The Perfect Smile

by Blake Pierce

  “I know, right?” he replied. His voice sounded weak and distant.

  “How are you doing?” she asked, unable to keep up the charade of light banter.

  “Peachy,” he answered raspily. “They say I’m getting transferred downtown to California Hospital Medical Center later today. It’s less than two miles from the station so it’ll be easier to provide security for me.”

  “Good to know,” she said. “That’ll make it easier to visit you. But it doesn’t really tell me how you’re doing.”

  “I’ve been better,” he admitted. “But the doctor says I get another hit of pain medication in a couple minutes, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.”

  “It sounds like you could use it now.”

  “I didn’t want to get fuzzy before I spoke to you,” he said earnestly.

  “I appreciate that. So maybe while you’re clear-headed you can tell me how you’re really doing rather than repeatedly avoiding the question.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. For a moment, Jessie thought he was debating whether to update her. But then she heard a loud gulp and realized he was struggling to catch his breath.

  “I’ll be okay,” he finally said. “My arm is all stitched up. The knife didn’t get anything vital. And it’s not my shooting hand, so there’s that. They were worried about the jab to the stomach for a while. But it missed everything vital too. Mostly just got belly fat.”

  “You don’t have any belly fat,” Jessie pointed out.

  “I’m trying to be self-deprecating here,” he wheezed. “Anyway, the doctors say I was incredibly lucky; that I should be back at work in a month and cleared for field duty in two.”

  “That’s great,” Jessie said. “But why do I sense that you don’t think your quick recovery is luck-based.”

  “I think we both already know the answer to that one, Jessie.”

  “Because that’s what my father wanted,” she said resignedly.

  “That’s what your dad wanted,” he confirmed.

  “You didn’t ‘fend him off’ like Decker said?”

  “I wish I could claim that. But he completely surprised me. The first slice came before I even knew he was there. The second one was more me throwing my arm at him than him swinging at me. I was on the ground before I really knew what was happening.”

  “And the gunshot?” she asked. “You didn’t hit him?”

  “I wasn’t even firing at him. He was gone by the time I pulled my weapon out. I shot in the air as a plea for help because I couldn’t manage to yell.”

  “Well, his little plan didn’t work,” she said, trying to buck him up. “We realized he was using you to get to me, hoping I’d show up at the hospital so he could take me down. I’m sorry. I would have come. But everyone agreed it would be a mistake.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, his voice fading so that she had to concentrate to hear him. “You made the right call. But that’s not the only reason he let me live.”

  “What do you mean?”

  There was a long pause so she repeated the question.

  “What do you mean it wasn’t the only reason, Ryan?”

  “What?” he said hazily. “Oh, sorry, I think the doctor gave me the pain meds without telling me. I’m feeling…cloudy. What was your question again?”

  “Why did Xander Thurman let you live?”

  “He wanted me to give you a massage. I mean…a message.”

  “What’s the message, Ryan?”

  “He said to tell you: You’re wrong. Look again.”

  “That’s it? That’s all he said?”

  But Ryan didn’t answer. Instead, she heard a long slow, wheezy breath. He was asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jessie decided to keep the message to herself.

  Until she better understood what it meant, there was no point freaking everyone else out about it.

  Back in the conference room, Collison was gone and Dolan was poring over old text messages from the Look of Love website. When she came in, he looked up.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yep,” she said. “He’s on the mend—should be back in the thick of it in a couple of months.”

  “Want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she answered honestly.

  “Good, because I could use a jumpstart here,” he said. “If we’re both skeptical that Collison is our guy, despite the strikes against him, then we’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel for legitimate suspects.”

  “That was my thought earlier too before I found that bin under Collison’s bed. I was dreading the possibility of having to wade through all this crap again to see if we missed anything. When I found that stuff, I thought my prayers had been answered. And then, when Matilda caught me, I thought I’d better say my prayers, she scared me so bad.”

  “Yeah, she’s an odd duck,” he agreed.

  Jessie sat down next to him, allowing a thought to percolate in her brain for a few seconds.”

  “Just how odd a duck do you think she is?” she finally asked.

  “What—you think this was her?” Dolan asked.

  “I’m just saying,” she began, “she’s obviously in love with Jett Collison. She wouldn’t have loved it when he started to take Claire seriously, much less when he proposed.”

  “But Claire said no so she was no longer a threat.”

  “In theory,” Jessie agreed. “But Jett was still pining, dare I say obsessing over her. If anybody would have known about that shrine in the secret room, it was Matilda. If she found it, it couldn’t have made her happy. How do we know she didn’t kill Claire in a fit of jealous rage? How do we know she didn’t mess with Jett’s phone that night—or his car battery for that matter—to screw with his alibi? She punishes him for loving someone else by framing him for killing her. Then she comes in at the last minute to rescue him, earning his endless devotion.”

  “How does she do that?” Dolan wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she finds video footage of him that verifies his alibi?”

