The Perfect Neighbor (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Nine)

by Blake Pierce

  “They don’t need this stuff for evidence?” she asked Ryan.

  “Everything’s already been processed,” he told her. “There was nothing noteworthy. Even the notes on his pad were hard to decipher. Maybe you can make something of them.”

  Jessie nodded and put the pad in her pocket to review later. Then she turned to face the man she loved.

  “We have to catch this guy,” she insisted. “Not just for Garland. This is two murders in two nights. Who knows what he’s got planned for tonight? So fill me in.”

  “You’ve read the report,” Ryan said. “Details are pretty sparse. The husband’s been eliminated as a suspect. The homeowners were out of town. Despite what Priscilla Barton thought when she entered the house, there was no one renting the place. The MBPD canvassed the neighborhood and came up empty. No one saw anything out of the ordinary. Of course, this is a community in which people ambling around from house to house isn’t cause for much concern.”

  “Yeah, well, forgive me if I don’t trust the interrogation skills of cops from a sleepy beach town. I think you and I should re-canvass all the neighbors. Maybe they just haven’t been asked the right questions.”

  “I’m all for that,” Ryan agreed.

  Jessie continued, barely listening to him.

  “And we need to find out what’s going on with the killer,” she said. “What was he doing in that house the second night? It’s pretty brazen to go back to the scene of the crime like that. Was he staking it out and saw Garland enter? Did he follow him in? Was he already there, waiting?”

  “All good questions,” he said. “I say we go back to the beach for the answers as soon as we’re done here.”

  Before she could respond, the coroner waved them in. They stepped through the door. As cold as the waiting room had been, this one was plain freezing. They walked over to the exam table where the coroner was waiting.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Ryan asked when she turned away from the sheet-covered form on the table in front of them.

  Yeah, in just a sec,” she assured him, trying not to hyperventilate.

  After a few seconds, she turned back and nodded at him.

  “Go ahead,” he said to the deputy medical examiner, who pulled back a white sheet to reveal Garland’s lifeless body.

  The first thing Jessie noticed was just how frail he looked. In his standard slacks, dress shirt, and sports coat uniform, it was easy to overlook. The man had projected authority and mental strength. But Garland Moses was a small man, maybe five foot eight and 150 pounds. His skin was weathered and wrinkly and his chest was slightly concave. His body seemed so insubstantial compared to what he had accomplished.

  Jessie noticed something else too. He was covered in scars, including what looked like healed-over bullet wounds. Having studied his career in detail, she knew he’d been in Vietnam and won a Purple Heart for injuries suffered in a firefight in 1969. She also knew he’d had several “up close and personal” run-ins with violent killers over the years. But she’d never seen the physical accumulation of all those encounters laid out so plainly. She couldn’t help but wonder if one day, someone would be looking at her body on a metal table, studying the map of disfigurement that her body was fast becoming.

  “I never realized just how much he’d been through,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “A detective who retired a few years ago told me Garland was asked to give a lecture when he first started consulting for the department. It was mostly an overview of the basics of behavioral analysis. But apparently people just kept peppering him with questions about his past cases. They wanted to hear his war stories. This retired detective told me that Garland mentioned that he got an exit physical when he left the FBI. The nurse counted up all his various scars and wounds. There were fifty-seven. And that was prior to any of the cases he handled for LAPD.”

  “Jeez,” Jessie muttered.

  “The detective said Garland didn’t give any more lectures after that.”

  Jessie studied several of the deep marks that ran along both of the man’s upper arms. They looked meticulous and intentional.

  “I wonder how many of these are from his run-in with the Night Hunter,” she mused.

  The Night Hunter was a notorious serial killer that Garland Moses had pursued while in his last years at the FBI. The killer had murdered and dismembered over fifty people up and down the eastern seaboard for a decade.

  When Garland closed in on him, the Night Hunter got the upper hand, captured him, and tortured him for two days before Garland finally got free and fought back, using the man’s own machete against him before the killer ran off into the night. Garland managed to get to a hospital and recover.

  The Night Hunter was never found but the murders stopped after that, so many in law enforcement believed he died that night. Garland still thought the guy was out there, but that didn’t stop him from retiring a month after getting out of the hospital. He never spoke of it to Jessie.

  “I’d say at least half of them,” Ryan said, jolting her out of her thoughts. “He’s got a series of carvings in his back from the guy, like some grotesque artwork. I would have thought he might have tried to have plastic surgery at some point to clean them up.”

  Jessie looked over at him and shook her head.

  “We profilers keep the scars as keepsakes,” she told him, her voice filling with emotion at the renewed realization that Garland Moses was done with reminders. “So we don’t get too comfortable.”

  “I wonder what kind of keepsakes he kept of his wife,” Ryan asked.

