Chapter 3: The House on Hollow Lane

The Rathbone estate sat on a hill draped in evergreens, a manor that looked older than the town itself, though modern in its sheen. Lena staked out Hollow Lane for two nights, hidden in a rental car with the engine running low, camera at the ready. Security was tight: cameras, men in Rathbone suits who watched more carefully than any CCTV. She photographed license plates, recorded comings and goings, and cataloged movements.

A pattern emerged: late-night deliveries under a different company's name, a gated entrance used only at odd hours, and a Rathbone SUV that driverless too often - always leaving after midnight. She tried to follow it once and lost it in a fog of side streets and a van that blocked her path. When she returned to the stakeout the next evening, someone had ransacked her car - glove marks on the door handle, her dashcam missing. The message was clear: STOP!!!

Instead of stopping, Lena turned her method to the inside. She requested archived business permits, tax records, and charity filings. She visited community centers funded by Rathbone donations and found the same glossy brochures and the same tight-lipped smiles. People were grateful for jobs and scholarships; they were not grateful for the price that might come with them.

An unexpected lead came from Jonas Reed, a junior accountant who had recently been fired from a Rathbone company. Jonas, young and thin from worry, met Lena in a laundromat with a plastic cup of coffee and a laptop, hands trembling as he whispered details.

 “They overstate their charitable funds,” he said.

“Some of it goes into… special projects. Offshore accounts with names that do not stack up. And there is a ledger - codified entries that line up with closures and -” He swallowed.

“There are expenses listed as ‘containment’ and ‘maintenance.’

 Jonas’s eyes widened as if seeing faces in the suds.

“It is more than money laundering. They treat problems like things that can be shelved.”

Lena felt a prickle of something angry and righteous. If you reduced human life to an entry in a ledger, what did that make you? She photographed the ledger pages, Jonas whispering instructions: burn the copies after she saved them. He handed her a flash drive that made the threat real; the files on it were encrypted in a way he admitted he did not fully understand.

The flash drive contained emails with coded language, invoices to shell companies, and one unsettling image - security footage from a night near the old mill. A shadow moved in a way Jonas could not explain, a person too tall, too fluid, as if their stride did not match a human gait.

At the same time, an untraceable fund transfer labeled “Harvest” coincided with the date of one of the murders.

Lena left the laundromat with her pulse a hard drumbeat. She had wanted evidence. She had found a map that pointed to something that refused human description. The Rathbone family was involved in things that moved in the dark - literal or not - and now she had to get closer. She also knew someone had just given her a live grenade.