The Perfect Impression

by Pierce, Blake

  His eyes widened again as he turned to look at the door. With him distracted, Jessie used the opportunity to take a large step back, creating a few feet of distance between them. She started to turn, ready to run outside to the safety of the advancing squad cars. But then an unexpected thought shot through the anxiety: what about Melissa?

  If Jessie ran out now, she was leaving the woman alone and vulnerable in a house with a man who had killed someone less than twelve hours earlier. If he was willing to snuff out a life just to protect his secret, what was he willing to do to his wife to protect himself from arrest? That was assuming that Melissa really was asleep; that he hadn’t already done something awful to her. Jessie turned back around to face him.

  “It’s over, Rich,” she said, though it most certainly wasn’t. But by saying so, she hoped that she could defuse the situation; that he might just confess and offer his wrists to be cuffed.

  Ferro’s attention returned to her. His teeth were grinding. She imagined this was how he looked in Gabby’s bedroom that night. He clenched his fists tight. She could sense that he wanted to pounce.

  Jessie did a quick calculation. Though he didn’t have a knife this time, he was still an imposing presence. He had about four inches and fifty pounds on her and looked like he was in good shape. With the element of surprise she might have been able to take him. But under the current circumstances, she didn’t like her odds. So she tried to change them.

  “I know you’re angry, Rich,” she said talking slowly, stalling for those sirens to get louder and closer. “But don’t make a bad decision here. Gabby’s death was a crime of passion. You were drunk and panicked. You might be able to plead down. But you’re not drunk now. And I’m LAPD. Harming me is death penalty stuff.”

  “No it’s not,” he hissed, taking a small step toward her. “Remember what you said to get us to talk to you? You’re not LAPD. You’re a civilian consultant. It’s not the same thing.”

  The sirens didn’t seem to be getting any closer. She wondered if they were just doing doughnuts in the cul-de-sac out front. She took another step backward, getting into a defensive stance, even as she tried to stall one more time.

  “A confession would really help you,” she said. “I’ve dealt with a lot of people in your situation. An expression of contrition, of remorse, can go a long way with the court. I’ll testify on your behalf if you get down on your knees right now, put your hands behind your head so I can handcuff you, and give me a full statement.”

  “But Ms. Hunt,” he said, his body taut and still. “What if I don’t feel remorse? What if I feel relieved?”

  That’s when he leapt at her. Despite anticipating it, she wasn’t prepared for either his speed or his ferocity. He bowled into her, knocking her down with the sheer force of his size and momentum. She toppled backward but managed to break her fall with her arms, avoiding her head hitting the hardwood floor.

  As she scrambled away from him on her back, certain that he was going to leap on her and pin her down, she prepared to lift her knee up to connect with his gut when he dove at her. But to her surprise, he didn’t try to jump on her.

  Instead, he grabbed her by her left foot and tugged her back toward him. Before she could gather herself, he yanked her up off the floor and in one motion, grabbed her by the waist and tossed her through the air toward the massive living room windows.

  Worried she might crash through them, fear briefly gripped her. But then it became clear that she wouldn’t go quite that far. Still, she did fly over the leather chair she’d been sitting in before her hip slammed into the arm of the loveseat just beyond it. The momentum sent her careening over it and to the floor beyond.

  As she skidded to a stop, Jessie felt her heart thumping almost through her chest. She sensed panic just beneath the adrenaline and knew that if it took over, she was lost. Though time was precious, she remained still for a moment, just long enough to instruct herself to remain calm and assess her situation.

  Her hip was stinging badly but otherwise, she seemed okay. Ferro was already stomping toward her as she used the loveseat to pull herself upright. The sirens sounded very close now but she doubted anyone would get inside before things got much worse.

  Despite Melissa Ferro’s defenseless status, Jessie was tempted to try to make a dash for the front door. But with her throbbing hip and Ferro’s physical advantage, she knew that she’d never make it. So she decided in that moment to do what he had done to her and take him by surprise. Squaring up, she waited until he was too close to avoid her and threw herself at him.

  He was startled, briefly pausing as she slammed into him, making sure to thrust the point of her elbow toward his abdomen. He toppled backward, crashing into the side table with the mugs of tea, which crashed to the floor. For a brief moment she was on top of him.

  But it only took a second for him to get the upper hand. Though he was coughing from getting the wind knocked out of him, he seemed otherwise unfazed by their collision. He rolled over so that he was above her, pinning her down with his extra weight. Even as he gasped for breath, he wrapped his hands around her throat, squeezing with so much strength that she thought her head might pop off.

  She flailed around desperately for anything to hold him off. The sirens were unceasing now and she thought she heard banging on the front door. They’d break in soon and get him, but not soon enough to save her.

  Her floundering hand brushed against something hard and she grabbed it. It took a second to process that it was one of the tea mugs. With all the force she could muster, she slammed it into the side of his head. It shattered against his skull but he didn’t even blink.

