Emma into my arms, grabbed my keys, and headed for the garage.

While I buckled her into the back seat, my phone vibrated with a text from Catherine.

I forgot my wallet.

I’m coming back for it.

Give me ten minutes and then I’ll go to the store.

Ten minutes.

That message erased any last hope that Emma had misunderstood.

Catherine was timing something.

I drove to the police station instead of anywhere else because instinct told me that if I went back to the house angry, I would either miss the truth or walk straight into whatever had been planned for me.

During the drive I made three calls: my lawyer, my accountant, and Rick Sullivan, the former Marine who ran site security for my company.

When Rick answered, I said, “Meet me at the station.

Bring the surveillance cases.”

He heard something in my voice.

“What’s going on?”

“My wife and Trevor were in my bedroom,” I said.

“My daughter heard them talk about making me disappear.”

He didn’t waste time with disbelief.

“I’m on my way.”

At the station, Detective Linda Reyes listened carefully while Emma repeated what she had heard.

A female officer named Patel sat beside her with a paper cup of apple juice and a worn stuffed bear they clearly kept for frightened kids.

Emma held the bear by one arm and spoke in that precise little voice of hers, and by the time she finished, nobody in the room thought we were dealing with a child’s imagination.

Reyes asked, “Does your wife think you’re still home?”

“As far as she knows,” I said.

She stood up.

“Then we do a welfare check right now.”

Rick arrived just as we were moving.

I explained everything in thirty seconds in the parking lot.

His face hardened, and he popped open the back of his SUV, showing me hard cases filled with cameras, receivers, battery packs, and equipment we normally used for vandalism investigations at job sites.

“What’s the plan?” he asked.

“We let them think I’m where they expect me to be,” I said.

“But first I need to know what was already done.”

Emma stayed at the station with Officer Patel while I rode back toward the house with Reyes, Rick, and two uniformed officers.

The closer we got, the more unreal everything felt.

The neighborhood looked the same.

The maple in the front yard was dropping orange leaves across the walk.

My porch light was still off.

Nothing on the outside suggested that the inside of my life had been hollowed out.

The first wrong thing was the side gate.

I always kept the latch set inward.

It hung loose.

Inside the house, the air was too still.

Reyes signaled the officers through the first floor while Rick and I headed toward the hallway.

The door to my master closet stood open.

The attic hatch above it was unlatched, and there were fresh scuffs on the shelf beneath it where someone had stepped up in work boots.

Then Rick stopped in the utility room and lifted his head.

“Gas,” he said quietly.

My stomach dropped.

He crouched beside the furnace and shined a small light along the thermostat wiring.

A black relay box had been clipped into the line.

The exhaust vent had