Brenda, a woman who once tried to fine me because my garbage can was a shade of forest green inconsistent with the approved onyx black, had been on a crusade for weeks. Her target: a series of small orange utility markers that the fiber company had planted along the main easement. An easement that ran right along the edge of her property. An easement where she grew her award-winning petunias.
"No," I whispered to myself, the gears turning. "She wouldn't."
But I knew she would. In the holy war for aesthetic conformity, Brenda recognized no Geneva Convention.
I slipped on a pair of sneakers, grabbed my phone, and headed outside, leaving the tomb-like silence of my office behind. I wasn't just a man trying to get back to work. I was an investigator now. This was a crime scene.
The moment I stepped outside, the strangeness of the situation hit me full force. Serenity Springs Estates is usually a place of manufactured tranquility. You hear the gentle hum of electric lawnmowers, the distant cheerful ding of an ice cream truck, the rhythmic thwack of a tennis ball from the community courts.
Today, there was only silence—a heavy, anxious silence. People were milling about on their perfectly paved driveways, holding their phones up like they were searching for a signal from a lost civilization. They looked like zombies from a George A. Romero movie, if the zombies were all dressed in Lululemon and Tommy Bahama. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and existential dread.
But it was the sight at the end of our street that truly set off the alarm bells in my head: the Serenity Springs Police Substation. It was a small brick building, more of a glorified office than a real station, but it was always lit up—a symbol of order in our beige paradise. Today, it was dark. No lights in the windows. The digital sign out front, which usually flashed reminders about speeding or upcoming community bake sales, was blank.
This had escalated. This wasn't about Braden missing his Cocomelon anymore.
I walked down the street, my steps feeling unnaturally loud in the quiet. I followed the line of the utility easement, marked by those little orange flags that Brenda so despised. The path led directly to the border of her property—a pristine stretch of lawn that looked like it had been trimmed with surgical scissors, bordered by an immaculate bed of prize-winning petunias.
And right in the middle of those petunias was a gash in the earth: a freshly dug trench about three feet long. Lying beside it, gleaming in the morning sun, was the murder weapon and the victim all in one: a thick, bright orange fiber optic cable.
And it had been cut.
I leaned in closer. This was no clumsy accident by a landscaper. A shovel would have mangled it, frayed the edges. This was a single, clean, deliberate snip right through the armored sheathing, through the Kevlar strengthening fibers, and through the delicate glass core within. It was an execution performed with a pair of heavy-duty shears. I could almost see the ghost of a satisfied, self-righteous smile hanging in the air above it.
"You magnificent, crazy bastard," I muttered, a grim smile on my own face. "You actually did it."
I pulled out my phone and snapped a few pictures, making sure to get the pristine cut, the disturbed flower bed, and the corner of Brenda's house in the frame. I was documenting evidence; this felt important.