THE PERFECT IMAGE

by Blake Pierce

  “Didn’t you have a key?” Ryan asked. “I figured that as sisters—”

  “I used to,” Janey cut him short. “But they were having some renovations done to the house. They did a bunch of stuff: bedrooms, an office, this deck, and they also replaced the front door. I just hadn’t been over since they made the change. I bet she would have given me the new key tonight if…” She trailed off.

  “What did Whitney do for a living?” Jessie asked, hoping to prevent the woman from spiraling again.

  “She’s—was a marketing executive at a studio.” Smyth’s voice quavered as she answered. Jessie sensed that she was struggling to hold it together.

  “The same one as Gordo?” Ryan asked.

  “No. They used to work at the same one, Third Millennium Wolf Pictures. That’s where they met. But Gordo was offered a better position at Sovereign Studios. He said he could hook her up there too but she didn’t want to commute all the way to Hollywood from out here.” She paused for a breath before adding, “I hope they get here soon.”

  “They?” Jessie asked.

  “When I found Whitney and the cops came, I called Stew to tell him what happened. I couldn’t bear to tell Gordo myself so I asked him to do it for me. He said okay and that he would drive them both back. He didn’t want Gordo trying to drive in that condition. But that was a while ago.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” Ryan assured her. “Orange County is quite a drive and it’s still rush hour. Tell me—how was Whitney and Gordo’s marriage?”

  He asked it so naturally that Janey didn’t seem to register the interrogatory nature of the question.

  “Good,” she said. “I obviously saw them up close. They doted on each other. It was borderline gross. We would double date a lot and they’d feed each other bites of their meals at dinner. Whitney told me they had started to talk about having kids.”

  That was what broke her. Janey expelled something between a hiccup and a sob. She bent over like she had in the security video. Loud guttural moans came from somewhere deep inside her. Jessie moved to comfort her but before she could, a female officer appeared out of nowhere and wrapped her in her arms.

  “I’m Nancy Caffey, the crisis counseling officer,” she whispered to them. “Unless you absolutely need her now, I think it’s time we get Janey to the hospital. She’s been a trouper but she’s in shock.”

  “That’s fine,” Ryan said as Officer Caffey escorted Janey down the deck steps and around the side of the house. Jessie watched them go, trying to keep it together herself. She couldn’t imagine how she’d react if that was Hannah lying on the floor in that living room.

  “Do we want to wait for the husband to arrive?” she asked abruptly once Janey was gone, hoping to shift her own focus away from thoughts like that.

  “I don’t think so,” Ryan said. “We can always ask him to come in later. Right now I want to go through that footage again in more detail back at the station. I feel like we might be missing something.”

  “Sounds good,” Jessie agreed. “Hopefully Jamil will get a hit on that guy in the hoodie. Plus we need to do a deep dive into Whitney Carlisle’s life. Maybe she has a connection to the other victims that can break this thing open. I would have loved to have asked Janey about that, but it’ll obviously have to wait. In the meantime I have a call to make.”

  “To who?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m going to ask Kat to spend the night with Hannah at our place. It sounds like we’re in for an all-nighter.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Jessie missed the sunrise.

  When she looked up from the laptop she’d been staring at, the morning light was already pouring in through the Santa Monica police station windows. She put her head back in her hands. She’d been at it all night and for what? Not a single lead she and Ryan had pursued had panned out.

  As far as she could tell, other than what they already knew, there was no useful connection among the three victims besides being wealthy and living in the same general area. They were different ages and traveled in different social circles. One had kids but the other two didn’t. It was true that one had an affair with another’s husband, but it was brief, it was months ago, and neither spouse seemed to have found out.

  Her phone rang and she looked at it with bleary eyes. The call was from Jamil. She was about to answer it when Ryan, seated across from her, caught her eye. She turned around to see that Gordon Carlisle was walking toward them, escorted by a uniformed officer. She sent Jamil’s call to voicemail and tried to look alert.

  “Thanks for coming into the station again, sir, especially so early,” Ryan said. “We have just a few more questions for you.”

  The truth was that they’d barely gotten to ask Carlisle any questions last night before he broke down completely. Part of that might have been that he was already deeply drunk from the bachelor party when Janey had called with the news. All they’d gotten out of him were some basics about where he’d been—enough to eliminate him as a suspect but little more. Their focus this morning would be on something much more specific.

  “Of course,” Carlisle said as he sat down, his voice hoarse. “The truth is, I didn’t get any sleep last night anyway so I figured I might as well do something productive now that the sun is up.”

  He had two days’ worth of stubble, uncombed black hair, and swollen eyelids. He was also wearing the same clothes as last night. Even with all that, Carlisle cut a dashing figure. He was well over six feet tall, with the rangy, relaxed look of a guy who surfed four or five days a week. Jessie imagined that when he and Whitney went out, they were a head-turning couple.

  “We want to focus your attention on something we didn’t get to discuss last night,” Ryan told him, sliding over his laptop and pulling up the still image of the man in the hoodie from the previous night. He’d cropped the photo so that Carlisle couldn’t tell that the man had been with Whitney at the time the image was recorded. They’d agreed before he came in that the fewer emotional distractions there were, the better.