  Garland’s wife, Gloria, had died nearly forty years ago from breast cancer, when he was still new to the FBI. She was only twenty-seven. They hadn’t had kids and he’d never remarried. Jessie never even heard of him going on a date in the intervening years. None of that information came directly from Garland, who rarely spoke of those days.

  “Those keepsakes are internal,” she said softly.

  There was a slight cough from the medical examiner, who was standing there quietly, waiting to give his report.

  “Go ahead,” Ryan said.

  The guy began methodically listing off the injuries that Garland had incurred last night.

  “He has bruising on his upper back, a fractured right hip, torn skin on his forehead, a hematoma on the back right portion of his skull, and a crushed trachea. It looks like almost all of those occurred during the course of the struggle. The actual cause of death was asphyxiation as a result a wide, leather-based item, almost certainly a belt.”

  “Are you sure? I thought this guy used a stocking,” Jessie noted.

  “The woman was killed with a stocking,” Ryan inserted. “But it looks like things got changed up here.”

  “Can we account for the source of all the injuries?” Jessie asked.

  Ryan nodded.

  “Trembley worked with the tech team and CSU to put together a meticulous recreation of events that I think makes a lot of sense,” Ryan answered, pulling up the report on his phone. “They used audio from the smart speaker in the bedroom, along with clothing fibers, blood spatter, and carpet markings. He thinks Garland was at the wife’s dresser when he was surprised by the assailant. They struggled and he was knocked backward into the dresser, explaining the bruising on his upper back. They think he broke his hip when he either fell or was pulled to the ground. The trachea is explained by the belt, as is the damage to the forehead skin. It seems the attacker was on top of him, with Garland lying on his stomach. The only injury they couldn’t account for was the hematoma on the back of his head. They assumed the attacker smashed the back of his head down on the ground at some point but there was no blood or hair on the carpet and no carpet fibers in his hair. Trembley thought that Garland might have initiated the contact, maybe using his head as a weapon to break free.”

  “That actually fits,” the examiner said. “He does have some neck strain than doesn’t seem connected to the belt strangulation. It looks
almost like whiplash. If he was throwing his head back in an intentionally violent way, then that could account for the strain.”

  “It sounds like he was a fighter to the end,” Ryan said admiringly.

  Jessie was turning over ideas in her head. After a moment, she responded.

  “I’d like to think that’s the case,” she said. “And maybe it is. But I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

  Jessie closed her eyes, picturing the struggle, imagining Garland on the floor with a broken hip, a belt around his neck, and a man straddling him from above.

  “It’s true that he could have been fighting to get away,” she acknowledged. “But Garland wasn’t a man known for false hope or dramatic gestures. He had a broken hip. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had to know he was going to lose this fight. So maybe he wasn’t trying to get away. Maybe he was trying to help us catch his own killer by branding him with evidence of the fight.”

  “How?” Ryan asked curiously. He’d known Jessie long enough not to be dismissive of her theories, no matter how out there they were.

  “I’m not sure. But maybe we should ask the MBPD to make a note of any local residents with bruises on their faces and forward them to our team. I know it’s a long shot but I feel like Garland was trying to leave us one last clue.”

  *

  Hannah couldn’t focus.

  It didn’t help that she’d already read Wuthering Heights twice on her own and the lecture her English teacher was currently giving captured none of the romantic torment that made the story so compelling. Ms. Gorton made the stormy battles between Catherine and Heathcliff seem somehow bland; the tortures they inflicted on each other rote.

  Of course that wasn’t the only reason she was having trouble paying attention. She couldn’t stop thinking about Garland Moses. She couldn’t help but imagine him lying cold on some metal table, his eyes forcibly closed by some flunky who thought it might bring him peace.

  Garland was a really decent guy. She liked how he never patronized her or treated her like she was some frail, damaged bird. He teased her. He called her out on her crap. He took her seriously. He genuinely seemed to care about her welfare. But unlike Jessie, he wasn’t so close to her situation that he inadvertently smothered her. As Hannah sat in class, using Ms. Gorton as a kind of human white noise, she realized something surprising: she would miss him.

  It was surprising because she had come to learn that she didn’t typically react strongly to loss. Even before her adoptive parents were murdered, she noticed that she wasn’t as emotionally fazed by traumatic events as others. She was pretty good at faking it when she heard about a school shooting or a baby beaten to death by his stepfather or thousands dying in an earthquake. But she rarely ever felt more than the mildest form of something resembling pity.

  When her parents were killed, she felt emotions for sure—terror in the moment, confusion at what was going, a sense of loss of normalcy in the weeks that followed. But she wasn’t sure she ever felt true grief at their loss. She wasn’t even sure how that emotion would manifest itself.

  She’d seen it enough on television that she was able to model it at their funeral. And in the months that followed she was able to play-act at something approximating mourning. But it never felt real to her.

