Chapter 3 - The Secret Life
They held David without bail for 48 hours, which gave the police enough time to rip our house apart. I stayed at my sister’s place with Lily, refusing to let her out of my sight.
When Detective Miller called me back, the truth she laid out was worse than any nightmare. David wasn't just an accountant. Before we met, he had been a financial auditor for a massive, corrupt pharmaceutical tech firm that went under. He had stolen proprietary data—and samples—when the company folded.
He was trying to sell the formula to black-market bio-hackers on the dark web. But buyers demanded proof that the chemical wouldn't cause immediate cardiac arrest in humans. He needed a test subject. Someone small. Someone whose baseline metrics he could monitor daily without raising suspicion from doctors.
May you like
He used his own daughter.
He used a timer to see how long she could stay submerged after inhaling the fumes from the washcloth. He was compiling data. I felt physically sick, rushing to a trash can in the precinct hallway to vomit. The easygoing smile, the insistence on taking over bath time—it was all a calculated, monstrous lie.
