The Perfect Facade (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Twelve)

by Blake Pierce

  She closed her eyes and tried to clear her head, imagining what she would do if she were Poston. How would she go about fulfilling her desires without getting caught and thrown in prison again? When she thought about it that way, she realized that she’d been foolish to expect the guy would hold his victim in this tiny house—the first place authorities would check—which had no good hiding spots.

  If it was Hannah doing the hiding, she’d keep the girl elsewhere, maybe a storage unit paid for in cash, maybe an abandoned house elsewhere in town. If that was the case, she was looking for the wrong thing. He’d want to keep as little evidence of the alternate location as possible in his home, maybe only a key. But that wouldn’t be all.

  He’d also want to hold on to some connection to his victim, maybe a photo of her that he could use to fantasize about her when he couldn’t be with her. Of course he’d never keep anything like that on his person or his phone. It would be too risky if he was arrested. He’d need a physical picture that could be safely hidden away, even burned if necessary. That’s what she should be looking for. Hannah opened her eyes.

  Armed with this new perspective, she took in the details of the house again. She turned in a slow circle like a submarine periscope surveying the ocean’s surface. And then, the moment of revelation that had eluded her earlier arrived in a flash.

  In the guest bedroom, on the floor at the foot of the bed, was a wooden storage ottoman. It was charming in an old-fashioned, antique-y way. But that charm was completely at odds with everything else in the house. Every other piece of furniture looked like it had been chosen at a garage sale because it was the cheapest option available. None of it matched and most of it looked like it might fall apart at any second.

  But the ottoman was different. It looked expensive, with elaborate feet and what appeared to be hand-carved designs on the front and sides. Hannah walked into the bedroom to get a better look. It was even more impressive up close, with a heft and sophistication that made it stand out compared to everything else around it.

  Why would Jimmy Poston invest in one piece of quality furniture when everything else in his home was crap? She could think of only one reason. He didn’t get it for the quality, but for some other attribute that wasn’t immediately apparent.

  She lifted the top to find it was completely filled with old blankets, folded as well as Poston could. She lifted them all out, put them on the bed, and then took a step back, hoping to confirm her suspicion.

  A little thrill snaked up her spine as she knelt down to find that the bottom of the ottoman extended a good two inches below the available storage space. That meant that the base of the thing was either extremely thick or that there was a false bottom.

  She hurried back over and looked inside, hoping to find an easily visible button or latch. But the surface of the wood was flat and unremarkable. Trying not to think too much about the grossness of what she was about to do, Hannah got down on her stomach and moved her head close to the base, ignoring the dirty floor and using her phone flashlight to look for any kind of release device on the underside of the ottoman. There was nothing obvious.

  Hannah was just considering turning the thing over when she heard the sound of a loud, clanging engine approaching. She immediately recognized it as Poston’s. A quick mental calculation told her that she likely had less than a minute before he pulled into his driveway and walked across the brown-grassed lawn to open his front door.

  She knew she should dart out the back door right now, but she was so close to uncovering whatever secret Poston was hiding. Trying to push the sound of the vehicle out of her head, she got up onto her hands and knees and forced herself to think.

  It didn’t make sense that the hidden compartment would be so hard to open that it required turning over. It needed to be easily accessible to the person using it or what was the point? With that in mind, she reached below the ottoman and ran her hand along the underside of the front plank. It was smooth until she got to the far right corner, where her finger grazed a raisin-sized bump.

  The car outside groaned as it rattled over the cracked, uneven driveway and eased to a stop. Hannah blocked it out and pressed on the bump as she gritted her teeth in anxious anticipation. There was a soft click. She looked over into the storage space and saw that the front of the wooden bottom had popped up enough for her to get her fingers underneath.

  She quickly pulled up to find that the entire base was attached by collapsible hinges at the back of the ottoman. In the compartment below was a manila folder. She flipped it open to find that it was filled with pictures.

  She looked at the top one and though she had prepared herself for what she might see, she still felt a surge of vomit rise in her throat, which she was barely able to choke back down. Taking a moment to regroup, she made herself shuffle through additional photos, only half-looking through watery eyes.

  The images she found were beyond what she could have imagined. They included girls who looked to be as young as kindergartners and involved…devices. The car door slammed shut outside, snapping her back into the moment.

  She held her phone over the open folder and took a quick photo. Then, as quickly as she could, she closed the folder, shut the false bottom, replaced the blankets, and pulled down the ottoman cover. She was just getting to her feet when she heard the key turning in the front door lock.

  Realizing there was no time to get to the back door, much less the kitchen, she briefly considered trying to hide. But the only options were the bedrooms and she didn’t want to get trapped in there. Besides, she didn’t want to run. She wanted to confront this sick bastard. So she took one more step forward to the center of the living room, stood to her full height, and waited.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  “I want my lawyer,” Joe Wender said firmly.

  In that moment, Jessie knew that whatever chance they’d had to get a confession was gone. She and Karen got up and left the interrogation room without another word. When they were in the hall, she turned to the detective.

