Daniel and I exchanged an immediate, sharp glance. The flashing red and blue lights swept across the hard, angry lines of his jaw.
“An animal call?” Daniel asked, his voice skeptical but tense. “Animal control is closer.”
“That’s what I thought at first,” Claire said, faint static hissing underneath her trembling words. “But it wasn’t an animal. I asked if she was safe in a room with a door. She whispered that her daddy said the snake was their secret.”
A cold, poisonous dread tightened deep inside my stomach. In our particular line of work, the word secret was venom. It was the currency predators depended upon.
“She was hiding,” Claire continued, every trace of professional distance now gone from her voice. “She was trying so incredibly hard not to breathe into the receiver. Then… the audio shifted. I heard something in the background. A slow, rhythmic metallic clinking. And a whistle. A man whistling, very softly, very slowly, like he was looking for a lost dog. Emily started hyperventilating. She called the noise ‘the hissing.’ I told her to stay quiet, but she started to panic. She whispered to me, ‘It’s slithering up the stairs.’”
Daniel buried the accelerator against the floorboard. The V8 screamed as we tore through the sleeping neighborhood, blowing past stop signs.
“Then what?” I demanded, gripping the plastic door handle until my knuckles whitened as Daniel threw the cruiser around a sharp corner.
“A door slammed open,” Claire said, lowering her voice almost to a whisper over the radio, as though she were standing inside that house beside the child. “A heavy thud, like something incredibly solid hitting the floorboards. She screamed, but it was muffled. Like a hand went over her mouth. And then… the line went completely dead. I’ve been trying to ping the phone’s GPS, trying to call back, but it’s completely shut off. Get there, Maria. Get there right now.”
“We’re two minutes out,” I promised, my heart pounding violently against my ribs like a trapped bird.
When a call involves a child in immediate danger, everything around you instantly contracts. Peripheral awareness disappears beneath a tunnel of adrenaline. As we turned aggressively onto Maplewood Drive, Daniel killed the sirens, leaving only the deep growl of our engine and the silent pulse of flashing lights. If someone inside was actively hurting a child, we had no intention of announcing our arrival from a mile away.
We stopped hard in front of 1427 Maplewood Drive.
It was exactly the kind of house capable of telling a perfect lie.
