by Blake Pierce
“She was in a happy marriage but didn’t need much prodding to sleep with a stripper.”
“What are you getting at, Jessie?” Karen prodded.
“We’re spending so much time trying to get in the heads of the potential killers and it’s getting us nowhere. Unless this was a total ‘spur of the moment’ crime of passion, someone killed Claudia for a specific reason and I can’t help but wonder if that reason doesn’t connect to how she was behaving that night.”
“What do you mean?” Karen asked.
Jessie could feel some of the puzzle pieces starting to click into place, even if she couldn’t see what the picture was yet.
“Okay,” she began, hoping her mouth could keep up with her brain. “According to Jerry Blatt, Claudia wasn’t quite in her right mind that night either, and not just because she was drunk. He’d said she was the aggressor, even though she was supposedly happily married, never complaining about her relationship. He said she’d seemed sad, even on a wild birthday outing, both before and after their encounter. Maybe it was just guilt at having cheated. But I feel like there’s more to it than that.”
“Like what?” Karen asked.
“Maybe the reason Claudia didn’t gossip or spill about her own life wasn’t because it was such a fairy tale. Maybe she just didn’t want any of her secrets getting out. And maybe, despite being so tight-lipped, one did, and that’s what had her worried.”
“Interesting theory,” Karen conceded. “Any evidence to support it?”
Jessie turned to her and smiled.
“Not yet,” she said. “But I have a hunch where we might find some. Let’s make a pit stop at the Hollywood Center Hotel.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
*
Jessie could tell Karen was annoyed. She felt bad about it. But until she had something other than her gut to go on, she wasn’t ready to share anything else.
They were waiting at the hotel’s parking valet station while the valet manager rifled through his back tickets. Just then, Kimberly called, returning Jessie’s text from only minutes earlier.
“Thanks for getting back to me so fast,” she said.
“Sure,” Kimberly replied. “You made it sound like an emergency.”
“Sorry about that. It’s not an emergency but it is pressing. Remind me—how did you all get from Westport Beach to Hollywood on Friday night?”
“Veronica drove. She picked up Lauren, then me before stopping to get Claudia.”
“And Veronica drove her own car, no one else’s?” Jessie confirmed.
“Yes, a Mercedes SUV. Why?”
“I can’t get into it,” Jessie said. “But thank you.”
“Does that help?” Kimberly asked hopefully.
“I don’t know yet, maybe. Take care, Kimberly.”
There was a pause before the other woman responded, with unexpected sincerity.
“You too, Jessie.”
The valet manager walked over just as she was hanging up.
“So, I did find one ticket that matched the license plate number you gave me,” he said, handing it over to her.
“I’m going to need to keep this,” she informed him, dropping it into a plastic evidence baggie.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, surprisingly untroubled. Jessie wondered if he’d been through this kind of thing before.
“I recognize that license number from the file,” Karen said. “It’s for Claudia’s Audi.”
“Yes it is,” Jessie agreed as they returned to the car.
“But Kimberly Miner just told you they all came here in Veronica’s vehicle. If Claudia drove her own car, Miner has to know we can verify that with the others. Why would she lie about that?”
“I don’t think she’s lying,” Jessie said. “But to prove it definitively, we have to go back to the station and see Jamil.”
“I feel like you’re taunting me here, Jessie Hunt,” Karen said, somewhere between irked and amused. “You’re like the cat that ate the canary. Do you have any plans to share this hunch with me?”
“I do,” Jessie assured her as they pulled out into traffic, “but not just yet. Before I say anything, I want to make sure I really am the cat that ate the canary and not the cat that ate…something that makes cats sick and throw up.”
“Wow, that analogy really fell apart,” Karen noted. “You’re not a cat person, are you?”
“Nope, and apparently I’m not much of an analogy person either.”
“I guess it’s a good thing you’re a killer-catching person.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Jessie replied.
This thing wasn’t solved yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Now Jamil was mad too.
They were in the research department, waiting for him to pull up the hotel footage from around 1:33 a.m., the timestamp on the valet ticket.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for?’ he said. “It might help me find it faster.”
Jessie shook her head.
“I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole with you guys until I’m more confident there’s something in it.”
“Infuriating, right?” Karen asked, looking at Jamil. “I’ve been dealing with this for the last half hour. Little Miss Knows the Answer is holding out on us.”
“If I’m right, you’ll know too in just a minute,” Jessie promised.
Jamil pulled up the video footage in question from 1:15 to 1:45 and played it at double speed. When it got to 1:30, he slowed it to regular speed and all three of them leaned in closer to the monitor. Jessie felt her heartbeat quicken in anticipation.
At 1:32, the Audi pulled up. A few seconds later, a valet jogged over, opened the door, and handed the ticket to a familiar-looking person. Jessie smiled to herself, waiting for her colleagues to make the connection. Even with the grainy footage and the high overhead angle, it was clear that the man with the dark hair was tall. As he walked toward the hotel, he moved fluidly, as one might expect from an athletic-looking forty-something man like Joe Wender.
