The Perfect Impression

by Pierce, Blake

  “That’s great,” Jessie said. “We’ll get into everything more when I return but for now, I’d like to nail down a few basics. Why did you leave Catalina so suddenly?”

  The pause on the other end of the line told her that she’d made an impact. Jessie let the moment linger. She could almost hear the woman’s brain working overtime.

  “It’s not as dramatic as it seems,” she finally said. “The group just enjoyed some activities that I…I wasn’t into. I started to feel uncomfortable. Theo didn’t seem bothered by that stuff and wanted to stay. I didn’t. So I left.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Jessie asked, keeping the pressure on.

  The pause this time was even longer than before.

  “You know, I thought you’d already have addressed all this with the others by now,” she said carefully. “I don’t really know all the details so I’m not the person to talk to.

  “What details?” Jessie demanded. “What activities were you referring to?”

  “I’ve got to go,” Aldridge said hurriedly. “If you need to follow up later, let me know.”

  “Ariana—” Jessie started to say before realizing the line was dead.

  She looked over at Peters, unable to hide her excitement. At last, she had something to work with, a way to burrow under the perfect impression that everyone was presenting.

  “What?” Peters said, without any of her interest.

  “What do you mean, ‘what?’ Didn’t that strike you as interesting? Whatever ‘activity’ the rest of the group was into was enough to make Ariana Aldridge bail on the whole weekend. All this time we’ve had to accept the notion that everyone was too drunk to remember what happened last night. Now we finally have a lead that suggests that maybe they weren’t just out of it, they were intentionally hiding something.”

  “What do you think?” Peters asked dismissively. “That they’re a bunch of Satanists who planned to sacrifice her at midnight?”

  “I don’t know,” Jessie replied, surprised at his indifference to the woman’s revelation. “It could be that. It could be some kind of sex club. I’ve come across that before. They could have been planning to go to some hidden warehouse to watch dog fights or intending to spend all night shooting heroin in someone’s suite. The point is that there is something they didn’t tell us that scared her off. I’m not sure why you’re suddenly so blasé about this.”

  “I guess I’m just not convinced that it’s the smoking gun you think it is,” he said.

  “Well, we’re about to see who’s right,” she told him. “We’ve got a little less than five hours before your boss starts wetting himself, so let’s get started.”

  “Where?”

  “With the one person most likely to react to this new information: Theo Aldridge.”

  “You think he’s going to be more forthcoming than he was last night?” Peters asked.

  “I think he was pretty cocky while he was drunk,” Jessie told him. “Now he’ll be hung over. And once I use the ammunition his wife just gave us, he’ll be feeling the heat. Besides, I’ve often found that the big, tough guys are the first to break. Let’s see if he’s one of them.”

  *

  Deputy Heck told them that Theo Aldridge had returned to his room. When Jessie banged on his door, it took almost two minutes for him to answer it. When he did, she saw why. He was wearing only boxers and a T-shirt and still had sleep in his eyes.

  “I only just fell back asleep,” he said irritably. “Couldn’t you have given me a little time to rest?”

  “Sorry, Theo,” Jessie said, sidestepping him as she entered the room. “Time is short and we need to talk.”

  “Hey, I didn’t give you permission to come into my room!” he objected, regaining some of the belligerence from the previous night.

  “Are you refusing to talk with me?” she asked in a tone that suggested it might be a crime for him to do so.

  “I just—I’m not dressed,” he said, switching quickly to a pathetic, pleading voice.

  “Then get dressed,” she instructed, flicking on his light and walking further into the room. “And please don’t make Detective Peters stand out in the hall. It’s rude.”

  Aldridge stepped aside for Peters to enter. The detective seemed reluctant to do so. Once Aldridge pulled on some jeans, his demeanor became immediately less deferential.

  “What was so important that you had to barge in here? I gave the hotel manager my timeline like you asked.”

  “I know,” Jessie assured him, speaking with an intentional aggression intended to keep him on his heels. “And he passed it along to me. I looked at it on the way up here. It’s pretty useless. You could drive a truck through the gaps in time that you listed. But that’s not what I’m interested in right now. Have a seat.”

  Aldridge sat down on the bed. Peters moved to the corner of the room. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. Jessie found his demeanor unnerving, but chose to keep her focus on the giant man sitting befuddled on the bed before her.

  “What then?” he asked apprehensively.

  “I spoke to your wife,” she said without preamble. “She explained why she left.”

  She let the comment hang in the air, seeing how he’d respond.

  “What did she say?” His voice was frustratingly impassive. In the space of a minute, he’d gone from annoyed to apologetic to cryptic. Since he wasn’t tipping his hand, Jessie had to be careful how she answered the question.

  “She told us she wasn’t into the kind of activities you all had planned. I can understand why. But considering that she obviously has a bit of bias, I wanted to give you a chance to explain yourself. This is your one opportunity to come clean, in your own words. If you hold out on me and I have to pull teeth to get answers, it’s going to go much worse for you. So make your choice.”

  She stood still, waiting for his reply. She’d learned that sometimes it was best to let an interview subject stew, their imagination conjuring up consequences far worse than she could administer. She saw that Aldridge was going through exactly that process. When he finally spoke, she could tell he was spooked.

