“Show me your hands!”
She rolled onto her back and raised both palms.
“I didn’t know,” she gasped. “I didn’t know.”
“Who are you?”
“They told me it was empty.”
Daniel froze.
The car alarm from the Trent driveway kept screaming in the distance. Dogs barked. Smoke drifted above the rooftops behind them.
“What was empty?” Daniel asked.
The woman’s eyes filled with tears.
“The house,” she said. “They told me the house was empty.”
That sentence changed the entire night.
Daniel got her onto her side, checked quickly for obvious life-threatening injuries, then called her location into dispatch. He did not have time to fully question her. Fire engines were now approaching from the south. A second patrol unit came in from the north. The house behind them was still smoking, and if her first words were true, then the explosion had not been a family accident.
Someone had sent her there.
And someone had lied.
The woman’s name was Emma Vale.
Daniel learned it from the ID in her pocket after EMS reached her. She was twenty-seven years old, unemployed, with a minor record: petty theft at nineteen, trespassing at twenty-two, possession of stolen property dismissed two years later. Nothing violent. Nothing that explained a house explosion. She kept repeating the same phrases while paramedics worked on her.
“They said no one would be home.”
“I was only supposed to get the box.”
“There was someone outside.”
Daniel tried to ask who, but she was drifting in and out, her breathing ragged from smoke and shock.
“What box?” he asked.
Emma’s eyes rolled toward him.
“Black case,” she whispered. “Behind the wall.”
Then she passed out.
By then, the house had become a full emergency scene.
Firefighters forced the front door and pushed inside through smoke thick enough to hide the living room. Daniel returned to the street as backup arrived, his lungs burning from the chase, his uniform dusted with ash from the side yard. He expected flames. There were some, but not as much as the blast suggested. Firefighters knocked them down quickly near a small room off the hallway.
The damage was concentrated.
That was the first thing the fire captain said when he came back out.
“Not the kitchen,” Captain Ortiz told Daniel. “Not the garage. Not the gas line, at least not obvious. Looks like the main pressure came from an interior office wall.”
“An office wall?”
“Small room by the stairs. Something went off in or behind the wall. We’ve got victims.”
Daniel felt his stomach tighten.
“How many?”
“Four pulled out. Two adults, two kids. All alive when we carried them.”
Alive.
For a moment, that was enough.
Then Daniel looked toward the side yard where Emma had appeared.
She had not come from the front of the house. She had not run from the living room window. She had come from the side passage that led past the office wall and toward the backyard. If she had been inside for a simple burglary, why was the blast centered where she said she had been sent to retrieve something?