All of us stared at the paneling, which looked quite normal when the Luma-Lite wasn’t shining on it. But when I pulled a chair closer, I could see what Vander was talking about. The tiny hole in the center of the knothole was perfectly round. It had been drilled. On the other side of the wall was the sheriff’s study, and we had just searched it.

‘That’s weird,’ Marino said as he and I went back out the bedroom door.

Vander, oblivious to adventure, resumed what he was doing while Marino and I walked inside the study and went straight to the wall where the knothole should be. It was covered by an entertainment center that we had gone through once. Marino opened the doors again and slid out the television. He pulled books off shelves overhead, not seeing anything.

‘Hmmm,’ he said, studying the entertainment center. ‘Interesting that it’s out about six inches from the wall.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s move it.’

We pulled it out more, and directly in line with the knothole was a tiny video camera with a wide-angle lens. It was simply situated on a shallow ledge, a cord running from it into the base of the entertainment center, where it could be activated by a remote control that looked like it belonged to the television set. By doing a little bit of experimentation, we discovered that the camera was completely invisible from Brown’s bedroom, unless one put his eye right up to the knothole and the camera was on, a red light glowing.

‘Maybe he was doing a few lines of coke and decided to have sex with somebody,’ Marino said. ‘And at some point he got up close to look through the hole to make sure the camera was going.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘How fast can we look at the tape?’

‘I don’t want to do it here.’

‘I don’t blame you. The camera’s so small we couldn’t see much anyway.’

‘I’ll take it to the Intelligence Division as soon as we finish up.’

There was little left for us to do at the scene. As he suspected, Vander found significant residues in the gun cabinet, but no blood anywhere else in the house. The neighbors on either side of Sheriff Brown’s property were cloistered amid trees and had not heard or seen any activity late last night or early this morning.

‘If you’ll just drop me by my car,’ I said as we drove away.

Marino glanced suspiciously at me. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Petersburg.’

‘What the hell for?’ he said.

‘I’ve got to talk to a friend about boots.’