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Music drifted from inside.

Iron Butterfly.

My breath caught as I stepped closer to the opening and looked inside.

The warehouse stretched far. Harsh work lights illuminated an open area beyond stacks of rusted shelving. Even from where I stood, the metallic smell drifting through the gap made my stomach roll. Plastic sheeting covered the floor. Tools were laid out with surgical precision.

Richard stood with his back to me, shirtsleeves rolled high, arms glistening red up to the elbows. He was sawing through the body of the woman. He hummed along to the music, swaying slightly, dropping chunks of what had once been a person into a large metal canister. Heavy thuds echoed through the empty warehouse.

She lay sprawled across the plastic-covered table like discarded meat. Her head had lolled toward the entrance, toward me. Her cloudy eyes were wide open. Their fixed stare made it seem as though she were looking straight at me. A strand of matted blonde hair clung to her cheek, glued there by darkening blood. Her mouth hung slightly open in a frozen, silent gasp. A deep, ragged gash crossed her mouth. Lower, where Richard worked, her torso had been split open like a book.

Richard chuckled under his breath, shook his head at something only he understood, and kept sawing. He paused to adjust the radio with the back of his bloody wrist, then picked the saw up again.

He was enjoying himself.

This couldn’t be real. My husband, the father of my children, couldn’t be doing this. The man who once carried our boys on his shoulders, who kissed me every morning before work.

I thought about Jessica and Marcy, then Jerry and the secretary who had disappeared. The late nights and hunting trips no longer needed explanations. Neither did the news stories about missing women or the man I’d slept beside for years.

I had believed every excuse he gave me and dismissed every warning from my father.

The Brentwood Butcher.

The realization slammed into me so hard my vision tunneled.

My throat closed before any sound could escape. I backed away on numb legs until I had enough distance to turn and run. I kept my eyes ahead.

By the time I reached my car, my hands were shaking so badly I could barely fit the key into the ignition. I pulled onto the road without checking the mirror, unwilling to see the warehouse again.

I needed to reach the boys and get us out of here before whatever monster I’d married realized I’d seen it.

Chapter 39

Samantha

Idrove straight to the police station in a fog, my mind replaying the scene in the warehouse over and over until the images blurred together.

Everything was connecting now in a sickening rush. That day at the farmer’s market when we first started dating. The woman’s tear-stained face accusing him of knowing exactly where Jessica had gone, her voice shaking as she begged him to tell the truth. The way his secretary had disappeared without a trace soon after Seth was born, right when Richard started working longer hours and coming home with that distant, satisfied look in his eyes. And the missing woman on the news just a couple of days ago, her smiling photo flashing across the screen while the anchor pleaded for information.

How many women has he killed in the warehouse? The pattern stretched back years, maybe decades, and I had ignored every warning sign because admitting it would have meant my entire life was built on a lie. The killings in Brentwood stopped when we left. The new ones began here. I felt like I was going to be sick.

By the time I reached the desk I was shaking so badly I could barely speak. The sergeant took one look at me and guided me to a quieter area, his expression shifting from routine boredom to focused concern.

“Ma’am, take a deep breath and tell me what happened,” he said, pen poised over a report form.

“I saw him kill someone,” I whispered, my voice cracking. “I followed my husband to an abandoned warehouse. I watched him through a gap in one of the boarded windows. He was cutting apart a woman’s body. He was sawing her apart and putting the pieces into a canister. I ran before he noticed me.”

The sergeant’s eyes widened slightly, but his voice stayed calm. “I need your full name and address, Mrs…?”

“Kincaid. Samantha Kincaid. My husband is Richard Kincaid.”

He immediately radioed for officers to secure the warehouse. While they drove to the location, he wrote everything down carefully, asking for the exact time, a description of what I had seen in as much detail as I could manage, whether Richard knew I had been there, and if there were any weapons visible. I answered through the haze, my words tumbling out in a rush.

Nearly forty minutes later, another officer entered the room and spoke quietly to the sergeant. I watched his face, waiting for some sign that they had found her.

The sergeant turned back to me. “Officers checked the warehouse and found it empty. There was no body, blood, equipment, or evidence that a crime had been committed there. Are you certain you gave us the correct address?”

“Yes. I know what I saw.”