by Blake Pierce
“So,” Jessie said, standing up and making sure her expression was blank, “I think our chat is over. Thanks so much for reminding why I’ll never be seeing you again. And good luck on the whole ‘not getting shivved in here’ thing.”
She hung up the phone just as he was replying. She couldn’t hear what he said and she didn’t turn back to find out.
*
Dr. Lemmon picked up on the first ring.
Jessie was driving back to DTLA from Westport when the panicky feeling hit her and she dialed her therapist’s number, hoping she might be on a lunch break and able to talk.
“Hi, Jessie,” the doctor said, her voice soothing as always. “How are you?”
“I’ve been better,” she admitted.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
Jessie proceeded to fill her in on recent developments, starting with her visit to Kyle. But she also mentioned everything from the apartment break-in to her falling out with Lacy to her professional challenges on the Missinger case and finally Bolton Crutchfield’s cryptic clues about her father.
“I feel like I’ve got an anchor tied to me as I’m sinking in a deep lake and people keep tugging me down when I try to get to the surface.”
It was only as she described the feeling that she realized just how low she felt and just how much she’d been faking getting by.
“Why did you go to see Kyle,” Dr. Lemmon asked, “if you were already in such a precarious place?”
“I guess I thought maybe it would give me closure. But it mostly just reopened old wounds. It just reminded me that I wasted ten years with him, that I lost my sense of self when he got me to move down there; that I lost my baby because of him. And it reminded me that I’m still facing the fallout from all that. I’ve moved on physically but I’m still a mess.”
“I think you’re doing okay, all things considered,” Dr. Lemmon said.
“Really?” Jessie asked incredulously. “Were you listening to the deluge of crap I just described?”
“I was. And it does sound challenging. But there are positives, Jessie. You’re officially done with that house. You’re almost done with your marriage. You have a roof over your head for the night, even if it’s not your preferred one. And neither you nor your friend was hurt in the break-in. The situation with your father is difficult, to say the least. But you’re meeting it head-on. And you are plowing ahead professionally, headed back to work right now to try to solve this case.”
“Wow, you are really are a glass-half-full kind of lady, aren’t you?”
“It’s kind of my thing,” Dr. Lemmon quipped.
“Well, I’m not quite there yet. I don’t see how I’m going to solve this case. I’m grasping at straws of innuendo here.”
“Just focus on the work, Jessie. It will allow you to set aside all the other stuff that’s eating at you. And we both know that when you’re zoned in on the behavioral patterns of your subjects, you pick up on things others miss. It’s your gift. Now is the time to use it—to help solve this woman’s murder and to give your mind a constructive place to go. “
When Jessie hung up she felt slightly better. Yes, her personal life was a shambles. Yes, her very life might be in danger. But she knew how to read people. And that’s what she was headed to do right now. She clung to that like it was a life preserver in that imaginary lake.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Something was eating at Jessie but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
Sitting in the dimly lit media room where the monitor displayed the interview, she rewound the footage with the Missingers’ maid, Marisol Mendez, to about the halfway point. It had been conducted by Detective Trembley, who was all over the map with his interrogation, bouncing around so much that Jessie had trouble following him. Mendez looked positively bewildered as she tried to follow his line of questioning.
It was obvious that when she wasn’t stressed out and sleep-deprived, the woman was startlingly attractive. Her dark hair and eyes matched her exotic Latin features. Jessie was surprised that she hadn’t tried her hand at modeling and even more surprised that Victoria Missinger would have let someone who looked like her spend so much time around her husband.
Despite the lack of continuity in Trembley’s questioning, her story eventually became clear. She said she’d been sent on vacation by the Missingers last Monday and that they’d paid for her hotel as a bonus of sorts. She had returned on Tuesday after being informed about Victoria Missinger’s death. But she was so overwhelmed with anguish that she’d taken too many pills and wasn’t able to be interviewed until yesterday.
It was a sloppy story but not necessarily suspicious. Officers had been to her home and found her in a heavily medicated sleep. The GPS on her cell phone confirmed her trip to Palm Springs on Monday and her return on Tuesday. Hotel surveillance footage matched up as well.
Trembley hadn’t asked about any potential affair so there was no way to gauge her truthfulness on the matter. And in general, she was pretty monotonous and rote when answering his questions anyway. Except for one moment.
That’s what Jessie had rewound to. He was asking her about her time in Palm Springs. It was a strange topic to make Marisol uncomfortable but she clearly was. Jessie hit play and watched the maid closely as she answered Trembley’s questions.
“So you arrived around four p.m. in the afternoon. Was there traffic?”
“It wasn’t too bad,” Marisol replied. She had a Hispanic accent, but it wasn’t pronounced.
“What did you do once you checked in?”
“I went to dinner with a cousin who lives there,” she said.
“Do anything else that night?”
“No. I was tired from the drive. I went to bed early.”
“And the next day?” Trembley asked. “What did you do before you got the call about Mrs. Missinger?’
“I mostly lounged around the room,” she said, seeming to lose herself in the memory of her time there before snapping back and adding quickly, “the pool more though. I lounged around the pool.”
