The Perfect Neighbor

by Blake Pierce

  He paused, apparently waiting for them to actually guess. Just then, a hot gust of wind blew lazily across the park. To Jessie, it felt like someone was using a hair dryer on her back. She grimaced silently. Though it offered no relief, it was strong enough to send Mariah’s artwork flying off the table. Carlos snatched it in mid-air and delicately placed it back down in front of his daughter.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and tell us, Carlos?” Ryan prodded.

  “Okay. She’s in the room, pulling off her sports bra, right in front of the window, staring at me like I’m a lollipop she wants to lick. And remember, this is her kid’s room she’s changing in, not her own. She could have picked any room in the house. But she goes to that one, stands right in front of the window, and waits until I’m looking that direction to pull her top off.”

  “What did you do?” Jessie asked.

  Carlos half chuckled as he recalled the moment.

  “I almost jumped off the ladder right then even though I was a dozen feet up. I scrambled down, left the rest of the ivy to do what it wanted. I got my stuff and moved it around front. I was almost done at that point anyway, so I just cleaned up. I was getting ready to leave when she came out. She was dressed normal then, shirt and pants. She asked if I wanted the check. I said yes. She said she forgot it inside and could I follow her to get it. I told her I was in a rush to get to my next job and I’d pick it up next time. That was a lie. She was my last job of the day. But I had to get out of there. I gave her a forced smile and said goodbye. But I could see from her face that she wasn’t happy. She looked embarrassed and pissed. So I wasn’t surprised when I got the call later that night. They fired me, no questions asked, no chance to defend myself, just done.”

  Jessie thought back to the expression she’d seen on Margaret Jules’s face earlier and realized she’d misidentified it at the time. It wasn’t fear or apprehension. It was guilt.

  “Why didn’t you report what happened?” she asked. “Just to get ahead of it?”

  “Are you kidding, lady?” he demanded incredulously. “I’m supposed to go into the office and call out a customer for flashing me? You think they’d believe me? Even if they did, you think they’d care? They probably would have fired me for complaining, just because I was more trouble than I was worth. My only hope was that she’d be too ashamed to say anything. I should have known better.”

  Ryan and Jessie exchanged a look. Neither was anxious to broach the main reason they were there. But since Ryan had done most of the heavy lifting so far, Jessie decided it was her turn.

  “So did you go back at all afterward, maybe to pick up a final check from the company?”

  “Yeah. I went back but not for a check. They stiffed me on that, said I violated some morals clause and I was lucky they didn’t report me to the police. But I had to wash and return my uniform and turn in the key to the truck I used.”

  “When did you do that?” Ryan asked.

  “The next day—Friday.”

  “And you haven’t been back since?” Jessie pressed.

  “No,” he said slowly, clearly sensing something else going on. “Why?”

  “Because we’re not here about the allegation made by Mrs. Jules,” Jessie said. “We’re here about a series of murders that occurred earlier this week. Did you hear about those?”

  “I haven’t been keeping up with the news lately. But one of my buddies from the job told me a body was found in a house just off Sixteenth Street. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “Yes, Carlos,” Jessie confirmed. “But it wasn’t just one body. It was two different people on consecutive nights in the same house. One of them was a local woman. The other was a man who worked for the LAPD. So we’re following up on every lead. And when we heard there might be a Peeping Tom in the area, we had to check it out. You understand that?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Great,” she continued. “Do you know Priscilla Barton, Carlos?”

  Fogata appeared to search his memory.

  “I don’t think so, at least not by name.”

  “What about Charles and Gail Bloom?”

  “I know those are the people who own the house where the body, er, bodies, were found. But that’s only because my buddy told me that.”

  “Does Beach Cities Landscaping work on their home?” Ryan asked.

  “Yes. But I don’t usually. I maybe helped out there a couple of times in the last year. Besides, they’d cut back on landscaping while they were gone. No one had been there in a few weeks.”

  “So you knew they were out of town?” Ryan wanted to know.

  “It was common knowledge.”

  “Did you have a key to their place?” Ryan pressed.

  “No,” Carlos said, sounding offended, his voice suddenly hard. “But that doesn’t get me off the hook, Detective. There was nothing to stop me from getting a copy made at a hardware store on a day when I did work there. Are you about to read me my rights?”

  Jessie ignored his indignation.

  “Do you know a man named Garland Moses?” she asked, an edge in her voice.

  Fogata shook his head.

  “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Where were you Monday, Carlos, late afternoon to early evening?” Ryan asked.

  The man’s head was swiveling back and forth, trying to keep up with their volley of questions.

  “I was stuck in a two-hour traffic jam, driving back from Agoura Hills.”

  “Why were you there?” Jessie demanded.

  “Job interview. It’s an even longer commute than to the beach but I’m in no position to be choosy.”

  “Did you get it?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m still waiting to hear.”

  “We’ll need the phone number and the name of the person you met with,” Jessie told him.

  Fogata sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “What do you think it’ll do for my job prospects if a police detective calls them up to ask if they can confirm I was there in order to rule me out as a murder suspect?”

