“Please come to the house,” she choked out through a sob that sounded heavy with fluid. “He lost his mind, Dad, and I think he broke something inside me this time.”
A sudden, sharp scream erupted from the other end of the line, followed by the sickening thud of a heavy object striking bone. I heard the phone clatter against a hard surface, then a dull crack against a wall, and then the line went silent.
The coffee mug slipped from my fingers and shattered into a thousand porcelain shards on the linoleum. The unassuming veteran who spent his weekends pruning hedges vanished, replaced by a cold, calculating ghost from a forgotten war.
I grabbed my keys and sprinted to my heavy-duty truck, the engine roaring to life with a mechanical snarl. I drove like a man possessed, weaving through the sleepy Sunday traffic toward the gated community of Ridgeview Heights.
The estate belonged to Simon Thorne, a man who had married my daughter five years ago and treated his life like a high-stakes poker game. He was a tech titan with a silver tongue and a heart made of cold, hard silicon.