“In December?” Trembley asked.
“It was warmer than expected. Not bikini warm. But not so bad that I couldn’t lie on a poolside chaise lounge and read.”
He went on to ask about how she’d found out about Victoria Missinger’s death, when she’d come back, and other mechanics of the day. But that wasn’t what interested Jessie. She rewound the tape two minutes to his question about what she’d done on Tuesday.
“I mostly lounged around the room.”
Jessie froze the screen on Marisol Mendez in that moment. From the dreamy, recollecting look in her eyes, it was clear that she was recalling a very specific moment. She was remembering the truth.
But only a second later, she corrected herself to say she’d lounged around the pool. In that split second, her entire demeanor changed. She seemed uncertain and jumpy, as if she’d made some kind of mistake. She was lying.
But why lie about such a small detail—whether she was in her room or by the pool? What difference could that make?
Jessie sat back in her chair in the darkened media room, closed her eyes, and gently rubbed her temples. Why would someone lie about such an unimportant detail? The only possible reason was that to Marisol, it was not unimportant.
Jessie opened her eyes. Pulling her chair closer to the monitor, she scrolled through the other surveillance footage from the Palm Springs hotel. She knew Trembley had gone through it and found nothing out of the ordinary. But she wanted to check again.
She did a cursory review of Marisol’s check-in, which didn’t reveal much. She arrived in sweats and a hoodie and the encounter seemed uneventful. Later that evening she left, apparently for dinner, in nicer, but still casual clothes, with her hair in a ponytail that stuck out of her ball cap. GPS data on her phone confirmed where she’d eaten and when she returned.
Footage from the next morning showed her going down to breakfast, wearing the same cap but a differe
nt, form-fitting workout outfit. She returned to her room for about an hour before leaving again, this time in a robe with its own hood.
Marisol went to the pool and settled into a chaise lounge, where she read on and off for the next three hours until she got a call that changed her whole demeanor. Jessie checked the phone log and saw that the call had come from a Lupita Mendez. Clearly, Lupita had informed her about Mrs. Missinger’s death. She packed up quickly, returned to her room, and checked out twenty minutes later. The phone GPS showed she didn’t make any unusual stops on the way back to L.A.
So she hadn’t lied. She really had been by the pool most of her last day at the hotel. Then why had she acted as if she’d been caught saying something false?
Jessie rewound the tape again to the moment when Marisol got the call by the pool. She watched her walk inside and into the elevator, where she removed the robe hood and hit the button for her floor. Jessie froze the video.
The image was from above and the quality wasn’t great. But it looked like Marisol had a thin blonde streak running through the left side of her hair. Jessie punched up the interrogation video—no blonde streak.
She went back to the hotel footage during checkout but Marisol was wearing the baseball cap again so Jessie couldn’t be sure if she’d seen things properly.
She went back through the footage she’d already reviewed and realized something she’d missed before. In every publicly visible moment of her time at the hotel, except for that one brief stretch on the elevator, Marisol’s head was covered. Sometimes it was a hoodie, other times a cap and, heading to and from the pool, a robe hood. It was almost as if she was doing it on purpose.
Why hide your hair and where did that streak go?
It seemed unlikely that Marisol had gotten a dye job in the brief window of time from when she’d left Palm Springs until she was questioned by Trembley. It wasn’t exactly ideal salon time.
Jessie pulled up the file on Marisol Mendez. Age twenty-six; lived at home with her single mother, Margarita, and younger sister, Lupita, age twenty-four, who had called her by the hotel pool. She did a search and came across Lupita’s Instagram, which had several family pictures. When she saw them, Jessie gasped audibly.
It was hard to tell the sisters apart. Despite the two-year age difference, they could have been twins, except for one thing—the blonde streak in Lupita’s hair.
*
“She’ll be here for the re-interview any minute,” Detective Ryan Hernandez told Captain Decker in the observation room as Jessie sat patiently next to Trembley.
“So walk me through your theory again,” Decker said, shutting the door and finally giving them his full attention after spending the last ten minutes putting out fires related to other cases.
“It’s not my theory, Captain,” Ryan said. “Hunt came up with it. She should explain it.”
“Okay, Hunt,” Decker said, projecting skepticism. “Go for it.”
“Yes sir,” Jessie began, ignoring the butterflies fluttering near her diaphragm. “I suspect that Marisol Mendez never actually went to Palm Springs and sent her sister instead. She even had her sister take her phone.”
“And you suspect this because of her hair?” he said, scoffing.
“No sir,” Jessie said, trying not to visibly react to his sarcasm. “That’s just what made me suspicious. With one exception, whichever Mendez sister is in Palm Springs never leaves her head uncovered. But I still wasn’t sure. After all, I saw that all the meals in Palm Springs used Marisol’s credit card and it was her car parked in the hotel garage.”
“Sounds like a home run so far,” Decker said drily.
“Give her a chance, sir,” Ryan said, clearly irked.
Decker glared at the detective before turning back to Jessie, his face softening a bit.
“Go ahead, Hunt. I’m just busting your balls.”