  The room was getting blurry. She felt her strength starting to wane. As consciousness began to fade, a sudden image of Hannah and Ryan flashed through her head. Both were stone-faced, silent, wearing black. They looked broken, beaten down by the burden of another tragedy they would have to bear. Seeing the image, she felt sad and small and weak. But worst of all, she felt guilty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  But she felt something else too. A remnant of the mug was still in her hand, a thick, sharp shard, like a ceramic arrowhead. She gripped it tight in her fist and brought it upward, aiming for the fuzzy part of his face that she hoped was his eye.

  She made contact and felt something give, like a balloon that initially offered resistance before giving way. The shard was no longer in her hand. She heard a garbled scream. Ferro let go of her neck.

  Still unable to see clearly, she opened her palm and swung it up toward his face, in the same general direction as before. It made contact with something hard and she heard the scream above her get even louder. Her vision cleared slightly and she squinted at the writhing head above her. As best she could tell, a chunk of the mug had punctured deep into his cheek.

  He was clutching at it, trying to pull it out, as his screams were muffled by a gargle of blood, some of which was drooling down onto her. She took a deep breath, ready to use whatever strength she had left to shove him off her and crawl to the door. But before she could, a loud voice barked out, echoing through the massive room.

  “Hands up! Get off the woman. Do it now or we’ll shoot.”

  “My face!” Ferro seemed to shout, though it was hard to understand him.

  “I don’t give a damn about your face,” the officer yelled back. “Get off her now or you won’t have a face to cry about.”

  He rolled off her and collapsed onto the floor, hugging his mangled cheek. Seconds later multiple officers appeared in her line of sight. One had Ferro on his stomach as he placed him in cuffs.

  “Can you hear me?” another one asked as he leaned down next to her.

  She nodded and tried to speak but found that her throat was raw. She swallowed hard. Suddenly, Detective Peters appeared before her too.

  “Don’t try to talk,” he said. “Just give yourself a moment.”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t strong enough yet to do it herself but someone ha
d to.

  “Melissa,” she croaked, “in bed. Make sure she’s okay.”

  He seemed to understand.

  “Find the bedrooms,” he ordered officers she couldn’t see. “The wife may be back there. Check on her status.”

  The officer who had cuffed Richard Ferro lifted him roughly to his feet. Loose skin from his cheek was dangling down onto his jaw. He was still howling in pain. Peters looked at him and winced.

  “We have an ambulance on the way?” he yelled over the noise.

  “I’ll check,” the officer replied.

  “Good,” Peters replied. “Take him outside. But he only gets checked out after Hunt does, got it?”

  “Got it,” the officer said, forcefully guiding the still moaning Ferro out of the house. When his voice finally faded, Jessie looked over at Peters.

  “Can you help me up?” she asked hoarsely.

  He eased her onto the loveseat and handed her a bottled water. She took a small sip as he stood over her. Once he was sure that she was semi-functional, he shook his head.

  “Why didn’t you wait for me to get here?” he asked.

  She took another small sip before replying.

  “Didn’t think…he’d react well to a…cop in his house.”

  Peters looked around at the broken side table, scattered mug pieces, and streaks of blood on the floor.

  “It looks like he wasn’t all that happy to see you either,” he noted drily.

  She laughed despite herself, and though it caused a sharp burn in her throat that lingered for minutes, it was well worth it.

  The joking ended abruptly when they heard an officer shout out from somewhere in the house.

  “Found her!”

  *

  They thought she was dead.

  The first two officers who found Melissa Ferro in her bed couldn’t rouse her and began shouting excitedly for their sergeant to come in the room. It wasn’t until he actually checked her pulse and breathing that they learned she was just heavily sedated with what was clearly more than the prescribed dose of Trazodone.

  By the time the officers eased Melissa out on a stretcher, Jessie felt close to normal again, though she was sure she’d have some major neck bruising for a while. She watched the group take the clearly still-disoriented woman out the front door to wait for an ambulance. Peters waited until the house was quieter before speaking.

  “So you want to explain what the hell is going on?” he asked.

  Jessie sighed, unsure where to begin.

  “Long story short, I had my suspicions about him so I started flirting. It worked. He came on to me, suggested we get a little more intimate. I asked if he’d been doing the same thing with Gabby.”

  “Did he admit it?” Peters asked, sounding surprised at her bravado.

  “He inadvertently admitted to the affair. Things deteriorated after I told him I knew Gabby was pregnant. Though he didn’t say as much, it was pretty clear that he wasn’t happy to hear the news when she told him. My guess is that she gave him some kind of ultimatum to leave Melissa or maybe just said she wanted to come clean with her husband. That was a mistake. I don’t think he could handle the idea of having his perfect life blown up.”

  She took another water break. When she was done, Peters had another question.

  “What made you so sure that he wasn’t gay?”

  “I wasn’t. But I started thinking about how Maura the bartender said he was handsy and remembered how he was scoping out the front desk clerk who came in during our interview. Then I called the councilman that he used as his alibi—something I should have done earlier—and he sounded genuinely confused by Ferro’s version of events.”

  “Wait, Ferro didn’t plan all that as his alibi ahead of time?” Peters asked.

