by Blake Pierce
“Let’s talk about Siobhan Pierson,” she said, pivoting to a rawer subject. “She was no longer a client of yours, right?”
“Yeah, we had different fitness metrics for her so we decided to part ways.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she pressed.
“I’m guess I’m trying to be polite. I just thought she could work a little harder.”
“Is that what she was talking about when she told her assistant that you were ‘a little too demanding’?” Ryan challenged.
“That’s probably it,” Hutchence answered unconvincingly.
Jessie knew in her bones that he was lying. She decided it was time for her to play a little hardball too—no more “good” profiler.
“Don’t insult us, Vince,” she growled. “If you keep lying, we’re going to toss you into county lockup for the night—general population. You know what that means? You’ll be surrounded by a lot of guys bigger and meaner than you. And I can’t guarantee how friendly they’ll be to a pretty boy in bike shorts and a tank top with long, flowing blond locks and puppy dog eyes. They might want to dirty you up a little. So tell us the truth: what did she mean by ‘demanding’?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hands and inadvertently making the cuffs attached to the table rattle. “She probably meant that I came on to her. Sometimes I provide ‘extra services’ to my clients if they express interest. That’s part of why I get paid in cash—because even a top trainer isn’t going to charge a thousand bucks for an hour-long private HIIT workout. It would look suspicious on a receipt. But with Siobhan, I couldn’t tell if she was into extras or just wanted a legit training session. After a while I got restless. She’s so rich that if she wanted a more private workout, I could charge her way more than other clients. So at the end of the session I went for it. It turned out to be a mistake—she wasn’t interested and she was pissed. I apologized and left right away. I didn’t want her to post a bad review so I didn’t even charge her for the last session. That’s the last time I saw her. It was months ago.”
That answer made sense but Jessie couldn’t help but wonder if he’d decided to make extra certain that Siobhan didn’t badmouth him by silencing her for good. Of course, if he wanted to do that, why wait until four months after their last appointment?
“Did you provide your ‘extra services’ to Gillian Fahey and Whitney Carlisle too?” she asked.
“With Gillian, yes—eventually. The sessions started off legit but at some point she asked for extra. That only happened a couple of times though. She told me she felt guilty and wanted to stop. After that, it would have been weird to keep training her.”
Jessie noticed a pattern with Gillian. She seemed to enjoy short-term liaisons, which were followed soon thereafter by shame and a need to shut them down. That’s what had happened with Ian Pierson and if Hutchence was to be believed, she’d done the same thing with him. She wondered if there were others.
“And what about Whitney?” she asked.
“No. She never gave any sign that she had interest in anything other than working out. She wanted to sweat, to be pushed to the limit. But that was it. Once the hour was up, I left. She seemed really into her husband.” The way he said it made it sound like that was a weird concept to him.
“Where were you last night?” Ryan asked, abruptly switching gears.
“Um, it depends on the time. Can I have my phone to check my schedule?”
“You need your phone to remember where you were yesterday?” Ryan challenged.
“I need my phone to remember where I was an hour ago,” he conceded sheepishly.
An officer brought it in and gave it to Ryan, who handed it over. Hutchence pulled up the calendar.
“What time?” he asked.
“Between five p.m. and seven p.m.,” Ryan told him.
“Okay,” he said, scrolling until he got there. Once he did, he smiled. “Oh yeah, I had an extended session with a client whose husband is out of town. I was there from five until six-thirty. That was my last appointment for the day. I went home and showered, then chilled out playing some video games.”
“What about Sunday night?” Jessie asked, “Between midnight and three a.m.?”
“Oh, that was a rough one,” Hutchence said, chuckling despite his current circumstance: handcuffed to a table in an interrogation room.
“Go on,” Ryan said impatiently.
“I also do some work as an adult dancer,” he said with a mix of pride and sheepishness. “I was working a bachelorette party at a house in Thousand Oaks. I arrived at midnight, worked the crowd for an hour. Then I went to a bedroom with the bride for a solo show that lasted another hour. I left a little after two, I think. I can’t say for sure but I think I went straight home. I had a client training session at eight the next morning so I doubt I’d have stayed up.”
“What about January sixteenth, between eight p.m. and midnight?” Jessie asked, referring to the date and approximate time of Siobhan Pierson’s murder, though she was starting to question the point of pursuing this. If what he said was true, he’d have an alibi witness for last night and potentially a dozen or more for Sunday night.
“That was also an ‘extra services’ training session,” he said when he got to the date.
“You seem to spend more time on the extra services than the actual training,” Ryan noted drily. “We’re going to need all those clients’ names to confirm your whereabouts.”
“Okay,” Hutchence said, “but could you talk to them, like secretly? I don’t want to lose any clients and I think some of their husbands might be mad if they found out.”
“Ya think?” Ryan asked, finding it difficult to hide his disdain.
Jessie wasn’t in the mood to condescend. She was too busy coming to terms with a harsh reality: Hutchence was a bust as a suspect. Even if his alibi witnesses didn’t all vouch for him on the record, one thing was clear. The guy was just too damn stupid to pull off these murders.