  Ryan looked at Jessie, who suddenly felt mildly ill. No matter how this played out, it looked like Carlos Fogata was going to get screwed.

  Or maybe not.

  “Did you have your phone with you that day?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Jessie turned to Ryan.

  “Maybe we can find another way to confirm Mr. Fogata’s alibi without contacting the folks he interviewed with.”

  Ryan looked at her with a mix of bemusement and admiration.

  “I was not expecting that,” he said before turning to Fogata. “Carlos, assuming this info checks out, we might be able to rule you out as a double murderer. This could be your lucky day.”

  “Man,” Fogata said, shaking his head ruefully, “as much as I appreciate that, I gotta say, I haven’t had a lucky day in four years.”

  Jessie believed him. More importantly for her work, she was becoming increasingly aware that her natural skepticism toward rich beach folk wasn’t based in unfair bias but in hard-won experience. It never hurt to be reminded that she was dealing with a bunch of vipers, especially when she was about to return to their pit.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “What do we have left for snacks?” Agent Poulter asked from the driver’s seat. As the senior agent he got to choose whether to drive or ride shotgun.

  Agent Cress leaned back and rifled through the cooler in the backseat. Another pitfall of being the junior agent was that he had to stock the supplies each morning.

  “We’re down to Sun Chips, string cheese, and juice boxes.”

  “No water?” Poulter wondered.

  “We used it all up. But at least these will give us a sugar hit.”

  “I always crash after the juice,” Poulter complained. “Just give me a string cheese.”

  “Your system is falling apart, old man,” Cress replied as he reached back to find the cheese, ignoring the rivulet of
sweat that streamed down his back toward his backside.

  Agents Poulter and Cress were uncomfortable. They’d heard rumors that one or both of them might soon be pulled off the Kyle Voss surveillance detail. But as of now, they were both still sitting in their black Hyundai Elantra across from his townhouse, blasting the air-conditioning in the ninety-four-degree heat of Claremont, California.

  The overnight team was jealous of them, because they got to go home to their families each evening and sleep in their own beds. That was certainly true. But the night guys didn’t spend all day sweltering in a metal box, trying to avoid detection even though Voss was clearly on to them.

  No matter how many times they changed vehicles or their stakeout location, he made a point of waving at them every time he drove by. Then they had to follow him as he drove all over Southern California, attending meetings, having lunches, and doing interviews. They had lost him on more than one occasion, though they were later able to confirm his whereabouts.

  Both agents were hopeful that the whole detail would be pulled. There was no way one agent could handle the alternative, solo duty, with the need for food and bathroom breaks, not to mention driving around while coordinating with support staff.

  Both were confident it would happen by the end of this week. It might have been different if they found something, but they hadn’t. Since getting out of prison, Voss had been a Boy Scout. Neither of them bought the act. The guy was a murderer. He’d killed one woman and then tried to kill his own wife. They were also sure he was in deep with the Monterrey-based Monzon drug cartel. But they couldn’t prove it.

  His phones were tapped but he said nothing suspicious. There were cameras in his house but he did nothing out of the ordinary. They had a tracker on his car but he didn’t go anywhere unexpected. He’d led a straight-arrow existence, at least for the last three weeks. And unless he did something problematic in the next two days, they would likely have to cut him loose.

  But at this moment, both agents were both more interested in snacks than surveillance. Cress had just snagged a piece of cheese for himself when his partner gave him a whack on the arm.

  “Hold up,” Poulter said. “It looks like we have movement.”

  Cress let go of the food and looked in the direction his partner was pointing. Voss lived in the back unit of a two-home townhouse. They saw a car emerge from the garage, ease down the long driveway, and turn right, away from where they were parked.

  As he drove off, the driver waved at them through the open window. He didn’t seem to be trying to lose them so Poulter didn’t rush as he made a U-turn and began following the target.

  *

  Kyle Voss sat on the couch, watching the FBI agents on his extra phone as they drove off.

  He knew the FBI had attached a tracker to his car, a blandly gray Toyota Prius. But in doing so, they had missed the small, web-enabled camera he’d installed in his back seat. The resolution was so good that he could see clearly through their windshield and knew when they were talking, making a phone call, eating, or even picking their noses.

  When they were a couple miles away, he got up and went to the bathroom of the house he was in. Of course, it wasn’t his house but the one that backed up to his backyard. What the FBI didn’t know was that before he even bought the townhouse, his friends in the Monzon drug cartel had purchased both townhomes on the adjacent lot, one street over.

  In the weeks leading up to Kyle’s release from prison, they dug a tunnel from the back townhouse on that lot, underneath the wooden fence separating the two backyards and into the guest bathroom of the townhouse Kyle eventually bought. The tunnel mouth opened into the cabinet below the bathroom sink.

  As the cartel expected and Kyle confirmed after moving in, the FBI did not put a camera or bug in that bathroom, only the master upstairs. As a result, he was able to climb through the tunnel opening, crawl along it underneath the connected backyards and emerge in the laundry room of the house one street over.

  He’d been doing it regularly for weeks now. The first time he’d gone over, he met the resident of that home, a man who went by “Rick” and who just happened to be a dead ringer for Kyle. They even took measurements to be sure.