Karen gave a slight gasp. Jamil didn’t realize the significance and looked at her questioningly.
“It’s Claudia husband,” she said before turning to Jessie. “What made you think to check for the ticket?”
“Like I said before, it was just a hunch. I didn’t want to make any accusations, even to you, before having something to back it up.”
“What was the hunch based on?” Jamil asked in that way he had that made it seem like he was a human sponge hoping to soak up every bit of investigative knowledge he could all at once.
Jessie allowed herself a smile at his youthful enthusiasm. She was only six years older than him but she felt decades more worn out.
“I just started thinking that if Claudia didn’t consider her life or her marriage to be the fairy tale everyone else thought it was, maybe her husband didn’t either. If she was so quick to cheat, maybe it wasn’t the first time. I wondered if Joe knew that, or at least suspected it. If so, then watching her head off to a ‘gals only’ bacchanal might have eaten at him enough to find out what was really happening. Their kids were at his sister’s so he didn’t have anything other than self-control to keep him in check. And it looks like that wasn’t operating at full strength. So I thought I’d see if either of their cars made an appearance at the hotel.”
“Seems pretty foolish to go to the valet rather than just park on the street,” Jamil noted. “Not a great way to hide his tracks.”
“Agreed,” Jessie said, “which is one of the reasons I don’t want to leap too far ahead on this. Another is that he has absolutely no alibi for the time in question, which seems equally foolish if he was planning a murder.”
Karen turned to Jamil.
“Were you able to verify his location data?” she asked.
He nodded as he pulled it up on another screen.
“Yep,” he said. “His car was at their home address all night after he dropped the kids off
, which makes sense now. His phone was home all night too.”
“Driving to Hollywood in your wife’s car without your phone in the middle of the night?” Karen said. “Now that’s suspicious.”
“It could have just been an oversight,” Jessie said, trying to stay objective even though she was the one who’d sent them down this road. “It was late. He was probably upset. Maybe he just forgot it.”
Karen shook her head.
“Or it could have been to hide where he was and what he planned to do. And even if it was an oversight, it doesn’t explain why he was headed there in the first place.”
“Well, let’s find out,” Jessie said. “Jamil, can you pull up all the available security footage once he enters the hotel?”
The young tech wizard’s fingers flew across the keyboard as he pulled up a series of screens for them to view.
“We’ve got the hotel lobby, the working elevators and the twentieth-floor hallway,” he said letting them play in that order.
At 1:35, Wender walked across the lobby floor and out of sight. They all turned their attention to the elevator cameras, but he didn’t appear on any of them.
“Did the footage cut out at some point?” Karen asked. “He should have gotten in one by now.”
“Nope,” Jamil assured her. “It did cut out a little later, around two a.m., but they were all working fine during this stretch.”
“Then where is he?” Karen asked, frustrated.
They were all quiet for a little longer, hoping for an unexpected break. But none came. Jamil sped the footage up a bit. Jessie could feel the hope leaking out of her chest as two minutes onscreen stretched into five and then ten.
Finally, at 1:51, he reappeared, crossing back across the lobby toward the valet station outside. As he walked, Jessie noticed him wipe at his face with the back of his hand. The exterior camera showed him waiting for the car for less than two minutes before it returned. Seconds later he pulled out into the night.
“That was disappointing,” Jamil said, voicing how they all felt.
Jessie didn’t speak. Though she’d hoped to see Joe Wender wiping blood off his hands as he came back down in an elevator, she’d learned that answers rarely came that easily. But it wasn’t a total setback. They knew he’d been at the hotel in the window of Claudia’s death. That was huge. Then a thought occurred to her, one she was embarrassed hadn’t popped into her head earlier.
“Are there cameras in the stairwells?”
Jamil did another round of keyboard finger flying.
“No,” he said after a few seconds. “Apparently they’ll be part of the upgrade next year. But right now, the stairs are blind spots.”
“How long do you think it would take a motivated guy in good shape to hoof it up to the twentieth floor?” Jessie wondered.
“You’re asking the wrong person,” Jamil admitted. “I’d collapse before getting halfway there.”
“We’ll set aside how pathetic that is for the time being,” Karen said. “I’m guessing that a former athlete like Wender might fare a little better.”
“Probably,” Jessie mused. “But even so, to take the stairs up to the suite level, somehow get in the room and kill his wife, all without waking anyone, then return downstairs and be outside again that fast? We’re talking sixteen minutes total. It seems like a stretch. And any decent lawyer would say the same thing. This looks bad, but we need more if we’re going to arrest the grieving husband of a murder victim.”
“When he was leaving, he didn’t seem like he was in the throes of grief to me,” Karen replied.
“Actually, Jamil,” Jessie said, “can you play him leaving the hotel lobby again and maybe try to zoom in on him a little. I want to see if he looks stressed.”
“I’ll try,” Jamil said. “But these cameras are pretty crappy. The closer we get, the grainier it’s going to look.”
