Weapons up and ready, Astra and I sweep the front rooms as Mo and Paige take the back of the house, the calls of “clear” echoing through the unoccupied home. It doesn’t take us long to clear the house, and when we’re done, we gather in the living room.

“He’s gone,” Mo says.

“We figured that was going to be the case,” I reply. “Let’s go ahead and spread out. Search this place from top to bottom. Tear it apart if you have to.”

“What are we looking for exactly, Chief?” Paige asks.

“Anything that might point to where Townsend’s secondary location is. He’s got a place where he’s keeping these kids. We need to find it,” I say. “I don’t know what that’s going to look like, so bag and tag anything and everything you think might give us a lead no matter how unlikely. We’ll sort it out back in the war room.”

“Copy that,” they say and head off into the house.

I stand in the living room looking around. On the mantle above the fireplace are photos of the Townsend family in happier times. In one, Davis, his wife Colleen, and Sean stand together at the front entrance of a popular amusement park. Sean looks to be sixteen or seventeen in the photo. A photo that was probably taken shortly before he was killed. In the picture, the family is all smiles, none of them even remotely aware of what was coming as they enjoyed their day out. None of them are even aware they’re standing on the tracks, let alone that a freight train of tragedy was bearing down on them at high speed. The picture is so normal that it’s haunting.

After Sean was killed, predictably, Davis and Colleen’s marriage fell apart. A terribly high number of marriages don’t survive the death of a child, which is just tragedy compounding tragedy. The cruel hand of fate wasn’t done with Davis though—not by a long shot. A couple of years after he and Colleen split, about four years after Sean’s death, she died too. Perhaps the cruelest irony of all was that Colleen died in a drunk driving accident as well. According to the reports I saw, her blood alcohol was nearly three times the legal limit when she died, and part of me wonders if it really was an accident or a woman who’d just given up.

That makes three lives shattered completely by Barlow, Olange, Moore, and Berenthal. Three lives forever altered because of their poor decisions and because of their parents’ willingness to cover up what, to that point, had been a tragic mistake… because they’d kept their kids from facing actual consequences for their actions. And now, faced with no prospect of justice or any form of closure, Townsend has forever altered four more lives—and many more when you consider their parents, siblings, families, and friends. Even if we can save those kids strapped to the tables in his hidden lair, they will never be the same.

The ripple effect of that one night keeps spreading outward, shattering and changing all the lives it touches. And who knows what will happen with those kids should they survive this? Will they go on to perpetuate this ripple of horror and death? Will they, in turn, go on to victimize others? Will they take what’s happening to them and use it to shatter even more lives? How many more lives are going to be impacted because of what happened when four spoiled and privileged kids killed a boy and were allowed to walk away sans consequences?

My heart filling with sympathy for Townsend, I turn away from the photo. I can’t afford to let myself feel too much sympathy for this man. I can’t afford to let myself relate to him. Regardless of what happened twenty years ago and how sorry for him I feel, what Townsend’s doing now is a crime. What he’s doing now is victimizing four innocent children. He is perpetuating that destruction done to him, causing it to ripple through the lives of even more people. I may understand his reasons for doing what he’s doing, but it’s my job to stop him. It’s my job to put an end to that cycle of perpetual victimization and destruction.

“You okay?” Astra asks as she pokes her head into the living room.

“Yeah. Fine,” I reply. “You finding anything?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing yet.”

“Keep digging.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

As Astra moves deeper into the house to search, I pull myself out of my head, then walk through the living room and into the kitchen. Mo is already looking through cupboards and drawers, so I head out of the house and toward the garage that’s set behind the house. The side door is open, so I walk in and don’t immediately see anything of interest. Everything is clean and organized. There are cabinets and drawers with labels that announce what’s inside each of them.

I poke through them all and don’t find anything other than what’s on the labels. Same with the boxes being stored inside the cabinets. Everything has a place, and everything’s in its place. The man’s dedication to order and tidiness is impressive. It’s a garage, and I don’t see a speck of dust anywhere nor a thing out of place. Which, unfortunately, means there’s nothing for me to find that gives me the faintest clue where Townsend has taken the kids.

Leaning against a workbench, I blow out a long breath and let my eyes drift around the garage, searching for anything that might help me. I don’t know what I’m expecting to find—a hidden compartment or trapdoor maybe? Whatever it is, though, I don’t find it. I don’t find a thing. And given that nobody inside the house has called out for me, I’m guessing they haven’t found anything worth noting either. With every passing second, I feel the chances of us finding these kids alive and unharmed dwindle even more.

