She was standing in the Blooms’ bedroom, almost in the exact spot where her friend and mentor had taken his last breath. Ryan’s head was down, reading something on his phone.
Without his eyes on her, she allowed the grief to consume her for just a moment. Her knees buckled slightly. She felt a catch in her throat. But then, as quickly as the feeling had come, she pushed it aside. She’d deal with it later. Right now she had work to do.
She alternated between looking around the room and studying the cryptic words on Garland’s notepad. He seemed to speak a language only he understood. The words on the page were English but they were barely legible and rarely formed coherent thoughts. Instead, the last page was comprised of individual words and unfinished phrases, among them: “OTB,” “missing h,” and “fetish?”
She glanced up again, imagining the bedroom at night, trying to picture the circumstances of the attack.
“You said there were no security cameras, right?” she asked.
“Right,” Ryan confirmed, reiterating what he’d mentioned on the drive over. “The Blooms didn’t have any. They had a smart speaker in the corner over there. As I mentioned, the tech team took it and checked the audio. It helped verify the time and some details of the attack. But no one actually spoke. It was mostly banging, grunts, and moans.”
Jessie tried not to think about that. She was glad she hadn’t heard the thing.
“What about neighbors?” she asked. “Any of them have cameras?”
“Some of them do,” Ryan told her. “But none have angles that clearly show this house.”
Jessie nodded, wondering how likely it was that the lack of footage of this home was a coincidence.
“Can you stand just outside the bedroom door?” she asked him as she stepped over to Gail Bloom’s dresser.
Ryan stepped outside and turned back to her. She turned to face the dresser.
“Okay,” she continued. “Now walk slowly toward me, as quietly as you can.”
She closed her eyes as he approached. After about five seconds she heard the creak of a floorboard and whipped around. Ryan was less than six feet away.
“That must have been what tipped Garland off,” Ryan noted. “But by the time he heard it, the guy was almost on top of him, too late to do anything.”
Jessie agreed. She turned back to the dresser where her mentor had been standing less than twenty-four hours ago. He had to have been facing this way to have been taken so unawares. What was consuming his attention to the point that an attacker was able to get so close without him noticing?
She opened the top drawer. It was filled with women’s underwear, bras, and a few pairs of workout ankle socks. It looked like they’d been quickly rifled through. She wondered if that was what Garland had been wondering about. Had Priscilla Barton’s killer had some kind of fetish for stockings and been in here with them when he’d heard the neighbor come in the house? Maybe that was what the reference to “missing h” meant—Gail Bloom’s missing pantyhose.
If he was up here, ogling the homeowner’s underwear, that meant he hadn’t invaded the home after Barton arrived. He was already here. He had already made himself comfortable.
As Jessie tried to recreate what Garland had been thinking last night, she began to get into a rhythm. It was like she was having a silent conversation in her head with Garland, asking him questions that his actions and notes attempted to answer.
The effect it had on her was both reassuring and troubling. One part of her was comforted. This interaction with his mind and memory brought her closer to him. But it also made the pain of his loss, of knowing they’d never interact this way again in life, all the worse.
“I think we’ve got all we can from the house for now,” she said suddenly. “Maybe we go outside and talk to some neighbors?”
“Sure,” Ryan agreed.
Once outside, they decided to split up to cover more ground.
“Just remember,” Ryan said delicately, “one of these folks might be our killer. You’re not in any condition to take someone on right now. So please don’t go into anyone’s house. Invite them outside to talk. Better to be curt than caught.”
“Did you just make that up now?” Jessie asked.
“I did. What do you think?”
“I think they should teach that at the academy,” she teased. “You really missed your calling, Shakespeare.”
“Hey, you know I’m a sensitive soul,” he countered, pretending to be wounded.
“All right you. Take your sensitive soul and go south. I’ll take the houses that head north toward El Porto Beach.”
Ryan faux-pouted as he stomped off dramatically. Jessie went in the other direction, skipping the home of Garth Barton. She knew he was at work now but she’d been warned to steer clear even if he was around.
The next hour was instructive even if it didn’t move the investigation forward as much as she would have hoped. Jessie learned from multiple residents that many locals rented out their homes for part of the summer while they went on extended vacations.
“Technically, it’s a municipal violation to do that without jumping through a series of administrative hoops,” a middle-aged guy three doors down from the Blooms told her. “But many folks do it on the down low, skirting regulations and making off-the-books deals.
“The problem,” he continued, “is that when something untoward happens, whether it be a theft or just a noise ordinance violation, there’s no formal record of who is staying in any given house or where to reach the homeowner. It makes enforcement challenging.”
Worse, according to some, it changed the “vibe” of the community. One retired widow described it in coded terms that made Jessie squirm uncomfortably.
“Suddenly our charming beach town gets overrun with strangers, and not just the ones expected during the day when the masses swarm the beaches. But also in the evenings, when leisurely evening strolls lead to encounters with people who don’t value the ‘specialness’ of the community.”
“It really sucks to go to the local coffee shop in the morning and not recognize half the people there,” one irked, forty-something bleached blonde woman wearing a massive diamond ring said obliviously. “It detracts from the homey feeling I like.”
Jessie got a distinct NIMBY sensibility from almost everyone she spoke to. Sometimes there was a racial undercurrent. But other people seemed to want to keep the place clear of anyone who wasn’t local, no matter where they came from.
She could feel the angst rising in her again. Even though most people she interviewed were pleasant, chill folks who simply enjoyed the slower pace of living by the beach and walking around their neighborhood barefoot, there were the others. Approximately every third interviewee reminded her of the people who made her Orange County existence so fraught.
Part of why she’d chosen to live downtown was because even the wealthy folk there embraced a kind of grittiness that felt more real than the plastic lives of these people, living in their cookie cutter mansions and worrying that they might encounter an interloper in the line for coffee.
She reached the last home before Bruce’s Beach, a park which served as a kind of informal dividing line before the next stretch of homes. The closest mansion was a good hundred yards farther north and it seemed unlikely that anyone that far away would be of much use as a potential witness. She decided that after this house, she’d turn around.