The coffee in the observation room tasted like burnt styrofoam and justice.
Maya stood in the dark, her forehead resting against the cold glass of the one-way mirror. Her shoulder throbbed where she had slammed into the gazebo floor, and her clothes were still damp from the storm, but her mind was razor-sharp. The adrenaline crash hadn’t hit yet; she was running on the fumes of closure.
Inside the interrogation box, Elias Thorne looked less like a monster and more like a broken marionette.
He was dressed in blue paper scrubs provided by the hospital after they had treated the gunshot wound in his shoulder. His arm was in a sling. He was handcuffed to the table by his good wrist. Under the harsh fluorescent hum, his skin looked grey, waxy, and translucent.
But his eyes were alive. They darted around the room, checking the camera angles, assessing the acoustics. He wasn’t scared. He was performing.
“He’s been talking for twenty minutes,” Detective Miller said, standing beside Maya. Miller looked exhausted, his tie loosened, a stain of mud on his trousers from the arrest. “But he won’t answer questions. He’s just… narrating.”
“He’s the producer,” Maya said, her voice raspy. “He’s giving you the director’s commentary.”
Inside the room, Elias leaned forward. He tapped the metal table with a rhythmic, agitated beat.
“The pacing was off in the third act,” Elias said to the empty air, ignoring the uniformed officer sitting across from him. “I admit that. The storm was a nice touch—very Gothic—but the police response time was unrealistic. In the original draft, you didn’t arrive until the fire was already out.”
“Mr. Thorne,” the officer said, trying to regain control. “Let’s talk about the gun. Let’s talk about the attempted murder of four women.”
Elias waved his hand dismissively, the handcuffs clattering against the steel loop. “Attempted? No, no. If I wanted them dead, they would be dead. I had the gasoline. I had the matches. The fire was symbolic. It was a cleansing.”
He looked directly at the mirror. Maya flinched, even though she knew he couldn’t see her. He smiled—a thin, terrifying expression that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Is she watching?” Elias asked softly. “Maya? Is she behind the glass?”
Miller pressed the button on the intercom. “Focus on the questions, Elias.”
“She’s watching,” Elias decided, settling back in his chair. “Good. She’s the only one who understands the narrative structure. The rest of you are just extras.”
He took a sip of water from a paper cup, savoring it like a fine wine.
“You want to know about Juniper,” Elias said. It wasn’t a question. “You want to know why she died. Everyone thinks it was the baby. Or the affair. Everyone thinks it was passion.”
He laughed, a dry, hacking sound.
“It wasn’t passion. It was accounting.”
Maya stepped closer to the glass. This was it. The ledger. The missing piece that linked the Blue Suits to the blood.
“My father,” Elias began, his voice dropping to the gravelly timbre of the Podcast Narrator. “Marcus Thorne. The President. The Architect. He didn’t build the Gables to be a neighborhood. He built it to be a washing machine.”
“A washing machine?” the officer asked, scribbling in his notebook.
“Money laundering,” Maya whispered in the observation room.
“The Reserve Fund,” Elias explained, his eyes gleaming. “Do you know how much money flows through an HOA of this size? Landscaping contracts. Pool maintenance. Snow removal. Roofing assessments. Millions of dollars a year. And who audits it? The Board. And who was on the Board?”
“Your father,” the officer said.
“My father. Rick’s father. Elena’s father-in-law. The Blue Suits,” Elias said. “They were taking cash from… interested parties in the city. Construction firms. Unions. Moving it through shell companies disguised as vendors. ‘GreenView Landscaping’ didn’t exist in 1994. It was a paper tiger. They paid invoices for work that was never done, cleaned the cash, and pulled it out in ‘consulting fees.’”
Maya felt a chill run up her spine. It was so banal. So suburban. The evil wasn’t a satanic cult; it was embezzlement hidden in mulch receipts.
“And Juniper?” the officer prompted.
“Juniper was the secretary,” Elias said. “Not for the Board. For the shell company. She thought she was doing data entry for a legitimate firm. She worked from home. From the sunroom.”
Elias closed his eyes.
“I watched her,” he whispered. “From my bedroom window next door. I was seventeen. I was invisible. I saw her typing. I saw her stop. I saw her pull a file she wasn’t supposed to see. She did the math, you see. Juniper was smart. Smarter than them. She realized the numbers didn’t add up.”
“She blackmailed them?”
“No,” Elias said, shaking his head sadly. “She wasn’t like that. She threatened to go to the IRS. She had morals. That was her fatal flaw. In The Gables, morals are a liability.”