  “What now?” she asked.

  Karen shrugged.

  “I think we’re out of options, at least with him,” she replied. “I’ll call his attorney. If you have a brilliant Hunt brainstorm in the next hour, let me know.”

  But Jessie didn’t have any “eureka” moment. As she sat in the Downtown Station snack room, waiting for Joe Wender’s lawyer to arrive from Orange County, the closest she came was a generalized unsettled sensation. Something just didn’t feel right.

  On paper, they had enough to take Wender down. He was at the murder scene during the window of death. He had lied about his whereabouts. His obvious suspicion of his wife’s possible infidelity was a clear motive.

  And yet, something was gnawing at her. Maybe it was his seemingly genuine shock at learning that Claudia had slept with a stripper. Perhaps it was her memory of how truly grief-stricken he’d seemed when they visited him at his home this morning. Maybe it was the troubling hotel timeline, which gave him only sixteen minutes to do what seemed like it would take much longer. Likely it was combination of all of it.

  As Jessie turned it over in her head, the frustration mounted. Each passing second was like a throbbing wound. Rush hour traffic was delaying the attorney’s arrival, but Jessie knew that once he got here, Wender would be useless to them. She had to try again. But he’d invoked his right to a lawyer so he was off limits.

  Or was he? Jessie wasn’t a cop. She wasn’t even an employee of the LAPD. She was an independent consultant profiling a case. She knew that if she broached the topic with Decker, he’d shut her down and say that was just a technicality. But Decker wasn’t here. He was off on some personal errand.

  She could talk to Karen. But that would put the detective in an awkward position. Even discussing it with her could put her job at risk if she was seen as colluding to violate a suspect’s rights.

  But if Jessie approached Wender on her own, without any LAPD representative in attendance, and if
she didn’t actually interrogate him, she thought she might avoid violating his rights. Was it worth the potential blowback?

  The truth was that, despite all the circumstantial evidence against him, there was no smoking gun. In her bones, Jessie knew that unless some other piece of evidence materialized, Joe Wender wouldn’t be convicted. And since she wasn’t even certain that he should be, it seemed incumbent on her to use the remaining time she had with him to find out for sure.

  “I’m going to stretch my legs,” Jessie muttered to Karen, who had been talking on her cell phone to her husband.

  The detective nodded absently and resumed her conversation. Jessie left the snack room and moved quickly. Now that she’d decided on a course of action, she couldn’t waste any time. She had no idea when Wender’s lawyer would arrive or when Karen would finish her call and come looking for her.

  She darted into the observation room, set the cameras to “record,” and entered interrogation room three, where Joe Wender was asleep. His head rested on his hands, which were folded across the metal table. He looked up groggily.

  “You can go,” she told the officer sitting in the corner of the room.

  He nodded and left them alone, closing the door behind him. Jessie didn’t speak for several seconds, instead pulling out a notebook that was mostly empty. Wender sat up, blinking several times until he looked mildly alert.

  “Is my lawyer here yet?” he asked.

  “No. But it’s a long drive at this hour. Traffic is probably brutal out there right now.”

  Wender ran his fingers through his hair and sighed deeply.

  “You can’t ask me any questions,” he said.

  “I know how Miranda rights work, Mr. Wender,” she said, pointedly not confirming his assertion.

  He stared blankly at the wall for several seconds, then turned back to her.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he wondered aloud.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know how long I’m going to be here? I mean, I’d like to let my sister know if she’s babysitting for a few hours or if she needs to move the kids over to her place long-term.”

  “Hard to know for certain,” she said, keeping her voice matter-of-fact. “But you’re under arrest for murder. And this is Sunday. So even in the best-case scenario, if your lawyer gets you out on bail tomorrow, you’ll be here overnight. If you’re denied bail because of the severity of the crime or because the judge thinks you’re a flight risk, then we’re talking months behind bars. Either way, your sister should probably keep the kids at her place for now.”

  He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its hardness.

  “I already used my one call to reach my lawyer,” he said dejectedly. “She’s probably wondering what the hell is going on. Is there any chance you could call her and tell her what’s going on?”

  Jessie shrugged uncertainly.

  “That seems inappropriate,” she told him. “I’m not sure I should be in contact with her at all. Then again, I’m not actually an employee of the police department, so I’m not certain what my limitations are.”

  She pretended to ponder the problem for a moment before continuing.

  “I don’t know if it’s a technical violation but I suppose I could let you use my phone to fill her in, as long as you kept it short.”

  Wender nodded enthusiastically and she handed it over. Jessie sat quietly as they talked, letting the conversation go on until he had nothing more to say. He hung up and handed her back the phone.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She nodded and returned it to her pocket. For several seconds, neither of them spoke. Finally, she broke the silence.

  “You looked shocked to hear about the stripper,” she said.

  His eyes widened at her directness.