“Yes sir,” Jessie replied, not sure how to respond to that. “Anyway, I decided to check out what Lupita was supposedly doing here in L.A. while Marisol was in Palm Springs. I checked out her phone GPS and financial transactions.”
“And…”
“And I found that for much of Tuesday, her phone was in the same hotel where Michael Missinger took his CFO’s wife, Mina Knullsen, for their afternoon delight.”
“So this hotel was his standing love nest and he was going back and forth between two mistresses all afternoon?” Decker asked, sounding both stunned and impressed.
“That’s possible,” Jessie admitted. “There is a record of Lupita’s credit card being used in the hotel lobby coffee shop mid-morning. But there are other potential scenarios too.”
“Like what?”
Ryan jumped in.
“She could have been spying on him. Maybe they were sexually involved and she suspected he was sleeping with someone else and followed him to the hotel and saw him with Mina Knullsen.”
“The only problem with that theory is that her phone was at the hotel for most of the day,” Jessie noted, “even before Missinger met Mina there.”
“That doesn’t absolve her,” Ryan argued. “Maybe she didn’t take the phone with her everywhere. What if he did put her up in the hotel but she left her phone in the room, went for a walk, and stumbled upon him and Mina at some point? She could have followed them and the phone GPS would show her as still in her room.”
“For that matter,” Trembley piped in, “she could have left her phone in the room and gone to Hancock Park to knock off Victoria Missinger.”
“That’s possible whether she saw Missinger with Mina or not,” Jessie said. “The alternatives are endless. She could have switched phones with Lupita simply to cover for an affair with Michael. Or she could have done it to provide herself with an alibi while killing Victoria. I don’t know what her game was for sure. What I do know is that she wasn’t in Palm Springs.”
Officer Beatty popped his head in the room.
“She’s here,” he said.
“Put her in the interrogation room,” Ryan said, before turning to the others. “It looks like we’re about to get some answers.”
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Even though she was only observing the questioning through a one-way mirror, Jessie felt nervous.
It was her theory on the line after all. She could only hope that Ryan and Trembley could get Marisol Mendez to confess to whatever it was she was hiding. Sitting in that interrogation room, she didn’t look like she was inclined to be forthcoming.
Her elbows were resting on the table with her head in her hands. Her face was set in a grimace, as if she were preparing to face down whatever they threw at her, as if it were her lot in life to be questioned periodically by men out to bring her down. Jessie wondered if it had even occurred to Marisol to ask for a lawyer. Then her mind did a mental skip as she went back over her previous thought.
Her lot in life.
The phrase jumped into Jessie’s brain and lingered. That was part of how Bolton Crutchfield had described the perpetrator of Victoria Missinger’s murder. On more than one occasion he had said that the murderer was unhappy with their lot in life.
That certainly seemed to apply to Marisol Mendez. Jessie didn’t want to make assumptions but she doubted that a pretty girl like Marisol dreamed that at age twenty-six, she would still be living with her mother and working as a maid.
How much more likely was it that she longed to be living with the man she saw every day but could not have to herself; that she longed to be the lady of the house? It seemed more than reasonable to conclude that Marisol was unhappy with her lot in life.
Jessie cast her mind back to Crutchfield’s other clue, the one he said was a twofer that would help with both the hunt for her dad and this case. He had said she needed to keep her focus on the never-ending battle for truth and lady justice.
She had assumed that lady justice related to the hunt for her father. But maybe only the “battle for truth and justice” was about Xander Thurman. They’d established tha
t the Superman reference was about the Kent Clark Building at Cal State-Northridge where Dr. Bertrand Roy worked. Maybe the reference to “lady”—the one word that wasn’t in the original Superman line, was Crutchfield telling her that the killer in the Hancock Park case was female. It made sense.
Ryan and Trembley had just begun the questioning and Jessie didn’t want to interrupt them when they were just underway. Instead, she scribbled a message on a piece of scrap paper that read:
Crutchfield hints fit. Marisol—maid, lives with mom, sleeping with unattainable man—“unhappy with her lot in life?” Also—battle for truth and LADY justice. Lady= female killer?
She folded up the note and gave it to Officer Beatty with instructions to hand it to Detective Hernandez. When Ryan got it, he looked up at the mirror as if he’d gotten an unexpected electric shock. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded in that direction before putting the note in his pocket and turning his attention back to Marisol, who was repeating her story for Trembley.
“How long have you been sleeping with Michael Missinger?” he asked, interrupting her.
She looked startled but not surprised by the question.
“Mrs. Missinger was a wonderful boss,” she answered. “I respected her. I would never—”
“Let me stop you for one second, Marisol,” he interrupted again. “We know you haven’t been honest about a lot of things so far. But none of them constitute crimes. It sounded like you were about to deny an affair with Mr. Missinger, which would make us very skeptical of your credibility, After all, it’s one thing to lie and say you were in Palm Springs when you were in fact in a downtown hotel. It’s quite another to deny you were sleeping with the husband of a woman who was murdered. At a certain point, we have to ask ourselves: why is this woman lying so much? Could it be that she’s trying to cover up something far worse than an affair?”
