He sighed. “The debt service on those units is killing me. Looks like I might have to sell.”

“Oh no,” she laughed. “The great Evan Wingfield is going to sell? I thought you only bought.”

“Not funny,” he snapped. “The good news is, my girl Vikki is working out great. That last city inspector was a pain in the ass. Every time I turned around, he had his hand out. Lucky for me, I heard he got canned. Vikki’s gonna work out just fine.”

“How do you know you can trust her?” Juliette asked.

“I just know. I get vibes from people. Vikki’s vibe is mellow. She’s not greedy. Realizes she’ll make more in the long run if she works with me.”

“And what kind of vibe did you get from Tanya?”

He turned to look at her. “Don’t start. She was an unfortunate, temporary lapse in good judgment.”

Juliette leaned down and kissed his neck. “Oh, Evan. Relax. I’m just teasing you. If it weren’t for Tanya, we wouldn’t have Maya now, would we?”

“That’s true,” he said, pulling his girlfriend onto his lap. “And if we ever get done with all this custody shit, we’ll have Maya full-time, and get her crazy mother out of my hair once and for all.”

Maya’s voice chimed in from off camera. “All done! JuJu, I want grapes.”

“Grapes, please!” Evan yelled. “Jesus, she’s just like her hillbilly mother. No manners.”

Letty winced at the mention of her late sister’s name. It was jarring, hearing Evan’s voice after all these months, and even more disturbing hearing the way he interacted with Maya.

“There’s a lot of this kind of stuff,” Sierra told her, pausing the video. “It’s a ton of data, so I broke it up into individual files and put them on a thumb drive for you. The original files are date-stamped, by the way, so it looks like your sister put the nanny cam into the elephant back in November. The most recent date on any of the files was from February twenty-eighth.”

“Sierra, this is amazing,” Letty said, sitting back in her chair. “I don’t know what to say. I never actually expected you to be able to get anything from the nanny cam. Isabelle said you were a genius, and she wasn’t kidding.”

The teenager grinned. “Not a genius. Lots of people are way better at this than me. One thing though. Some of the video is pretty crappy quality, and you can’t quite make out what they’re saying on the audio. Maybe that’s because Maya was holding Ellie, or moving around, or whatever. Not really sure.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Letty said. “I can’t thank you enough. This was a lot of work. You have to let me pay you.”

“No way,” Sierra said. “It was fun. Like solving a mystery. Real James Bond spy stuff.”