  “It’s not a question,” she said, waving her hand. “You don’t need to say anything. It’s just an observation. I’m sorry you had to find out that way.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be my motive though, that I found out she slept with a stripper? Now you’re saying you don’t believe I knew about it.”

  “I think it’s possible the stripper was a shock but that learning she’d cheated wasn’t all that surprising. Assuming your story is true, that’s why you came up all this way, right? Because you had some kind of suspicion about what she was doing. In my experience, husbands don’t drive fifty miles in the middle of the night to check up on their wives unless something’s bothering them.”

  “Are you speaking from experience?” he asked.

  “Actually, my experience was slightly different,” she said, deciding that opening up couldn’t hurt in this situation. “I wasn’t cheating but it turned out my husband was. Maybe if I was a little more suspicious early on, it wouldn’t have ended so badly.”

  “How did it end?” he asked, intrigued despite himself.

  “He killed his mistress, tried to frame me for it, and then tried to kill me when I found out. And that’s just the stuff he did before he got out of prison.”

  She watched Wender’s eyes nearly pop out of his head as he realized who she was.

  “Oh my god, you’re that Jessie Hunt. You used to live in Westport. I can’t believe I didn’t put it together.”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, you’ve been kind of busy,” she pointed out. “My point is that I do know what it’s like to have a spouse cheat and then end up accused of a murder associated with that cheating. Luckily, in my situation, I’d been training to solve crimes like the one I was wrapped up in. Even then, I was too close to the situation to see what was going on until it was almost too late. Unfortunately, you’re not a criminal profiler.”

  “Yeah, sucks for me that I’m not,” he said bitterly.

  “But here’s the thing, Mr. Wender,” she said, leaning in. “I am. And if you didn’t do this, then you should take advantage of the fact that I’m here. Who’s better equipped to solve this than the person who’s been in the same boat and does this for a living?”

  He stared back at her, his eyes a mix of hope and doubt. She wondered how much of that was genuine and how much was a deceptive put-on for her benefit.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  She sat up straight now, the picture of professionalism, projecting the air of the one individual who could help him out of this nightmare.

  “I’m saying I can help, but only if I know the whole truth. If you didn’t do this, then telling it to me shouldn’t be a problem for you. Jealousy isn’t a crime, Mr. Wender. Neither is suspicion. They may be a source of shame, especially if the person that evoked those emotions is now dead. But unless you killed her, shame seems like a small price to pay in order to find the truth.”

  “It’s more than just shame,” he insisted. “It’s guilt and grief and terror at what comes next.”

  She nodded in understanding.

  “I can’t promise you all of those things will go away if you help me,” she told him. “But if the information you’re holding onto assists in finding out who did this, that’s a place to start. You can tell your kids that you did something to help bring their mommy’s killer to justice. You can find a way to move on that involves something other than guilt. It’s not a magic solution, but it could be a new beginning.”

  He sat quietly for a long time, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, his breathing slow and deliberate. Though her mouth was dry, Jessie swallowed hard, well aware that if this appeal didn’t work, nothing would.

  Finally Wender looked up.

  “What do I have to do?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Jimmy Poston was hungry.

  He’d managed to restrain himself, only snacking on a few fries on the way home. But as he unlocked his front door, his mouth salivated at the thought of sitting on his couch and diving into an In-N-Out double cheeseburger and animal fries.

  He stepped inside, closed the door, a
nd dropped his keys in the bowl on the table by the door. Then he turned around. A teenage girl was standing in the middle of the room. Startled, he dropped the bags. It took a second to realize that it was same girl from earlier, the one who had tried to get him to buy candy for her school.

  Half a dozen thoughts flew into his head all at once. He wondered if the candy thing was just a ruse to scout his place, so that she could rip him off when he left. But that concern quickly faded as other ones overtook it. Was she a victim from his past, one of the many the cops had never learned of, coming back for revenge? Did she know about the secret he was guarding so zealously?

  And then another thought penetrated through all the others. Whatever her reason for being here, it put him at risk. If some cop doing a random check-in found an underage girl in his home, it meant immediate revocation of his parole and an automatic additional three years behind bars, even if he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he growled.

  “I wanted to give you a second chance to buy that candy,” the girl said.

  Her tone was much more challenging and cocky than he would have expected from a teenage female intruder. He didn’t like it.

  “You’re in a serious situation, young lady,” he told her, trying to keep control, even as he felt a familiar stirring in his chest. “I could call the cops on you right now.”

  She stared back at him silently, with the hint of a smile at the corners of her lips. There was something in her demeanor, a self-assured coolness, which he found equal parts unsettling and infuriating. He wanted to wipe the half-smirk off her face. His fists clenched involuntarily.

  “But you’re not going to call the cops, are you, Jimmy?” she said more than asked. The half-smirk was now a full one.

  “How do you know my name?” he demanded.

  “How do you think, Jimmy? I got it from the same place that makes me sure you’re not calling anyone—the sex offender database. You’re on parole and I bet that having me here would mess with that pretty bad.”