  “Look, I’ll tell you,” he said resignedly. “But I don’t know what this has to do with Gabby’s death. The other couples we came with—they’re swingers.”

  Jessie let the admission settle in. It was hardly the most shocking revelation she’d heard in her career. In the last few years, she busted up an underage sex ring, caught a killer intent on executing cheating women, and nailed a couple who worked in tandem to murder a woman they’d both been sleeping with. Swingers was comparatively tame.

  “Okay,” she replied. “What does that mean exactly?”

  “They come to this place a few times a year and I guess all the rules go out the window. Apparently the Paragon caters to stuff like that. There are hotel staffers who work as waiters or porters or housekeepers but do double duty as sexual partners.”

  Jessie looked over at Peters, who had a guilty expression on his face. It was now clear to her why he’d been so reticent to pursue this line of inquiry. He clearly knew all about the hotel’s reputation.

  She bored into the detective with her eyes, furious at how much investigative time he’d cost her by keeping this secret. She wanted to rip into him then and there, but that confrontation would have to wait. With much effort, she swallowed her frustration, said nothing to him, and returned her attention to Aldridge.

  “Why did Ariana get cold feet?” she asked.

  “She didn’t,” he told her. “We didn’t know about any of this until we got here. Friday night was just like a normal vacation. They only sprang it on us yesterday. I guess they wanted to give us a chance to settle in. Ari wanted no part of it. I was more…curious.”

  “And that’s what set her off?” Jessie pressed.

  “She seemed like she might be open to the idea at first,” he said. “But the more she heard about it, the less she liked it. She said it seemed like cheating. I said it wasn’t
cheating if everyone was cool with it. She told me she definitely wasn’t cool with it. It escalated from there. She accused me of wanting an excuse to sleep with the hot bartender. That’s around the time she started demanding to go home.”

  “But you didn’t want to go,” Jessie prompted.

  “I thought she was overreacting and made the mistake of saying so. That only made things worse. She started packing her bag right then. Nothing I said after that mattered. She wouldn’t let me come with her.”

  He was saying all the right things but Jessie didn’t quite buy it and she let him know.

  “It doesn’t seem like you tried that hard. You could have taken the next ferry and met her back home. But you didn’t do that.”

  “No,” he said, a flush of arrogance in his tone. “I thought about it but then I said ‘what the hell—I’m not going to ruin my weekend just because she got all puritanical.’ I’d been looking forward to a break from a crying baby for weeks and then I had to cut it short, just because my wife got on her high horse? I don’t think so.”

  “So you stayed to spite her,” Jessie poked.

  His face got red and he sounded like he was trying hard to keep the agitation out of his tone.

  “No, I just didn’t want to be bullied. Sure, I wanted to have a nice dinner, maybe get a little loaded, and relax. What do I care if these guys like to bed down with the staff? It’s none of my business. For the record, I didn’t do it. Ask anyone who works here if I was with them. They’ll all tell you the same as me: no.”

  Jessie could tell that his anxiety was giving way to defensiveness. She was dangerously close to the point where he might start talking about invoking rights and talking to lawyers. She wanted to avoid that mess, especially when she wasn’t sure she could count on her partner, and decided to back off for now.

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Aldridge,” she said abruptly, turning to leave.

  She caught Peters’s eye. He looked like he might prefer to stay in here than face her outside. But as irked as she was with him, she was more fixated on something else. After Ariana Aldridge’s inadvertent revelation, and her husband’s reluctant confirmation, she finally had a string to pull at. If she handled it right, hopefully the whole thing would unravel.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Night Hunter sat patiently in his car.

  He’d fasted since last night so he wouldn’t have to leave his post to go to the bathroom. And he had water bottles if things got dire. He didn’t love this part of it. But it was essential to know what he was dealing with. And that required patience, something he had in spades.

  It had taken him a while to find the house. There were layers of paperwork designed to hide it, and they did so effectively. It didn’t surprise him. Garland Moses was nothing if not thorough. He knew that from painful, personal experience.

  The last time he saw the man, Moses was an FBI profiler on the verge of retirement. The Night Hunter often wondered what might have happened if Moses had left the bureau to retire out west just a little earlier, before taking on his case. He suspected the last two decades would have been much different.

  With no one skilled enough to stop him, he could have continued his adventures up and down the eastern seaboard without interference. By now he might have taken close to a thousand targets, rather than the paltry 267 he’d tallied to date.

  And if he was really honest with himself, that latter number was inflated. A whopping 186 of them came after “The Skirmish,” as he liked to call it, with Moses. Only eighty-one of the subjects were truly worthy, ones on which he was able to use his signature calling card, a machete.

  Almost all the others came without fanfare, in the dark years, when his body was suffering from the aftereffects of The Skirmish. His two-story fall—really a desperate jump—from Moses’s condo had left him with both a broken leg and hip on one side, a dislocated shoulder and crushed ankle on the other, as well as facial fractures and several broken ribs. And that didn’t include the gashes Moses had inflicted on him with his own blade. He still had a long scar that ran horizontally across his forehead, a final parting gift from the profiler. He had to literally drag himself away before the police arrived on the scene and barely managed to sneak into the sewers mere seconds before the first cop car pulled up.

