THE PERFECT IMAGE

by Blake Pierce

  As she hung up, she saw Ryan’s smirk and faked a pout.

  “What, not convincingly shallow enough?”

  “That’s not it,” he said. “I’m just wondering when I get to see that naughty nurse outfit.”

  “Play your cards right and maybe you’ll get a surprise this weekend,” she teased, before switching gears. “In the meantime, I don’t want to wait for this guy to call me back. If he’s our killer, every second is precious. We don’t know when he might strike next. I think we can justifiably request a GPS search on that phone’s location, don’t you?”

  “I think it will be a hell of a lot easier than it was getting the one on Ian Pierson,” he replied, before smiling mischievously. “But can we go back to your promise about this weekend for a second?”

  “Later, lover boy,” she said. “Right now, we’ve got a peak performance trainer to visit.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  They didn’t have to go far.

  According to Jamil, Vince Hutchence’s phone had been at the same location for the last half hour, an address in Santa Monica only six minutes from the station. They pulled up across from the house, which belonged to a divorcee named Eileen Schock.

  They knew it was the right place because Hutchence’s car, which Jamil had said was a red Jeep Wrangler, sat out front. Schock lived on a tree-lined street comprised mostly of impressive but tasteful two-story homes, almost all of which looked like they’d been built by the same three or four architects.

  “It’s almost eleven,” Jessie said. “I guess we should just wait for him to come outside. It’ll give us a chance to check him out.”

  “It looks like Jamil already did it for us,” Ryan said, pulling up a message on his phone and reading from it. “He says that the guy has all the appropriate personal trainer accreditations. He’s twenty-nine and has been doing this for three years. Most of the client comments and reviews are positive and they’re all from women. Apparently he works exclusively with the fairer sex.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Jessie said, rolling her eyes. “I was originally willing to bet the workout session would be ending soon, but maybe not, if there’s some kind of ‘overtime’ involved.”

  “When did you become so cynical?” Ryan asked, pretending he didn’t have the exact same suspicions as her. “I remember when I first met you and you ascribed the best of motives to people. Now you assume the worst. It’s a crying shame.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about, Detective Hernandez,” Jessie replied cheekily. “Maybe your other fiancée? Because I lost my ability to give most people the benefit of the doubt a long time ago.”

  “As long as it was before you met me,” he said, wiping away an imaginary bead of sweat from his overly furrowed brow.

  They may have been playing with each other, but Jessie didn’t need any help remembering the exact moment that she realized the depths of depravity people were capable of. She was six years old, tied to a chair in a remote, snowy Ozarks cabin, when she watched her serial killer father slaughter her mother with a knife before turning it on her, cutting a long line across her collarbone that left an ugly scar. Then he’d left her to die.

  She was there three days, slipping in and out of consciousness, before a pair of hunters happened upon the cabin and rescued her. Ever since, anyone she met started with a negative humanity rating. It took quite a few points just to get back to zero, much less enter positive territory.

  She looked at Ryan, who had the highest point total going. He was wearing a frown. It took her a moment to realize that she’d never confirmed that her cynicism pre-dated him.

  “Of course it was before you, Ryan,” she said hurriedly. “I’d just as soon leave it there.”

  “Good, because for a second there, you had me wondering. I didn’t know if maybe the last few weeks shook your confidence in me.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “You know, Alan Trembley,” he said, referring to the detective who was murdered in a hostel bedroom while Ryan waited, unknowing, in a car on the street below.

  “Ryan,” she said, taking his hand in hers. “You have to stop beating yourself up over that. I know you feel responsible. And I’m not going to sugarcoat what happened that day. It wasn’t your finest moment. But let’s be real. You were still rehabbing after the coma. You wouldn’t have been able to make it up the stairs of that hostel even if you’d gone inside with Trembley. The Night Hunter would have gotten the jump on him either way.”

  “But I might have been able to stop him in the lobby,” Ryan insisted, “before he killed other people.”

  “Maybe,” Jessie conceded, “or maybe in your diminished state, he would have gotten the jump on you and jammed an X-Acto knife in your throat too. You did what you could under the circumstances. I know you think you froze up when he came out of that hostel. And maybe you did. But what if you had tried to take a shot at him from across a crowded street? You said yourself that he used a family as a shield to escape. What if you accidentally shot one of them? Then you’d be flagellating yourself for coming back from rehab too soon and killing a civilian. It’s time to make peace with what happened and move on. Trembley wouldn’t want you to hold onto the guilt. He knew what I know in my heart: that there’s no one on the force more brave or loyal than you. He’d want you to forgive yourself. He’d want you to be happy, because he loved you—maybe not the way I love you, but he did.”

  Ryan nodded, wiping away a tear from his eye.

  “I just don’t want to be a disappointment to you,” he whispered.

  “Would I have said yes that morning in Wildpines if I thought you were a disappointment?” she asked, her eyes watery too, before answering her own question. “Of course not.”

  He couldn’t know that her doubts about pressing forward with a wedding weren’t about the past but the future. Again, she wondered how wise it was to plan nuptials with everything so unsettled with Hannah, with their lives so in flux. But now wasn’t the time to bring that up. She wasn’t sure there ever would be an ideal occasion for that conversation. Luckily she didn’t have to worry about it at that moment.

