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.
What kind of man sneaks into a wealthy stranger’s home to squat, and when discovered, kills the woman with a high-end stocking that he had