The taillights of the Volvo faded into the rain-slicked darkness of Bittersweet Court, taking Dan and Leo to the safety of the Marriott three towns over. Maya watched them go from the front porch, her arms crossed so tightly her fingernails dug crescents into her biceps.
She was alone in the house. The silence that followed was not peaceful; it was pregnant with threat.
Maya didn’t go back inside immediately. She stood in the doorway, breathing in the wet, metallic scent of the storm. She needed the cold air to sharpen her edges. The mother in her had fled with the car; the journalist was the only one left standing at Number 4.
A pair of headlights cut across the lawn. Chloe’s massive black Escalade rolled into the driveway, engine growling.
Chloe stepped out before the car even fully stopped. She wasn’t wearing her usual beige loungewear. She was dressed in black leggings and a dark hoodie, clutching a heavy, orange Pelican hard case.
“Where is he?” Chloe asked, rushing up the steps, her eyes scanning the tree line.
“Dan took Leo,” Maya said, ushering her inside and deadbolting the door. “The house is empty.”
“I meant the bug,” Chloe said. She dropped the case on the foyer floor with a heavy thud. “Show me.”
Maya reached into her pocket and pulled out the small black square. It was unassuming—just a piece of plastic and circuitry no bigger than a domino. The tiny green light was still blinking. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.
Chloe stared at it, her face pale. “He was broadcasting from the nursery. That sick…”
She didn’t finish. She knelt and unlatched the Pelican case. Inside, nested in foam, was a device that looked like a Geiger counter, bristling with antennas.
“RF signal analyzer,” Chloe explained, seeing Maya’s look. “We use it for the studio. When you have five wireless mics, a router, and a drone operating in one room, interference is a nightmare. This thing finds every frequency in the air.”
She flipped a switch. The device hummed to life, its screen washing Chloe’s face in a sickly green glow.
“We sweep,” Chloe said, handing Maya a wand attachment. “Room by room. If there’s one, there are more.”
They started in the nursery.
The room was already a crime scene of Maya’s making. The vent cover lay twisted on the floor. The baby monitor was smashed against the wall. But they weren’t done.
“Tear it down,” Maya said. Her voice was calm, detached. “Anything that can hold a battery.”
They moved with systematic violence. Maya slashed open the mattress of the crib, checking for embedded transmitters. She pulled the books off the shelves, shaking them out. She unscrewed the switch plates on the walls.
Chloe swept the RF wand over every inch. The device chirped rhythmically—a low, steady beat that spiked whenever they passed a cell phone or the Wi-Fi router.
“Clear on the south wall,” Chloe called out.
“Clear on the closet,” Maya responded, throwing a pile of onesies onto the floor.
They worked in a grim rhythm, dismantling the sanctuary of Maya’s son. The plush rug was rolled up. The mobile was dismantled. The room smelled of drywall dust and ozone.
When they reached the window seat—the one overlooking the wetlands—the wand screamed.
SCREEEEEEEE.
Maya froze. “Another one?”
Chloe moved the wand slowly, triangulating the signal. She pointed to the decorative molding above the window frame.
Maya dragged the step ladder over. She ran her fingers along the top of the wood. There, tucked into a gap in the caulking, was a wire as thin as a fishing line.
She pulled. A second bug, identical to the first, fell into her hand.
“Stereo,” Maya whispered. “He wanted surround sound.”
She crushed the device under the heel of her boot. The crunch of plastic was satisfying, but it didn’t stop the shaking in her hands.
“Let’s check the rest,” Chloe said, her voice tight.
They moved through the house like a SWAT team. The master bedroom. The kitchen. The sunroom. The wand chirped near the Smart TV (normal), near the microwave (normal), and near the refrigerator (normal).
They found nothing else. Just the nursery.
“He targeted Leo,” Maya said, leaning against the kitchen island, surrounded by the debris of her own paranoia. “He didn’t care about us. He wanted the baby.”
“Because it hurts more,” Chloe said softly. She sat on a barstool, pulling the first bug toward her. She took a small screwdriver from her kit and pried the casing open.
Maya watched her. “You know what you’re doing.”
“I fix my own gear,” Chloe murmured, adjusting a magnifying loupe over her eye. “Rick buys the expensive stuff, but he doesn’t know how to maintain it. I learned. Necessity is the mother of… whatever.”
Chloe poked at the circuit board with a pair of tweezers. She frowned.
“This isn’t Amazon spyware,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Most creepers use GSM bugs. They work like cell phones—you put a SIM card in, and you can listen from anywhere in the world. China, Russia, wherever. But they have a lag, and the audio quality is trash.”
Chloe pointed to a tiny silver chip on the board.
“This is a UHF burst transmitter. Continuous stream, high fidelity, zero compression. It captures breath sounds. It captures whispers. It’s what private investigators use when they need courtroom-quality audio.”
