Too short a time for random tinkering. Long enough for someone who knew exactly what to do.
That night, Morales returned to the house. Walking through the parents’ bedroom again, he noticed something he had missed.
A faint mark on the doorknob. As if someone wearing a rough glove had twisted it.
No forced entry. No broken locks.
Someone had been let in. Or someone knew the house well enough not to need force.
“This was planned,” Morales murmured.
What no one knew yet was that the key to the case was not in the boiler, or the cameras, or the phone records.
It was under a child’s bed.
The next day, Sofia was taken to a temporary foster home. She arrived with a backpack, her stuffed animal, and a thin notebook filled with drawings.
That night, a caregiver flipped through it while helping her unpack.
She stopped suddenly.
The drawings were simple. Crayon and pencil. But the scenes were not.
In one, several faceless men stood outside a small house.
In another, her father shouted into a phone while her mother cried in the kitchen.
In the last drawing, Sofia’s bedroom was shown. She was awake in bed. On the stairs was a dark figure, moving toward the basement.
Police were called immediately.
When Morales arrived, he knelt in front of Sofia.
“Can you tell me about this drawing?” he asked gently.
She hugged her stuffed animal closer.
“I heard footsteps,” she said. “Heavy ones. I thought it was Dad, but he was already sleeping.”
“Did you see the person?”
“Only their shadow,” she whispered. “I was scared.”
“Was this before your parents went to bed?”
She nodded.
“Yes.”
That changed everything.
It meant the intruder had been inside the house before the gas was released.
Investigators checked the father’s phone. Deleted messages were recovered. One contact stood out, saved only as “R.”
“The deadline is tomorrow.”
“No more excuses.”
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