“I’m going down to the pier,” she said.
“Good idea,” he agreed. “I’ll check in with you in a bit.”
He gave her a kiss and squeezed her arm affectionately. She tried to force a smile but found she couldn’t. As she walked toward the station exit, he returned to the interrogation room.
“Barnard Hemsley,” she heard him say loudly, “I’m placing you under arrest for the murders of…”
The door slammed shut, cutting off the rest of the sentence. She knew what came next. But it didn’t make her feel any better.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
The wind had a surprising bite to it.
As hot as the day had been, with the sun now having set, the ocean breeze felt suddenly malevolent, slicing against her sensitive skin with unexpected ferocity. She embraced it.
There was something clarifying about the sting. It cleared her mind and forced her to focus. The fury of the interrogation room was already starting to fade, replaced by a desire to put the pieces together, to ensure that Barney Hemsley paid the price for his actions.
She felt a buzz in her pocket and checked her phone. The text was from Hannah, saying the cops had arrived, cleared the building’s lobby and parking structure, and were currently doing a sweep of both the condo and the whole thirteenth floor. Jessie texted back thanks for the update and asked her to relay any additional ones.
She returned the phone to her pocket and took several additional deep breaths, trying to clear her head. She was at the very end of the pier, in the same spot where she’d stood with Ryan earlier today, seemingly a lifetime ago.
In the distance she could see the lights of several massive cargo ships, all waiting to unload their freight at the Port of Los Angeles. Much closer in, she saw a few surfers braving the black waters, oblivious to the sea monsters she felt sure were lurking just out of sight. Monsters liked the dark, though not necessarily the one she was hunting.
While Garland had been killed at night, both Priscilla and Kelly were murdered when the sun was still out. That was a brazen act, especially in such a highly populated, heavily trafficked area. It seemed hard to believe someone could have done those things and simply left the scene without being noticed. And Barney Hemsley, with his flyaway hair, rotund stomach, and garrulous nature, didn’t strike her as the type to recede into the shadows unnoticed.
Frankly, despite the mounting evidence against him, Barney didn’t seem right for this in any number of ways. The guy had everything—a huge house, a lucrative career, and a pliant, adventurous girlfriend.
More compellingly, he just didn’t seem like an obsessive, furtive guy. All his desires were right out in the open. If he was into choking attractive women for kicks, Brandee seemed amenable. And had she not been, he surely could have found women willing to play that game for the right price. Plus, he just didn’t seem like the squatter “type,” whatever that meant.
Yes, he had clear connections to both women. But they weren’t as personal as Ryan had suggested. And they could have just been coincidences. Barney was a grotesque human being. But he was also smart, or at least wily enough to almost taunt her into assaulting him. The idea that he would kill women that he knew could be traced back to him, even if they were crimes of passion, seemed doubtful.
Jessie couldn’t dismiss him as a suspect. But for the time being, she decided to set him aside. In fact, it might be worthwhile to do something unusual. Instead of trying to get into the killer’s head, maybe she should shake things up and get into someone else’s head: Garland’s.
Something had made him come back to this neighborhood and return to that house on his own, late at night. That was not standard procedure. What was eating at him so much that he couldn’t wait until the next day to check it out? She pulled out his notepad and flipped through it to the last page.
“OTB,” “missing h,” and “fetish?”
Those were the only words scribbled on it. The last two phrases made some sense. She was confident that “h” referred to hose, though she wasn’t sure what “missing” meant. “Fetish?” was clearly a reference to liking to choke women with stockings.
The top result when she’d searched the term “OTB” online was for off-track betting, which seemed random and unlikely. But he wouldn’t have written it down if it wasn’t important. She pulled out her phone and searched the term again. She got the same results. Frustrated, she was about to put the phone away when it occurred to her that since he considered all three terms to be connected, perhaps she should put in all three terms together.
Shy typed “OTB” again and had just started to add “missing h” when she realized she could now change “h” to “hose.” She stopped mid-type as her brain did the equivalent of a silent, internal fireworks show. It was all suddenly clear, as if someone had laid out the facts, buffet-style, in front of her. She recalled Brandee’s comment earlier, “only the best for the best, right?” Only the Best wasn’t just a description of the stockings. It was their name: OTB.
She cleared the search screen and started fresh, this time typing in the phrase “Only the Best stockings pantyhose.” The first result was for the boutique that Brandee was so fond of, right here in Manhattan Beach, less than a quarter mile from where Jessie now stood. She tapped the link. The page loaded to reveal the company’s website, complete with its logo, a diamond with the letters “OTB” inside.
Before she knew what was happening, she found herself running. Doing her best to ignore her tender back, she moved as fast as she could, until she was back in front of the Bloom house where both Garland and Priscilla Barton had died.
Since the second death, the department had assigned an officer to stand watch at the home 24/7. She flashed her ID at him and hurried past, going inside and taking the stairs two at a time. When she got to the master bedroom, she turned on the light and hurried over to Gail Bloom’s dresser. After putting on gloves, she slowly opened the top drawer and looked in.
Just as she had remembered, the drawer was messy, as if it had been rifled through. But if her hunch was correct, it wasn’t the killer who’d gone through Gail Bloom’s underwear but Garland himself, just before he’d been killed. She looked through it now, just as he had, and made the same suspicious discovery that he had: Bloom had no OTB stockings.
Jessie again unknowingly did the same thing Garland had and knelt down to see if perhaps one had fallen under the dresser. But there was nothing there. She closed her eyes and thought the scenario through. In the end, she came to the same conclusion that her mentor had.
The logical assumption would have been that the killer was in the house, maybe even this bedroom, when heard Priscilla Barton enter and grabbed a stocking to use as a weapon. But if that was the case, then one would assume he’d leave the other stocking here in the bedroom or that it would have been found during the search of the house later. But it hadn’t.
Furthermore, not only did Gail Bloom have no pairs of OTB stockings in that drawer, she didn’t seem to own any pantyhose at all. If that was true then there was only one other conclusion to draw—the killer had brought the stocking with him into the home and had it in his possession at the time of the attack.