“So they killed her,” the officer said.
“They held a meeting,” Elias corrected. “In the gazebo. I heard them. My father said, ‘She’s a loose end.’ Rick’s father said, ‘We handle it in-house.’ They drew straws. Or maybe they just flipped a coin. I don’t know who held the knife. Does it matter? They all held the handle.”
“And you watched,” the officer said.
Elias opened his eyes. They were wet.
“I watched,” he admitted. “I saw the man in the blue suit go in. I saw the light go out. I saw her fall. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run over there. But I was a Thorne. And Thornes don’t make scenes. We keep the peace.”
Maya felt a wave of nausea. He had been a boy, paralyzed by his father’s shadow, watching a woman die because she knew too much about landscaping invoices.
“Why now?” the officer asked. “Why the podcast? Why terrorize these women thirty years later?”
Elias smiled again. This time, it was beatific.
“Because the money is still moving,” he said. “My father died. Rick’s father died. But the system? The system is perfect. It kept running. I inherited the presidency. Rick inherited the vice presidency. We inherited the laundry.”
“You’re laundering money now?”
“I tried to stop it,” Elias said, his voice cracking. “I wanted out. But the ‘interested parties’… they don’t let you retire. They threatened my wife. They threatened my life. I was trapped. Just like Juniper.”
He looked at his handcuffed wrist.
“So I decided to burn it down. All of it. The reputation. The property values. The secrets. If I exposed the murder—really exposed it—the police would have to look at the books. The feds would come. The neighborhood would be destroyed. And I would be free.”
“You terrorized innocent women to trigger a federal investigation?” the officer asked, incredulous.
“Innocent?” Elias scoffed. “Sarah knew. She saw it too. She slept with the cop who covered it up. Maya burned a source for a headline. Chloe is a fraud living on credit. Elena deals drugs to soccer moms. None of them are innocent. They were the perfect cast. I needed a protagonist who wouldn’t stop digging. I needed Maya.”
Maya stood frozen in the dark. He had picked her. He had groomed her. He had fed her clues—the dress, the poison, the files—to force her to destroy him.
“The script,” Elias mumbled, his energy fading. “It was supposed to end tonight. The Fire. I was going to burn Number 4. The epicenter. And I was going to stay inside. A final act of penance. The boy who watched becomes the man who burns.”
He looked down at the table.
“But they changed the ending,” he whispered. “They broke the glass. They ran to the gazebo. They fought back. I didn’t write that part. It was… improvised.”
He looked up at the mirror, staring directly into Maya’s eyes.
“It was better,” he said. “A twist ending. The victims became the heroes. The villain goes to jail. The neighborhood is saved… or is it?”
He leaned back, exhausted.
“The servers,” he said to the officer. “The encryption keys for the offshore accounts. They’re on the laptop. The password is ‘Juniper’. Case sensitive.”
“We have enough,” Miller said, turning away from the glass. “He’s confessing to RICO violations, conspiracy to commit murder, arson, stalking… he’s never seeing the sun again.”
“He doesn’t want to see the sun,” Maya said softly. “He wants to be in the dark. It’s where he’s lived since 1994.”
She looked at Elias one last time. He was humming to himself now. A low, discordant tune. The theme music from the podcast.
He wasn’t a mastermind. He was a victim who had metastasized into a monster. He had tried to use fiction to fix reality, and reality had punched him in the face.
“I’m done,” Maya said. “I want to go home.”
“We’ll need a formal statement,” Miller said.
“You have the recording,” Maya said, gesturing to the interrogation room. “You have the podcast. You have the truth.”
She walked out of the observation room, leaving the sterile air of the station behind.
Outside, the storm had passed. The sky was a bruised purple, the sun rising over the horizon. The air smelled clean, scrubbed of the humidity and the lies.
Maya walked to her car. Her phone buzzed. It was the group chat.
Chloe: Is it over?
Sarah: Did he talk?
Elena: Are we safe?
Maya typed a reply, her fingers steady for the first time in weeks.
Maya: He talked. It wasn’t a ghost. It was a ledger. And we just closed the account.
She got into her car and started the engine. She didn’t turn on the radio. She didn’t turn on a podcast. She drove in silence, listening to the sound of the tires on the wet pavement, a rhythm that belonged only to her.
The Gables would wake up in an hour. The news vans would be there. The property values would tank. The illusion was shattered.
But as Maya drove back toward the broken white fences of Bittersweet Court, she realized she didn’t care about the illusion anymore. She had the truth. And for the first time since she moved to the suburbs, the truth hadn’t destroyed her. It had set her free.