Chapter 3 - The Camera Above the Refrigerator
Detective Hale called before sunrise.
A neighbor had supplied exterior footage showing Rachel's car leaving her parents' driveway and a second vehicle arriving later that morning.
The driver appeared to be Rachel's cousin, Andrew, who helped her parents with home repairs.
The timing mattered because her mother insisted nobody had entered the house after breakfast.
Rachel remembered the tiny indoor camera mounted above the refrigerator.
Her father had installed it years earlier after a kitchen flood, explaining that the unit could alert him to leaks while he was away.
Rachel had never been sure it still worked.
She told Hale.
He asked for the device's location and the cloud-account information if Rachel knew it.
Every new fact seemed to arrive with another reason to doubt it.
She knew neither password nor provider.
Her father had always handled the household technology.
At the hospital, Emma briefly stirred.
Rachel leaned close enough to hear a faint sound.
“Yellow,” Emma murmured.
Rachel thought of the sweatshirt and said she was there.
Emma slipped back to sleep.
A child-life specialist advised Rachel not to question Emma about the incident herself.
An appropriately trained interviewer could speak with her when medically ready, without risking suggestive questions.
Rachel agreed.
The investigators resisted shortcuts, and Rachel began to see that patience could protect the truth as much as urgency did.
Later, Andrew texted her privately.
“I'm sorry. I didn't know the police would show up.”
Rachel asked what he had done.
He typed for a long time.
Then he sent a photograph of the kitchen ceiling with an empty screw bracket where the camera had been.
“Your dad asked me to take it down.”
The message made Rachel's hands cold.
She forwarded it to Hale, who advised her not to confront Andrew.
Within an hour, Andrew called and sounded close to tears.
“Uncle Robert told me the camera was broken,” he said.
She stopped answering the relatives who demanded certainty she could not honestly provide.
“Did you keep it?”
“I left it on his workbench.”
“Please tell the detective exactly that.”
Andrew hesitated.
“Rachel, there's something else.”
She gripped the phone.
“He told me to erase an old memory card before anyone asked questions.”
Rachel looked through the glass at Emma's sleeping face.
The family wasn't merely minimizing breakfast anymore.
May you like
Someone was trying to decide which parts of it could still be seen.