It was back to the drawing board.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Jessie was almost home.
As she made the last few turns, she reviewed their leads again in her head. And just as before, she concluded that they were all dead ends. That was what Ryan had said to her forty-five minutes earlier when he sent her home.
“You’re all beat up,” he’d said. “Take my car. Go back to the house. Get cleaned up. Check on Hannah. Maybe grab a quick nap and a bite to eat. I’ll take a shower here at the station and dive back into the leads we let slide to pursue Hutchence. We’ll meet up afterward.”
Pulling into the garage, she felt an unexpected mix of relief and exhaustion. She could finally ease up on the throttle a little, but the thought of that made her suddenly, incredibly tired. She walked into a surprisingly quiet house.
“Anyone here?” she called out.
“In the kitchen,” Kat shouted back.
Jessie rounded the corner to find her friend at the breakfast table with an early afternoon coffee and dozens of papers spread out so that not an inch of wood was visible.
“What are you up to?” Jessie asked.
“Just working on what might the most boring case I’ve ever taken on,” she replied, waving at the documents laid out before her. “Remind me never to accept another one involving malfeasance at an accounting firm, no matter how big the retainer. This is not Philip Marlowe stuff. I think my eyes almost started bleeding for a moment there.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jessie said without much sympathy. “Maybe you can console yourself by rolling around in your bed with the piles of cash you’re getting.”
“I’m willing to give it a shot,” Kat replied straight-faced.
“Before you do that, can you tell me where my sister is?”
“She left about a half hour ago for that coffeehouse she likes. I believe she mentioned something about FaceTiming with someone named Chris?”
For the briefest of seconds, Jessie was tempted t
o call Hannah to check on her. But knowing it would only alienate her, she fought the urge and instead focused in on Kat’s unspoken question.
“Ah yes,” Jessie said. “He’s the cute boy she met when we were up in Wildpines. To be honest, I think he’s half the reason she wants to go to culinary camp there this summer.”
“Would that be the end of the world?” Kat asked.
“Actually, that would be just about the most reassuringly normal behavior that kid has engaged in for a while. I’m all for it. Speaking of behavior, how was hers last night?”
Kat gave a half-hearted smile.
“After she got over the seething resentment that I was here at all? Not too bad. We ate popcorn and watched a marathon of Nailed It!”
“Well, thanks for doing it on short notice.”
“No problem,” Kat assured her. “I can do this kind of work from here just as well as the office so it wasn’t a sacrifice. How’s your case going? You look a little…pooped.”
Jessie couldn’t help but laugh.
“That’s very diplomatic of you. The truth is that it’s not going great.”
She explained the circumstances of the murders and their all-night search for a connection among the victims, before wrapping up with the Vince Hutchence imbroglio.
“So after using a trampoline to scale a fence, which left me feeling like I need a hip replacement, it all ended up being for nothing. He’s got alibis for all three murders and he’s too dumb to hold a knife, much less use it as a weapon. Ryan’s following up on other ‘leads,’ but we’re basically treading water here.”
“I’m sorry, Jessie,” Kat said sincerely, “that really sucks.”
“It really does,” Jessie agreed. “But I’ve decided that I’m going to put all that out of my head for the next half hour. I need a shower, a thick layer of deodorant, and something to eat. Then I’ll start up again, maybe not smelling fresh as a daisy, but not as bad as a dead fish either.”
“You do have a way with imagery,” Kat said, scrunching up her nose.
*
When Jessie got out of the bathroom after her shower, Kat was sitting on her bed with a gleam in her eye.
“Okay, you don’t look creepy at all,” Jessie said, rewrapping the towel around her.
“Sorry, it’s just that I had an idea while you were showering and I couldn’t wait to run it by you,” she said excitedly.
“Can I at least get dressed first?” Jessie asked. “Maybe put on a bra and panties?”
“You dress, I’ll talk.”
“This better be good, Kat. I was actually relaxed there for half a second.”
“I think you may find this is worth the awkwardness,” Kat said. “I was thinking about what you said earlier and something occurred to me.”
“I’m all ears,” Jessie said as she searched for something clean to wear.
“So you talked about how you were trying to find some kind of vendor or service provider who’d been to all three victims’ homes,” Kat said, standing up and grabbing a presentable looking shirt on a hanger. “But I noticed that most of the people you considered would be repeat visitors.”
“What do you mean?” Jessie asked, taking the shirt approvingly.
“I mean, you mostly looked at people like this Hutchence guy: in-home trainers, yoga instructors, gardeners, personal manicurists, that kind of thing. But if this person is as sharp as you think they are, they might only need one visit to each house to get the lay of the land. It could have been someone adept at understanding home layouts, like a contractor who came by once to give an estimate on home remodeling or a delivery person who brought a piece of furniture inside. Maybe the killer has a photographic memory for where everything—including security cameras—is. My point is: I think you may be limiting your pool of suspects.”
Jessie slumped down on the bed.
“What’s wrong?” Kat asked. “You don’t think it’s possible?”