  Rick was slightly smaller than Kyle. At six foot one and 210 pounds, he was an inch shorter and five pounds lighter. But he had the same muscular build and their subtle physical differences would be lost on almost everyone. Their facial bone structure was similar, though Kyle’s nose was slightly more petite. The folks in Monterrey had considered having Rick get a nose job but decided the recovery time would be a complication, a risk not worth taking.

  He had dyed his hair the same shade of blond as Kyle’s and shaved it to the same length so that both men were growing it back at the same rate. Rick had brown eyes but wore blue contacts outside the house just to be safe, even though he usually wore sunglasses everywhere.

  He’d purchased the same wardrobe as Kyle and made sure to get sizes that gave the same snug fit. On the several occasions when Rick took the tunnel to Kyle’s house and left in his car, the outings had gone without incident. He made sure to wave at the agents as he left, though he always tried to pull out of the driveway in the opposite direction from them so they couldn’t get too good a look at him.

  On this day, Rick was off to run a series of errands that wouldn’t require him to interact with many folks. He had Kyle’s regular phone so the FBI could keep tabs on his location. He was going to the nearby Claremont Colleges Honnold/Mudd Library to “read” a few textbooks to bone up on new finance regulations. Then he would make stops for gas and to the grocery store. Depending on what Kyle needed to do and how long it might take, Rick could make the trip plausibly last between two and four hours.

  In the bathroom of the other townhouse, Kyle changed into appropriate attire for his planned outing, hopped in the Toyota 4Runner in Rick’s garage, put on his cap and sunglasses, and pulled out of the driveway, past the front house, which was also owned by the cartel and currently unoccupied.

  He looked both ways for safety and to confirm that there were no FBI agents on that street. When he felt comfortable, he pulled out of the driveway and headed toward his intended destination, confident that he was free to do what was needed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kelly Martindale was pissed.

  She had spent a good ten minutes circling the streets of downtown Manhattan Beach, looking for anywhere to park. Exclusively residential streets needed permits. All the public lots were full. And there were no available meters other than the twenty-four-minute ones. She needed a lot more than twenty-four minutes.

  Finally she saw a woman walking out of a boutique with both hands holding shopping bags and followed her slowly, basically stalking the chick until she got to her car, three blocks south of the main drag. She was pretty sure the woman took an extra-long time loading up just to spite her.

  When she left, Kelly pulled in, paid the meter up to the two-hour maximum, and hurried down to Carl’s place. When she got to his massive mansion on the Strand, three blocks south of the pier, she was torn.

  It was only six minutes until their planned meeting time and she wanted to be ready when he arrived. He’d been in New York since last week and was returning today. He’d told her he wanted to ravish her as soon as he got home.

  But she also needed to be discreet. After all, Carl Landingham was married and Kelly was his mistress, not his wife. It was true that Mrs. Landingham—or Mrs. Landinghag, as Kelly called her—was out of town all week. But that didn’t mean the neighbors wouldn’t talk if they saw something juicy.

  So despite both her urge to rush in and the sultry afternoon weather, Kelly pulled the hoodie on her sweatshirt over her head, strolled casually to the house’s side door, and used her spare key to get in. Once in the house, she moved fast.

  She hurried up to one of the three guest rooms, where she changed. It was safer to do it in a rarely visited room, in case someone unexpectedly came over. She
could stuff her clothes in the extra closet or even hide in the room if need be.

  She undressed quickly, stripping out of the sweatshirt, top, and leggings. Then she pulled the lingerie out of her small backpack. Carl usually liked her to wear something elaborate. But considering the heat, he’d recommended she go with a light, silk teddy. She did as he asked but added a little something extra—a pair of sheer, thigh-high stockings she knew he’d enjoy rolling down her legs when the time came.

  Kelly looked at her watch. It was exactly 1:29. Carl would be here any second. She rushed into the bathroom to give herself one last check and was immediately glad she had. Her long, black hair was still in a ponytail. She pulled out the tie and let her hair cascade down past her shoulders.

  Under normal circumstances, she’d brush it out. But she didn’t have time and it looked sexy in casual, blowsy way. Everything else looked good. The teddy hugged her hourglass figure in all the intended places. The stockings ran up her long legs teasingly. Even before she put on the pumps, she knew she was bringing it today.

  She was under no illusions about the nature of their relationship. Carl had taken an interest in her because she looked good at the lingerie fashion show where they’d met three months ago. It didn’t take long after that first meeting for him to find out what was under that lingerie or for her to get the spare key or the other perks that came along with it. But she was well aware that if she wanted to keep her human slot machine dropping coins, she needed to keep him happy.

  It wasn’t that much of a burden anyway. While Carl was nearly thirty years older than Kelly, who had just turned twenty-three, spending intimate time with him wasn’t objectionable. He was good looking, in a distinguished, Scent of a Woman–era Al Pacino kind of way. Kelly loved that movie.

  And he was in solid shape for a man his age, a result of what she knew was a pretty intense workout regimen. In fact, he’d lost a few pounds since they started spending time together, which she attributed to his desire to impress her.