The Perfect Secret (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Eleven)

by Blake Pierce

  “Remember, don’t acknowledge her in any way, just in case you’re being watched,” Jessie said. “I’ll be in touch throughout the day with any relevant updates. Please stay safe.”

  “I will, Mom,” Hannah said playfully, dramatically rolling her eyes.

  Jessie knew her sister was attempting to puncture the intensity of the situation and decided it was best to just play along.

  “In that case, have a nice day, dear,” she said, adopting her best June Cleaver tone.

  Hannah got out and walked to the escalator, impressively not even glancing in the cop’s direction. For a few seconds, the officer didn’t move, making Jessie worry that she truly hadn’t seen Hannah. But then she casually got up, never taking her eyes off her phone screen, and ambled toward the escalator. Only when she disappeared from sight did Jessie finally, reluctantly pull out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Decker was waiting anxiously when Jessie got back.

  When she stepped into the bullpen, he was wandering among different units, ostensibly checking in with all the detective teams. But she could tell he was antsy. When she caught his eye, he motioned for her to follow him out to the courtyard. Despite her apprehension that it might not be secure, she did. But just as he was about to open the exterior door, he suddenly changed directions and headed for a maintenance closet a little ways down the hall. He stepped in and she followed a few moments later.

  “I’ll be brief,” he whispered, locking the door after her. “First, I just got word that the stay will be lifted at one p.m. I’ll receive a copy of the order at one oh-one and send it to you and Bray immediately. You should probably be outside the Otis Estate gate waiting.”

  “We will be,” Jessie assured him.

  Despite her best efforts to stay cool and collected, she felt a surge of excitement course through her. It was finally happening.

  “As to our other concern about leaks, I’ve got good and bad news,” Decker continued. “As I feared, all the footage from the time Parker’s secure locker was infiltrated was wiped clean. A generic access card, untraceable to any particular individual, was used to gain admittance to different areas.”

  “I’m hoping that’s the bad news,” Jessie said.

  “It is. Like I said yesterday, I’m old but wily. Without getting into specifics, I’ll just say that, based on certain patterns associated with how and when access was gained, I’ve been able to narrow down the list of likely culprits. And your well-placed concern that the courtyard might no longer be secure either may help me narrow it even further. I hope to know more later today.”

  “That’s it?” Jessie said. “You can’t tell me who I should be watching out for?”

  “I genuinely don’t know yet. And I wouldn’t want to tip that person off if I did know. We could turn a liability into an asset if we play this right. But for that to happen, you have to stay focused on your case. Find out what happened to Millicent Estrada. Hopefully the other stuff will fall into place.”

  “Speaking of,” Jessie noted, “I’ve gotten multiple texts from both Detective Bray and Jamil in the last few minutes. I think they’re anxious to discuss developments. I should probably go see what’s up.”

  Decker’s only response was to unlock the door and hold it open for her. She hurried out, headed toward Research. She was almost there when she stopped in her tracks. Something Decker had said moments earlier was bouncing around in her brain, making it itch in that way she knew she shouldn’t ignore.

  He had told her to find out what happened to Millicent Estrada. And while she knew what he had meant—that she should find out who murdered the woman—it occurred to her that she should be focusing on the larger question: what happened to Milly.

  Jessie had been so busy running around, trying to get stays lifted, studying surveillance footage, and listening to audio files from trafficked young girls that she’d lost sight of her purpose. To find out what happened to Milly, she had to understand why it happened, and that meant profiling the killer, not the victim.

  Instead of going to Research, Jessie stepped out into the courtyard. There was still a chill in the morning air, which she found clarifying. She sat on a shaded bench and closed her eyes, allowing her breathing to slow and her mind to clear.

  After a minute, she let her brain relax and go wherever it chose. The first image that popped into her mind was of Milly’s blouse, lying on the floor beside Jasper Otis’s bed.

  However it had ended up there, the fact that the buttons had been undone, rather than ripped off, suggested that, despite how Milly had been found—half naked in a shower—this hadn’t started as an assault. Either that blouse had been removed voluntarily or it had been removed after her death, without any resistance.

  There was bruising on Milly’s body. But the medical examiner said there were no scratches on her, meaning the perpetrator had likely gotten close to her without a fight. That implied it was someone she knew and was comfortable with.

  It was possible that the encounter had begun consensually before turning violent. She’d explored that theory a bit. But another theory, one she’d mentioned to Decker in passing but never truly considered, was that the incident wasn’t about sex at all. What if it was just made to look that way afterward to throw investigators off? What if Milly had been killed for another reason entirely?

  If that was the case and this wasn’t a moment of passion gone awry, it meant that whoever had killed her wasn’t worried about time. People in a panicky rush don’t methodically undo all the buttons on someone’s shirt.

  And if the killer wasn’t worried about time, that meant it was someone who wasn’t afraid they’d be discovered in the residential wing, or even in Otis’s personal space. It was someone who felt like they belonged there. Add that to the possibility that Milly knew her attacker and suddenly the pool of likely killers got pretty small. There were only a few people at the estate that night who both knew Milly and had free rein of the residential wing.

