The canary token didn’t sing; it screamed.
In the fluorescent-lit sterility of the rented office space above a dry cleaner in the next town over, the sound pierced the air like a dental drill. It was a jagged, digital shriek that made everyone jump.
Chloe Vance scrambled over the desk, nearly knocking over a cup of lukewarm takeout coffee. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, silencing the alarm but leaving the red dialogue box pulsing on the center monitor.
“He clicked,” Chloe breathed, her voice trembling with a mixture of triumph and terror. “He actually clicked it.”
Maya Lin-Baker was at her shoulder in a second. Sarah and Elena crowded in behind them, forming a tight knot of tension.
“Did we get through the VPN?” Maya asked, her eyes fixed on the scrolling lines of code.
“The deepfake worked,” Chloe said, typing furiously. “He couldn’t resist the bait. He thought he was downloading a lost audio file of Juniper. The moment he opened the container, the tracker executed. It bypassed the tunnel.”
“So we have him?” Sarah asked. “We have a location?”
“Resolving now,” Chloe said. “It’s grabbing the GPS coordinates from his device’s Wi-Fi triangulation. It’s… oh god.”
“What?” Elena asked sharply. “Is he in Russia? Is he a bot?”
“He’s not a bot,” Chloe whispered. The color drained from her face, leaving her contour makeup standing out like war paint on a corpse. “He’s local. Look at the latitude.”
Maya leaned in. 41.8. The same prefix as The Gables.
“Map it,” Maya commanded.
Chloe hit a key. The screen shifted from code to a satellite view. The globe spun, zooming in with dizzying speed. It dove past the state lines, past the county borders, past the town of Willow Creek.
It hovered over the green, grid-like expanse of The Gables development.
“He’s in the neighborhood,” Sarah said, her hand flying to her mouth.
“Closer,” Maya said. The map continued to zoom.
The image sharpened. The familiar grey loop of asphalt appeared. The hydrangeas in the center island. The four houses standing like sentinels.
The red pin dropped.
It didn’t land on Maya’s house. It didn’t land on the birdhouse in the woods.
It landed squarely on the roof of Number 5.
The Cursed House. The empty house. The house right next door to Maya.
The room went silent, save for the hum of the server rack in the corner.
“He’s at Number 5,” Maya said, the words tasting like copper. “He’s right next door.”
“But that house is empty,” Elena argued, shaking her head. “The bank foreclosed on the last owners six months ago. The water is off. The power is… well, the power might be on for showings.”
“It’s not empty,” Chloe said, pointing at the data stream. “Look at the signal strength. He’s pushing massive data. He’s not just downloading our trap. He’s broadcasting. He’s uploading something else.”
“The finale,” Maya realized. “He’s uploading the finale.”
She turned away from the screen, pacing the small room. The pieces slammed together in her mind with the violence of a car crash. The proximity. The knowledge of their movements. The birdhouse camera was just a backup. His primary vantage point wasn’t the woods; it was the bedroom window of the house next door.
“He’s been squatting there,” Maya said. “Right under our noses. He watches us from the window, then goes down to the basement to record. That’s why the background noise on the podcast is so clean—it’s soundproofed by the earth, but it still catches the mail truck because the driveway is ten feet away.”
“Number 5,” Sarah whispered. “That was the Thorne house. Elias’s childhood home.”
“Elias isn’t the killer,” Maya said. “We proved that at the library. But he still has keys. Or someone else does.”
“Rick,” Chloe said, her voice cracking. “Rick has keys to every house on the block. He kept copies when he was on the architectural committee. He said it was for ‘emergencies.’”
“It doesn’t matter who has the key right now,” Maya said, grabbing her coat. “What matters is that he is there right now. He’s trapped. He thinks he’s anonymous. He doesn’t know we just painted a target on his back.”
“We call the police,” Sarah said, reaching for her phone. “We call Garrett. He’ll send a SWAT team.”
“Garrett won’t send SWAT,” Maya snapped. “Garrett will send a patrol car to drive by and spook him. Or worse, Garrett will tip him off because he thinks we’re the problem. If we call the police, the killer flushes the evidence. He wipes the drives. He disappears back into the woodwork.”
“So what do we do?” Elena asked. “We can’t go in there. He’s dangerous, Maya. He poisoned a dog. He cut your brake lines.”
“He’s a coward,” Maya said, her eyes hard. “He hides behind microphones and voice modulators. He hides in empty houses. He’s not a fighter. He’s a director. And directors panic when the actors go off-script.”
She looked at the time. 11:42 PM.
“We have the element of surprise,” Maya said. “He’s focused on the upload. He’s looking at a screen, not the street. If we leave now, we can be there in fifteen minutes.”
“And then what?” Chloe asked. “We knock?”
“We breach,” Maya said.
The word hung there, heavy and military.
“I have a taser,” Maya said. “In my glove box.”
“I have pepper spray,” Chloe offered weakly.
“I have a scalpel,” Elena said. She pulled a surgical blade from her purse. The other women stared at her. “What? I came from a shift. I forgot to take it out of my pocket.”
“We’re really doing this?” Sarah asked. She looked terrified, but she wasn’t backing away. “We’re going to vigilante a murder suspect?”
“We’re going to save our lives,” Maya said. “Because if that finale uploads… if he releases whatever he has on us… we’re dead anyway. Socially. Professionally. Maybe literally.”
She walked to the door.
“Let’s go.”
