“Open the door,” he adds. “Will you?”
I roll my eyes as I walk toward it.
“You scared the shit out of me,” I say, unlocking it. I keep the phone pressed to my ear as I lean against the doorframe. “Are you stalking me, detective?”
“I need your brain on a few things.”
I nod once, lips pressed together, eyes narrowing at him. “Mhm.”
He steps inside without waiting for an invitation and pulls a small voice recorder from his jacket. He leans back against the kitchen counter as I close the door and move toward him.
Daisy notices the stranger immediately and rushes over to sniff him. When he gives her no attention, she loses interest and pads back to her bed in the living room.
“In 1998, there was an explosion at the Halden Institute,” he says, exhaling slowly. “When the firefighters arrived, they found bodies chained in the basement.”
His hand drags along his jaw, fingers brushing through his salt-and-pepper hair.
“The site,” he continues, “stays with you. They found a lab in the basement. Most of the records were destroyed in the fire, but a few survived—incident reports, funding logs, internal memos. Everything that didn’t burn was sealed and reclassified.”
My eyebrows pull together. “How do I not know about this?”
“Because it was buried,” he says. “What they found wasn’t something they could explain away. So they controlled the story. Seven years later, they reopened the Institute. The town was told it had been an accident. That was the official version. Nothing else.”
He presses play on the recorder.
The first few seconds are mostly noise; just movement, and muffled voices, the hiss of static. Then screaming breaks through—panicked voices. Fire crackles in the background, something pops, and glass shatters near the microphone—people shouting over each other, words blurring together.
Near the end, the noise drops off.
A boy’s voice came through, breaking as he called for his father.
I don’t realize I’m crying until something warm hits my lip.
“There were kids inside?” I ask.
“They never found him,” he says, and plays the tape again.
“Stop,” I cry out.
He doesn’t.
“Stop,” I whisper, my voice collapsing. “I can’t listen. I can’t listen to their screams.”
He rewinds the tape and presses play again.
This time, he brings the recorder close to my ear. “Can you hear something odd?”
I wipe at my tears, forcing myself to listen past the screaming. Beneath it, threaded between the chaos, were whispers. Repeating over and over again.“Protect the boy. Protect the boy. Seven. Five. Thirteen. Nine. Fourteen. Nine. Protect the boy.”
He presses the stop and turns to me.
“This tape was sealed with those files,” he says. “I was on desk duty back then. First year as a cop. When we caught Mercer, I saw the same numbers tattooed on the back of his neck, right beneath a barcode.”
“You think he’s the boy who ran away?” I ask.
“It fits,” he says, sliding the recorder back into his jacket. “But I need you to get it out of him. I need you to connect both cases. Him looking identical to the Ozark Butcher from the eighties is not a coincidence. And if there are more monsters like him out there—“
He slams his fist against the counter.
