The phone rang at exactly two in the morning, cutting through the silence of my Denver hotel room like a blade across glass. I was three hundred miles from home, visiting my sister Margaret after months of her begging me to get away from Chicago for a few days. The room was dark except for the thin blue glow of the alarm clock and the streetlights leaking through the curtains.
I had been asleep for less than three hours, but when the phone started vibrating against the nightstand, I woke with the strange calm of a man who had been expecting bad news. I was not surprised. In fact, I had been waiting for that call for weeks.
“Mr. Harrison?” a man said, his voice tight but controlled. “This is Marcus from Secure Watch Security.
Your apartment alarm just went off.”
I sat up slowly, feeling every one of my sixty-three years in my knees and lower back. The long drive, the unfamiliar mattress, the late dinner with Margaret, all of it had left my body tired. But my mind was clear.
“What is the situation, Marcus?” I asked. There was a pause. I heard muffled voices in the background, then the faint crackle of a radio.
“Well, sir, there is a man at your front door. He says his name is Alan Morrison. He claims he is the new owner of the apartment and that you gave him permission to enter.
He has some paperwork with him, but our protocol is to call you first.”
Alan Morrison. My son-in-law of five years. Married to my only daughter, Lucy.
The man who had spent the last eighteen months slowly, carefully, and almost politely trying to convince everyone around me that I was losing my mind. A smile came over my face in the darkness. It was not a pleasant smile.
It was the kind of smile that appears when a trap you have been setting for months finally begins to close. “Let him in,” I said. Marcus hesitated.
“Sir?”
“Let him in,” I repeated, calmly. “But keep watching. And Marcus?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Make sure every camera is recording.”
Another pause followed.
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