On the floor sat a high-end baby monitor, playing a recording on a loop. And taped to the back wall of the closet was a map of the city with red circles drawn around every crime scene we had visited that month. I froze.

I felt the barrel of a gun press against the back of my head. “I told you to stay in the car, Todd,” Miller whispered. “But since you’re here, look at the signature on the map.” I moved my light to the bottom corner, and my knees buckled when I read the name Detective Sergeant Miller.

My breath catches. My flashlight shakes in my hand as the name sears itself into my brain like a brand. It’s his handwriting—blocky, jagged, unmistakable. Not some coincidence, not a shared last name. It’s his. He marked every single location. Every murder. Every missing person. Every silent scream etched into that map… by him.

“You’ve been behind this?” I rasp, unable to turn around, the barrel cold against my skull.

“Not behind,” he says calmly. “Above.”

I twist fast—instinct overriding fear—and slam my elbow backward. It connects with his wrist. The gun clatters to the floor, and I lunge, grabbing it mid-spin. Miller’s already stepping back, his hands raised like this is just another Tuesday briefing.

“Easy, Todd,” he says smoothly. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Don’t I?” I snap. My hands tremble, but the gun stays level. “That kid’s voice. You played it. You rigged it. You lured me here.”

He chuckles. Chuckles.

“I didn’t rig anything. I set a trap. A test. And you passed.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I bark, inching backward toward the front door. I need to call this in. I need backup. I need—hell—I need to wake up. This can’t be real.

“You’re not like the others,” Miller says, stepping forward. “They hesitate. They rationalize. You kicked the door in.”

“I should shoot you right now,” I growl.

“And you’d be a hero,” he says, eyes glinting. “But you wouldn’t understand. Not yet.”

Behind him, I catch a flicker of movement. A shadow, slithering at the corner of the exposed wall studs.

“What’s back there?” I demand.

He doesn’t turn. “You’re not ready.”

I fire. A warning shot. It blows a hole through the drywall an inch from his ear.

Miller flinches, finally. “Okay,” he mutters. “You want answers? Follow me.”

I keep the gun trained on him as he leads me to the back of the house, where a decaying pantry door swings open to reveal a staircase leading down. Blacker than ink. The smell doubles. Triples. Death and chemicals and something… old.

He descends first. I should cuff him. I should call it in. But every instinct I’ve honed in ten years on the force tells me: If you stop now, no one will ever know the truth.

So I follow.

The basement is low and cramped, lit only by the beam of my flashlight and a single flickering bulb in the ceiling. The walls are covered in newspaper clippings, missing persons posters, and police reports—our reports. And photos. Surveillance photos. Me. Other cops. Some dead. Some missing. Some I haven’t seen in months.

And in the center of the room stands a steel examination table.

On it lies a mannequin. A child’s size. Covered in dried blood and tape residue. Its face is painted like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

I recoil.

“That’s not real,” I say.

“No,” Miller agrees. “But the last kid who was on that table? She screamed for three days.”

I whip the gun toward him again. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want out,” he says, tone flat. “I built this network to clean up the filth. To go where the law couldn’t. We warned them. They didn’t listen. So we made them disappear.”

“You… killed people?”

“We saved the system from itself. But now? It’s gone too far. Others joined in. Took it further. I tried to stop it. But the machine keeps running.”

I’m shaking now. Sweat beads at my temples. “Why not just confess?”

“Would you believe me?” he asks. “Would anyone? I needed you to see it. I needed you to end it.”

“Why me?”

“Because you still kick in doors.”

He tosses a file onto the table. I pick it up, thumbing through pages of photos, emails, internal memos. Corruption in the mayor’s office. Judges on the take. Officers—my officers—on payrolls that don’t exist.

“This goes beyond me,” he says. “This is rot. Deep. Systemic. And if I vanish, they’ll erase all of it.”

He looks me dead in the eye.

“But if you bring it in? If you leak it? The system might just eat itself alive.”

I lower the gun slowly.

This is madness. It’s also the clearest picture I’ve ever seen of how broken things really are.

I grab my phone. No signal.

“Jammer,” Miller says. “Upstairs.”

I back up the stairs, never turning my back to him. He doesn’t move. Just sits on a crate, head in his hands, muttering something I can’t make out.

Outside, the storm has stopped. The cruiser is still there. The street is silent.

I kill the jammer. The signal returns.

I call it in. Not to dispatch. Not to internal. I call McKenzie—FBI. A friend from Quantico. She answers on the second ring.

“McKenzie. I need you to get here. Now. No uniforms. No lights. No sirens.”

“What’s going on, Todd?”

“Just come.”

Thirty-five minutes later, she arrives. No backup. Just a black SUV and a Kevlar vest. I brief her as we move through the house. She doesn’t speak until we reach the basement.

Miller is gone.

But the file is still there.

And something else: a small digital recorder, blinking red.

I hit play.

Miller’s voice crackles through the speaker.

“I know you’re listening, Todd. Or McKenzie. Or both. By now you know enough to burn it down. Just remember—this didn’t start with me. It ends with them. Do what you came to do. Or walk away. But if you walk, don’t look back.”

The line clicks off.

McKenzie’s eyes meet mine. “He’s not wrong.”

“I know.”

We take the file. The photos. The clippings. Everything. We upload it to six secure drives and send it to every major news outlet in the city. We use McKenzie’s clearance to push it through encrypted channels. We don’t sleep. We don’t eat. We work like men on fire.

And then the storm breaks.

Within hours, the mayor resigns. Internal Affairs opens dozens of investigations. Three judges are arrested trying to flee the state. Two detectives turn up dead—apparent suicides, but no one’s buying it. The media devours it all.

They call us whistleblowers.

Heroes.

Traitors.

Depends who you ask.

And Miller?

Gone. No trace. No prints. No sightings.

But sometimes, when I walk past a vacant house, I hear a faint scritch-scritch… and a child’s voice whispering, Mama?

The first time it happens, I nearly lose it. The second time, I record it.

It’s not a loop. It’s live.

McKenzie hears it too.

We follow the voices. We find more rooms. More files. More names. A new web.

It hasn’t ended.

It’s only just begun.

But now we know where to look.

And we never walk away.