Death in the Sunshine (Retired Detectives Club, #1)(70)

Moira frowns. If Peggy Leggerhorne is asking the moderators not to delete her message again, they must be taking down posts on topics they don’t like – and it looks likely that the subject of murder is one of those topics.

As she watches, comments start to appear beneath Peggy’s post. Interesting. It’s barely six in the morning, but it seems as if plenty of the residents are awake.

TexasPete58: I heard a girl died

SamanthaLovesCats: Someone died? Who?

MarkGrecian: It’s just a rumour is all

DorothyKnits: It was a young woman. She was in the pool.

TeaAndCake44583: I heard something about an accident in the pool at Manatee

MarkandJack: It was murder

BlakeGotterton: This can’t be true

Moira hasn’t finished reading the comments when the thread suddenly disappears. She scrolls up and down the page, but can’t find it. Comes out of the app, and then goes back in – still nothing. She’s just about to post a question to ask what’s happened when a notification flashes up:

The moderator has turned off posting and comments.

It seems overkill if it’s due to Peggy’s discussion post – there wasn’t anything inappropriate being said, and they were talking about something that had happened in the community. Moira thinks about the lack of news reports on the murder. Perhaps the problem is that they were talking about it happening in the community. Opening up Messenger, Moira taps out a message.

Moira Flynn: Hi Peggy, I just saw your post but it’s disappeared now. Do the moderators usually delete things like that?

Peggy replies almost immediately.

Peggy Leggerhorne: All the goddamn time! I just wanted to know what’s going on but I’ve posted three times about the death and they delete it every time. It was the same when I posted about getting burglarised – they deleted that too!!

Moira Flynn: I’m so sorry to hear you got burgled

Peggy Leggerhorne: We were the first home it happened to. We’re on Stingray Drive. If they’d let us post about in on the group maybe others could have gotten more preventative measures in place and saved themselves the heartbreak of getting burglarised

Moira Flynn: Who moderates the group?

Peggy Leggerhorne: Homestead management. I thought they’d be asleep now but no!

Moira stares at Peggy’s reply. It’s interesting that the management run the community Facebook page. She clicks back to the page and looks up the moderator list. There are three of them, two women and one man. In their profile pictures they look like they’re all young – probably in their twenties – and have the super-wide smiles of a Disney cast member. They’re all wearing turquoise The Homestead T-shirts. Only one of them has a green dot beside their name, indicating that they’re online right now – Brad Winslow.

Moira inhales sharply. She recognises him. It’s the guy. The turquoise T-shirt has replaced the maroon and gold scarf and navy hoodie, and he’s not wearing his black-framed glasses in the photo, but the slim face and blond hair are the same. Brad Winslow was the man with the silver VW Beetle who was spying on her two days ago.

Why did you follow me, Brad? Moira wonders. And why did you delete Peggy’s post? She puts her phone on the bedside table and lies back in the darkness. There’s something really odd going on here: he’d followed her for most of the day after she’d found the body, but after she’d chased him off he hadn’t seemed to return. Online, there were Peggy’s posts about getting burgled and the murder being deleted whenever she posted them, the lack of news coverage about the burglaries, and the fact that the Manatee Park murder hadn’t appeared in any telly or radio broadcasts and was only on one newspaper site online, and even then it had been reported as an ‘accident’. That’s far too much to be pure coincidence. Instead it points to The Homestead meddling in how the news is portrayed and shared inside and outside the community. Moira just doesn’t get why.

She reaches out to Pip and strokes his silken head. He snores louder.

It’s as if The Homestead is able to block bad news getting reported. And deleting residents’ posts when they’re trying to share information and find out what’s going on in their own community isn’t okay. It’s like Big Brother is watching their every move and deleting the things they don’t like – editing the narrative of The Homestead in a kind of Stepford community or Truman Show-type situation.

Moira shudders. That’s really not okay. It’s creepy.

This is real life; real things – bad things – are happening, and the residents are entitled to know about them. Hank could have died today. A young woman has already lost her life.

Finding the killer isn’t enough now. Moira also needs to know why the management of The Homestead are censoring what their residents say, and if they are somehow manipulating the news.

She thinks back to when she was sitting in the ambulance earlier and the conversation between Detective Golding and Philip. Remembers the venom in Golding’s voice, and the fear in Philip’s.

She needs to know what’s going on.





38


RICK


He’s barely gotten a couple of streets from home when his cell phone starts ringing. Easing his foot off the gas a little and driving one-handed, Rick reaches into his pants pocket for his cell and answers. ‘You’re talking to Denver.’