“If it was hidden, how did you know it was there?”
“I walked over to the agency after Holly left, and I poked around a bit. That’s when I saw it. The agency may have been falling apart, but the camera looked new.”
My pulse quickened. “Do you think Holly saw the camera?”
“I doubt it.”
I took in everything he had told me.
The lies.
The secrets.
A hidden camera at a shuttered business.
“Where were you the day Holly died?” I asked.
“In Sedona,” he said. “I was in a holistic seminar all day. I can give you a list of names of people who saw me there.”
“Sure, I’ll take it.”
He reached for a small notepad on the counter. While he wrote, I took one last look around the camper van. On the wall was a collage of pictures of what appeared to be Lenny and Holly in earlier times. After all these years, it appeared he’d never forgotten her. And now, at the moment he was ready to step back into her life, her life was taken.
Lenny tore the paper free from the notepad and handed it to me. “Here you go.”
He looked out the window, his eyes fixed on the red cliffs beyond the park. “It was hard, you know? Seeing Holly again, even if it was from a distance. She may not have been in my life for long as a child, but the years we were together were my happiest. We always think we have more time, until we don’t.”
I nodded and stood.
“When you find the person who did this, I’m going to look them in the eye, give them a piece of my mind.”
In the time we’d talked, he’d come across as a man who was gentle and soft-spoken, with the exception of what he’d just said to me.
Not that I blamed him.
If what he’d told me was true, he’d held a flicker of hope—hope that one day he and Holly could reunite—and that hope had been taken from him.
It was dusk when I stepped outside, and the last of the day’s sun was washing the park in burnt-orange light. I walked to the car, reflecting on our conversation.
The camera at the adoption agency was suspicious.
Someone else had also been following Holly, and I needed to know who.
10
The next morning, I called Wren to update her on the developments of the case so far. After the call ended, I saw that Hunter had texted me the address of the adoption agency, and I headed that way.
The agency sat on the edge of a quiet business district, tucked between an abandoned consignment shop and a building with a faded sign that once read “Travel Center.” Part of the last word had peeled off, leaving only “Travel Cen,” which felt like its own sad plea to an area of San Luis Obispo that had once been thriving.
I pulled into the cracked parking lot and parked close to the front door. The building looked dead, the kind of dead that went beyond empty. A metal plate covered the old mail slot, a thin layer of dust coated the glass, and there was an old, faded “For Lease” sign tilted behind the front window.
I stepped out of the car and walked to the entrance, searching for the surveillance camera. I looked in the hedges where I thought it should be, surprised to see it was no longer there. Someone had removed it. A bracket remained, along with the outline of a dark square on the siding.
Next, I tried the door.
It was locked, so I walked around back.
A rusted dumpster leaned against the wall, and a stack of old pallets sat beside it. One of the latches on a window around back had rust spots. It also looked loose. I dug a small tool out of my bag and wedged it beneath the frame. Seconds later, the wood creaked and the latch popped.