  “Check it out,” she said, pointing at the house, “it looks like Eileen’s training session is over.”

  The front door was open and a man stepped out, waving to a woman in the doorway they could barely see. Jamil had sent them Hutchence’s driver’s license and the man walking to the Jeep was clearly him. But neither his license photo, nor the one on his website, did him justice.

  The guy swaggering down the walkway looked like he might have been a former male model or a former football player. Jessie hadn’t had time do research on him but she wouldn’t have been surprised if he was once both.

  Easily six foot five and 240 pounds, Hutchence’s sun-bleached hair was as long as her own. He wore bike shorts and a tank top that revealed his broad, tanned shoulders and chiseled muscles. His brown eyes were huge, which gave him the look of an especially strapping puppy dog.

  “This should be interesting,” Jessie said, getting out of the passenger seat.

  Ryan smirked in agreement as they headed over to meet the guy at his Jeep. As they approached, Hutchence noticed them and slowed from his peppy walk to a more leisurely, hesitant stroll. He stopped playfully swinging his workout bag in the air.

  “Vince Hutchence?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah,” the giant answered, his surfer dude vibe immediately apparent in his tone, “who’s asking?”

  “I’m Ryan Hernandez and this is Jessie Hunt. We’re with the LAPD and we have a few questions—”

  He hadn’t even completed the sentence before Hutchence dropped his bag, turned, and started sprinting back in the direction he’d come from. He looked to be headed for the open side gate of the house next to Eileen Schock’s.

  Jessie and Ryan exchanged a quick, unspoken glance that both immediately understood. Ryan wasn’t yet in condition to go sprinting after anyone. There was f
rustration in his eyes, but also an acknowledgment that he just wasn’t up to it. That meant Jessie was on chase duty. As she started after the trainer, she heard her partner and fiancé shout out after her.

  “I’ll call for backup and try to loop around.”

  She hoped that worked but couldn’t count on him having success. As she dashed toward the gate that Hutchence had disappeared beyond, she undid her gun holster and removed her weapon. She hoped she wouldn’t need it but if the guy took her by surprise and she wasn’t prepared, she doubted it would go well for her.

  When she reached the gate, she scanned the backyard. It was huge, with a large kidney-shaped pool in the middle. A big play structure, complete with monkey bars and a curling slide, sat further back in the yard, and just beyond that, a trampoline. Suddenly, she saw movement. Hutchence had already run around the pool and past the structure and trampoline. He was preparing to scale the tall, wooden back fence, which looked to be at least ten feet high.

  She skirted by the edge of the pool just as he leaped up to grab the top of the fence. But he lost his grip and dropped back to the ground. He looked back. Seeing Jessie with the gun in her hand seemed to give him a renewed burst of energy. This time when he leapt up, he got hold of the top of the fence easily and hoisted himself up and over. In the place where he’d been moments earlier, now there was nothing.

  She stood there in momentary shock. Then she saw a ray of sunlight that was poking through two fence planks briefly disappear. It happened to another one to the left, and then another. He was running that way. Somehow the small discovery of which direction he was headed in gave her an unexpected surge of hope. This wasn’t over yet.

  She started running again and as she approached the fence, a crazy idea popped into her head. There was no way, even at her considerable height, that she could scale that fence unassisted. Hutchence had barely done it with the advantage of seven extra inches and triple the arm strength. But maybe she could get an assist.

  Without taking time to think about it, she reholstered her gun and scurried up the play structure stairs to the wooden bridge leading to the slide. Then she started running. When she got to the slide, she took one step near the top and leapt through the air.

  For one endless moment, she was flying. Then she locked her knees as her shoes landed solidly on the surface of the trampoline. She felt the material give and then shoot her back up into the air in the direction of the fence.

  It came up on her fast and she barely had time to process two things. First, she was definitely high enough that she could grab the top of the fence. Second, she was going to slam into it hard.

  She was right on both counts. Her right hip smashed into the wall, right where her gun and holster rested, sending shooting pain through her pelvis. She was so high up that she almost toppled over the thing entirely. Then gravity did its work and she slid back downward, barely managing to hook her armpits over the top of the fence to stop her momentum. The wood dug into the tender skin there, but compared to her screaming hip, it was nothing.

  Gasping for breath, she looked left and saw Hutchence dashing west down the back alley, in the direction of the next cross street. He was moving fast. There was no way she could catch him at this rate.

  Still, she heaved herself up and over the fence, then dropped the rest of the way. When she landed, she stumbled and fell back onto the gravel road, feeling the little bits of rock dig into her backside. Ignoring it, she gritted her teeth, got to her feet, and started after the massive being that was almost to the end of the alleyway.

  Hutchence looked back in her direction, and seeing that she was easily fifty yards back, he gave a satisfied smile as he reached the next street. Jessie watched as he turned around, just in time to see the open passenger door of Ryan’s car slam into him. She watched him soar a good ten feet before landing in a heap in the street.

