'Almost two hundred pounds,' I replied as Neils Vander rounded the corner, holding the Luma-Lite by its handle. An assistant followed with cameras and other equipment.

Vander wore an oversize lab coat and white cotton gloves that looked ridiculously incongruous with his wool trousers and snow boots. He had a way of looking at me as if we had never met. He was the mad scientist, as bald as a lightbulb, always in a rush and always right. I was terribly fond of him.

'Where do you want me to set up this thing?' he asked nobody in particular.

'The bedroom,' I said. 'Then the study.'

We returned to the sheriff's bedroom to watch Vander shine his magic wand around. Lights out and glasses on, and blood dully lit up, but nothing else important did until several minutes later. The Luma-Lite was set to its widest beam and looked like a flashlight shining through deep water as it worked its way around the room. A spot on a wall, high above a chest of drawers, luminesced like a small, irregular moon. Vander got close and looked.

'Someone get the lights, please,' he said.

Lights went on and we took our tinted glasses off. Vander was standing on his tiptoes, staring at a knothole.

'What the hell is it?' Marino asked.

'This is very interesting,' said Vander, who rarely got excited about anything. 'There's something on the other side.'

'The other side of what?' Marino moved next to him and stared up, frowning. 'I don't see anything.'

'Oh yes. There's something,' Vander said. 'And somebody touched this area of paneling while they had some type of residue on their hands.'

'Drugs?' I inquired.

'It certainly could be drugs.'

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.