Glendale brings the Socrates Club’s public advocacy, Alice Zoghbie’s orderly domestic world, and the investigation’s most disturbing discovery into the same setting. The city first appears as the club’s headquarters and the home of the woman who rented the van associated with Eldon Mate; later, Alex Delaware returns to Glendale and finds two bodies in Zoghbie’s backyard. That shift turns a place introduced through organizational paperwork and manicured gardens into the scene of a concealed horror.

The club and its Glendale headquarters

The Socrates Club is headquartered in Glendale, California, at a home on Glenmont Circle. Its president, Alice Zoghbie, is also identified as treasurer of the Secular Humanist Infantry. When investigators learn that she leased the van and left for Amsterdam the following day, Glendale becomes a practical point of inquiry: the club’s headquarters is also Zoghbie’s residence, and the organization’s office phone leads to her home voicemail. She is away at a humanist convention and is expected back in a week, leaving investigators with an address but no immediate opportunity to question her.

Alex finds the club’s website and its declaration of personal ownership of life, opposing what it calls conventions imposed by organized religion. The site presents the organization as a membership-based enterprise: a hundred-dollar fee promises notice of events and other benefits, with major credit cards and Discover accepted. The address in Glendale thus serves both as an institutional base and as a domestic address behind the club’s public appeal. In the investigation, those two functions make the location more than a mailing point: it is where the organization’s stated principles and its president’s private circumstances meet.

Zoghbie’s house

The residence is a modest English country-style house in the northern hills of Glendale, with vanilla-colored stucco, an entry turret, and a copper rooster weather vane above the shake roof. White drapes frame clean mullioned windows; a flagstone path leads to an iron canopy and carved oak door. Flower beds are arranged in tiers, from statice and multicolored impatiens to low white blossoms. A white Audi sits in the cobblestone driveway beside a carefully shaped young podocarpus, while a larger sycamore stands across the path. The lawn appears almost unnaturally green; only the older tree’s scattered rusty leaves interrupt the appearance of exact control.

When Alex and Milo first visit, they approach the front door along the path. Its knocker is a brass goat’s head, whose hinged face drops with a sound that vibrates through the oak door. The door opens before the sound has died, marking the residence as an active destination for the inquiry. The evidence here establishes the approach and the opening door, not the details of what follows inside.

Return to the property

Alex later drives to Glendale in the morning, a trip taking thirty-five minutes. The house looks much as before: the beds are brightly colored, the copper rooster moves in the breeze, and the white Audi remains in the driveway, now with dust on its windshield. The neighborhood is no longer empty; an older resident sweeps a porch, and a young couple pulls out of a carport. Yet the ordinary signs of morning do not produce an answer at Zoghbie’s front door. Alex knocks once, then again more forcefully, without response.

He goes around the house through a green wooden gate that is latched but unlocked. Lights are on in the kitchen, but no one is visible through the glass panes. Dishes remain in the sink; a carton of milk and half an orange sit on the counter, the fruit slightly withered. The unanswered door and untouched-looking domestic details make the empty house feel more immediate than an ordinary absence, though they do not establish when Zoghbie or anyone else was last there. Alex continues along the side of the house, listening and looking through the windows; the only sound he notices is the buzzing outside.

The backyard discovery

The backyard is small and landscaped for privacy. Italian cypress hedges screen two sides, a tall wooden fence closes the rear, and Victorian lawn furniture and shade-loving flower beds occupy the enclosed space. A second sycamore, larger than the tree at the front, spreads over a dark part of the yard; its thick branches support a macramé hammock. Against its trunk, two people are propped upright. What first might be mistaken for bees is a mass of flies. Both bodies have been tied to the tree with thick rope, secured around the chest and waist; the rope is crusted with dark, dried blood.

The discovery reverses the meaning of the property’s careful order. The controlled planting, screened yard, and maintained house initially distinguish Zoghbie’s residence from the death-oriented organization associated with her name. In the backyard, that quiet domestic enclosure instead conceals bodies bound to a tree. Alex leaves the property shaken and drives to a gas station on Verdugo Road to use a pay phone. Although the killings fall within Glendale Police Department jurisdiction, he calls Milo Sturgis. Glendale is therefore both the local setting of the discovery and the point from which Alex brings his investigative partner into a scene that would otherwise belong to another police jurisdiction.