  Even from as far away as Jessie was, she could hear him groan. Ryan got out of the car and looked down the alley toward her. They might have been fifty yards apart, but the proud grin on his face was impossible to miss.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  She had to admit she was impressed.

  As Jessie stared at Vince Hutchence through the one-way mirror of the SMPD interrogation room, she marveled that the guy was even sitting upright.

  After cuffing the dazed trainer and tossing him in the back of the car, she and Ryan thought they might have to make a pit stop at the hospital. Jessie was even looking forward to it, on the off chance she could stop in to see Callum Reid.

  But the mountain of a man recovered enough that it was clear no stopover was needed. In fact, it had taken three good-sized officers to drag him into the room where he sat now, handcuffed to a table that was bolted to the floor, looking far less like a puppy dog than before. His expression was surly and his eyes were flinty.

  “You ready?” Ryan asked from beside her.

  “What I’m ready for is a good bath,” she said. “My hip is killing me.”

  She didn’t mention that she was also so tired that she thought she might keel over then and there.

  “Maybe we should have stopped at the hospital to get you checked out, Evel Knievel. I don’t know what you were thinking.”

  “I clearly wasn’t,” she admitted. “I’ll be fine once the ibuprofen kicks in. Let’s see if we’ve got our guy, shall we?”

  They walked into the room and, as she had while waiting in the observation room, Jessie stood in quiet wonder at the modern touches the Santa Monica police station had that Central Station did not. The technology in both was state of the art. Most of the stuff they used downtown was approaching a decade old. Here, the interrogation room was soundproofed, with hidden microphones intended to make suspects forget they were being recorded. The multiple cameras were built into the walls for the same reason. At Central Station they were lucky if all their recording equipment worked.

  “Hello, Mr. Hutchence,” Ryan said. Jessie knew he was addressing the guy formally to remind him in one more subtle way that he wasn’t in charge. No one would be fawning over his good looks and physique here. “So I read you your rights back in the vehicle. I know you weren’t at the top of your game then, what with your run-in with the car door. Are you willing to talk to us now?”

  Though Ryan had Mirandized Hutchence in the car, they hadn’t tried to question him then. He was angry and volatile and they didn’t want him invoking his right to an attorney, so they’d held off until he was a little calmer.

  “I don’t even know why I’m in here,” he said belligerently. Jessie considered the fact that he was speaking at all to be a good sign. She decided to take advantage of it.

  “Do you know Gillian Fahey or Siobhan Pierson?” she asked as if she was merely curious about the weather. His face softened slightly at the names.

  “Yes. They were both clients of mine. It was awful what happened to them.”

  “Not just them, Vince,” she said, using a gentle tone and his first name to make their interaction more informal, as opposed to the one with Ryan. It was classic good cop, bad cop, or in this case, good profiler, bad cop. “Someone else was killed too—Whitney Carlisle.”

  “What?” he said with a look of disbelief on his face.

  “I believe she was a client of yours as well, correct?” she noted, not hinting that under her comparatively affable visage, she was just as skeptical of Hutchence as Ryan.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, slack-jawed, before adding, “I had no idea.”

  Ryan jumped back in.

  “Are you really trying to tell us that you didn’t know she was killed last night?”

  Hutchence first looked dumbfounded, then appalled.

  “How would I know?” he demanded, before seeming to finally put the pieces together. “Wait, you think I did this—killed three of my own clients?”

  “It’s not a crazy assumption. You did run when we identified ourselves,” Jessie pointed out.

  “Not because of that though,�
� he insisted.

  “Why then?” Jessie asked.

  Suddenly the guy looked much less willing to talk. There was unmistakable guilt in his eyes.

  “I’m not sure I should say…” he said before trailing off.

  “Vince,” Jessie replied, sitting down in one of the chairs across from him and leaning in, “if you have an explanation that doesn’t involve you killing three women, you’d be well advised to provide it. Whatever it is, it’s preferable to being charged as a triple murderer.”

  She was skeptical that he could explain himself out of this one and waited for him to either confess outright or fumble through a lie. The first was obviously preferable but if he tried the latter and failed, that could be useful at trial. He sighed heavily before answering.

  “It’s just that I’m little behind in paying my taxes.”

  Jessie hadn’t been expecting that answer, though she did her best to hide it.

  “How far behind?” she asked, waiting for him to get to the point.

  “About six years.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you ran,” Ryan reminded him.

  “The IRS has been sending me letters for a while now. I thought that maybe they were taking it to the next level, like sending the cops to arrest me.”

  Jessie didn’t know how to react to such an absurd claim. She tried to keep the bewilderment out of her voice when she replied.

  “You’re saying you believed the IRS would send an LAPD detective to arrest a personal trainer for not paying back taxes?”

  He shrugged.

  “It seemed possible. Some of those letters they sent are really intense.”

  Jessie looked over at Ryan and could tell he was thinking the same thing as her: either Vince Hutchence was one of the dimmest bulbs they’d ever encountered or he was brilliant at acting the part. Getting an answer to that question was crucial. If he was as stupid as he seemed, there was no way he could have pulled off such complicated murders. If he was faking his cluelessness, then he was still their best suspect.