Chapter 5 - WEST RIDGE
West Ridge cooperated quickly.
Their records showed an online service request submitted two days before the incident.
Request type:
wildlife deterrence inspection.
Contact name:
Margaret Hale.
Phone:
Rebecca’s.
Email:
a generic account investigators later linked to a prepaid service.
Payment:
a virtual card.
The company dispatched technician Evan Brooks.
Evan told police he arrived at 1:53 p.m.
He used the side gate because the work order stated:
homeowner recovering from surgery, avoid front door disturbance.
False.
Arthur was not recovering from surgery.
Evan performed a limited exterior inspection.
He documented:
gaps beneath a patio storage cabinet,
dense ornamental grass near the fence,
and rodent activity near the rear wall.
He left recommendations.
He did not enter the house.
He did not handle snakes.
He did not bring live animals.
Important.
Then Claire asked:
“Did he leave the tag?”
Yes.
Evan had attached the service tag to the side gate.
Wind could have moved it.
So far:
suspicious scheduling.
No proof of sabotage.
Then Detective Laura Chen asked Evan:
“Did anything unusual happen?”
He thought.
“A woman called while I was there.”
“Who?”
“Said she was the homeowner’s sister.”
“What did she ask?”
“If I had checked beneath the patio planters.”
“Anything else?”
“She asked whether a snake could already be living close to the house.”
“What did you say?”
“That anything was possible, but I hadn’t seen one.”
Then:
“She sounded disappointed.”
That was subjective.
Not evidence.
But Evan had also documented the call in his job notes because it was unusual for a third party to redirect an inspection.
The caller number matched Rebecca.
Still no snake-placement evidence.
West Ridge also reviewed its own procedures.
A fake work order had sent a technician onto private property without direct homeowner confirmation.
Nothing in that visit itself caused the snake incident.
Still, the company saw a vulnerability.
They changed policy for residential exterior work requested by third parties:
direct confirmation with the occupant,
clear identity logging,
and refusal to accept “do not disturb the homeowner” instructions without verification.
Evan Brooks appreciated that.
He had spent several nights replaying the job.
“What if I had seen something?”
His supervisor told him:
“You documented what you saw.”
“I should’ve known the call was weird.”
“You wrote that it was weird.”
Again:
not omniscience.
Systems should not require one technician to intuit a crime.
They should make suspicious instructions harder to exploit.
That became another quiet consequence of the case.
Then investigators obtained one text between Rebecca and a man named Paul Denton.
Sent the morning of the bite:
He’ll have the kid outside around four.
May you like
Claire read it.
Her stomach turned.
