill." The pieces clicked together with sickening clarity. "Vincent killed my mother because she threatened to expose him. Dad adopted me to protect me."
Sarah pulled out the last document in the file—a handwritten letter from my father:
Marcus—If you're reading this, then I'm dead and you've found the truth. Vincent is your biological father, and he killed your mother Lisa when she threatened to go public about the trafficking operation at the mill. I adopted you as my son because I loved you and wanted to keep you safe. But Vincent always knew where you were. That's why I could never expose him—he would have killed you too. Now that I'm gone, you're the only one who can stop him. Be careful who you trust. The corruption goes deeper than you know. —Dad
I sank onto a folding chair, feeling like the world had shifted beneath my feet. Everything I'd believed about my family, my identity, my entire life had been a lie.
"Marcus," Sarah said softly, kneeling beside me. "We'll get through this."
But I wasn't sure we would. Because if Vincent Kane was my father, that meant I was the son of a serial killer. And worse—he'd been watching me my entire life, waiting for the moment when I'd discover the truth.
The moment when he'd have to kill me too.