The drive back to Bittersweet Court was a blur of rain-slicked streets and adrenaline. Maya drove, her knuckles white on the wheel. No one spoke. The radio was off. The only sound was the hum of the tires and the shallow breathing of four women who had decided to stop being victims.
They parked the car a block away, on Oak Hollow Lane, to avoid alerting him with headlights.
“On foot from here,” Maya whispered. The rain had stopped, leaving the air thick and humid. The streetlights reflected in the puddles like spilled oil.
They moved in a tight formation, sticking to the shadows of the hedges. They didn’t look like a book club anymore. They looked like a wolf pack.
When they reached the cul-de-sac, Bittersweet Court was silent. The houses were dark, sleeping beasts.
Except for Number 5.
From the street, it looked dead. No lights in the windows. The “For Sale” sign creaked in the breeze. But Maya knew better now. She looked at the basement window—a small, ground-level rectangle half-hidden by overgrown boxwoods.
A faint, almost imperceptible glow leaked from the edges of the blackout curtain.
“He’s down there,” Chloe whispered. “The signal is screaming on my phone. He’s still connected.”
“How do we get in?” Elena asked.
“The back door,” Maya said. “The lockbox. Chloe, do you have the app?”
Chloe pulled out her phone. “I renewed my license this morning. Just in case.”
They crept around the side of the house, moving through the wet grass. The mud sucked at their shoes. Maya looked up at her own house next door. It was dark. Empty. It felt strange to be invading the space next to her sanctuary, like stepping into the mirror universe.
The back deck of Number 5 was rotting. The wood was soft and slick with algae. They stepped carefully, testing each board for squeaks.
The back door had a standard heavy-duty realtor lockbox hanging from the handle.
Chloe held her phone up to the sensor.
Please work, Maya prayed. Please let the bank be lazy with their security updates.
Chloe tapped the screen. The phone communicated with the box via Bluetooth. A spinning wheel appeared.
Accessing…
Accessing…
Click.
The shackle released. The key tray dropped open.
“You are a genius,” Sarah whispered.
“I’m a fraud,” Chloe corrected, grabbing the key. “But sometimes it pays.”
Maya took the key. Her hand was trembling, but not from fear. It was a cold, vibrating rage. This was the man who had recorded her son crying. This was the man who had hung the red dress.
She slid the key into the deadbolt. She turned it slowly. The mechanism was well-oiled. Someone had been maintaining it.
The door swung inward with a soft sigh.
The smell hit them first. It wasn’t the musty smell of an empty house. It was the smell of ozone. Coffee. And something else—the sharp, metallic tang of heated electronics.
They stepped into the kitchen. It was empty, stripped bare of appliances. Dust motes danced in the beam of Maya’s penlight.
“Basement,” Maya mouthed.
They moved through the living room, their footsteps muffled by the thick, dusty carpet the bank hadn’t bothered to replace. The door to the basement was in the hallway.
It was slightly ajar.
A blue light spilled from the crack, cutting a jagged line across the floorboards.
Maya paused at the door. She could hear it now. A low, rhythmic sound coming from below.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Typing.
And then, a voice. The voice. Not the gravelly, modulated narrator voice, but a human voice. Muttering.
“Pacing is off… cut the scream… fade to black…”
Maya looked at her friends. Sarah was gripping her pepper spray with both hands. Elena held the scalpel like a pen. Chloe had her phone up, recording everything.
Maya pulled the taser from her pocket. She flipped the safety off. A small red light appeared on the device.
She pushed the door open.
The stairs stretched down into the blue gloom.
“Let’s cancel his show,” Maya whispered.
She took the first step. The wood groaned under her weight.
The typing stopped instantly.
Silence rushed up the stairs, heavy and suffocating.
“Hello?” the voice called out from below. It sounded confused. “Pizza?”
Maya didn’t answer. She rushed down the stairs, the others close behind her. They descended into the belly of the beast, ready for a monster.
But as they rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs, the scene that greeted them wasn’t a dungeon.
It was a control room.
Banks of monitors lined the concrete walls. Server towers hummed. A mixing board that looked like it belonged in a professional recording studio sat on a folding table.
And on the screens…
Maya gasped.
The screens weren’t showing code. They were showing feeds. Live video feeds.
There was Maya’s kitchen. There was Chloe’s pantry. There was Sarah’s bedroom. There was Elena’s living room.
He hadn’t just bugged them. He had cameras. Tiny, pinhole cameras they hadn’t found.
And in the center of the room, spinning around in an expensive ergonomic office chair to face them, was a man.
He wasn’t wearing a mask. He wasn’t wearing a blue suit.
He was wearing a headset and a ‘World’s Best Dad’ t-shirt.
But the chair was empty. The man had thrown himself to the floor behind the desk the moment he saw them.
“Don’t move!” Maya screamed, aiming the taser at the space behind the desk. “I will drop you!”
“Wait! Wait!” The voice cracked. It was terrified.
A hand rose slowly from behind the monitors. Then another.
“Don’t shoot,” the man whimpered.
He stood up slowly.
Maya stared.
It wasn’t Elias Thorne. It wasn’t Rick Vance. It wasn’t Chief Garrett.
“Who are you?” Sarah asked, her voice shaking.
The man looked at them, his eyes darting to the taser, then to the scalpel. He looked like an accountant who had been caught embezzling.
“I’m the producer,” he stammered.
He looked at the screen where the upload bar was frozen at 99%.
“And you just ruined the season finale.”