Fool Me Once

Eileen started to cry. “I thought the cams weren’t connected to the web, you know? I mean, they use an SD card. I didn’t realize. It’s not even that uncommon. Hacking into cameras, I mean. People do it with those FaceTime and Skype cameras and… I should have put security measures up. But I didn’t know.” She stopped and wiped the tears from her face.

“I’m so sorry, Maya,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t know what happened with your nanny cam,” Eileen said. “And it’s okay if you don’t want to tell me. But I thought that maybe this would explain it. That maybe someone hacked in and could see you and Lily.”

Maya tried to digest this new information. Right now, she couldn’t figure out exactly what this news meant or if it related to her situation. Could someone have made a video of Joe in another place and uploaded it to her nanny cam? And if that was the case, so what? It had still been filmed in that room, still recorded on that couch.

But was she being watched?

“Maya?”

“I didn’t get any emails like this,” Maya said. “No one sent me photographs.”

Eileen looked at her. “What then? What happened with your nanny cam?”

“I saw Joe,” Maya said.

Chapter 23

Maya carried Lily upstairs and tucked her into the bed. She debated checking the back of the nanny cam to see if the Wi-Fi was on, but right now, she didn’t want to tip off whoever might be watching her.

Watching her. Wow. Talk about sounding paranoid.

She and Eileen set up the Chinese in the formal dining room, far away from the possibly prying eye of the nanny cam. Maya filled her in on what she’d seen on the nanny cam, on Isabella… and then she stopped with the confessional because she was being stupid.

Fact: Eileen had brought that nanny cam into her house.

Maya tried to let that go, but the suspicion buzzed in her ear. She could quiet it, but it wouldn’t go away, not completely.

“What are you going to do,” Maya asked, “about Robby?”

“I gave copies of the photographs to my attorney. He said without proof there’s nothing I can do. I made sure the Wi-Fi setting was completely off. There’s a company that’s going to come in and make sure my network is secure.”

That sounded like a pretty good plan.

Half an hour later, after she had walked Eileen to her car, Maya called Shane. “I need another favor.”

“You can’t see,” Shane said, “but I’m sighing theatrically.”

“I need someone we trust to come in and sweep my place for bugs.”

She explained about Eileen and the hacked nanny cam.

“Do you know if yours was hacked?” he asked.

“No. Do you have someone who can help me?”

“I do. But I have to be honest. This is all sounding a little…”

“Paranoid?” she finished for him.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Were you the one who called Dr. Wu?”

“Maya?”

“What?”

“You’re not okay.”

She said nothing.

“Maya?”

“I know,” she said.

“Nothing wrong with needing help.”

“I need to get through this first.”

“Get through what exactly?”

“Please, Shane.”

There was a brief pause. Then: “I’m sighing again.”

“Theatrically?”

“Is there any other way? I’ll come by with some guys and sweep your place in the morning.” He cleared his throat. “You armed, Maya?”

“What do you think?”

“Rhetorical question,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Shane ended the call. Maya wasn’t quite ready yet for another horror-filled night of flashbacks. Instead, she turned her attention toward Claire’s trip to Philadelphia.

Lily was still asleep. Maya knew that she should wake her daughter and change her out of the clothes she’d worn all day and give her a bath and put her in clean pajamas. The “good” moms would insist on that, of course, and for a moment, Maya could also see their disapproving gazes. But those other moms weren’t carrying a gun and dealing with murder, were they? They didn’t even get that blood-soaked worlds like hers lived side by side with theirs, neighbor to neighbor; that while they worried about arts and crafts and after-school activities and karate classes and enrichment programs, the family next door was dealing with death and terror.

Was someone watching her?

There was not much she could do about that right now. There were other things, important things, that had to be dealt with right away, so she put the paranoia in a box and broke out her laptop. If her house was indeed bugged-and that still seemed like overkill to her-they could also have tapped into her Wi-Fi. To be on the ridiculously safe side, she changed her home network’s name and password and used a VPN-virtual private network-to browse.

That would probably be enough, but who knew?

She got back online and started searching for the name “Andrew Burkett.” Not unexpectedly, there were several-a college professor, a car salesman, a graduate student. She tried adding in other key words and searching back in time. A few articles on Andrew’s death began to pop up. A large local newspaper covered it thusly:

YOUNG BURKETT SCION DROWNS OFF YACHT