  In the years afterward, not wanting to draw more attention, and physically unable to escape if he was ever found, he’d been reduced to fulfilling his cravings by acting them out on the homeless and the addicted, sacrifices who were less likely to put up a struggle when the frail-looking older gentleman he now was suddenly revealed his true intentions.

  But even then he had to mask his work so that it couldn’t be connected to his past exploits; never using the same method, rarely in the same city, often going many months between completing his work. Sometimes he felt like a vampire reduced to feeding on injured wild animals so as not to draw the attention of the townsfolk. It was demeaning.

  But that had all changed last summer, when he saw the report on the news that Garland Moses, now a consultant for the LAPD, had been murdered. When he did the research, he uncovered a delicious discovery. His longtime nemesis’s death came at the hands of Garland’s own protégé’s ex-husband, a fellow who seemed like a real piece of work in his own right.

  The axis of the whole world tilted that day. The one man who had been his equal, who had kept him in the shadow for twenty years, was dead. The Night Hunter had a new lease on life. And just as exciting, he had a potential new adversary. He had to know if Moses’s golden child, this woman named Jessie Hunt, was as good as her mentor. So he’d come west to find out, to test her.

  So far he’d found her wanting. She was talented, to be sure. She had thwarted Bolton Crutchfield, an impressive student of slaughter himself. She caught Andrea Robinson, who seemed to be just like any other wealthy socialite, but was actually a sneakily brutal murderess, one whose obvious potential was going unfulfilled while she languished in a mental hospital. Most impressively of all, Hunt had bested her own father, the legendary Ozarks Executioner, whom the Night Hunter had both admired and envied.

  But to his dismay upon arriving in Los Angeles, he found that she’d left the business, choosing instead to teach others about the minds of serial killers rather than try to catch them herself. Yes, she occasionally consulted on cases to help her old colleagues. But she seemed to have been scarred by the loss of Moses, the near-death of her detective boyfriend, and the close call that she and her young charge, a half-sister named Hannah, had barely survived. Some might say she’d gone soft. But he knew that wasn’t the case. She was just hibernating. He knew the feeling.

  He’d tried to help her find her way again, first with the elimination of Jared Hartung last month, and more recently by removing Jenavieve Holt. But Hunt had been oblivious, perhaps because she was no longer in the thick of it, more likely because of the unfortunate van accident that prevented Hartung’s body from being properly catalogued.

  Still, he had hoped that the creativity of his work, combined with the unusual coincidence that both victims shared her initials, “J.H.,” would have drawn her attention. But they hadn’t. Now he would have to up the ante.

  That’s why he was sitting in a car down the block from her house now, the one he’d only found after visiting her campus, sitting in on one of her profiling seminars, and eventually following her home. Without that stroke of luck, he might still be searching for her home, as her ability to hide her ownership of it was as prodigious as her mentor’s had been.

  He’d arrived before dawn, as he had for the last several days. He watched as her boyfriend, the hobbled former detective, Hernandez, left early this morning, likely off to the police station in a vain attempt to recapture his former glory. The Night Hunter had initially considered using him. But the man was such a pathetic shell that it hardly seemed like a challenge.

  With him gone, that left only Hunt and her sister, Hannah, in the house. Neither had so much as poked a head ou
t yet today. Part of him had wanted to enter the home one day while everyone was out, to explore; to prepare. But knowing Garland Moses, the modest-looking home would have an array of security measures he was unequipped to navigate.

  He was an expert at taking life. But at seventy-five, the Night Hunter had to admit that his mastery of modern technology was a weakness. The most certain way to enter this house was to be invited in. He chuckled silently to himself. Apparently he was like a vampire in more ways than one.

  He settled back into the car seat, trying to get comfortable despite the joints that never stopped aching. He had time. Eventually, Ms. Hunt would pick up on the clues. It was only then that he’d introduce himself to her sister, Hannah, as merely a feeble old man in need of help from a youthful lass. Maybe he’d even use his real name, Walter, which he hadn’t spoken out loud this century. It might be nice to open up to her before he opened her up.

  A car pulled into the driveway. He didn’t recognize it but from the confidence with which the driver marched to the front door, he knew she must be well-acquainted with the residents. He made a note of her and took out his binoculars to get a better look.

  The woman was dressed casually in jeans and a light sweater that suggested she wasn’t bothered by the morning chill in the air. Her gray eyes were alert. She was about five foot seven and well-built. He estimated that she weighed about 140 pounds, most of it muscle.

  The woman was nice-looking despite a long, vertical scar under her left eye and pockmarks on her face and neck that stood out against her tan skin. Some might mistake them for acne remnants. But the Night Hunter knew better. They were burn marks, the kind one got from an IED explosion. This woman had been a soldier once. He got the sense that she could still take care of herself, and if need be, others.

  She paused at the door and turned around to the street, her eyes darting quickly about. She seemed to sense something was off. Though he knew he was too far away to be seen, the Night Hunter sank down in his seat.