4th of July

Chapter 75

THE INSIDE OF THE house had been sanitized, spiffed up, and repainted—whatever it took to get top dollar for a very challenging property. I lingered in the center hall, then followed Joe up the winding staircase.

When I got to the master bedroom, I found him staring at the closet door.

“There was a small hole here, at eye level—see, Linds? It was patched.” He dented the still-malleable Spackle with his fingernail.

“A peephole?”

“A peephole in a closet,” said Joe. “That’s odd, don’t you think? Unless the O’Malleys were making home movies.”

My mind whirled for a moment as I grappled with a possible connection between homemade porn and the Randy Long variety. Had the cops seen the camera setup?

And if they had, so what?

There was nothing illegal about consenting adults at play.

I stepped inside the newly painted closet, batted the wire coat hangers aside, then grabbed them to stop their jangling.

That’s when I saw another patch of Spackle visible under the fresh paint.

I prodded it with a finger and felt my heart start to hammer. There was another peephole at the back of the closet and it went right through the wall.

I took one of the hangers off the rod and straightened it into a long wire, which I inserted into the hole.

“Joe, could you go find where this comes out?”

The wire felt like a living thing as I waited for the tug that finally came from the other end. Joe returned seconds later. “It goes through to another bedroom. You should see this, Lindsay.”

The room next door was still partly furnished, with a ruffled four-poster, matching vanity, and an ornate full-length mirror affixed to the wall. Joe pointed out the hole disguised as a floral detail in the mirror’s carved wooden frame.

“Shit, Joe. This is their daughter’s room. Were those bastards spying on Caitlin? Were they filming her?”

I stared out the car window as Joe drove us back to Cat’s house. I couldn’t stop thinking about that second peephole. What kind of people had the O’Malleys been? Why would they have trained a camera on that child?

Had it been some kind of nanny-cam in the past?

Or was it something far more sinister?

My mind did pretzel loops around that peephole as I tried on every possibility. But it all came back to one question: Did any of this tie in with the murders?