him before trying again. “So what’s your name?”
He looked like he was going to continue to be combative, but then seemed to change his mind.
“My full name is Randall Horatio Fuller. But my friends call me Randy. My enemies call me Full-Of-It.”
“Do you have a lot of enemies, Randy?” Jessie asked playfully.
“I sure do. I’m kind of a one-man neighborhood watch around here. And as it turns out, my neighbors don’t take too kindly to being watched.”
“Seen anything interesting lately?’ Jessie asked, fully aware that he was dying to share everything he knew.
“You could say that,” he replied, making a token effort to be coy.
“Why don’t you go ahead and say that,” Ryan suggested.
“Well, here’s the thing, Detective Hernandez,” Randy offered. “It’s real easy to pick out the troublemakers in the wintertime around here. Everybody’s living in their own homes, leading their normal lives. It gets chilly, so you don’t get all the inlanders coming down. And it gets dark earlier so anybody out and about when they shouldn’t be draws notice. But the summer’s a different story altogether.”
“How’s that?” Ryan asked.
“For one thing, you got all the rabble-rousers coming in from the city, looking to blow off steam. They go crazy, bugging folks who are just relaxing on the beach, getting in the way of surfers and then getting pissed when a board knocks ’em in the head.”
“They should know better,” Ryan said, egging him on.
“You get it,” Randy said, before glugging some more margarita. “Those types are bad enough. But what’s worse is when residents take off for the summer. Some of them leave their places unattended and the yards get all gross. That’s a whole other story. Then there are the folks who rent out their places. Now, all of a sudden I have to deal with a different breed of rich troublemakers who think they own the town, treating the locals like crap and the streets like their own personal garbage dump.”
“Sounds like a real nightmare,” Jessie offered, trying to sound sincere.
“It is,” Randy agreed enthusiastically. “And then I get the worst of both worlds.”
“Like what?” Ryan wondered.
“For example, there’s this couple that lives two doors down, Carl and Eileen Landingham. She’s the worst so I don’t mind when she’s gone, which she is right now. But Carl—who’s not actually a terrible guy—he’s got this chippy he likes to bring around when Eileen’s away. The girl has no regard, playing music too loud, that kind of thing. Carl thinks he’s being all sneaky but everybody knows what’s going on.”
“Sounds rough, Randy,” Jessie said, feeling that she’d buttered him up enough to get more specific. But before she could ask her real questions, Randy’s eyes went wide. He pointed behind them.
“Speak of the devil,” he said, looking at a fifty-something man who was sprinting out his front door, yelling and flailing his arms wildly. “That’s Carl there now.”
Jessie and Ryan looked at Carl, who appeared to be in genuine distress. Then they heard what he was screaming.
“Help me! Someone killed her!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ryan reached the man in moments.
He glanced back and saw that Jessie, with her still-sensitive back, was a few seconds behind.
“I’m a police detective,” he said to the man. “What’s going on?”
The man had an expression that was part horrified and part disbelieving, as if he couldn’t process what he’d just seen.
“I just got home and found my…girlfriend in the foyer. She’s dead. Somebody did something awful…it looks like she was beaten or something. I tried to help her. I thought she might be alive because she’s still warm. But there’s no pulse.”
“Take us in there now,” Jessie said, short of breath from just arriving.
The man ran back inside and they followed him. The door was open. Before they even got inside, Ryan could see the body on the floor of the foyer. It was rough. The victim, a woman who appeared to be in her twenties, was lying on her back, wearing nothing but a teddy. Her left leg bent back grotesquely in the wrong direction. Her right arm was equally disfigured. She was bleeding from somewhere on the underside of her head, a crimson pool slowly spreading outward.
But none of that was what drew Ryan’s attention. Wrapped around her neck was a stocking, one that looked similar to the one that had been used on Priscilla Barton. Ryan noticed something else. On the marble floor were bloody footprints headed off in the direction of the back of the house. The prints were of bare