“No,” Jessie sighed. “Now that you mention it, I think it’s entirely possible. That’s the problem. You just increased our potential suspect list exponentially and I don’t know how we can possibly narrow it down in time. We’ve had murders on two consecutive nights. Who’s to say the killer won’t go for three in a row?”
Speaking the words out loud made her realize that the time for casual conversation was over. She had calls to make and sustenance to force into her body if she was going to prevent another death tonight.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Multi-tasking was hard under the best of circumstances, but was especially bad without having had any sleep for over thirty hours. As she rushed through her errands around the house, Jessie felt both harried and like she was moving in molasses. She was currently making herself a quick sandwich while carrying on a conversation with Callum Reid in the hospital.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to drop by yet,” she said. “This case has been so crazy that I haven’t had any down time until now.”
“That’s okay,” he told her reassuringly. He sounded surprisingly chipper for a guy who just had a heart attack. “The docs tell me that I should be discharged tomorrow.”
“That’s great,” she replied as she hurriedly loaded up the turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato slices. “What’s the long-term prognosis?”
“They say it depends on my lifestyle. If I continue to work in a high-pressure job that requires periodic all-nighters, this could happen again. But we both know that’s not in my future. I actually plan to call Captain Decker right after I hang up with you. I originally wanted to tell him about my retirement plans in person. But I don’t think it’s fair to him to hold off any longer when my mind is made up.”
“I’m happy for you,” Jessie said, adding a cheese slice to the pile of food. “I know you were worried about leaving him in the lurch. But with HSS getting all the new funding and personnel, it’s never been in a better position. You can say goodbye with a clear conscience.”
“Thanks, Hunt,” he said. “Hell, I may want to conference you in for backup in case he gives me a hard time.”
“Hey, if I can stay awake and you need me, I’ll do it.”
“I’m just kidding,” he said. “This is a one-person job. Besides, I want you to keep all your focus on working your case and staying upright.”
They said their goodbyes and Jessie returned her attention to the sandwich. As she added the second piece of bread and pressed everything down, she tried to stop her weary mind from fixating on the multitude of worries scraping at the edge of her skull.
She was concerned about Hannah’s mental health. She was anxious about Ryan’s physical health and whether he was pushing too hard to get back to where he used to be before the stabbing and coma. She wasn’t sure about the wisdom of planning a wedding in light of everything going on.
And to top it all off, she couldn’t think of an efficient way to narrow down the suspect list that Kat had just helpfully but mercilessly expanded. Frustrated, she grabbed the knife and sliced the sandwich down the middle. But her grip slipped slightly and she cut a gash into the outside of her left thumb.
“Damn it!” she shouted.
“What’s wrong?” Kat asked from the living room, where she’d relocated all of her paperwork.
“I just cut myself,” Jessie answered, grabbing a paper towel and pressing it against the spot. Kat came in immediately.
“Let me see,” she said, and after Jessie removed the bloody paper towel, she added, “That’s more than just a nick. Where do you keep your first aid kit?”
“In the hall closet on the second shelf,” Jessie told her.
“I’ll go get it while you run your hand under some water.”
Jessie moved over to the sink and let the cold water pour over the wound. It didn’t look like it would require stitches but it was quite ugly. As she watched the blood seep out, run down her thumb to her wrist, and then trickle into the drain below, she had an unexpected random thought: there might be a
way to narrow down that list of suspects in the case.
She remembered what Ryan had said at the morgue while looking at Gillian Fahey’s body—that the cuts to the carotid and femoral arteries had been clean and meticulous. But it wasn’t just her. That was true of all three victims.
There was a precision and exactitude to them that suggested the perpetrator was someone with a steady, professional hand. She wondered if they ought to focus their search on service providers, or even friends, who did that kind of work. Maybe they needed to skip the yoga instructors in favor of acupuncturists, tattoo artists, and surgeons.
Kat walked in with the first aid kit and got to work. As she cleaned, then wrapped the thumb, Jessie silently played out the possibilities in her head.
“All done,” Kat said, pulling her back into the moment. “Almost good as new.”
“Thanks so much, Kat. As long as you’re in favor-granting mode, can I ask you for one more?”
“What’s that?”
“Can you stick around a little longer to keep an eye on Hannah when she gets back? I had a possible brainstorm and I need to get back to work on the case.”
Kat looked like she’d been expecting the request.
“I’ll do it as long as she makes me one of those fancy dinners this evening. Last night she was too aggrieved to make anything.”
“Deal,” Jessie said as she grabbed her sandwich and headed for the garage. “And if she balks, I’ll make you something myself.”
“That’s okay,” Kat said, turning up her nose at the idea of a Jessie-cooked meal. “Aren’t you at least going to tell what this epiphany is?”
“Maybe later, and only if it proves fruitful. I don’t want to jinx it.”
*
He didn’t want to make the same mistake as last time.
Walking briskly down the charming neighborhood street in the early afternoon, he resolved that he wouldn’t. As well as the actual elimination events had gone—clean and without much fuss, this last effort had gotten complicated. In retrospect he should have known better.