He was right. There was no way to accurately discern Wender’s expression, using the zoom or not. But she did notice something else.
“When he wipes his face with the back of his hand, does it look like he’s wiping away a tear?”
Jamil played it again; and then another time after that.
“He is wiping right below his eye,” Karen acknowledged. “But I can’t honestly say more than that.”
Let’s play this out,” Jessie said, talking to herself as much as the others. “He’s inside the hotel for sixteen minutes. Assume for a second he was crying. One would imagine he’d recently had an experience that made him emotional.”
“I think murdering his wife might fit the description,” Karen offered. “Don’t you?”
“I think it’s time we found out,” Jessie said.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Ryan heard the doorbell ring from the bedroom.
Knowing that his day nurse, Patty, would answer it, he continued his meditation session. He thought he was getting better at it. In the last week, his practice had extended to twenty minutes before he started getting restless. And when he was done, he could often sense a real feeling of calm that extended for hours afterward.
A soft knock on the bedroom door startled him briefly. He looked up from where he sat on the floor to find Patty’s cherubic face peeking in with an apologetic expression.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” she said.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, his chest tightening slightly despite fifteen minutes of concentrated breathing.
“Yes, it’s nothing like that,” she assured him. “You just have a visitor and it seemed rude to keep him waiting.”
“Who is it?’
“He’s an older gentleman,” she replied, “said his name is Roy Decker.”
Ryan felt an unexpected surge of anxiety.
“Can you help me up please, Patty? I don’t want to keep him waiting too long.”
“Someone important?” she asked as she came over and helped him to his feet.
“He’s the police captain at my station. He also supervises the unit I ran before the attack.”
“Oh, that’s very nice of him to stop by. He hasn’t done that before, has he?”
“No, he hasn’t,” Ryan said as he slid into his slippers and tucked in his shirt.
“You sound worried,” she noted.
Ryan shook his head unconvincingly.
“No,” he lied as he started for the door, “just surprised.”
As he moved into the hall, he reminded himself that maintaining the deep breathing routine might be a wise idea. Decker had never come to his home before for any reason and he doubted today’s visit was for a casual chat. There were only two possible reasons that his captain would show up here on a lazy winter Sunday. One of them was unthinkable: something had happened to Jessie.
When he stepped into the living room, he found Decker standing in the foyer, dressed in his standard attire. He had on a dress shirt with a tie and rumpled slacks. His only concessions to the more relaxed environment were a slight loosening of the tie and a casual windbreaker more appropriate to a ballpark than a professional meeting.
Decker hadn’t seen him yet. Based on his untroubled, distracted expression, Ryan immediately knew his worst fear was unfounded. If Jessie was injured or dead, he’d be taut and focused.
Reassured briefly, Ryan’s thoughts quickly turned to the other likely reason for the man’s presence. A more casual setting might be the perfect place for the captain to break some bad news; like that Ryan was being permanently relieved of his duties with the LAPD.
As he stepped into the foyer, he wiped his face of any obvious concern. He didn’t want his boss to sense his dread.
“This is a bit of a surprise, Captain,” Ryan said as conversationally as he could. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know,” Decker said noncommittally, not actually answering the question. “How are you?”
“I’ll be doing better once we sit down. Your call: couch or kitchen table?”
“How about the table?�
�� Decker suggested.
Ryan nodded, his mind racing as he slowly made his way over. If this was really a casual check-in, the couch was preferable. But the table provided a slightly more formal setting for sharing bad news.
He tried to steel himself for what was coming, though he wasn’t sure how he’d react. All these months he’d been grinding to get back to a point where he could resume active duty. If that goal was taken from him, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Plead his case? Break down? Stoically accept it? As he settled into the chair opposite Decker, he genuinely had no idea. One thing was certain: he wasn’t going to cave preemptively. The captain would have to get the ball rolling.
“You guys have done a nice job with the place,” Decker said once he’d settled in. “It’s much homier than Garland kept it.”
Ryan had temporarily forgotten that Roy Decker and Garland Moses hadn’t just been colleagues but friends. It stood to reason that the captain had been in this very room on multiple occasions, most likely far less awkward than this one.
“You guys watch football here or something?” he asked, only letting a little snark slip though.
“Actually, yes,” Decker said. “It wasn’t a regular thing but I can think of several times when we sat right over there in the living room, pretending to care who won a game we mostly watched to take our minds off the world around us.”
“It does tend to bleed through, doesn’t it?” Ryan noted.
“Almost always,” Decker agreed. “Ms. Hunt is experiencing a bit of that right now, I’d imagine.”
It seemed like an invitation so Ryan accepted it.
“How’s the case going?” he asked.
“The truth is, she and Detective Bray have been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to get an update yet today. I know they’ve got a suspect coming into the station as we speak. I hope to learn more when I return.”
“You know,” Ryan told him, “at some point before this is done, she’s going to crush you for tricking her into taking this case.”
“You’re probably right. But if we catch this killer it’ll be worth the hit.”