Chapter Twenty-Two

The story broke nationally that afternoon, and Callum understood, watching it unfold across every major outlet within a matter of hours — a remanded murder suspect found dead in custody, in a case already tangled up in the public imagination with the reopened Taken investigation, a story with exactly the combustible ingredients that made national editors sit up straight and reach for their phones on a slow December news day — that the false solution had not simply collapsed under its own weight. It had detonated, publicly, catastrophically, in a manner that made it considerably more dangerous now to whoever had originally built it than a quiet, contained unravelling would ever have been.