It was Caspian. His idiotic head intact. Sitting with his hands cuffed to a small table pushed against a wall. A man in a police uniform sat across from him, and they appeared to be arguing. Caspian’s head was shaking as he spoke, gesticulating with his cuffed hands. The officer leaned back and crossed his arms, looking skeptical at best. I searched and found an audio panel with buttons corresponding to each monitor. I pressed the one for Caspian’s room, and caught the cop midsentence.

“—yourself any favors, here. You were the last person to see him. Your prints are in the car and on the gun found inside the culvert.”

“What gun? What fucking gun?” Caspian’s voice was hoarse, his words still slurred. “I didn’t have any gun.”

“Then how’d your prints get on it?”

“I have no idea! Planted somehow. I was fucking passed out, you know. Jesus!” I stopped listening as I scanned the other screens. My stomach sank when I saw other rooms I recognized. My master bathroom back home, looking out through the mirror covering the medicine cabinet. My bedroom, looking down from the ceiling fan over the bed. My living room, from the television toward the couch. Each of these rooms was empty.

Where was Cassie? Where was Rox? It would help if I knew what time it was, but I didn’t have my phone and wasn’t wearing a watch.

“Being blackout drunk doesn’t count as an alibi, Lance,” the cop was saying.

“Fuck this, I’m done. I’m not saying nothing else without a lawyer.”

He had been watching us. There were cameras in every room of my house. Even one in Rox’s bedroom, looking down from a mobile of planes that we had constructed together. The instructions said it would take an hour to assemble, but it had taken us the better part of a week. Kid had really wanted to help, so I’d let him, breaking it up into manageable chunks that could hold his attention, reconfiguring pieces over and over and over again until we got them just right, calming his tantrums and encouraging him to keep trying. His eyes were beaming with pride when I hoisted him up to hang it from a hook on the ceiling. He gave one of his rare smiles – that smile more precious than any material in the world – as the planes took flight, circling one another in the formation we had created. And this psycho fuck had turned my son’s most prized possession into a spy camera. Watching who knows what, as he lay in bed alone.

Of all the fucked-up things I had seen so far, this was the worst. This demanded retaliation. I’d find the freak behind this and hurt him. Hurt him bad. You don’t fuck with a man’s family. You especially don’t mess with a father’s son.