  “Do you recognize this man?” he asked.

  Carlisle leaned in, squinting.

  “Yeah,” he said without equivocation, “that’s Frank, our contractor.”

  “Frank?” Ryan repeated.

  “Frank Marr—he and his guys have been doing all the work on our place: they redid my office, converted one bedroom into two, and replaced the front door. They’re finishing up the deck this week.” It took him a second to process that they weren’t just curious. “Why?”

  “We’re checking on everyone that was seen in your security camera footage,” Jessie said, not wanting Carlisle to jump to the obvious conclusion before they had anything on the man. “Would it have been normal for him to be at your place yesterday, late afternoon?”

  “I’m not sure,” Carlisle said guardedly. “Most days they were long gone by the time I got home. Whitney was the one who dealt with him day-to-day. Did he do this?”

  He was sitting up straight now and his red eyes were attentive.

  “Like I said, Mr. Carlisle,” she repeated reassuringly, “we’re just trying to identify everyone in the footage from yesterday. We didn’t recognize him and were hoping you could. I wanted to ask you something else.” She moved on quickly, hoping to get his mind off the man whose image he was currently staring daggers at.

  “Do the names Siobhan Pierson or Gillian Fahey sound familiar to you?”

  Carlisle sat back in his chair, thinking.

  “Wasn’t Pierson the name of that society lady who was killed a few weeks ago? I thought I saw that on the news.”

  “It is,” Jessie confirmed, holding out a photo. “But did you or perhaps Whitney know her?”

  “I didn’t,” he said, shaking his head, “and I don’t think Whitney did either. She would have said something.”

  “And Gillian Fahey?” Jessie prompted, swiping to a photo of her. “Did you or your wife know her?”

  Carlisle shook his head
.

  “I don’t recognize her and the name isn’t familiar. If Whitney ever mentioned her, I don’t recall it. Why?”

  Jessie wasn’t sure how much they should reveal but Ryan shrugged at her. He didn’t seem to be concerned.

  “Both these women were killed in the same manner as your wife,” he said quietly. “We’re just trying to determine if there’s a connection among them.”

  “Oh,” Carlisle replied blankly, not seeming to totally get that his wife was the victim of a potential serial killer. “You have her phone, right? Did you check her contacts list?”

  “We did,” Jessie said. “Neither name was in there. That’s why we wanted to talk to you, just to make sure.”

  Jessie’s phone rang. It was Jamil again. Two calls in succession meant he had news.

  “I have to take this,” she said. “Detective Hernandez, can you finish up with Mr. Carlisle?”

  She didn’t wait for his answer, instead getting up and leaving the mini-conference room. Only when she was far enough not to be heard did she pick up.

  “What’s up, Jamil?” she asked as she passed through the station’s lobby and stepped outside. She’d been inside for ten hours straight and the chilly air cut right through her.

  “Did you listen to my message?” he asked urgently.

  “No. We were doing an interview. Give me the good parts.”

  “I ran facial recognition on the guy you sent me and got a hit. His name is Frank Marr from Thousand Oaks.”

  “Thanks, Jamil. Great work,” she replied, pretending not to already have that information. She didn’t want him to think that all his hard work was for nothing. “What else did you find on him?”

  “Not much—nothing but a couple of parking tickets in recent years. He was in a civil dispute with a client about a decade ago. He’s a contractor and someone wasn’t happy with the work he did. But they settled the case. That’s really all I could find, at least on him.”

  “Okay,” Jessie said. “We’ll definitely look into him. Anything else? Oh wait, hold on. Ryan just walked over.”

  Ryan joined her outside, handing her the coat she’d forgotten to take with her. She muted the call and put on the coat

  “Thanks for this,” she said. “By the way, Jamil just confirmed the Frank Marr ID. I didn’t tell him we already had it. He sounded so proud.”

  “Got it,” Ryan said, smiling at her subterfuge.

  “We’re back, Jamil,” she said, taking the call off mute. “I told Ryan about your ID of Marr. But I got the sense you had more to share.”

  “Right. We got approval to track Ian Pierson’s location data. For the window of time you mentioned last night from five pm. to seven p.m., I initially thought he’d left his residence, but I was wrong. When I checked closer, I realized that it only looked that way because his house is so big. I pulled the most recent architectural plans on file with the city—”

  “Of course you did,” Ryan couldn’t help but interject.

  “And,” Jamil went on, apparently not amused by the interruption, “it seems that he, or at least his phone, went from a large room on the western end of the estate to a small alcove just off what appears to be the kitchen. Then he went back to the larger room. Other than that, he never moved more than thirty feet at any given time.”

  “I think I can solve that mystery,” Ryan said. “I’m pretty sure he went from the game room to the bar we saw just off the kitchen for more booze and then went back to numb himself some more.”

  “What?” Jamil asked, confused. He hadn’t been read into Pierson’s current mental state.

  “Never mind,” Jessie said. “Great work, as usual, Jamil. I know you’ve been looking for more social media connections now that you’re able to plug Whitney Carlisle into your data set. Please let us know if you find anything worthwhile. Frankly, we’ve come up empty so far.”

