The clip ran that night beside the ceremony speech.
Ryan’s online defenders vanished first.
Then Linda’s neighbors began talking.
That was when the second safe was found.
It happened because of Mrs. Alvarez next door, a retired librarian with sharp knees, sharper eyes, and a memory that could have qualified as an intelligence asset. She called the tip line after seeing Linda on the news.
“I don’t like that woman,” she told investigators, according to Sarah. “Never did. She smiles like she’s counting your teeth.”
Mrs. Alvarez had seen Ryan carrying boxes into the detached garage two nights after the shaving incident, before the retrieval order, before the first search. At the time, she thought he was hiding valuables from a divorce. Now she wondered if it mattered.
It did.
Investigators obtained another warrant.
The garage had always been Ryan’s kingdom of unused tools and half-finished projects. He had once spent eight hundred dollars on woodworking equipment and produced one crooked shelf, which Linda praised as if he had rebuilt the cathedral of Notre-Dame.
