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Avenue had beauty, glamour, and palm trees—but it wasn’t all fancy-schmancy, either. There was a funkier edge to the big picture.
    All of those art galleries weeded through a scattering of hungry artists—some bohemians of uncertain hygiene—all eager to find wall space for their work. Andersen figured the killer could be any one of them.
    Joyce Wishart had the wall space and was not a big believer in negative space. Cluttered and busy was more like it. She had a lot of artwork displayed in her gallery and dealt with many artists, some strangers from heaven-knows-where.
    There were even homeless people who were semi-regulars along the block, but they were the same ones all the time, so folks learned to pay little mind. Now it was: “Should I have been afraid of that guy all along?” Andersen sometimes saw the same—pardon the expression—“bum” three times a day, stumbling down the street. Would she ever be able to look at him the same after all this?
    After the murder the cops came and didn’t leave. “They were there for a long time,” Andersen recalled, and by that she meant weeks .
    One part of her felt freaked out by the persistent heavy police presence, a steady reminder of the nightmare; the other part was reassured. It was easier to get through her day when protection was only a few feet away.
    The seemingly never-ending news stories on the murder, hinting at the ghastliness of the crime without being specific, made Andersen’s morbid imagination go wild. She found herself wondering what it was like for the cleanup crew. What mind-numbingly horrendous things would the crew have to see and do—just so that life could go on in that room.
    And what of the poor first responders? Joyce wasn’t found for several days and her remains must’ve been an assault on the senses by the time her corpse was discovered. What they must have seen! Whatever the ghastly secret, they knew firsthand. It was burned into their memories. How could a person ever sleep again?
    She had heard that the body was posed to resemble one of the pieces of art, but no one knew which painting or drawing it was, allowing imaginations to percolate.
    Years later, Michelle Andersen’s memories hadn’t faded.
    â€œIt was so close! I mean really, really close!” she exclaimed.
    There were popular events going on at the time, a ritzy film series and an art festival. The town was teeming. So there was an exceptional amount of pedestrian traffic along Palm Avenue. Businesses kept their doors propped open, hoping strollers would wander in.
    Even when there weren’t tourists to be wooed, security was never tight. Even on days when the weather might be inclement and the doors to the businesses kept shut, they still weren’t locked. The proprietor would just put a little bell up on top to tinkle the news when someone entered.
    Not that Joyce Wishart’s end of the strip was the most traveled. Since it was at the west end of the street, not that many tourists strolled by. If they went there, chances were good that it was their planned destination.
    Andersen was there late on that Friday. How scary was that? She was in and out on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday, she noticed that it was odd that Joyce Wishart hadn’t opened the gallery door. Andersen clicked on that—weird, no Joyce—and then moved on to something else. Andersen worked long hours that week. She worked her regular job, and then at night she made arrangements for the film festival, which had her working with directors. She’d probably been working alone in the office when it happened, just on the other side of the driveway. She thought out loud: “I’d been going back and forth in the parking garage alone. . . .” There must have been long hours that weekend when Andersen worked alone at night and Wishart’s desecrated body lay posed only a few feet away.
    After noting her absence