Annalisa worked one end of the block while Nick took the other. The hardest part was taking notes fast enough to keep up with the eager neighbors, each jostling the other for a turn to be interviewed. “She was nice enough,” said Louisa Vann, the woman next door, reporting on Grace Harper. She bounced a baby on her hip, a chubby-cheeked girl with dark curls and eyes like a lemur. “She never complained to us, even when this one started howling at five in the morning or our two boys got into her backyard. But she wasn’t quite friendly, either. Never came to our barbecues or anything.”
“She worked at a supermarket too,” one of the men grumbled. “Probably could’ve gotten us a good deal on the meat.”
“Dad, stop it,” replied a teenager with a messy topknot and barely-there shorts. “She died. Someone murdered her. It’s not about steak right now.”
“Just because you’ve gone vegan doesn’t mean the rest of us—”
“What about visitors?” Annalisa interrupted him. “Did you see anyone go into or out of Grace Harper’s house?”
A few people shook their heads. “She didn’t seem like she had family,” one woman offered.
“There was one guy,” Louisa Vann said, unhooking the baby’s vice grip on her boob. Annalisa winced inwardly in sympathy. “I saw him once or twice, maybe last winter? Then he showed up a few weeks ago, and Grace didn’t want to let him in. He made a scene about it, and the cops showed up.”
“Where was I?” her husband wanted to know.
She rolled her eyes at him. “Down in the basement with your video games, like usual.”
“Can you describe this man?” Annalisa asked.
“Mmm, he was real big, with round shoulders. He had a bushy beard, like the hipsters wear. Down to here.” She indicated her chest, and the baby went in for another grab. “It was kind of reddish blond–colored.”
“Age?”
“Maybe late twenties? I don’t know. I only saw him from a distance. I went out on my porch to see what all the hollering was about and he scared me so bad I went right back in.”
“What was he yelling?”
“‘You won’t get away with this! It’s mine!’ Something like that. He was pounding on her door real good.”
“Did you see what kind of car he was driving?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, no. We get a ton of cars on this street now, on account of those traffic apps routing people off the main road. We’re even thinking of moving, it’s got so bad in the afternoons.”
Annalisa asked Louisa and then the others, one by one, if they had seen anything else suspicious in the days leading up to Grace’s murder. One man said he’d found his garbage cans turned upside down. Another woman reported a package had been stolen from her mailbox. “What was in it?” Annalisa asked, prepared to follow up.
“Cooking spices. Turmeric, lime leaves, chili paste…”
Annalisa stopped writing. “Anyone else?”
A middle-aged man in a Blackhawks jersey shuffled forward, his gaze downcast. “I almost don’t want to mention this. It’s probably nothing.”
“Please, tell me.”
“We live on the back side of the Harper place, across the alley from her.” The man looked around at his neighbors and cleared his throat. “My boys, they’re six and eight. Good kids. Active. They’re always climbing the furniture, so my wife, she sends them outside. Go climb a tree, she tells them. So they did. We’ve got a big old oak in the backyard. Then one night last week, I heard them in their bedroom, giggling like they were up to something. I went in to see what was up, and they showed me a pair of women’s panties. They said they found them in the tree.”
“Did you keep them?” Annalisa asked quickly.
He scowled. “No, I didn’t keep them. I’m not a pervert.”
“What did they look like?”
Twin red spots appeared on his cheeks. “They were pink with little purple stars on ’em,” he said, and some of the group tittered.
Annalisa wrote it down and put her notebook away. “I’m going to need you to show me that tree.”
The man, whose name was Terry Guzman, led her around the block to the houses that sat behind the Harper place. His yard had a high fence, suitable for containing rambunctious boys, and a pair of old trees at the back overlooking a two-car garage. Each tree was probably a hundred years old and perfect for climbing. Annalisa grabbed a limb and lifted herself up. She ducked and eased around the leafy branches until she arrived at a solid V in the middle of the tree. A couple of months ago, she would have been easily spotted, perched among the naked branches, but spring hit like a bomb in early May, spraying the whole region in vibrant green. The tree made a perfect blind. No one could see her sitting there unless they stood directly by the trunk. She pulled down the nearest branch to peek out, her skin going cold when she saw the view. Straight ahead at eye level sat Grace Harper’s bedroom window.
When Nick found her back inside the house, she had a handful of lingerie in one hand and was digging through Grace Harper’s drawer for more. “Uh, are you looking for inspiration?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow at her. “Because I always liked you in red.”
“Look at these,” she said, showing him a pair of cotton blue underwear with purple stars and a pink pair with blue stars. “Don’t they look like a set to you?”
“Sure, maybe. Why?”
She told him about the bizarre finding in the neighbor’s tree and how the underpants had stars on them. “You can see right into her bedroom from out there.”
Nick went to the window to see for himself. “Okay, but if he had a pair of her underwear, either he lifted them from a laundromat somewhere—”
“Or he’d been inside before.” She fisted the underwear. “I checked. There’s a washer and dryer in the basement.”
“Good find,” he said, turning from the window. “You did better than I did. The neighbors down that end mostly wanted to rat each other out for noise complaints and some fight about a parking spot. None of them really knew Grace Harper.”
“Seems like she kept to herself.”
“In real life, yeah. But we know she was active online. I called up our friend Molly Lipinski and got the names of the other local Grave Diggers in the group. I figure we can start with them. I ran them through the system and sent you a copy of the results. All of them look clean so far.”
“Thanks.” Annalisa pulled out her work phone and checked her email. Several names looked familiar. Jared Barnes, Molly, Oliver Benton. She stopped scrolling when she reached Christopher Colburn, age thirty-five, with a photo of his driver’s license. He had a big bushy beard like the hipsters wear. He was listed as six foot three, 250 pounds, someone who could make a ruckus if he started pounding on a door. She held up her phone to show Nick. “I think we start with him.”