As I stand there with my mind spinning, I catch a faint whiff of something I hadn’t noticed before. It gets a little stronger with the soft breeze that blows in through the open door, telling me whatever it is I’m smelling, its origin point is outside. Following my nose, I walk out and look around. It’s then that I notice there’s a slightly secluded area behind the garage set up with some chairs and tables. There is a glass of water on one of the tables that still has ice in it, making me realize Townsend was out here recently.

But as intriguing to me as that is, it’s the red kettle barbecue that catches my attention. More specifically, it’s the small wisps of smoke that drift out from beneath the lid that draw me toward it. A cloud of white smoke billows up from the belly of the grill as I lift the lid off and set it aside. The stench of burning paper is thick and cloying as I wave away the clouds of smoke that hover over the grill. Once it finally clears, I find a stack of half-burned paper sitting in the bottom of the kettle and feel a burst of adrenaline hit my system.

The browned, stiff pages crinkle as I gingerly pick them up, careful to be gentle so they don’t fall apart as I move them. As I look through the pages he’d tried to burn, that rush of adrenaline grows as quickly as the sensation of momentum building in the pit of my belly.

“What did you find?” Astra asks.

“I think Townsend finally made a mistake,” I say. “We need to get back to the war room.”

FBI Operational Black Site, Foggy Bottom District; Washington DC

Hands in my pockets, I pace the floor of the war room, my stomach churning and my heart pounding in my ears. Rick and Nina are carefully sifting through the pages I rescued from the bottom of the grill at Townsend’s house. I’m doing my best to manage my expectations. The sheets of paper we have are browned and crispy, and I don’t know if we’ll get anything useful from them, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

“What makes you think these papers are relevant?” Mo asks.

“The fact that he tried to burn them tells me there’s something in them he doesn’t want us to see,” I tell her. “He anticipated that we were coming and took steps to destroy evidence. That alone is enough to convince me there’s something in those papers we need to see.”

“It’s thin,” Astra says.

“It’s all we have,” I reply. “But think about it. If there wasn’t anything in there that might be incriminating, why go to the trouble of burning them?”

“To throw us off?” Astra offers. “I mean, this guy has been so careful and so clean this whole time, it just seems too careless for me to believe. That he didn’t stick around to make sure those pages were actually destroyed… it’s just too convenient.”

“Maybe. But the pages were still smoking when we got there. That tells me we just missed him. Maybe by only minutes,” I reply. “I think perhaps he didn’t have the time to ensure they were actually destroyed.”

“Yeah. Maybe,” Astra says, sounding less than convinced.

“He’s good. Better than good. Confoundingly good,” I admit. “But nobody is perfect. Everybody makes mistakes. And even though he’s been clean to this point, he’s human, and imperfection is part of the human condition. He was bound to slip up at some point. I think we possibly found him before he thought we would, and because we were breathing down his neck, he didn’t have the time to be as thorough as he normally would be.”

Astra is right, of course. It’s a mistake that’s so out of character for Townsend, there’s some small part of me that’s dubious we’re actually going to find anything useful. There’s a part of me that worries Astra is right and this is nothing more than a misdirection. But given the fact that we found nothing else in the house that provides even a hint about where his secret lair might be, all I have is hope that these papers will help us. And I’m going to cling to that hope for all I’m worth.

“It’s thin,” I admit to them all. “But if any of you has a better idea or know how to find his secondary location, I’m all ears.”

As I expected, nobody else has a thing to say. I glance at Rick and Nina who are doing their best to keep the burned pages from falling to pieces as they try to glean some bit of useful information from them.

“What do you think, guys?” I ask.

“Most of these pages are too burned to be useful,” Rick says. “They’re falling apart even as I touch them.”

I grimace. It’s not unexpected but still disappointing all the same. I honestly don’t know what we’re going to do if we can’t get anything from those pages. I have no fall-back plan. I have no other idea how to find Townsend’s secondary location. Having all our eggs in one basket is something I try to avoid simply because nothing good ever comes of that.

But we’ve searched property records in his name, his wife’s name, and his son’s name, and have come up empty. There is no property anywhere in or around Virginia tied to Townsend that we’ve found. Finding something on these charred pages is literally our only chance to find where he’s keeping the kids.

“Hey, hey, I think I found something!” Nina exclaims.

I dash over to her workstation and see her delicately smoothing out the page in front of her with exaggerated care. The ink is smudged, the edges curled and brown, and I can’t see exactly what she’s looking at.

“What do you have?” I ask.

“I found a company name I don’t recognize. It’s a company called Praxidice, Inc. These look like ownership papers for an incorporation,” she says.

“Praxidice, Inc.?” I ask.

“That’s what it says, but I don’t recognize the name from any of the backgrounds we did on him,” Nina replies. “Rick?”

“Working on it,” he says.