Chapter 9 - The Camera They Missed
"The cameras were removed?" Ortiz asked when she saw the invoice.
I nodded. "Ethan said the old system had a wiring problem. He told me the replacements were back-ordered."
The detective photographed the mounting brackets near the kitchen ceiling. There was fresh paint around each one.
"That doesn't prove what happened on the stairs," she said. "But it gives us a time line."
Back at Dad's little house, Sophie sat at the kitchen table drawing a yellow sun over a gray building.
"Do you remember if there were any cameras left?" I asked her.
She shook her head, then hesitated.
"Mommy, is my story box a camera?"
"What story box?"
"The blue one Grandma Joan gave me. You push the star and it saves your voice. I put it on the windowsill so Fox could hear bedtime stories."
Grandma Joan had been gone for five years. She had given Sophie a little recorder with a painted star on it, not long before she died. Sophie used it for invented fairy tales and messages to people she missed.
"Where is it now?" Dad asked.
"In my room. Under the bed, in the shoe box."
I remembered Sophie's bedroom door stood open across the landing. On the day I fell, she had been recording a story about a fox who found a secret garden.
Maybe the recorder had captured her scream.
Maybe it had captured much more.
Tessa shook her head when I reached for my phone. "No one goes back without arranging another lawful visit. Tell Ortiz exactly where it is."
We called the detective. She said she'd seek consent or a warrant as appropriate and asked Sophie not to be questioned repeatedly about the event.
That evening, while we waited, a stranger knocked on Dad's door.
He was a thin man in a mechanic's jacket. He introduced himself as Calvin Rusk and said he'd done bookkeeping for Ethan's construction company.
"I saw the ambulance that day," he said. "Then I heard what Margaret told the bank."
Dad kept the screen door closed.
"Why come here?"
Calvin swallowed. "Because I helped move money for those people, and now they're saying your daughter died from her injuries."
I stepped toward him.
"What did you say?"
May you like
He held out an envelope stamped by an insurance broker.
"They're trying to collect on your life insurance, Leah."