  “You got it,” Jamil promised.

  Once they’d hung up, Jessie started to head back in but Ryan stopped her.

  “You lucked out, by the way,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “About ten seconds after you left us, Gordon Carlisle had a delayed freak-out when he processed that his wife might have been murdered by a serial killer. I had to send him home.”

  “Sorry you had to deal with that on your own,” Jessie told him.

  “That’s okay,” he said, sounding as tired as she felt. “One more thing: I wouldn’t say this officially to the folks inside just yet, but I think we can safely cross Pierson off our suspect list, especially now that we have Frank Marr. He’s looking pretty good for this.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Jessie asked, surprised at how definitive he sounded.

  “First of all, we can place him at the scene around the time of the murder. Plus he knew the house well from working on it. It makes sense that he’d know how to avoid cameras. And remember he picked up that thing under the deck. It looked like a tool belt. What if he ‘accidentally forgot’ it there so he would have to come back later to pick it up?”

  He made some good points but something seemed off to her about the theory. She was getting the same unsettling sensation that had overcome her back in the bedroom with the splintered door at the Carlisle house, an instinct that told her there was something she wasn’t quite seeing clearly because she just wasn’t looking at it right.

  “I think you’re wrong,” she said flatly.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ryan’s jaw dropped open.

  “What?” he managed to say.

  She hadn’t intended for it to sound so harsh. It was just that she was so lost in her own thoughts that when they coalesced, she spoke them aloud without thinking how they’d come across.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that I’m not sure that Frank Marr is the home run you think he is.”

  To his credit, Ryan seemed to get over her abrupt tone quickly.

  “Okay, why not?” he asked.

  She had lots of reasons and did her best to keep them organized in her head.

  “For one thing,” she replied, “he was dressed differently than the shadow image we saw leaving the house in the front door security footage. Marr was in jeans and a hoodie. The killer wore all black.”

  “You don’t think he could have changed in the house?” Ryan challenged.

  “Possibly,” Jessie conceded, “but we didn’t see Marr carrying a bag that might hold other clothes. If he had them on underneath what he was wearing, we didn’t see the hoodie or jeans in the shadow person’s hands and we didn’t find those clothes at the house. Maybe he borrowed Gordon Carlisle’s clothes but you saw both men. Frank Marr has three inches and forty pounds on him. I doubt he could fit into anything of Carlisle’s. Even if he could, we know that Whitney Carlisle was alive at five twenty-one and the killer left at five twenty-eight. That doesn’t allow a lot of time to sneak in, kill the dog, chase her down, kill her, change clothes, and leave. You think he could do all that in seven minutes?”

  “I’ll admit it’s tight,” Ryan said. “But remember, he was working in the house for weeks. He knew the place well. If this was planned in advance, he could have stashed an outfit somewhere ahead of time.”

  As Ryan’s words echoed in her ears, the wisp of smoky thought that had evaded her grasp twice now—at the house and just a minute ago—returned. Only now it didn’t dissipate. It grew stronger in her mind until it was more like a rope she could almost physically tug on.

  “You’re right,” she said, confidence rising in her chest. “He did know the place well. Something’s been bugging me ever since I was in that bedroom at the end of the hall and I finally figured out what it is.”

  “What?”

  “The killer chased Whitney down that hall. When the door was locked, he smashed it open. Then he went inside, allowing her to escape through the door to the adjoining bedroom.”

  “So?” Ryan said.

  “If Frank was the killer, he
might have broken down that door and peeked in but he wouldn’t have stayed there long if he didn’t see her right away. He would have known that she could escape through the other bedroom because he was the one who converted one bedroom into two. He would have waited in the hall for her to dash out. But she got all the way back to the living room and pulled a lamp out of the wall before he caught up to her.”

  “So you think the killer didn’t know the house well?” Ryan asked.

  “No. I definitely think they’ve been in that house, even in that bedroom, but not since the renovations. They didn’t realize that the bedroom had been split into two rooms. They knew Whitney couldn’t escape through the window because it overlooked a cliff so they assumed she was trapped. That’s why they spent so much time in that room—enough for her to get back to the living room and yank out that lamp. Whoever did this was taken by surprise, maybe for the first time since all these killings started.”

  “You could be right,” Ryan said sincerely. “Or Whitney Carlisle could just be a lot faster runner than her attacker.”

  “Listen, I’m not dismissing Marr as a suspect, not by a long shot. He should be interviewed. But do you really think this mastermind killer who meticulously slices arteries would be so sloppy as to show up right before the murder and show his face on a security camera for everyone to see?”

  “That sounds like the exact argument a brilliant killer might make if he was arrested,” Ryan countered. “Why would I be so stupid to let myself be seen on camera if I was the killer?”

  Jessie sighed. They were at an impasse.

  “I think we should have other HSS detectives talk to Marr,” she suggested. “Meanwhile you and I should focus our attention on people who might have been in all three victims’ houses, but not recently. I think we should look at caterers, massage therapists, yoga instructors—that kind of thing. If we can find someone who visited all three of them in the last few months, we’ll have something to go on.”