  “Isn’t that our job?”

  “Yes. But if she set him up, she’d know exactly where to find the footage that saves him. Do we even know what her alibi is? Where was she two nights ago?”

  Murph coughed self-consciously from the corner of the room. Jessie looked up at him. It was obvious he had something to say.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “While you we upstairs in that mansion violating Collison’s privacy and Dolan was interrogating the guy, Matilda came back with that water looking for you. I knew you were up to no good so I tried to stall her. In the course of that stalling attempt, I asked about her life and stuff. She mentioned that she was starring in a play in Rolling Hills. She performed two nights ago. It started at nine p.m. and ran for two hours. “

  Jessie was silent for a moment, letting the information sink in.

  “Has anyone checked this alibi?” she finally asked.

  “I believe Toomey mentioned it to your captain when you two were questioning Collison. He was having someone follow up.”

  “Rolling Hills is really far from Studio City,” Dolan said, almost apologetically. “The chances of her getting there after performing onstage are remote.”

  “Yeah, I can do the math on that,” Jessie said tersely before turning back to Murph. “Why do I suspect you’ve already ‘followed up’?”

  “I may have checked online to see if there was any footage of her performing.”

  “And?” Jessie asked expectantly.

  “A couple of people recorded it on YouTube. I’m not sure why. The play isn’t very good. And Matilda is…perhaps better suited to her day job.”

  “How long were you going to let me go on like that, spouting off totally bogus theories?”

  “For a while longer,” Murph said. “They weren’t awful theories. And it was pretty entertaining.”

  Jessie slumped back in her ch
air, too deflated to chew him out. Once again she’d let her instincts take over before even checking to see if the evidence bore it out. Despite Dolan’s embrace of the “gut method,” it didn’t seem to be serving her very well lately.

  She resolved to spend the next few hours focused only on leads based on credible facts, even if that meant going through dozens of mind-numbing texts from sexually rapacious old guys and the young women who were playing them.

  And that’s exactly what she did. Over the remainder of the afternoon, she reviewed hundreds of texts, looking for anything even mildly relevant. Nothing she read was out of the ordinary. Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Some of the messages in other threads were sexually graphic. Some were depraved. Some were cruel. But none of the messages to or from Claire was threatening or even especially titillating. The word that best described them was “businesslike.”

  As she studied them, she couldn’t stop her thoughts from drifting to the message Ryan had passed along from her father: You’re wrong. Look again.

  What does that mean? And why is he saying it?

  She knew that she should be more focused on the second question. After all, the first one was bait intended to draw her in. And yet, that first question was what intrigued her more.

  Did he mean she was wrong about this case? If so, how could he even know that she was investigating it? Was he somehow following her? Had he, despite the best efforts of the marshals, managed to keep tabs on her movements, just as Crutchfield had?

  An idea occurred to her. She clicked through the LAPD’s intranet site until she got to the page for the media tracking unit, which kept logs of every reference to an LAPD case in local media. She typed out a quick request before returning to her thoughts.

  Assuming Xander did somehow know about the case, how could he know she was wrong about her assumptions without access to the evidence? The answer to that didn’t take long. Xander Thurman, she reminded herself, wasn’t an evidence guy. Like Agent Dolan, he was a gut guy. He used his instincts and knowledge of human nature to make his moves.

  Unfortunately those moves usually involve killing people. But they also involved knowing how people might put themselves in vulnerable positions that would make killing them easier. It was a sick, bastardized variation of what a profiler did, but used the same basic skill set.

  Setting aside the discomfort of recognizing once again that she and her father weren’t that different in how they approached their “work,” she tried to home in on what about the people involved in this case would make Xander think she was wrong to pursue them as she had.

  He didn’t know any of the details of Claire’s life so that wasn’t the source of his comment. All he knew was what was publicly available—that an attractive young party girl had been stabbed to death and that, based on interviews with some friends and social media photos, she was known to have dated several older, wealthy men.

  And then it hit her. Xander didn’t need to know anything about Claire. He just needed to know how the mind of her killer worked. And he was an expert at that. Then again, so was she.

  So what would motivate this killer? What incorrect assumption am I making?

  For starters, all the likely suspects were rich men trying to keep these relationships on the down low.

  Are they though?

  Now that she thought about it, that wasn’t really the case. The three main suspects she’d questioned were all wealthy, powerful men. But none of them would be truly ruined if word of their involvement with Claire got out.

  Milton Jerebko had told his wife, Gayle, about the affair before Claire died. And he didn’t seem overly concerned about potential voters finding out. That’s why Claire’s blackmail scheme had failed.

  Gunther Stroud had an open relationship with his wife, who didn’t even live in the same country as him. The idea that he could be shamed by the revelation of a relationship with a young hottie seemed absurd.

