Chapter 3 - The Interrogation Room and the Hidden Files
By midnight, the rain had slowed to a steady, melancholic drizzle, but the atmosphere inside the precinct’s interrogation room felt heavier than ever. Douglas sat at the metal table, his high-end suit jacket wrinkled, his hair slightly disheveled. He had been brought in under formal detention thirty minutes prior after state troopers arrived to back up Terrence’s lock-down order.
Across the table sat Detective Miller, a seasoned investigator with tired eyes and a low, gravelly voice, flanked by Terrence Callahan.
"You're making a catastrophic mistake," Douglas muttered, leaning forward, trying to project an air of calm, injured dignity. "As a physician, I prescribed a mild anxiolytic for my daughters to manage a hereditary sleep disorder. Children wander. Children fabricate stories under stress. The oldest one has an active imagination."
Detective Miller didn't blink. He slid a thick manila folder across the table and flipped it open, revealing a series of printed bank statements, pharmacy logs, and digital registry exports.
"Dr. Sinclair, let's talk about your practice," Miller said quietly. "Or rather, let's talk about how your medical license was placed on administrative probation six months ago for illicit acquisition of restricted sedatives under fictitious patient names."
Douglas’s composure flickered for a microsecond. His eyes darted to the papers, then back up to Miller’s face. "Administrative oversight. Easily cleared up with a compliance hearing."
"Is it also an oversight that your wife—the girls' mother—mysteriously passed away eighteen months ago in this exact county from an acute, unexplained overdose of the exact same medication currently running through seven-year-old Delilah's bloodstream?" Terrence spoke up for the first time, his voice cutting through the stale air like a scalpel.
Douglas stiffened in his chair, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle twitched near his temple. "My wife’s death was thoroughly investigated. Heart failure. Certified by the coroner."
"A coroner who happened to be your fraternity brother," Miller added smoothly, dropping a second file onto the table—a private digital forensics report pulled from the cloud storage drive Charlotte and Delilah had secretly backed up using an old tablet their father thought was broken.
The tablet files contained audio recordings. Hours of them. Recorded in the quiet hallways of the Sinclair home late at night.
As Miller tapped the play button on his desk recorder, the tinny audio filled the room.
“Drink it, Delilah. Drink it all down or the bad feelings will come back.”
“Daddy, it tastes like burning. I don’t want to sleep anymore.”
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“You sleep when I tell you to sleep. Otherwise, people start asking questions about your mother, and I won't have you ruining our lives.”
The room fell dead silent. Douglas stared at the recorder, the color draining entirely from his face until his skin resembled old parchment. The arrogant, untouchable physician facade shattered completely, leaving behind the shivering, cornered predator he truly was.
