Pete Sebeck stared at a dimple in the concrete of his cell wall. It was the only imperfection in an unrelenting sameness. It was his secret—a place upon which to center his mind as the world turned unseen around him.
It might have been night outside, but it was never dark in here. There was nothing even to mark the passage of time, and if there was, they would erase it. He was watched constantly. A fluorescent fixture buzzed light down on him from overhead. Surveillance cameras in mirrored enclosures on two ceiling corners recorded his every movement. A microphone his every utterance. He was alone, but never alone. As a high-profile prisoner, no expense had been spared to monitor him 24/7—guarding against the possibility that he might harm himself before the government could mete out justice.
As Sebeck lay staring at the wall, his memories were still raw nerves. Each turn of his mind made him wince.
Worth losing everything for. That’s what he used to tell himself about Cheryl Lanthrop. She was beautiful, but there was more to it than that. It was what that reflected about him. That he was worthy of attracting such a successful, confident person. Why did he think she would want him? What part of him nursed such fantasies? That was the sad truth of it. He was ripe for programming. He was ready to suspend disbelief to live that life. He hadn’t wanted to know the truth—not about her and definitely not about himself.
They said Lanthrop was dead now. If she had only confided in him. Perhaps he would have done the right thing. To his shame, he wasn’t certain.
The trial had been a fast-moving media circus. He was shocked at how incriminating the evidence against him was. In hindsight he felt it should have been obvious that he was being set up—Lanthrop urging him to secrecy. And then there were the things he had no knowledge of that crucified him. The files on his computer. Lists and corporate documents, all digitally shredded—but incompletely. A passport under the fictitious name Michael Corvus. The travels of that fictitious name, establishing offshore bank accounts and corporations. The credit card purchases and corporate officerships. The offshore payments and records of phone calls to Pavlos and Singh. The e-mail accounts detailing a convenient, media-friendly conspiracy.
Everyone believed that Sebeck was responsible for the deaths of all those people—and of Aaron Larson. He recalled the several times Larson sought guidance from him. Sebeck had refused the role of mentor. Being a father figure to anyone was the last thing he wanted.
Sebeck could hardly blame the public for hating him. The evidence was wide and deep. The clincher was that Sebeck did, indeed, have an affair with Cheryl Lanthrop. What they did together seemed merely kinky and strange at the time—but when combined with the mountain of evidence against him, it revealed a person quite different from the public face of Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck, decorated officer and dedicated family man. So different that he had begun to question it himself.
His wife, Laura, surprised him, though. He thought she would be glad to be rid of him.
Strange. After all this time, he couldn’t recall whether she goaded him into marriage or whether he had volunteered as a means of doing the right thing by her. It never even occurred to him at the time that she might not want to marry him. The pregnancy had been something that happened to him—at least in his own mind. Perhaps she had married him because she also thought that was the right thing to do.
After his arrest, when everyone abandoned him, she was there for him. The press pilloried her as a guileless moron, but she knew him. Tears welled in Sebeck’s eyes remembering it. She knew he could not have done these things, even when he doubted it himself. She had kept him sane, or near enough to sane.
They were just two people who got lost somewhere early in life.
Chris, their son, had come to see Sebeck only once and stared at the floor almost the entire time. When he did look up, there was a glare of utter malevolence through the glass that stung Sebeck worse than anything the federal prosecutor could say. It still stung.
Sebeck curled up on his cot around a pain so deep that he longed for it all to end. There was no clearing this up—even if proof of his innocence were found. His name had been too thoroughly dragged through the mud. Some taint would always remain. Some doubt would always exist in the minds of those around him. Death would be welcome, if it weren’t for the fact that almost everyone he cared about considered him evil. That his passing would be seen as justice. He was thankful his parents hadn’t lived to see this day.
But his deepest despair came from the knowledge that no one believed that the Daemon existed. From the outset it was clear that both the prosecution and the defense would be arguing not about the Daemon, but about whether Sebeck had been involved in the conspiracy to defraud Sobol’s estate and murder federal officers. The judge refused to hear testimony about the Daemon—largely because there was no evidence it existed. But it had to exist. Sebeck was convinced of it.
They were appealing his conviction to a higher federal court, but his lawyer didn’t hold out much hope. The government was clearly making an example out of Sebeck. His trial had been fast-tracked in response to public outrage, and failing the introduction of new evidence, there was little chance his guilty verdicts would be overturned on appeal.
Sebeck tried to remember a time when he was last truly happy. He had to think back all the way to high school, sitting on the roof of his neighbor’s garage with his buddies. That was the night before he found out Laura was pregnant. But was that true? Now the idea of coming home and seeing Chris and Laura laughing at the kitchen table was a treasured memory. The laughter stopped as he arrived, but that wasn’t their fault. It was his fault. He had purposefully distanced himself from them. Without this disaster, would Sebeck ever have realized what he had?
Sebeck’s mind turned to that voice on the phone at Sobol’s funeral. Experts proved it wasn’t Sobol, but Sebeck realized that was the whole point of it. It had to not be Sobol, and provably so. Nonetheless, that voice had actually warned him about what was to come.
I must destroy you.
He contemplated it emptily. Without hope or purpose.
But there was something else the voice had said. Sebeck tried hard to remember, buried as it was under months of pretrial testimony, interrogations, and hard evidence. But then it came to him.
They will require a sacrifice, Sergeant.
And so they had. Sebeck sat up and stared into nothingness, straining to recall the exact words of the voice.
Before you die…invoke the Daemon.
Somewhere there was a surveillance tape that showed Sebeck silently nodding to himself in the stillness of his empty cell. Because he now realized what he had to do.