  Even Jett Collison, with his fake actress girlfriend, wasn’t hiding Claire from those closest to him. And having proposed, he had to know that if she said yes, the truth of how they met would get out. He clearly wasn’t overly concerned about it. Besides, he had seemed genuinely distraught over her death. And he just wasn’t that great an actor to be faking it.

  The simple truth was that none of those suspects had a reason to kill her. The people in their lives either already knew about Claire or wouldn’t have been shocked to hear about her. None of these guys would have viewed the potential scandal of being associated with her as remotely worth the risk of killing her.

  So either the killer was someone they hadn’t found yet who would fear being exposed or there was another motive for the killing. And since Jessie had gone through every text from every suitor on the site, she knew there weren’t any legitimate “fear of exposure” candidates left.

  That left the alternate motive theory. And Jessie was fairly confident she knew what that motive was: passion twisted into rage. She’d already theorized that the use of keys as the murder weapon suggested the killing wasn’t premeditated. If it were, the killer would have used a more efficient, less messy implement. The decision to kill was made in the moment, without thought of the consequences. This was a crime born out of passion, not fear.

  For the first time in hours, Jessie felt like she was on the right track.

  Focus on the passion, find the killer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  So who had that kind of passion?

  Jessie thought again of Matilda, who clearly carried a torch for Jett and might have let her jealousy get out of control. But even she likely would have brought some kind of weapon with her to a confrontation. Besides, she had an unassailable alibi.

  Jessie started to go back through the suspects she’d reviewed previously to look at them through this new prism of passion rather than fear. Just then an email alert popped up on her laptop. It was from the Media Tracking Unit. The message was a single line:

  “One media engagement found one requested matter, with relevant video.”

  The video was attached. She opened it. Immediately, a news hit from a local station began to play. It was from yesterday, detailing the sad death of a young woman in the Studio City home she rented. As footage from the scene played, the voiceover said the police weren’t commenting but her roommate confirmed that the woman was stabbed to death.

  Just before the reporter’s concluding standup, there was a small clip of B-roll showing several investigators walking around inside the house. The glare from the window made it hard to see much detail. The camera zoomed in to get a better view. It was still hard to discern identities. But one of the investigators was a tall brunette with her hair in a ponytail. If someone already knew what she looked like, they would easily be able to identify her as Jessie Hunt. Clearly, Xander Thurman had been watching and done just that.

  Equipped with that information and the address of the house, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to have learned the victim’s identity, find the LOL site, hire or threaten someone to hack it, and read the same texts she had, ultimately drawing his own conclusion as to the killer’s identity.

  If he was on the side of the angels, we could actually use his skills.

  The dark irony that her father would have made a pretty good profiler made her smile slightly before she got serious again. She had to assume, based on this new knowledge, that her father wasn’t just blowing smoke and really did know who killed Claire. So she could take as credible his words to Ryan: “You’re wrong. Look again.”

  That answered her first question: What does that mean?

  Of course her second question—why is he saying it—still hung over her like a cloud threatening to open into a downpour. But for now, she chose to ignore it.

  Armed with something approaching certainty, she went back through the suspects, looking for anyone who might be motivated by passion. But still, there was nothing. Well, not quite nothing. She did notice something odd that she’d missed
before.

  In one of the text exchanges between Claire and Milton Jerebko, several weeks after they’d clearly been seeing each other, he asked for her email address. She gave it in her next reply. There was no other reference to the request in future texts, which continued for weeks until the whole blackmail thing reared its head.

  Why ask for her email address and then keep communicating via texts on the app? It didn’t seem to make any sense.

  “Hey,” she said, looking up at Dolan and speaking to him for the first time in what felt like hours.

  “Yeah?” he replied, his own eyes bleary from constant, close reading.

  “Did we ever look at Claire’s email exchanges?”

  “I didn’t know people her age still even used email,” he replied only half-joking.

  She ignored the crack and pressed ahead.

  “In one text, Jerebko asks her for it and she gives it to him. But then they keep texting. I would have thought they’d have switched over to email exclusively at that point. But they kept chatting on the app as if nothing had changed.”

  Dolan rifled through some papers until he found what he was looking for. He held up a single sheet.

  “It looks like your tech unit got her email password from the provider and sent it to us. But everybody has been so busy that it looks like no one has actually gone through the messages yet. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m curious to see if they ever actually communicated off-app.”

  “Well, have at it,” he said, handing her the page as he stood up. “I’m going to go shake the dew off the lily if you know what I mean.”

  “No idea, Dolan,” she replied, scowling. “You’re very cryptic.”

  “I’m saying I’m going to the restroom to urinate,” he said in a tone that suggested he was extremely proud of himself. He managed to just get out the door before getting nailed by the pen she threw at him.

  Refocusing, she plugged the password into Claire’s email account and pulled up her inbox. She went to the date of the text when Jerebko first asked for her email address and searched for any messages that seemed related. One titled “Re: LOL” seemed to fit the bill. She opened and read the email.