  “I doubt it,” Jessie said. “I think he went to Catalina hoping to continue the affair with Gabby. He used the excuse that he was helping Philip Blake to his room as a pretext to leave the bar. It was a way to maintain the fiction of his sexuality and avoid anyone suspecting that he was violating the group’s intermingling rule. And since he knew Melissa was in her suite with the golf caddy, he probably thought he was in the clear.

  “But when he arrived at Gabby’s suite, I suspect that she gave him the unexpected pregnancy news and told him what she wanted to do. He would have been drunk and panicked and impulsively grabbed the knife that was right there. I suspect it was a spur of the moment thing and that almost everything after the actual murder was just him scrambling.”

  “But there were no prints on the knife,” Peters pointed out.

  “No, and there were none on the doorknob either,” Jessie said. “It’s likely that he was in there so briefly—maybe less than five minutes—that those were the only things he touched. Remember, the door wasn’t even closed completely. If he was thinking clearly, he wouldn’t have made that mistake. If Melissa hadn’t seen it, then it might have been several more hours before she was found.”

  “So you think he killed her right before Melissa found her?” Peters asked.

  “It’s hard to know for certain,” Jessie admitted, “but it probably occurred less than a half hour before she found her. He would have been desperate, in such a hurry to get back down to the bar and his alibi that he wiped down what he could and left. Then he made a big fuss of his presence in the bar so he’d be remembered. At some point he must have decided to use Philip Blake as an alibi, making up the secret lover story about a man he had a passing acquaintance with. He must have hoped that Blake’s high profile would make us hesitant to question him, which I’m ashamed to say it did, at least for a while.”

  “But it started to fall apart,” Peters added, catching on now. “It was getting increasingly clear that Ariana Aldridge hadn’t done it. I tracked the GPS on her phone after interviewing her and found that she was exactly where she said she was at the time she said. She hung up with her mom at ten thirty-nine. It would have taken her a couple of minutes to get upstairs.”

  “Right,” Jessie said. “So we know Gabby was alive and with Rich Ferro around ten forty-three, when Ariana heard voices in the room. But of course Richard didn’t know anything about the timeline we had developed. I gave him the impression that Ariana was our sole suspect. At that point, he would have assumed that all his machinations had worked and he was free of suspicion. That’s when I started flirting with him, to see if he would hit on me. It all went well, that is until I raised my suspicions and he heard police sirens.”

  Peters nodded, seemingly satisfied, before his brow furrowed.

  “But he never officially confessed to killing her, right?” he noted.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about a confession,” Jessie assured him. “We’ll check both his and Gabby’s phone data to confirm the affair. We can check the DNA from the pregnancy to confirm his paternity. That will provide motive. And then there’s the whole part where he tried to kill me when he found out I knew it was him.”

  Though she was doing better, Peters helped her outside. They walked over to her car, which was currently boxed in by four squad vehicles. Jessie could see Richard Ferro in the back of one of them, groaning loudly. Ignoring him, she zipped up her jacket to protect against the howling mountain winds.

  “So what now?” Peters asked.

  “Now I go home,” she said, dreading what she knew was to come. “This isn’t the only fire I have to put out today.”

  “You don’t get at least one night off?” he asked.

  “My teenage sister lives with me, so no.”

  Peters laughed. Jessie didn’t join in, worried what it would do to her throat.

  “Well, I guess that leaves me to do the paperwork,” he said.

  “Do you mind? You are the lead detective on a successfully solved murder case,” she reminded him.

  “Oh yeah,” he replied. “I guess I am. That ought to play well with Captain Hawley.”

  “Hell,” she added, “if you play your cards right, maybe soon you’ll be
the new captain in town.”

  The look of sheer delight on his face at that prospect almost made her neck stop throbbing—almost. But then she remembered what was waiting for her at home and the ache returned in force.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  It was late when Jessie finally pulled into the garage.

  The EMTs had let her drive herself home after checking her out and giving her some pain meds they said not to take until she got home (but which she popped a few minutes early). They wanted her to see a throat specialist, but said it could wait until tomorrow. That was good to hear, because she wasn’t sure she could keep her eyes open much longer.

  She walked into the house quietly, not certain who was home or even awake. Since both Hannah and Ryan were limited to using rideshares and cabs these days, only her car left the house regularly. Unless she checked camera footage, she never knew who was around until she got inside.

  Once she got to the kitchen, she put her keys on the counter and got some milk, which she warmed up in the microwave in the hope that it would soothe her throat. She was equally relieved and apprehensive when she saw a light coming from under Hannah’s door. At least she was home safe. But it also meant the reckoning was imminent.

  She thought about calling Ryan to see if he’d be home soon so she wouldn’t have to face this alone. Then she immediately chastised herself for her cowardice. But the idea reminded her that he had called when she was at the Ferro house. Everything had been so crazy in the aftermath that she’d completely forgotten about it.

  The microwave beeped and she took out the milk. Then she pulled out her phone and saw that he’d left a voicemail, along with a text asking her to call when she was able. She was just about to do that when Hannah’s door opened. She looked skittish until she saw who it was.

  “I heard the microwave and freaked for a second because I didn’t realize anyone was home,” she said, relieved.