“So he’s a pro,” Maya said.
“He’s well-funded,” Chloe corrected. “This unit costs about six hundred dollars. You found two. That’s twelve hundred bucks just to listen to a baby cry.”
Maya felt sick. “But if it’s not cellular, how does he hear it?”
Chloe looked up, her eyes dark. “That’s the catch. UHF gives you perfect quality, but the range is garbage. Physics is a bitch.”
“How short?”
“Through drywall and brick?” Chloe calculated. “Five hundred feet. Max.”
Maya turned slowly to look out the kitchen window. The rain was lashing against the glass, blurring the world outside. Five hundred feet.
“He’s close,” Maya whispered.
“He has to be,” Chloe said. “The receiver—the recording deck—has to be within a block. Maybe closer.”
Maya visualized the cul-de-sac. Five hundred feet covered Sarah’s house. Elena’s house. Chloe’s house. And the empty house next door. It covered the gazebo. It covered the edge of the wetlands.
“He’s not just watching from the woods,” Maya said. “He’s practically living in our pockets.”
She grabbed her phone from the counter. “I’m calling the police. We have physical evidence. We have a federal crime—wiretapping.”
“Wait,” Chloe said sharply. She reached out and covered Maya’s hand.
“Chloe, he bugged my son’s room. I’m done playing detective.”
“Think about the podcast, Maya,” Chloe said, her voice desperate. “Episode Four is teased for Friday. The title.”
Maya paused. The teaser had dropped right after the episode ended. Next time on The Gables Ghost: The Liars.
“He said he knows our secrets,” Chloe whispered. “He said the investigation is fueled by ‘hypocrites.’ If we go to the police, we provoke him. What if he releases everything? The debt? Your source?”
“I don’t care about my source,” Maya lied. She did care. If that name came out, a man in Chicago would be dead within a week.
“I care about my kids,” Chloe said, tears welling up. “If Rick finds out about the debt… if the bank finds out… we lose everything. The house. The custody. I can’t lose my boys, Maya.”
Maya looked at the destroyed bug on the counter. She looked at the rain hammering the window. The police would come. They would file a report. They would dust for fingerprints and find nothing because Elias Thorne wore gloves. And in retaliation, the Podcaster would burn their lives to the ground before the cops even opened a case file.
“We have the advantage,” Maya said slowly, lowering the phone.
“What?”
“He doesn’t know we found them,” Maya said. “We destroyed the one in the nursery, but he might think it just malfunctioned. Or that the storm knocked out the power.”
“He knows,” Chloe argued. “He heard you screaming at Dan.”
“Maybe,” Maya admitted. “But he doesn’t know we know about the range. He thinks we’re scared moms running to a hotel. He doesn’t know we’ve triangulated him to five hundred feet.”
Maya picked up the tweezers and held the bug up to the light.
“If there’s a transmitter here, there has to be a receiver out there,” Maya said. “A hard drive. A recorder. Something collecting the signal.”
“Yes,” Chloe nodded. “It would be a box. Probably with an antenna.”
“And if it’s within five hundred feet,” Maya said, her eyes narrowing, “we can find it.”
“How? We can’t search every house.”
“We don’t search the houses,” Maya said. “We hunt the signal.”
She looked at the RF wand in Chloe’s hand.
“Can you modify that?” Maya asked. “Turn it from a sweeper into a tracker?”
Chloe looked at the device, then back at Maya. A spark of competence lit up her face, displacing the fear. “I can rig a directional antenna. We’d have to walk the perimeter. It would look suspicious.”
“Not if we’re walking dogs,” Maya said. “Everyone walks dogs in The Gables. It’s the only time we’re allowed to look at each other’s lawns without being rude.”
“I don’t have a dog,” Chloe said.
“Sarah does,” Maya said. “And Elena has a golden retriever.”
“Sarah won’t help us,” Chloe said. “She’s terrified.”
“Then we steal the dog,” Maya said, grabbing her coat.
“Steal the dog?”
“Borrow,” Maya corrected. “We’re taking the fight to him, Chloe. He violated my house. Tomorrow, we violate his.”
She walked to the window and stared out at the cul-de-sac. The streetlights reflected on the wet pavement like spilled oil. Somewhere out there, a tape recorder was spinning, waiting for a sound that would never come again.
“Let’s get some sleep,” Maya said, though she knew she wouldn’t close her eyes. “Tomorrow is a hunting day.”
Chloe packed the RF wand back into the case, her movements precise. “Five hundred feet,” she muttered. “You can’t hide in five hundred feet.”
“Watch us prove it,” Maya said.
The house settled around them, no longer a sanctuary, but a fortress. And for the first time since the podcast aired, the silence in the nursery wasn’t empty. It was tactical.