  Clearly Jasper Otis was one of them. He had dozens of alibi witnesses, not even including his unnamed lady friend, though Jessie was skeptical of all of them. On the other hand, Davey Pasternak had zero witnesses but didn’t seem like the type to have the run of the Otis Estate. But there were others.

  Jessie got up from the bench and rushed to the Research department to see if Jamil could rule any of them in or out. When she walked in, she got exasperated looks from both him and Karen, who were hunched over the same monitor.

  “Glad you could join us,” Karen said, trying to sound jokey but failing to hide her frustration.

  “Sorry, guys,” Jessie said. “I’m currently juggling five balls with two hands. I understand you’ve got some updates.”

  “Quite a few,” Jamil said, returning his gaze to the screen. “You’re not going to like any of them.”

  “Way to sell it, Jamil,” she replied.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I figured I’d just rip the Band-Aid off.”

  “Rip away,” she said, waving her hand as she took a seat beside him.

  “Okay, let’s deal with Nancy Salter first. I noticed that after she cold-cocked that caterer, she texted someone. It got me thinking. Even though I couldn’t track her location using her phone, maybe I could track it using her texts. Turns out I could, kind of.”

  Jessie waited for him to continue but he seemed hesitant, as if she might shoot him down.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Your job is to give me the facts, whether I like them or not.”

  That seemed to set him at ease a bit.

  “Right, so I found the corresponding text from after the caterer incident, at five forty-six a.m. She told one of her staffers that she wanted to look into a new catering company because the current one was incompetent. So we know the text matches her expected location. She sent multiple other texts throughout the night, all very demanding, most unpleasant. I won’t depress you with the details. But there were two in particular I wanted to draw your attentio
n to.”

  He punched up a new screen that included the texts with their timestamp and what appeared to be locations on the estate.

  “So,” he continued, “other than these two texts it’s basically impossible to verify Salter’s location at the time they were sent. Despite their vitriol, they either weren’t specific enough or nowhere near a camera. But these are different.”

  He enlarged one text. It read: Buster’s wreaking havoc. Getting complaints. Don’t need a lawsuit. Kick him out. The timestamp was 2:57 a.m.

  “Now look,” he said.

  He played a video time stamped 3:04 a.m. from the South House main entrance. It showed the door open and a portly, balding man being escorted forcefully to an area to the west of the roundabout, where several taxis were waiting. He was placed in one, which pulled out seconds later.

  “What did I just see?” Jessie asked.

  “That was Buster Catalano, the comedian.”

  “The guy who does impressions of people no one cares about,” Karen added.

  “Right,” Jamil said. “He’s also notorious for being grabby. He’s been sued for sexual harassment twice. It appears that he was up to his old tricks and Salter wasn’t happy about it. In fact, she was so unhappy that she personally supervised his removal from the estate.”

  He recentered the image and magnified it to show a figure standing in the doorway, watching Buster being taken away. The face was cut off because of the camera angle but the business suit and doily scarf were visible. Jamil looked over at Jessie proudly.

  “We couldn’t mark her location with facial recognition earlier because there was no face to recognize.”

  “That’s good, Jamil,” she said, “really good. What’s the other text?”

  Jamil pulled that one up. It read: Be there in 2 min. It was from 3:13 a.m.

  “So I checked to see what she was replying to,” Jamil said. “And it was this.”

  He pulled up a text from someone named Mary Proul. It read: Grease fire extinguished in the kitchen. Ugly mess. Smoky. Please advise.

  “This is what we see a few minutes after that,” he said, zooming in on a small open space between the junctions of the South House and East House. “According to the house plans, that’s the side door of the service kitchen.”

  At 3:22 a.m., a young woman walked out the open door, disappeared briefly from the frame, and returned with a wheeled trash bin. Someone who couldn’t quite be seen tossed several bags of trash in the bin. Jamil froze the frame, then pulled cropped images of the person’s sleeves and shoes over to another monitor. He then pulled images of the sleeves and shoes Nancy Salter wore at the main entrance when Buster Catalano was kicked out. They matched exactly.

  “So that’s her then?” Jessie said, verbalizing the obvious.

  “It would seem so. She drops in additional trash bags at three twenty-six and three thirty-two.”

  “Okay, Jamil,” Jessie said. “Why don’t you pull up the timeline I know you’ve created and are dying to show me?”

  Jamil smiled at her, then pushed a button. A timeline appeared on the screen. It was titled “Millicent Estrada window of death” and read: 3:00 to 3:50 a.m. He hit another button and a new timeline appeared below the first. It was titled “Nancy Salter time accounted for.” It read: 2:57 a.m. to 3:06 a.m. and 3:13 a.m.to 3:32 a.m.

  “So,” Jessie concluded, “while it was technically possible for Nancy Salter to have killed Milly, she would have had an extremely tight window and she would have had to go from the far end of one wing of the estate to the opposite end of another wing. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” Jamil confirmed.

  Jessie sighed. Her suspicion of Salter wasn’t completely disproven but it was looking like one of her most promising suspects almost certainly had to be removed from the list.

  “Okay,” she said. “What other bad news have you got for me?”