  She wasn’t proud of it. In fact, she kind of hated it about herself. It made her feel apart from everyone else in the world. She sensed that some people were aware of it—Jessie, Dr. Lemmon, and Garland—even if they didn’t address it with her directly. She wished she could change it.

  She actually tried in recent months, especially with her sister. Despite Jessie’s flaws, of which there were many, Hannah sincerely liked her. She was funny and tough and whip-smart. She was one of the few people who could relate to what Hannah had been through. She had experienced variations of the same traumas herself so she wasn’t just blowing smoke when she talked about getting it. And she seemed to be honestly trying to be a good big sister to her, to give her some kind of normal home life. Hannah appreciated that.

  When she thought of Jessie, a pleasant sensation of affection came over her. She wished good things for her in her work, in her relationship with Ryan, in life. But would she grieve if Jessie was murdered by a killer tonight? She wasn’t sure. She’d miss her, just as she missed Garland. But was that the extent of it?

  Before she could ponder the question more, the bell rang. She gathered her things and headed to lunch. As she walked distractedly down the hall, letting routine guide her along the familiar path, the desire to probe her own psyche faded. She allowed her mind to slowly refocus on the present and her surroundings.

  The moment she did, she got an odd prickling sensation, like when superstitious people say someone has stepped on their grave. She stopped and looked around the campus courtyard. There was nothing unusual, just “troubled” teenagers wandering to their various classes and clubs and like her, to lunch.

  And yet she couldn’t shake the strange sensation that she was being watched. She’d faced far too many real threats to simply dismiss the feeling as an overactive imagination. Once again, she scanned the courtyard, looking for anyone or anything that seemed out of place. But nothing jumped out at her. Still, she stayed alert as she continued to the cafeteria. The tingling didn’t stop until she was halfway through with lunch.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The beach looked less welcoming this time.

  As Ryan drove them back to the crime scene so that she could get a sense of the place in daylight, Jessie sat in the passenger seat, letting her mind wander. She stared out the window at the crowds of people who had staked out spots on either side of the Manhattan Beach pier for as far as the eye could see. Whereas last night the beach had seemed almost empathetic, today it looked intimidating.

  It was a hot, muggy day. When they left downtown, the temperature was in the mid-nineties. But even here by the ocean, it hadn’t dropped much. The dashboard readout said it was eighty-seven.

  They parked in the police station lot a few blocks from the water, mostly because there were no available spots on the street. Even though it was a weekday during work hours, the town was packed. They walked the two blocks west to the Strand along the main drag on Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Jessie couldn’t help but glance at the storefronts.

  They were a mishmash of overpriced beachwear boutiques, crowded outdoor cafes, pressed juice bars, tiny art galleries, and tourist shops that sold everything from scented candles to lingerie to kitschy wooden signs that said things like “This way to the beach→.”

  Everyone around her was having a great time, but Jessie could feel her chest tightening with anxiety. It took her a second to realize why. This community reminded her of Westport Beach, the wealthy, coastal Orange County community ninety minutes south of here that had briefly been her home only a few years ago.

  She had never felt truly comfortable there, even before her ex-husband tried to kill her. The gaudy McMansions, overly inquisitive neighbors, and sour “grass is greener” mentality left her feeling lonely and depressed for months before she figured out that moving there was part of Kyle’s elaborate plan to lead a life of consequence-free decadence. When she got in the way of that, she became expendable. But almost from the start of their time there, she felt expendable.

  As they reached the bottom of the steep boulevard, where the shops gave way to a parking lot dominated by surfers changing into and out of their wetsuits, she pushed the memories from her mind. This was not Westport Beach. It was a different community and she needed to be careful not to let her biases against the one bleed into her analysis of the other.

  Ryan glanced over at her and seemed to sense her disquiet.

  “We don’t have to go straight to the house,” he reminded her. “Why don’t we walk down to the end of the pier, just to clear our heads? As long as we’re here, we may as well take in the view.”

  She nodded without replying and they wandered to the end of t
he pier, hand in hand. There was a small aquarium at the very end, in a quaint building with a Spanish tile roof. It bore a sign that said it had been there since 1920, an eternity in Los Angeles time. They walked past it, careful to steer clear of the men casting their fishing rods nearby until they got to the very end of the pier.

  They could see sailboats in the distance and massive cargo ships in the haze beyond that. Just south of the pier, a line of patient surfers waited for their perfect swell. Just to the north, the water was comprised mostly of swimmers and boogie boarders, happily riding even the smallest waves. She could hear little kids squealing with pleasure while they tried to outrun the water that chased them back up the beach.

  “How are you doing?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m trying to remember that there’s beauty in the world, even on the darkest days.”

  “How’s that going for you?”

  “Right now, pretty well,” she said. “I’m going to try to hold on to this mental picture.”

  “Me too,” he said, smiling at her.

  She smiled back but when she spoke, her words were firm.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  *

  It took a moment before Jessie felt clear-headed enough to actually investigate.

  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?”