“What happened inside?”
Emma swallowed.
“I used the side door. Code worked. I went to the office. I found the wall section. I started pulling the panel loose. Then I heard someone upstairs.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. A man’s voice. He said, ‘Hello?’ I panicked. I tried to put it back, but the panel was already loose.”
“Did you see him?”
“The father. I guess. He came down the stairs. He saw me. I said I was sorry. I told him somebody sent me. He started toward the phone.”
“Then?”
Emma looked toward Daniel.
“Then I saw a person outside the sliding glass door.”
Mara did not move.
“What person?”
“A man. I think. Standing in the backyard. Dark jacket. He was watching us.”
“Face?”
“No. Reflection, smoke, dark. I don’t know. But he was there.”
“What did he do?”
Emma’s hand trembled on the blanket.
“He lifted his phone.”
The room went quiet.
Mara said carefully, “Then the explosion happened?”
Emma nodded.
“I woke up on the floor. Everything was smoke. The man from the stairs was down. I heard a woman screaming upstairs. I tried to crawl toward the back door because the hallway was full of smoke. When I got outside, I saw the man again near the fence. He was walking away.”
“Did he see you?”
“Yes.”
“What did he do?”
“He smiled.”
Emma began crying then, not loudly, not dramatically, but in a way that made Daniel believe she had not invented that part.
“He smiled like I was supposed to be dead.”
That was the first time Mara truly stopped seeing Emma as the center of the crime.
She was involved. She had entered the home unlawfully. She had opened the wall. Her actions had set the night in motion.
But someone had expected her to die with the evidence.
That changed everything.
The side door keypad became the next major clue.
The Trent family had moved into the house six months earlier and changed the main alarm code, but the side utility door still accepted an old contractor access code tied to a previous security system integration. Aaron Trent did not know that. The installer who upgraded the system did not catch it. The old code had remained buried in the keypad’s access memory.
Emma had used it.
Which meant the person who sent her had data from before the Trents owned the house.
The previous owner was Leonard Pike.