  “I actually have one bit of good news I can toss in to shake things up.”

  “Please,” Jessie replied. “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “You asked me to check on the security footage from Beto Estrada’s house and let you know if I found anything unusual. I did. All the cameras cut out from nine fourteen a.m. to ten twenty-two a.m. For over an hour, it was just static. Then they magically turned on again.”

  He was looking at her hopefully, as if he might have brightened her day with news that actually confirmed her concerns about Estrada’s house being tapped. She didn’t have the heart to burst his bubble.

  “Great job, Jamil,” she told him reassuringly. “Now you can go back to the bad news.”

  Jamil looked over cautiously at Karen, who shrugged.

  “Just tell her,” she said. “Remember, we’re in Band-Aid ripping mode here.”

  Jamil still seemed wary, but gulped and went for it anyway.

  “You know those other big names you wanted me to check into, the senator, the actor, and the sultan?”

  “Yeah,” Jessie replied.

  “It looks like you may have to cross them off the list too.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Senator Johnson was in Washington, D.C., last weekend. Paul Gilliard is shooting a movie on location in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And the sultan, whose full name is Omar Abdul Salah and appears to be worth over a billion dollars based on my research, was on a flight home from Paris on Saturday.”

  Jessie nodded quietly. Jamil was exploding every potential option in her tiny bucket of remaining suspects. As she sat swiveling in the chair in the darkened research room, she allowed the complete failure of their investigation to settle in.

  Almost all of their suspects had airtight alibis. Even Jasper Otis, who Jessie still liked for this, had multiple witnesses who’d offered statements on his behalf. Without formal evidence to contradict their claims, he would skate, just like he’d skated on all the sexual allegations made against him. It was infuriating to know that her most credible suspect kept slipping just out of her grasp.

  The only person without a solid alibi was the Humbert Humbert roadie, Davey Pasternak. Jessie was actually surprised that Karen hadn’t already suggested they leave to pick him up. She guessed that it was just a polite delay, so as not to rub salt in the wound.

  She closed her eyes as she swiveled. Something was still eating at her, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It was poking at her, teasing her, taunting her. It came down to this: She couldn’t get past the idea that Milly’s killer felt comfortable enough to carefully remove her blouse, then place her in a shower and turn on the water.

  Who other than Otis would feel comfortable in the residential wing, as if they owned the place? And who knew Milly Estrada well enough that she’d let down her guard? Jessie opened her eyes.

  “Do we have visual evidence of all three of those men being elsewhere or is that just what their schedules say?” she asked.

  Jamil looked taken aback, then slightly embarrassed.

  “Just schedules,” he admitted. “After I found those, I stopped looking.”

  “That’s okay,” Jessie told him, not wanting to be too harsh. “But we should look now.”

  “What are you thinking?” Karen asked.

  Jessie smiled at her even though she had no credible reason to.

  “I’d be willing to bet that we won’t find a single photo of one of them in the location his schedule says he was supposed to be.”

  “Why not?” Karen asked.

  “Because I think Milly’s killer is still in that house.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Jessie’s eyes were blurry from studying screens so intently.

  They’d spent the last half hour reviewing alibis and she decided it was time for everyone to give an update on the suspect they’d been looking into. Karen was investigating Paul Hilliard because she had the most insight into the Hollywood community. Jamil was following up Sultan Salah because it involved technical understanding
of flight patterns and airport footage. That left Jessie with Senator Johnson, who had the most public schedule. She started first.

  “I think we can officially rule the senator out,” she said. “He didn’t have any formal events over the weekend. But an ‘on the town’ item for the Post mentions a brunch sighting of him on Saturday afternoon in D.C., and he posted footage of himself from his kid’s soccer game on Sunday afternoon, also in D.C. That doesn’t leave him much time to fly to L.A. for an all-night party and still get back.”

  “The sultan may be a dead end too,” Jamil told them. “I found security footage of him in a Paris jewelry store on Saturday three hours before he was scheduled to fly home. I also pulled video from the airport where he landed. It’s grainy but facial recognition has the guy exiting the plane as a seventy-four-percent match to Sultan Salah.”

  “So that just leaves our Oscar winner,” Jessie said. “What did you find, Karen?”

  “It’s a little weird, actually,” the detective said.

  Jessie perked up. Weird was better than nothing.

  “Weird how?” she asked.

  “First of all, Gilliard has been on location in Santa Fe for the last month shooting a western. But I checked the production bulletin. According to the call sheets, his last shooting day was Friday. I called the production office and they said they’re in the middle of shooting an extended gunfight. He’s not a part of it so he’s off until tomorrow.”

  “Did they say where he was?” Jessie asked.

  “Nope. As long as he shows up on set when he’s needed, they don’t keep tabs on him.”

  “So he could have come back to L.A.?” Jessie pressed.

  “Possibly,” Karen said. “Unfortunately, it will take a while to check flight manifests to see if his name comes up.”

  “There might be another way,” Jamil said, pulling up a new screen.

  “What’s that?” Jessie asked.

  “On the right is the archived footage from the South House main entrance,” he said, pointing. “On the left is the live feed of the entrance right now.”